Setting the direction, pointing the way

Opinion

Fresh green beans have a taste like the smell of freshly-mown grass.

Hold that thought.

Hold that thought and think of Blues legend Clarence “Pinetop” Smith, and Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie.

Think about Pinetop’s lyrics: “Now listen here all of you, this is my own Pinetop boogie-woogie / I want everybody to dance ’em just like I tell you / And when I say ‘Hold yourself,’ everybody get ready to stop / And when I’ve said ‘Stop,’ don’t move a peg / And when I say ‘Get it,’ everybody do a boogie woogie / Hold yourself now … Stop / Boogie woogie / Now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”

When Pinetop wrote and recorded Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie in 1928, he was considered by some to have written the first rock ’n’ roll song, just one year after my father was born.

Pinetop was shot and killed in 1929.

Bluesman pianist Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins recorded the same boogie woogie as well — with his nickname, how could he not? The second Pinetop would still be performing a couple of times a week in Austin, Texas, until just before his death at age 97 in 2011.

It’s the Pinetop Perkins version I know best, though it is close to a mirror of the original, which winds out from a thick 78-r.p.m. vinyl if you can find it anywhere.

Both depend on, both centre on, the piano — and both require you let yourself go from your own order of things and let someone else’s deliberate direction take you to where you should go, what you should do, what you can hear and what you can see.

That is what I like about writing.

Writing is just collecting small orders of things and parcelling them up for delivery. About the way the arrival of spring is often the turn of a sharp corner you don’t recognize until it has already happened; about the particular combination hiss of car tires on wet pavement; about the curious choir of five teens who pick up a discarded giveaway vacuum cleaner on a quiet Winnipeg neighbourhood boulevard, and then use their smartphones to shoot video of themselves taking turns pretending to vacuum the grass. Laughing as if they had been there at the invention of humour itself.

About shouldering out into the early morning breaking dark to head for the bus, and finding, instead of cold, that you’ve been enveloped in a curling morning breeze as warm and welcome as the bed you’ve just left. Rolling into that comfort as if you’ve actually somehow earned it.

There is a kind of poetry, known as erasure poetry, where you take an already-written poem by someone else, and black out parts of their work until you’re left with your own brand-new poem, made out of fragments of the original author’s work. It’s the ultimate in seizing control of the handlebars of creation, blindly ignoring the path already laid out to just go ahead and impose your own.

Now, just this time of year, is the time of blackout conversation, when every set of people who walk by your door contribute a new line or two to the overall discussion, even though they have no idea of the whole that they are a part of.

Safe inside the screen porch, you hear:

“He didn’t say anything about it…”

“No. No, Sasha (Sasha, for clarity here, is a dog). Sasha. Leave it. LEAVE it.”

“Can you just walk for a while, Daddy?”

“You said you could keep up.”

“But my legs hurt…”

“Did you call him back?”

“No.”

When I say “Stop,” don’t you move a thing.

A family of four, all speaking French, have the most greenway of Sunday collisions; they’re all riding bikes in loose formation when it happens. Husband, wife, small boy, newer baby belted in and riding prone in a wheeled cart behind the father’s bike.

In the other direction, a man on a mountain bike shoots by, a speaker hanging from his neck, classic rock booming out. (It seems to me that must be like travelling inside of a bubble of your own chosen sound, a bubble that drags along at the same speed you’re moving, swimming over those you pass and then pulling back away from them like a falling tide.)

The father stopped his bike suddenly: the four-year-old, craning his head around to see where the sound was coming from, piled into the trailer. Crashes. Falls. Bleeds from both knees. Baby in cart is both fine and oblivious.

There are remonstrations in all directions, and in both official languages. Blame is spread on thick, accepted by none.

The party splits in two: Dad and baby head west.

Mom and injured, righteously hard-done-by boy head east, walking their bikes. The high tones of small-boy hard-done-by indignation sound piccolo for far longer than he remains in sight.

The afternoon continues in bits and pieces. Evening comes. The walkers thin. I can see a sliver of sunset from the screened porch.

Have a fresh green bean. Taste the newly-cut grass.

Have a listen to Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie. Listen to the running joy of hands streaming up and down the piano keys. The uphill, downhill incredulity of it.

Let a little deep, rich joy seep in. Allow the whole world to be a flavour, a tasting menu.

The wonder of juxtaposition, especially fine when pieces fire bright because they are set off against themselves.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca.