Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - Home - Rendi & Fire at the Old Town Hall

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

“How can you deny an old man his dying wish?”This week’s episode is all about the powerful pull of home. We start with a story about Dave’s neighbours Eugene and Maria and their longing for their hometown of Rendi. And in our second story, an event in Dave’s Big Narrows brings back a cascade of memories.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the Apostrophe Podcast Network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton and this is Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome. Today on the show, two stories about home. In our first, we're going to Italy to visit the hometown of Dave and Morley's neighbor, Eugene. In our second, it's Dave's hometown of Big Narrows. So many of you have written in to tell us how much you love Eugene. I totally agree. I love him too. He's such a great character. This is a story about Eugene that doesn't get played very often. I hope you enjoy it. This is Stuart McLean with Rondi. Dave's neighbor Eugene, 86 years old this year, and Eugene's wife Maria, 88, moved into the basement of their house several winters ago. It was Eugene's idea.

He thought they would be happier if they could be closer to the furnace during the long, gray winter afternoons. It turned out even better than he had imagined. Before long, Maria was preparing their dinners in the old basement kitchen. Next thing, they were sleeping down there. In June, they discovered the basement was not only warmer in winter, it was cooler in the summer, and they'd been living down there ever since. They brought down all their family pictures to complete their basement home, some old sepia prints of Eugene's village in Calabria, the fearful portraits of Maria's parents, and countless photos of their son Thomas. Thomas in a crib, Thomas sitting in the fig tree,

Thomas on skates, Thomas with his wife, Thomas with his own son. Best of all, Eugene would tell you, there are no stairs when you live in a basement. I don't understand, says Eugene, why everyone doesn't live downstairs. Eugene, who's a gardener, spends the languorous days of summer in his yard, tilting back precariously on an old vinyl-covered kitchen chair, smoking his little Italian cigars and watching over his sweet peppers and his string beans, tilting back under his beloved fig tree while he crushes grapes on his thighs to distract the wasps. Eugene, who comes to life in the summer,

spends the winter on a brown leather chair in the center of the big basement room where he and Maria cook and eat and doze. The television's always on down there and the radio too. Eugene listening and watching and more often than not, snoring all at the same time. Eugene was in his chair the Monday before Christmas, watching This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and listening to the BBC World News when he heard that the Italian opera singer Renata Tobaldi had died.

The announcer said, Tobaldi had one of the most beautiful voices of the last century. And then someone said she had a voice that sounded like pouring cream. And then someone said she had a voice that sounded like pouring cream. When she sang, she sounded just like pouring cream, said Eugene to Sam an hour later. Sam, 12 years old, comes over to Eugene's house every Sunday night after supper. He brings his laptop computer with him, and he sits at the big table in the center of the basement room, and Maria puts out a plate of cannoli or zabaglioni. Sam comes over to collect the weekly email from Eugene and Maria's son, Thomas.

Thomas lives in London, England. And he sends an email every week and most weeks pictures too. Sam reads the emails out loud using his outside voice. So Maria and Eugene can hear him and he shows them the pictures and then Eugene and Maria yak at each other in Italian and they tell Sam what they want to write back to Thomas. On the Sunday before Christmas Eugene said tell him Renata Tabalda died. Write that when she sang she sounded like pouring cream. Then Eugene's head drooped and he began to snore softly and Sam pulled out his game boy which he brought with him precisely for these moments and he got in some Pokemon until Eugene stirred and said, write that I want him to go back to the old country.

Tell him it is my dying wish that he goes back to the village where I was born. On the other side of the room, Maria snorted. This wasn't Eugene's first dying wish. Eugene submitted his first dying wish to his son the year he turned 70. It's my dying wish that you return to Canada and spend Christmas with your mother, he wrote. Thomas, who had never heard his father talk like that, bought a plane ticket home that very day. Thomas, who had never heard his father talk like that, bought a plane ticket home that very day. The next year, Eugene asked Thomas to find a wife. And then he asked Thomas that he and his wife have a baby, and then more babies.

