IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE! AND IT’S NOT JUST A MOVIE

(A personal Christmas-time message about being home for the holidays, and all other days in between)

Have you ever had a curious moment, when you felt as if someone had lightly touched or brushed your shoulder or back.....maybe the everso slight feeling a hand was slipping into yours without any one being there? Or have you sworn that someone had called out to you when in fact, you were quite alone? Maybe it was an old familiar scent or an out-of-place reminiscence, an aura that subtly reminded you of another time, another place, possibly the dearly departed. Well, there are times in my life, when all of the above feel at liberty to express themselves in a variety of forms, and most frequently when the last thing I’m contemplating frankly, is whether there is life after death,...... or paranormal anything, beyond the wacky stuff that happens on a daily basis to a family with seven cats. All rescued you see from abandonment in our neighborhood.

But as someone who writes frequently about those who have crossed over, and paranormal activities our family has experienced for many years, I can understand how the belief in ghosts can sway a realist into believing the Currie clan is rather “mad.” Delusional! Crazy people! Wouldn’t blame anybody for thinking this way! Still, I will ask those who refuse to have anything to do with spirit-kind, if they have ever had experiences they couldn’t explain. Those interesting little intrusions upon day to day living that seem to defy the protocol of whatever you’re doing and why, at that precise moment. When all of a sudden you can smell the aroma of a cologne, or freshly baked bread that makes you think of your grandmother’s kitchen, or your father’s after shave lotion. Little signs from somewhere that make us rekindle a memory but we don’t always know why. We settle for a moment with a wee smile and wish only we could relive those cherished affections of former hearth and home. I have always felt it was the spirit-world’s way of occasionally reminding us of our own history, our legacy, as being important at the time for whatever purpose or reason. Maybe to answer some doubt or reinforce an opinion or mood. Not to evoke sadness but to seek a validation; of sorts, that one still remembers affections of the old days.

Even those who staunchly adhere to the finality of life at that final breath, with nothing beyond, must surely admit to having experienced something or other in their lives that defied simple, or any explanation. If I hear a book fall to the floor, here at Birch Hollow, if it wasn’t the work of cat or dog, or earthquake, I acknowledge my book-collector mate, Dave Brown, who passed in the late 1990's. When all of a sudden I start getting some Civil War inkling, referencing Gettysburg, I say hello to my old research partner Charlie Wilson, who was, in life, an avid Civil War historian. If on the other hand Suzanne catches a whiff of something baking, and the kitchen is baking-free, she is sure her mother Harriet or aunt Ada are trying to make a point. We’re not always speedy on the uptake, and probably miss a lot of connecting calls but we certainly validate that those who have crossed can interact with reality.......in the way they feel most comfortable. Most of the time it’s a feeling of contentment. While some would be unsettled by such spirited company, we look forward to our next invitation to experience trans-dimension communication. Heck I’ve gone as far as asking Dave Brown to help me find an evasive book, and while it might take a week, it usually pops out of the strangest place in my archives.....much as if pulled out from a stack to catch my attention. The very moment I turned to put my rough work, written for Dave’s biography (done in 2000), back on the shelf, after the book was successfully off to the publisher, I felt a hand on my shoulder......as if the subject himself let me know he was pleased with content. It was the one fear I admitted to Suzanne throughout the book project. “What if Dave doesn’t like it.” Suzanne would answer, “You know Dave. He will let you know what he thinks, no fear of that!” While it might be hard to believe, it was the exact pat on the back he gave me many times when we were together in life. I knew at once who it was. And there wasn’t any one in that office but me. Or so I thought. But this isn’t to validate whether there are paranormal qualities and quantities, as much as offering an explanation about how and why we moved to this town, and the many pats on the back that encouraged us to sign the offer to purchase......which divine intervention or not, we have never regretted.

I have been a keen student of Charles Dickens and Washington Irving for many years now, and the spirits and hauntings they write about, despite the fiction in which they freely ramble, have always been my adopted philosophy....... those things we can’t fob-off on science alone to explain are dear to me as a writer. For example, the good Mr. Irving, wrote in the text of “Bracebridge Hall,” in his character, the visiting Mr. Crayon, that while science reveals the structure and functioning of life to the minute detail of cell structure and beyond, it can not, for him, remove all the mysteries of existence.......the phantoms, wee beasties of the moor, fairies and their Queen Mab, and the dance circles tucked in amidst the forest fauna, from that past midnight’s revellry beneath the star-light. It was Irving’s fear that the botanist might, if allowed, drain all expectation out of our lives, and make this quite a dull old world without the magic of expectation and imagination.

Dickens three spirits are as real to me as if science laid them out for summary dissection. I could no sooner sit by this brick hearthside, on a Christmas Eve, and not think of the busy work of spirits, than walk in this forest across the road, and not expect to see dear wee creatures of mythical proportion, darting from portal to safe haven. As a writer for these many years, I have enjoyed all these possibilities and expectations, and have practiced, as if religion, an openness to discovery. As a voyeur of curious events, I have enjoyed many moments of inspiration that have come gently, quietly, without fear or trembling, but with an insightful, strange quality which prevails upon me a newfound ambition.....feeling as if I should sit at this keyboard for hours, if even just a modest composition results.

