There is a group of musically-minded people that I used to get together with periodically to jam in the basement of my old friend, Al, in Mississauga. So last night I rode the commuter train out to Mississauga and Al both picked me up and drove me all the way home after our session.

We first met Al, by the way, almost thirty years ago when he came to live with us briefly when we were living in an old farmhouse north of Toronto. At the time he was going to school to become an auto mechanic (today he’s a car company executive) and he stayed with us while he went to classes. A particularly strong memory I have is the extremely cold day in January that he helped me staple plastic around the outside of the windows on the old, gigantic house. Anyhow, in order to use the stapler it was necessary to take off my gloves, but the problem was that my hands were becoming so numb they wouldn’t function. So Al came to the rescue and, to my amazement, stapled the remaining windows for me without gloves. I kept asking him if his hands were cold and he answered that they weren’t. A case of extraordinary circulation.

So back to the story: the group last night consisted of a man (who happens to be a school principal) and woman who can sight read as well as improvise practically anything on the piano and organ which Al has in his basement. Next there was Al’s brother Danny, who alternately played the mandolin and the fiddle. (We would sing a few verses of a song, then call out for Danny to “take it” and he would play a near-perfect solo while we accompanied.) Another remarkable instrumentalist in the room was Eugene, a former high school teacher formerly of Liverpool, England. Eugene used to know the Beatles and “jam” with them (!) and his specialty was improvisational “licks” on an acoustic guitar. And then there was Al’s son, Andrew, who this year began taking lessons in bluegrass banjo and who can already perform amazingly well. He provided a plunka plunka backdrop for numerous folksy and country-type numbers. Al himself competently played electric bass guitar as well as vocals (we had microphones) while my own contribution was vocals and rhythm guitar.

Anyhow, we rather amazed ourselves at how good we managed to sound and it was the most fun I’ve had with music in quite a long time.

By the way, before the musical part of the evening got started, I sat and had a conversation with Al’s mother, Aggie, about her past. She was raised in the Ottawa Valley, a part of Ontario which was slow in developing. She told me how she’d grown up in a family of ten children. Her father would be gone for the winter working in lumber camps and her mother would manage the children in their remote (the nearest school was six miles) home, which actually had been made out of a grain silo when the house burned down. The children slept three in a bed, in their clothes (she said she didn’t learn what pajamas were until later on) and often had only bread and lard to eat. Because temperatures often would be -40 in the winter and they didn’t own warm enough clothing, they stayed home from school. Aggie said she only went to school for two months in her whole life. She and the older children in the family later learned things from the younger ones who were able to go to school when the family moved into town. Aggie met Al’s father in the town and later they both moved to Kitchener, Ontario, which had become a booming industrial town, and the place Al and his two brothers were raised.

Here in Canada we’ve been following with interest the Liberal Party’s leadership convention, which concluded last night. One thing that might be of interest to Americans is that the keynote speaker was Howard Dean, chairman of the Liberal’s soul mate Democratic Party. (According to pundits, Dean's speech was not inspiring.) Anyhow it was a four-way race which was decided on the third ballot, making it all quite exciting. The winner was the Quebecois candidate that had formerly been in fourth place, Stephane Dion. He speaks fractured English, and like the current Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party, Stephen Harper, is known as a “policy wonk.” (He’s a former professor of political science.) Some have dubbed it “the Battle of the Nerds.” The Conservatives are probably quite happy because Dion was seen as the least formidable of the four candidates.