Gradually, the wishes became, as far as dying wishes go, more and more peculiar. Please buy me some of those French chocolates when you're in Paris next. I wouldn't mind another Maria Callas record. Send three of the cotton undershirts they have at Marks and Spencer's. It's my dying wish. So on the Sunday after Christmas when Eugene asked Thomas to go back to the family village and say it was his dying wish, Thomas in England didn't pay it much heed. Thomas had already been to Italy five times, twice to the Grand Prix in Milano, twice to a friend's villa in Tuscany, and once skiing in the Alps. I've been to the old

country, he wrote. Why don't I send you some smoke kippers from Lock Finn instead. It's my dying wish, Eugene shot back. How can you deny an old man his dying wish? Now this went on for several weeks until Thomas finally relented. Eugene alerted family and Rondi that his son was coming. And a month later, on a damp Friday morning at the end of January, Thomas left Waterloo Station on the four-hour train trip to Paris North. He had seven hours before his train left Paris-Bercy for Rome, so he took a taxi to Saint-Germain and went to the Dubov and Galet Chocolatier, and he bought a box of pistols, a chocolate disc with nuts. The clerk told him that the pistols were Marie Antoinette's favorites.

Je sais, je sais, I know, said Thomas. He ate a crepe at Le Samaritan and he bought a pair of mauve socks and then he sat in the Berce station making calls on his cell phone and sending emails. He took an overnight train to Rome and at Rome he changed to a train for Napoli and in Napoli he boarded a local to Cosenza. Eugene's instructions were exhaustive. At the station in Cosenza, Thomas was to find a country taxi, not one of the city ones, one of the cars owned by the men who hung around the back of the station, men who wouldn't charge a ransom to drive you to the mountain villages. I want to go to Rondi, said Thomas to the men hanging around the line

of old Fiat's. Now Thomas knew his Italian was far from perfect, but he'd always found it passable in the north. The men, however, didn't seem to understand a word. The men squinted at him. Rondi, said Thomas. I want to go to Rondi. The men looked confused and then there was much yammering back and forth and Thomas retreated to the one word that he was sure of. Rondy, he repeated, saying the name of his father's village louder and louder until he was shouting it. Most of the men were pointing into the mountains to the north of the station, but two of them kept shaking their heads and pointing west. Thomas took a pen out and a pack of cigarettes from one of the men and he wrote the village name on the cigarette package.

The men passed the package around and there was more fast talk and much shaking of heads until a man in a red plaid shirt stepped forward and slapped his chest and said, Rondy, and pointed at one of the rusting fields. They drove for an hour, twisting up the sides of mountains and through ancient vineyards and plunging down into the dusty valleys. They skidded around a herd of goats and bounced by old stone ruins. It was as if they were racing from time. Thomas, sitting in the back seat, was oblivious to the sublime glory of the sunburned hills. Instead, he spent the ride wondering what the stock market was doing and whether his whole life was going to be taken up by his father's wishes.

Rondi turned out to be a walled village, a cluster of red-tiled roofs on a rolling hillside surrounded by vineyards. The blue Fiat rocked to a stop at the Porta Nuova, and Thomas paid the driver and walked into town, his black leather satchel slung over his shoulder. The first people he saw were two old ladies dressed in black, arguing at the edge of the piazza at the village center. I'm looking for Michelina Conte, said Thomas, an Italian. The two women stared at him blankly. Michelinacante, said one of the women to the other.

Si, said Thomas. Michelinacante. Thomas set his satchel down on the cobblestone road. His father had told him everyone in town would know his uncle's widow. Mi chiamo Tommaso Conte. Vengo da Toronto. Figlio di Eugine Maria. Before long, a crowd of people had gathered around him. Apparently, the old family connections were not as strong as Eugene had wanted to think.