While it can be difficult to explain to naysayers, critics and their cronies, why I have been open to such alleged fictional influences, other than the tried and true, “hard core” of reality, and its economy, I can only answer that a writer takes what is offered as a sign of generosity, regardless of the vehicle or dimension in which it arrived. While I’m ever wary of making deals at crossroads, at least ones involving my soul, just in case, there are times when a forensic accounting just isn’t necessary. A gift is a gift.

What fulfillment are you looking for, and where have you always found it? In my case, it has always been a welling-up of strong feeling, and a good, or bad sensation with a situation. Some of it is indeed untraceable, and unexplained, yet we all at one time or another, get this unanticipated inkling about an event, a move, an adventure that we have to separate from the science of life.....even if we don’t know why!

I wrote the short piece below, earlier today, in an attempt to explain how our family decided to make the move to Gravenhurst back in the late 1980's, when in all honesty, it was not even on the radar when we began shopping for a new residence. I had moved to Bracebridge in the winter of 1966, when my father re-located our family from Burlington, Ontario, to work at a local lumber company. With exception of a short time living in Toronto, during my years at university, I made the decision to come home to Bracebridge after graduating. It even cost me a girlfriend, because I refused to live in the city. I worked to establish a museum in town, and became editor of the former Herald-Gazette, and assistant editor of The Muskoka Sun, and was fully involved with local hockey, baseball and football. I met a girl I had known back at Bracebridge High School, and we discovered the spark was still there after all the years that had passed. We decided to hook-up permanently and make Bracebridge our home address. It all seemed perfect. Almost scripted. Maybe it was but I had wrongly assumed my contentment was defined by our home town. That we would be happy ever after as a family, living in the town I adored since childhood. I was way wrong. Suzanne and I found a growing discontent instead but it had nothing to do with our life together. It was about raising our boys, and where they would thrive. It was the seed of much contemplation but for a long while, we only thought about neighborhoods within Bracebridge, not about re-locating hometowns. But that is exactly what fate laid out for us, and as soon as we saw our future abode in Gravenhurst, we knew at once our kids were going to grow up here. How did we know? What signs? What inspiration? Was there a hand on our back pushing up up the driveway, or spiritually moving the pen on the “offer to purchase?” No, there was just a feeling. A good feeling, as if at that moment, Suzanne and I could both see at once, as Dickens empowered Ebeneezer Scrooge through time, by the hand of a spirit, to witness Christmases yet to be. Could this have been a supernatural experience? Was this the work of playful sprites, influencing poor mortals to do things against their will? While we have disagreed many times, why we re-located to Gravenhurst to raise our family, we knew, standing there at that moment, looking at this humble residence, that it was as much in need of a confused, nervous family to cradle, as we were in need of a forgiving, adaptable nest in which to thrive. And on each occasion, even today, when we roam about the countryside in the pursuit of musical instruments and antiques, as we have for so long, we will round this corner of the neighborhood, and be so delighted to be home once again.

The piece written below is an honest look back at how our family made it to the open arms of Gravenhurst. It isn’t intended to be a sloppy, heart rendering, syrupy re-telling of family history, or for that matter a slur or an insult to Bracebridge, because it will also be my cherished hometown in memoirs of my parents and their dwelling up on Alice Street. But it will explain, to some who think they know us, just how important and providential it has all been, when we report proudly, to anyone who cares to listen.....that Gravenhurst is home.....and it’s good to be here, amongst friends at this wonderful time of the year. And folks, has this town ever influenced us!

A MOVE TO THE FUTURE.......THE WINTER OF 1989

There was a shadow of doubt about a planned move. It wasn’t done without serious contemplation. We had to consider the impact on our family, Suzanne’s father and my parents, adding distance between them and their grandsons. Quirky as I am, I remember thinking about the history and fate we were tampering with, in a big way, by considering a re-location even if it was only a few miles south. What imbalance might we be creating in our universe? I guess it’s true that we were asking the heaven’s above, inadvertently, whether we should just stay put, instead of adding a bunch of unknowns to life’s adventure. I suppose in the process, we opened the door for the spirit-kind to intervene with their two cents’ worth. I found it all a little precarious but I knew we could not thrive in the situation we found ourselves. In retrospect, yes, I’m a little weirded-out by the reality we weren’t more decisive, and that it was possible we could have remained in the wilds of rural Bracebridge. Thinking about the boys work now, I can’t help but have that Jimmy Stewart moment, and recognize that we must have had our own Guardian Angel that led us, gently, to anticipate the future correctly.

In the late 1980's, early 1990's, I was unhappy with my employers, disenchanted with the way Bracebridge was sprawling into the countryside......in the pastures where I used to play pond-hockey, and my Manitoba Street antique business was a hair’s breadth from financial implosion. Suzanne had a slim to none chance of transferring from Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School, but we both realized a change was necessary in all areas. We had two wee lads, we were living on Golden Beach Road, in Bracebridge, with one car and it was a long hike to town if the battery quit.....which it did frequently. And the waterline would freeze at the same time as the septic tank. And when the wind blew, I swear the walls moved. It wasn’t our most prudent real estate acquisition.

