FROM MARCH 2020 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

Elvis, The Stretch Marks, Lucinda, Tom Waits – my keenest memories are set to the mixed tape in my mind

My first memory of music is of my mother singing to me in German, sitting on her lap in the rocking chair, the scratchy feel of her woollen skirt, the warmth of her embrace, the sun pouring in through the bedroom window. I was two years old. Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen. You, you, are close to my heart.

In church, from birth to age 15 when I stopped going, I spent approximately 5,475 hours sitting on a wooden bench listening to grown men storm around threatening me with fire and horned oxen. The hymn that moved my soul, made those hours in church bearable, was “Work for the Night is Coming.” I loved it when the entire congregation sang it in mournful four-party harmony.

At nine, I mourned the departure of my older sister – she was leaving us all behind for summer camp in Alberta, so she may as well have been dead – and listened to “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks over and over and over, a little 45 she’d given me before she split, with a weird song on the B side called “Put the Bone In.”

Then at 12 I heard Elvis, The Ramones, T-Rex and Bob Marley in a friend’s basement. They were records belonging to her older adopted brother, which made me think for a long time that only adopted people were cool. And that was it. Life changed.

I survived adolescence by taking the Greyhound into the city of Winnipeg and going to punk shows and jumping around to the Stretch Marks, the Ruggedy Annes and Personality Crisis. A lot of people were talking with fake British accents until Sikbee or somebody else from the Stretch Marks told everyone talking with fake British accents to get the fuck real and so we stopped.

I moved to Montreal when I was 18 and was so hungry and lonely and pissed off that when I heard the opening track “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” come pounding up on U2’s War album I was so blown away I listened to it non-stop and then went to Northern Ireland and rode a bicycle to Maze prison, where Bobby Sands died as a political prisoner from a hunger strike. I felt that I was in love with him, with his ghost.

When my son was just 10 days old, I was marooned with him in the Blizzard of the Century, just the two of us, in our shitty apartment in downtown Winnipeg, and I taught myself how to juggle using his tiny balled-up wet diapers and listened to True Stories by Talking Heads continuously. You dreamed me a heart, you’re the dream operator.

When my daughter was born I walked and walked and walked, carrying her and nuzzling my face into her wild head of black hair and softly sang along to Sinead O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got all night long, night after night after night after night.

When the kids and their dad and I went on a road trip down to the Deep South we drove around in our beater VW van singing to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and stopped at every place Lucinda Williams mentions on the record.

Three years later, when my beloved cousin went missing, I drove very slowly around and around the streets of Winnipeg listening to The Weakerthans’ Left and Leaving. I wait in 4/4 time.

Then deaths. The night before my dad died we were listening to Closing Time by Tom Waits, just the two of us, driving in the darkish spring evening along the Trans-Canada, then the number 12, from Winnipeg to my hometown, to our house, his house, then to the hospital. He asked me who was singing. I was driving. He had his arm slung over the seat. I said “Tom Waits.” He said he liked it, the “fellow” had a nice voice. I thought at the time that was funny. But I guess early in his career Tom Waits had a pretty mellifluous voice compared to now.

Another death. My wonder-filled, restless sister. Neil Young’s “See the Sky About to Rain.” No words, but...yeah, none.

Fado was all I played during my awful divorce, because I had no mind left to absorb the meaning of words and I don’t understand Portuguese so that was good. I just heard pain.

Life, life, life, life is unbelievable. My Toronto years – John Southworth. Thank you. It is, right?

And now, the best of all – grandbabies. Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high. I love the way my two-year-old granddaughter says “sooo high,” stretching her arms up as far as they go.

— Miriam Toews is the Governor General Award-winning author of A Complicated Kindness.