Thomas felt sorry for his father. No one had seemingly even heard of Michalina Conte. Michalina Conte, said Thomas as each arrived. Michelinaconte. Until finally someone said, ah, Michelinaconte. And there was a lot of fast talk. Just like at the taxi stand, it was far too fast for Thomas to follow. And then someone ran off and came back with a priest, his black robe swaying back and forth as he swept down the street. Mi calina conte, said the priest, as he threw his arms around Thomas. And so Thomas' weekend began.

All the villagers pushing forward and clapping him on the back, their bewilderment dissolving. Two young men carried up a long wooden table right to the center of the piazza, and slyly, like a picture developing in a darkroom tray, the wooden table began to fill with food. Bottles of red wine that had no labels, a big block of hard crumbling cheese, and more as more people appeared, carrying loaves of crusty bread, a big dish of sweet peppers swimming in oil and garlic, a pot of bubbling tomato sauce, plates of fresh pasta. Thomas dug out his camera and took pictures of everyone at the table. And then he gave his camera to a young boy who took pictures of him with everyone.

He wanted evidence to send back home. When Thomas left Rondy the next morning, there were 20 people standing at the massive town gate, waving goodbye. On the way home, he wrote his father. And this is part of what he wrote. I never understood before, he wrote, why you left Italy. And now I do. It's quaint and not without beauty, but it's so backward. I left Canada for the same reason.

And I can't imagine living there anymore. Imagine what might have become of me if you had stayed in Rondy after the war. I know it wasn't always easy for you. I'm grateful for what you did. As Sam read the letter out loud, Eugene began to scowl. No one said anything when he got to the end. The silence was, in fact, so deep and so profound that Sam glanced at Eugene to check if he had fallen asleep. When he saw he was in fact very awake, Sam sat and waited for the old man to speak. He waited so long, Sam finally said quietly, there are pictures. Eugene grumbled as he hauled himself out of his chair. He snorted when he squinted at the pictures. That's not Rondi, he said.

That's not Rondi, he said. Well, it was, but it wasn't. There are, it turns out, three Rondis. Rondi del Mare, Rondi del Castello, and Rondi di Santa Maria. Thomas had gone to the wrong one. The indignity of it provoked a dramatic and unexpected response from eugene with his jaw clenched and his eyes set eugene shuffled unwaveringly across the room and picked up the telephone eugene who's never once in his life incurred long distant charges on his own telephone not once not ever eugene who won't even talk to his son when Thomas phones home

because he can hear the money being spent with every word. That Eugene picked up the phone and dialed Thomas direct in London as if this was something he did every day. Except it was night in Canada. Two in the morning in London. Maria watched with her hand on her breast. Madre santa, said Maria with genuine shock. Not, however, as much shock as Thomas, who was sound asleep when he picked up the phone and heard his father bellowing at him.

When he sorted out what was happening, Thomas tried to convince his father that his memory was playing tricks on him. If I was in the wrong village, said Thomas, why did they make such a fuss? They fed me. They took me into their homes. Eugene was apoplectic. Don't you know anything about Italians, he barked. They felt sorry for a man who gets himself so lost. Italians are very kind to idiots. Then he slammed the phone down and he turned to Sam. What are you looking at? He said, it's okay, it's okay. Type, type. Tell him, go back. What else, said Sam? Nothing else, said Eugene. Thomas's reply came in an email the following Sunday. Don't ask me to go back, wrote Thomas.

I got the point. Eugene was shaking his head as he stared at Sam. Right, what point? Right, how many years in school and you talk nonsense? Right. This is my dying wish. And with that, Eugene started to snore. Thomas went back to Italy a month later. And if I told you the progression of his second trip, it would sound to you that in all the details, it was exactly the same as the first one. He took the train from Waterloo to Paris and from Paris to Rome and from Rome to Napoli. In Cosenza he carried

his black leather satchel to the back of the station and found a cab to take him to Ronde, the right one this time, Ronde del Castello. Once again the cab bounced over the hills and valleys of the sunburned and rocky wilderness the Italians call il mezzogiorno. And once again when he got to the village Thomas tried in his fractured Italian to introduce himself to no avail. Just like on the previous visit a small group of the curious gathered around Thomas. All of them talking so fast Thomas had no idea what anyone was saying until suddenly a man clenching a pipe in his mouth pushed his way to the center of the circle of people. He was wearing an overcoat and a fedora and he smiled at Thomas and he said in heavily accented English, what seems to be the problem here? Like I said, the events of the visit were almost identical to those of the first trip.