Our change began in stages, not by choice but by circumstance. We sold our cottage-abode and moved to a family cottage on Lake Rosseau, at Windermere, and for months commuted to Bracebridge for our store and Suzanne’s teaching gig. We couldn’t find a house in our price range anywhere in Bracebridge. As Suzanne was getting anxious about having to stay in a poorly insulated cottage over the winter, I knew we had to find a place before the first major snow flurries of 1989. We did!

As if a providential development, we found a rather plain but nicely situated bungalow in Gravenhurst, across from a beautiful little lowland, we now call The Bog. We have always called our home “Birch Hollow,” after our business of the same name. While it was a considerable struggle those first few years, especially heading right into a recession, and property de-valuation, Suzanne jumped at the opportunity to transfer when a position opened at Gravenhurst High School. We were able to transfer the boys to Gravenhurst Public School, and after accepting a part-time job with former National Hockey League goaltender, Roger Crozier, to help with his fledgling Youth Foundation in Muskoka, we brought our antique business home, and after five years of re-organization of business and personal affairs, we were all settling finally, happily into our new home town.

While we both missed aspects of our lives and residency in Bracebridge, we wanted a smaller community for our boys to experience. And while some folks here didn’t like to be told their town was smaller, and less stressed by expansionary influences than their more northerly neighbor, they eventually recognized that what we really meant, was that Gravenhurst had avoided the kind of urban sprawl that both Bracebridge and Huntsville seemed to be welcoming far too rigorously....and measuring quality of life balances, solely by the number of new commercial establishments constructed in any given year. We wanted a community that handled development sensibly and proportionally to what citizens and their historic values had built in character. What made Gravenhurst different from the other towns? And while some former councils, in this town, were scorned for protectionism and excessive rigidity, resistant to accepting development without full scrutiny, what they did possess was a reverence to old standards of operation that were still reliable cornerstones amidst the orgy of new investment hitting Muskoka. They were keenly aware of precedents and protocols, when some councils in other municipalities couldn’t have cared less, other than to report a binge of economic development, and employment opportunities for all. Funny how we’re still staring at high unemployment none the less in this new century!

Some out-of-towners say Gravenhurst was stuck in the 1950's, for a half century, when they should have been cruising into the future with the rest of the pie-in-the-sky progressives, sucking the marrow of the 1980's surge of development investment. In my opinion that pause, and reluctance of government to embrace all development as good and enhancing, has enabled Gravenhurst to learn from the mistakes of others......knowing I’m sure by now that beanstalks all over the place, don’t define prosperity and quality of life but instead illustrate quite poignantly why we need to watch out for sellers of magic beans.

When we made this change in our young family’s life, we took an enormous risk on our new neighborhood. Today, pulling out of this wee lane at Birch Hollow, looking out over the snowy woodlands, and seeing the quaint, Christmas-decorated homes of neighbors and good friends, and drive up onto the main street, we have always adored for what it possesses of small town architecture, of history and accomplishment, and pull up in front of the shop where Andrew and Robert operate their music business, across from the Opera House (where they frequently meet up with friends to promote music events, for charity), it’s a settling, comfortable feeling about this adopted hometown......., and how it has all worked out for us over the decades. And one can pause, like Jimmy Stewart, for a moment, in the spiral of gently falling snow, and think about the possibility we had moved somewhere else, and established ourselves in another neighborhood. What a wonderful life we would have missed indeed. Ambitions I’m sure would have been at work there as they have been here, of course, and it is by no means the intention of this writer to be overly critical of my former hometown. Yet I know we made the right decision to move here, where today there is that effervescent feeling of belonging......as if we have been here for generations.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “so what the heck does this have to do with a Christmas message,”(or finding out that we think there are kindly spirits that walk the earth throughout the rolling year). After last weekend’s fundraising concert, at the Opera House, in benefit of the Salvation Army Food Bank......and all the kind remarks we’ve had over this week from sponsors, performers and patrons, and of course from the recipients of the funds, I can tell you honestly, on behalf of our family, that moving to Gravenhurst was a life-enhancing, wonderful adventure.......a risk we’re all glad we took back in 1989.

As for the future. We have so many more projects planned with our musical friends and helpers.....and with the spirit(s) of the season, and elsewhere as we seem to have as permanent companions, (we’re not complaining), we hope you will be part of our history of home town life and times, in that grand perpetuity of goodwill on earth. And if you have some suspicion that our paths were meant to cross, and there was some handiwork of providence at play, a hand on the shoulder, a mysterious voice of welcome, or odd feeling of being in the right place at the right time, well, then you’re on the right page with like-minded folks. Kindred spirits you might say.

For the entire time I was writing this lengthy tome, I have kept thinking about an author friend and mentor, Wayland Drew, who has for long and long had a hand on my own shoulder from beyond, of which inspires evermore. It was sitting with him, at hearthside, one Christmas, that his sage advice struck that chord of creativity, to write with spirit, write with devotion, write with passion. Write honestly. God bless!

We wish you all a safe and merry Christmas and of course a Happy New Year.