I took a class at Dalhousie University in Creative Writing from Andrew Wainwright. Dr. Wainwright was a published poet and novelist, as well as a scholar of literature, particularly Canadian Literature. I'd already taken his CanLit class (and was thankful for the introduction to Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen, one of my favourite books). One day, at the beginning of class, he pulled out the Globe and Mail's Review. It was probably a Monday since that's a Saturday edition thing. Anyway, on the cover was Coke Machine Glow, the recently published book of poems by The Tragically Hip's Gord Downie.
"To get on the cover of the Review as a poet, you have to be a rockstar. What does that say about culture in Canada?" Wainwright said.
I have never forgotten, ever, that I will never make the front page of a newspaper as a poet, unless I get to be a rockstar first.
By the way, I read Coke Machine Glow. It's okay. Downie writes better song lyrics. The poems come across as B-roll, stuff not good enough to make a song.
All that to get at this: I have a list of influential people in my life. I don't usually list it off, or make a big deal out of it. At the same time, I know who they are. Some of them know (or knew) who they are.
In the past year, two of them have died. Wainwright, as far as I know, is not one of them, though he did influence me quite a bit.
The first one to die was Malcolm Stone, the copyeditor at the paper where I worked when I was 21. Malcolm was the dirtiest old hipster you ever saw. He lived in a farmhouse, had no running water and made his living teaching bridge and correcting the grammar and spelling of his local community paper.
He was, in a way, my hero. He was a connoisseur of French fries, a lover of canned goods, and a gourmand in all the best ways. His New Yorker was a pleasure to be savoured, as was his weekly Wednesday copy of the New York Times (purchased solely for the food section). He loved to write headlines influenced by song lyrics.
I didn't know what to make of him at first, but once I got past the cigarette aura, I admired him. He was the ultimate freespirit.
I excelled at copyediting and I knew it was, in part, because I had been under the tutelage of a man who carried around a battered copy of the American Heritage dictionnary.
This week, my former boss died. A heart attack felled him in his office Monday morning. It would have been sunny, I think, and he may have just watered his plants. He would have already had his coffee. He always had his coffee ready first.
That's the one thing he and Malcolm had in common - they both liked coffee and drank more than I could ever manage.
Bernie hired me, with no real "finance" experience to be his assistant. I think it was because I claimed to know databases. I did know databases - it had just been a long time since I'd played around with one.
Bernie would give me a task and let me do it. I would come back and ask questions, but I normally figured it out. If I got frustrated (as I did when it came time to making the blank budget files work), he'd just ask me a couple of questions and send me back to work on it. I did get it eventually, and I felt good about what I had managed to do.
I felt like I could have been an accountant if I'd wanted, which is something for a girl who wanted nothing more than to be a journalist. See, I already had the word thing down pat.
Bernie's best quality, his most influential quality, was making you feel like you could do something if you put your mind to it. He treated everyone as capable. Some people said you had to go with a fully formulated plan of action, and it was true. If something needed to be done, you needed to know what. But once you knew what it was, Bernie was willing to let you figure out how to get there.
He was my boss at a time when I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I wish I could have kept working for him.