But that's not how it felt to Thomas. On his first afternoon in the new Rondi, Thomas was walking through one of the narrow streets when he came across a man carrying a huge wooden toolbox. He had to step into a doorway to let the man by. And as the man passed, they made eye contact and they nodded at each other. Thomas walked 10 more steps in the opposite direction when something made him turn around and look over his shoulder. And when he did that, he saw the man with a toolbox had done the same thing. They stared at each other for what might have been an uncomfortable moment,

but wasn't uncomfortable at all. And then Thomas smiled, and the man nodded again, and the moment was over. The man reminded Thomas of someone, but it was only after he was out of sight that Thomas realized who the someone was. The man reminded him of himself. He was thicker and rougher, to be sure, a craftsman rather than a businessman, but it could have been his own self if he had grown up there. The feeling of recognition intensified as the day wore on. As the hours passed, Thomas found his head snapping around to look at one person after another. By nightfall, a feeling had settled on him that he tried to describe in an email to

his father when he got home. But he couldn't find the words. It was an unsettling feeling. A feeling of the world shifting. A feeling of the world becoming both larger and smaller at the same time. A sense of claustrophobia and expansion all in one. He phoned his wife and tried to tell his wife about it, but he couldn't explain it to her either. He was staying at his uncle's widow's house,

sleeping in a second floor bedroom with a stone floor and a wooden shuttered window that overlooked a valley of olive trees. There were some old stone arches from Roman times down in the valley. On his second morning at breakfast, Thomas's uncle's widow pointed at one of the arches from Roman times down in the valley. On his second morning at breakfast, Thomas's uncle's widow pointed at one of the arches and told him when his uncle was a young man, he had a dream about the biggest arch. He dreamed there was buried treasure under the far arch, she said. And when he woke up, he took an axe and a pick and a shovel and he went down there and he started to dig. He dug and he dug and he dug until he had a hole as deep as his waist. And then he hit something hard.

And it was a chest. And he hauled the chest out of the hole and he saw the lock on the chest was already broken. And when he opened it up up the chest was empty. Thomas said someone else must have had the same dream as him. Someone else must have found the chest first and got all the gold and Thomas laughed and laughed thinking to himself that was pretty funny. His uncle's widow didn't laugh. His uncle's widow didn't even crack a smile. She said, that's what your uncle said. What happened to the chest, asked Thomas. His uncle's widow shook her head. He put a hundred lira inside and buried it for the next person who had the dream.

The sun was shining and the wind was blowing softly up the valley. And they sat there in the kitchen with their coffee and sweet rolls. And Thomas was reminded of the quiet breakfasts he shared with his mother as a boy. They'd sit and eat and watch his father, the early riser, working in the garden as they ate their toast. When Eugene finally dies, and that will not happen for many years yet, but when he does die, he will do so at home. And there will be a small funeral at a local church, and everyone who attends will leave with a bottle of his homemade wine.

It will be, after all, his dying wish. And after the funeral, people will go to the house and sit in the basement room in the backyard garden and they'll talk. Sam will be there. It'll be his first funeral. Dave will be there too, of course. And in the late afternoon, Dave and Thomas will find themselves alone by Eugene's garden shed. And Dave, who will never get to know Thomas very well, will ask him why he decided to move back to Canada from London. It was your father's greatest wish, you know, but he would never tell that to you. I guess because he was an immigrant himself, because he had left Italy and never moved back,

he felt he couldn't ask you to come home. He was a generous man. felt he couldn't ask you to come home. He was a generous man. Thomas will smile and reach up and tug at a branch of Eugene's beloved fig tree and he'll say, oh I think he told me in his own way a number of years ago when he sent me back to Rondy. Thomas was thinking of the morning when he was sitting at the table with his uncle's widow and the priest had come and knocked on the door and they had walked to the village graveyard. The priest in his black cassock. It's not a long walk, but it took a long time because they walked slowly,

not wanting to rush the old lady. And when they got to the graveyard, they stopped before all the stones that she wanted to show them. This is my husband, she said. This is his father. This is my sister. This is her child. Thomas watched how she crossed herself and he did it himself as he peered at the photographs set in each stone, each picture fading softly behind its piece of cloudy glass. After a while, he stood and with his aunt leaning on his arm, they headed back along the sun-soaked road back to the village. Thank you very much.

That was the story we call Rondi. We recorded that story in Port Hove, Ontario, back in 2005. That was one of the very first shows that I produced. One of the very first shows that I was in charge of, without the guidance of the legendary founding producer of the Vinyl Cafe, David Amer. I was so young, so green, and so inexperienced. And there were so many things that I did wrong, or I guess things I didn't know I had to do. One of them was pronouncers. When hosts like Stuart record, they're usually reading a script.

pronouncers. When hosts, like Stuart, record, they're usually reading a script. And one of the things that their producer does is review the script to see if there are any words that the host might stumble on. When someone's live on stage or live on air, they can't pause for a second to think, is this word homeopathy or homeopathy. So producers put in little phonetic spellings in the script. There are tricks for it. The syllable with the emphasis, for instance, is written out in all caps. That way the host knows which syllable to put the emphasis on so they don't put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. It's also how a host knows how to say place names that they may not be familiar with. At CBC Radio, there's a style guide for this sort of thing. That's why, by the way, you'll hear all CBC

hosts saying things like harassment instead of harassment. Anyway, I didn't know any of this when I was first starting out. And we got into Port Hope to record that story, the one you just heard. And about 30 minutes before Stuart went on stage, he asked me to remind him how to pronounce some of the Italian words in the script, including Rondi, the title of that story, and a word that appears like 40 times throughout it. It never occurred to me that Stuart didn't have any idea how to say that word. But why would he? I mean, he looked at a map and he chose the name and he wrote it. He didn't say it out loud to himself as he was writing the story. But the show was about to begin. This was back in 2005. So we

probably didn't even have internet at the theater. I don't remember. I definitely didn't have a smartphone. So I called my best friend, Andrea Cuccaro. Andrea's dad, Tulio, is Italian. So I called my best friend, Andrea Cuccaro. Andrea's dad, Tulio, is Italian. So I called Andrea, and she called her dad, and her dad called his mom, Andrea's noni. The clock was ticking, and Andrea's dad knew it. But he delivered. He called Stuart back before the show, and he explained how to say those words in Italian. And I wrote them into the script, and I immediately learned that lesson. Make sure you know how to pronounce every single word that Stuart has written. That became part of

my job description, along with always knowing where he put his glasses. We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with another story so stick around welcome back time for our second story now this is fire at the old town hall everyone in town heard the lightning hit. It was well after midnight and most everyone was asleep, but they all heard it. Next morning at the Maple Leaf Cafe, the regulars who sit at the back table were playing the moment and Smith Gardner said, I heard it even woke Bob Wilson. Smith got a good laugh for that one. They buried Bob Wilson last summer.

But it was loud enough to wake the dead, I mean. The lightning hit town like a cracking big whip. If anyone did manage to sleep through it, the thunder got them. Like the end of the world, said Alf McDonald. Like the old days, said George McDonnell. Meaning the days when things used to happen at the mine. Though those were more bumps than bangs. More muffled. And those days are long gone. Last shaft closed 50 years ago.

Dave's cousin Brenda was the first in town to know what got hit. Brenda was sitting in her taxi right under the portico, her engine running, the Halifax radio playing along to the slap of her windshield wipers. Brenda was thinking she might as well pack it in, go home and play some online bridge. Who's going to call a taxi in the middle of this wet night? when BAM! So close that Brenda ducked and smacked her head on the steering wheel. It was pure reflex. Next thing she did was reach for her radio. That was reflex too. Brenda called it in before she even saw the flames.

She knew right away it had hit the bell which is ironic when you consider all the work that went into saving that bell and getting it up there the fire department couldn't have got there any faster 10 minutes at the most though it seemed way longer to brenda It occurred to her that she should go in and save something. She had a key. Half the people in town had a key. But what was she going to save? The coffee machine? And then sparks started landing on the hood of her cab and that settled that. Brenda backed across the street and started calling people instead. Dave was her third call. The fireman didn't even have the hoses out when the phone on his bedside table rang, and some 2,000 kilometers away, Dave lurched up with a gasp. He did that thing we all do when

the phone wakes us in the middle of the night he pretended it didn't hi he chirped as if he had been sitting around expecting the call Brenda who wasn't fooled and didn't care just said the hall's on fire the big narrows community hall. Dave made some indistinguishable worrying sound and Morley, who had been woken by the ring, sat up abruptly. Her mother is old. Their daughter has moved out. What? She said. So it was a relief, for Morley anyway,

when Dave covered the mouthpiece and told her what was going on, the hall's on fire. Brenda said, I posted a picture, I'll put up a video, it's not over. But almost the moment she said that, the flames burst through the roof and started crawling down the walls. Brenda said, I got to go. Next thing you knew, Dave's cell phone was beeping. It was a text message from his boyhood pal, Billy Mitchell. You awake?

The hall's on fire. the hall's on fire. Now that would have been a thing, to get two calls in the middle of the night about a fire in your hometown. That would have been a thing, even if Billy still lived in the Narrows. But Billy is in Afghanistan. What kind of crazy world is this, said Dave. Morley and Dave were wide awake now. Morley had fetched her laptop and had it perched on a pile of pillows between them. They were staring at the videos that Brenda was posting, at the people in the crowd as much as the fire. There's my mother, said Dave. Is she in her nightgown?

And then Morley said, OK, if we're staying up, I'm making tea. Well, she was doing that. The phone rang again. It was either the kettle or the phone that woke Sam. Is something wrong, he said. Did someone die? Sort of, said Dave. And so the three of them sat on the bed, staring at the computer, and Dave told them the story of the hall that was burning right in front of their eyes.

It was the summer that he was 12. Someone had the idea they'd tear down the old schoolhouse and build a community hall in its place. In those days, if you had an idea like that, you could just go ahead and do it. I think they got a little money from the town, said Dave. They used it to hire an architect from Glace Bay. and do it. I think they got a little money from the town, said Dave. They used it to hire an architect from Glace Bay, but I don't think they followed his plans. Mostly they just did it themselves. They were miners and fishermen and farmers and they knew how to do things with their hands. There was no question of fixing up the old schoolhouse.

The schoolhouse was done in. First thing they had to do was demolish the school. The whole town gathered to watch that. They had four tractors with chains attached to each of the four walls. The moment they started pulling, the roof smacked down. Big cloud of dust and suddenly there was an empty lot where the school had been. It was every school kid's dream. All the kids thought it was fantastic. Everyone who had gone to school watched with tears in their eyes. The kids cheering and the old folks crying. Isn't that the way of the world? Then they set to building the new hall. Sam said, did you help?

Of course, said Dave, everyone pitched in. The kids had come home from school and the parents had come home from work and they'd gather at the hall, start in the late afternoon and work until 10 at night, five nights a week, then all day Saturday. People would bring supper and they'd sit around the picnic table out back and eat together. Mostly, the kids did things like clean up, sweeping nails and dead bits of wood and burning them out back. I hammered in the sub floor, said Dave. His little sister Annie hammered in the window frame at the back of the kitchen, the one to the right of the sink. the one to the right of the sink. If you examined it, you could see the dents around each nail,

like they had blindfolded her before they gave her the hammer. How old was she, said Sam. Probably three, said Dave. She was seven. Dave reached for the phone. We should call her, he said. It was Annie who reminded him about the basement. Your grandfather had a thing about concrete, said Dave. Every time he poured concrete, Charlie got Dave and Annie to put their prints in it.

So the night they poured the slab for the community hall, Charlie waited until everyone had left, and then he snuck them back. I'll never forget it, said Dave. They had to use flashlights. They crawled along a plank so they were out in the middle. There's a picture somewhere, two sets of little hands and feet in the concrete floor of the Big Narrows Community Hall. I just can't believe it's burning, said Dave. It's not often you get to hear your parents talking like this, and certainly not in the quiet, dark, confessional middle of the night.

Sam was lying at the foot of their bed praying they wouldn't send him back to his. He was sleepy enough to go, but he didn't want the moment to end. He needn't have worried. His father was staring at the computer at the images of the burning hall and reeling off one story after another. Sometime early that summer, they had arranged to have a skid of lumber delivered. That evening when they got to the site, the lumber, which they knew had arrived in the morning, was nowhere to be seen. Whoever took it, and they had a pretty good idea who that was,

had dragged the skid away so it was easy enough to follow the trail down the dirt concessions. Charlie and Fred were deputized to go after it. I went with them, said Dave. to go after it. I went with them, said Dave. Just like they expected, the skid marks led from the half-built hall directly to Digger Flowers' farm. Now, the Flowers family had always been different. You hardly ever saw them in town or even when you drove by their place. Maybe a shadowy figure going from the house to the barn, but no more than that. They'd been like that for generations. The grandfather, long dead, used to steal chickens and then try and sell them back to the farm where he'd stolen. So Charlie and Fred and Dave were standing by the road, staring at the tracks that clearly turned down the flowers driveway. What did you do, said Sam? Did you call the police?

Nope, said Dave. We drove in. They found the skid, just as they expected, hidden behind the barn and not a flower's insight dave said they were there you you could feel them but we pretended no one was home and they accommodated that what happened said sam we hooked up the skid of lumber to Fred's truck and we de-stole it, said Dave. Morley said, didn't they steal an outhouse or something? Dave glanced at the clock on the bedside table. It was three in the morning. Sam caught that glance and said, tell about the outhouse. The outhouse, said Dave, immediately forgetting the time, that wasn't Digger Flowers. That was a fellow from the city. When he said the city, he meant Sydney or maybe Glace Bay. What happened

was someone had donated an old outhouse and they had set it up at the back of the hall to use while they worked. And then one day, just like the skid, a new lumber, the outhouse had disappeared. They didn't find it for months, but they knew they would eventually. And when they did, it was this city fella who had a camp along the creek at the base of Macaulay's Mountain. He was a hunter, said Dave. He'd drive up on Friday nights and sleep in a trailer. Now, by then they had a new outhouse and they didn't need the old one back. And everyone figured if this guy needed an outhouse so badly he was prepared

to steal one, they'd let him keep it. Of course, a group of them did go out and serve the guy a dose of small-town justice. What did they do, said Sam? Well, said Dave, they picked that outhouse up and they moved it three feet back from where the guy had it placed. I don't get it, said Sam. They finished the town hall in the early fall, though it's hard to pinpoint when exactly. It had been the social center of town all summer long. Ever since that morning in April when everyone had gathered to watch the old schoolhouse come down and through the afternoon in June they found the skid of wood hidden behind Digger Flowers' farm.

Afternoon in June, they found the skid of wood hidden behind Digger Flowers' farm. And the night in July, when they held the moonlight ball and danced under the stars on the subfloor before the roof was on. Through all that and everything else, and it just sort of continued. They had an opening ceremony, of course, but it was just a formality. Moose McIsaac was the mayor at the time. Instead of cutting a ribbon, someone suggested that Moose mark the moment by sliding down the spiral slide that was still in the yard from when the hall was a school. Moose, who was a robust man and always happy to oblige a constituent's request,

struggled up the ladder but got wedged halfway down the slide. It took all the men in town a good hour and a half to pull him out. When Moose passed, they held his wake at the hall. Everyone had their wake there. And there was a lot of talk of getting him out of the casket and running him down the slide one last time. But out of respect for the widow MacIsaac, they didn't do that. Although there are folks who will tell you they were there or knew someone who was there late that night and that Moose did have a final moment of glory.

Is that true? Said Sam. I don't know, said Dave. I was too young for that sort of stuff. I've heard people swear it's true, but I'd never heard anyone who will swear to have been there when it happened. but I'd never heard anyone who will swear to have been there when it happened. Phone hadn't rung for an hour. They had shut the computer and Morley was drifting in and out of sleep, and there was more and more silence between Dave's stories. Not long after that, Sam got up and went back to his bed. Good night, he said.

Not long after that, Sam got up and went back to his bed. Good night, he said. And Dave was left there lying on his back with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. A few minutes after Sam left, he said, it makes me sad that he hasn't had a time like that. He thought he was alone. He thought Morley was already asleep and was surprised when she answered. Morley said, he has his own times. And Dave said, yup, you're right. And then he said, maybe what I was

trying to say is those were my times. And I'm thankful for them. We all have our own times. In Dave's time, monumental things have happened. We have flown to the moon and back. And by moonlight we have seen the downtrodden both rise up and bow down. But the times are always monumental. And the things we remember are never the monumental things. When the phone rings in the middle of the night,

it's always about small things we hold in the small of our hearts. They will rebuild the hall in Big Narrows this summer. And Dave will go down for the ceremony the weekend it opens. It'll look pretty much the same, for they'll do their best to recreate it. It'll look pretty much the same, for they'll do their best to recreate it. But he will no longer know the secret place where the floorboards creak, or the spot where you shouldn't dance if you don't want to get the DJ's record skipping. Before that opening night's over, Dave will go outside and get down on his knees by the front door, outside and get down on his knees by the front door, and because he knows exactly where to look,

he'll find a few small letters carved into the side of the old concrete steps that are all that will be left of his hall. S.K. Hart, M.L. Forever. It'll make him happy to see them. Stephen and Megan still sitting in a tree. Maybe not forever, he'll think, as he stands up and brushes the dirt off his knees, but maybe long enough. He'll do one last thing before he leaves. He'll stand on the top of those stairs by the door for a brief moment and he will slip his keys out of his pocket and try his key to the old hall in the lock of the new door

it won't fit. And that will make him strangely happy. He had his times. But life moves on. He'll leave the key on his ring, however. And every now and then when he notices it, it will unlock these memories, the ones I have told you. For it's no longer a key to a hall he seldom visits. Forged by fire, it has become a key to a small corner of his heart.

Thank you, everybody. That was Fire at the Old Town Hall. We recorded that story at the Community Theater Center in Sault Ste. Marie back in 2014. And by the way, Stuart knew how to say Sault Ste. Marie because we went there, you know, dozens of times over the years. But if I was writing a script for another host, I would absolutely write in a pronouncer for that one. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, Google it. Google it.

All right, that's it for today's episode, but we'll be back here next week with more from Stuart McLean, something very special for Remembrance Day. In the meantime, if you want to find out more, you can go to our website, vinylcafe.com, or you can find us on Facebook at Vinyl Cafe, or check us out on Instagram. Our handle is Vinyl Cafe Stories. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the Apostrophe Podcast Network. The recording engineer is Greg Duclute, and he's doing this gig because

it's my dying wish. Theme music is by Danny Michelle, and the show is produced by Louise Curtis, Greg DeCloot, and me, Jess Milton. Let's meet again next week. Until then, so long for now.