Friendship

Life's finest gift

From Peter

I’m off adventuring this week, to a distant land I’ve long yearned to visit and never dreamed I would. Made possible now by a cherished friend who passed away two years ago, and to my surprise, mentioned me in his will.

Always unexpected and delightful, my friend Peter. Not to mention brilliant, charismatic, eccentric and amusing.  I resolve to honour his gift by living every moment with as much enthusiasm and laughter as he would, bless him. And so wish he was coming with me!

Celebrating Peter

1928-2022

This is a love story.  How could it not be? My dear friend Peter McLaughlin—how I miss him!  In our decades of friendship he brought me nothing but delight.  Clever, quick-witted, spontaneous, fun, he was always willing to drop everything and come out and play. How many adults, how many kids do you know who are like that?

                I’d notice him, a dramatic figure bicycling through Toronto Annex streets in his red velvet smoking jacket in the early 1970s, white hair flying in the wind. Then “met” him for real one spring on Walmer Road, next-door neighbours in Therafields group houses, planting flowers in our front yards. A novice gardener, I’d ask him for advice about sun and shade, how close, how deep, and only later learned he was making most of it up as he went along.

                Peter was an “original,” as they’d say in Regency England.  We got along famously, good buddies from the start. Our only disagreements ever: he loved Brahms and Schubert, and I didn’t. He wasn’t much of a housekeeper, for which I chastised him. Then there was the day Peter looked at me in horror, realizing I might put credence in signs of the zodiac and people’s personalities. “How can I possibly be friends with someone who believes something so preposterous?” he demanded, more serious than I’d ever seen him.  Valuing our time together, I suggested diplomatically that we agree never to mention Brahms, Schubert, dust or astrology again—and we didn’t, for the next forty years.  Problem solved. Until, toward the end, I could tease him about our long-ago pact, and he would laugh, that lovely ringing laughter of his.  In truth I learned lots from him about his own sun sign.  Aquarians are so unique, so different from everyone else they can border on eccentric.

                Peter did, delightfully. Every story he wrote expressed that fact, filled as they were with odd characters, improbable scenes and plots so unexpected they kept readers on the edge of their seats, waiting breathlessly for a resolution…  Which never came, for he seldom went back and “worked on” his tales, preferring to move on to something new.  We eventually called his pieces “fragments” –a growing collection I gleaned during years of writing together.  We’d meet afternoons in public libraries, or quiet rooms at Hart House, at Ryerson. At his house on Albany, then Gainsborough; at his great wooden harvest table out on the island.  In my sunroom, when he came on the GO train. And best of all, a few precious week-long “writers retreats” in my hometown in Illinois, where my aging mother, a writer herself, would join us for 15-minute warm-ups on topics picked out of the ethers, then a few hours of silence except for the scratching of three pens. After heading out for a walk to clear our brains and catch our breath we’d gather again to share aloud the brilliant words we’d just spilled onto paper, bits and pieces I’d ferret away and type up later. Hoarded contents for my mom’s autobiography, “Travels with Me,” which I published as a surprise for her 90^th birthday.  And for Peter’s anthology, “Stormy Weather and Other Tales of Intrigue,” a surprise for his 90^th some fifteen years later.

                Those writing sessions were often followed by libations of wine, then nibbles and a feast, for Peter was just as creative in the kitchen as he was filling those big spiral notebooks with his scrawling penmanship.  Notebooks from the dollar store, and boxes of pens, were the best presents I ever gave him.  And the strings of coloured Christmas lights he kept glowing in his living room all year long.

I still have a bag with two fresh notebooks ready to take to him, and a few tomes from my shelves I thought might pique his interest, including “Elizabethan Songs in Honour of Love and Beautie,” published 1891. “I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of songs and sonnets here,” wrote the Bard in his Merry Wives of Windsor, and Peter would surely agree.  Though I phoned him regularly throughout the pandemic, I rarely got out there to see him, given the travel restrictions, GO train glitches, uncertain ferry crossings, not to mention breaking my arm, and catching covid myself… Always something!  And then he left us.

                Left us, yes. Covid was helping me get used to that eventuality.  And now I value even more his rich warm presence threaded throughout my life, my memories.  Meeting up with him at high noon at the Café de la Paix in Paris, on July 4^th 1976, the 200^th anniversary of the United States of America—that’s worth remembering! Parisians say anyone in the world standing on that corner for half an hour will see someone he or she knows pass by.  We made it happen, long before cell phones were invented, just going on a verbal agreement made back in Ontario weeks earlier.  My friend Grace and I sat expectantly at the corner sidewalk table, peering up and down the streets. Peter, crossing the Channel from England, was fifteen minutes late, and arrived wearing that ragged red shirt of his, complaining of Paris traffic, impossible parking and the scorching heat.  We went off to find a swimming pool, and next morning squeezed into Peter’s Deux Cheveaux for three spontaneous days together on the blessedly cooler Normandy coast. Dinan, Dinard, St. Malo and Mont St. Michel… Plates of steamed mussels, clams and cream sauces.  

We spent the first night in an ancient hotel in La Ferté-Macé, enjoying happy hour in our room overlooking the square, French doors thrown wide, sipping Grace’s coveted chartreuse, while Peter the English Professor entertained us with tales of American poet e. e. cummings imprisoned there during World War I, mistaken for a spy. The one restaurant still open by the time we decided we were hungry was back out on the highway; the only food they would serve us “assiette anglaise”—a collection of greasy cold meats and chips, washed down with beer.  The waiters were burning trash in the side yard, faces glowing in the firelight, when we finished up. Mellow and replete, we spontaneously joined them and broke into song, a round begun by Peter’s beautiful baritone: “Fire’s burning, fire’s burning, draw nearer, draw nearer…” They applauded as we vanished into the night.

                Did I say free-spirited? I laugh, remembering how, having lost yet another pair of gloves, he met me for a Toronto Field Naturalists outing one frigid day wearing his oven mitts.  My dear friend Peter, wonderfully irreverent, was always willing to carol through Christmas streets with me, singing “Good King Wenceslaus” at the top of our lungs. He was always singing, and playing CDs—that damn Schubert! 

Peter spent several summers polishing his French at Montpelier in the south of France, visiting family in England as he came and went, and sometimes meeting up with me.  I hiked Exmoor with him, me afraid of the free-ranging cattle we encountered whenever we climbed over another stile, him fearless.  We toured the standing stones at Avebury.  He helped me shop for wool long johns at a posh men’s store in Exeter, it was so cold that summer.  Introduced me to his beloved Sidmouth, where he and his brothers had spent three years of the war in Boss Airy’s boarding school.  We swam from the magnificent pebbled beach at Budleigh Salterton, where I collected some of the most beautiful stones in the world, and begged him to bring me more every summer thereafter.

                Then there was the summer evening he jumped up from his seat on the deck of a friend’s cabin in the woods north of Huntsville, back in Canada, and without a word walked off up the hill.  He didn’t reappear for supper an hour later, or by sundown. And then it started to rain….  I was frantic, certain he’d had a heart attack and was lying helpless, no flashlight, on some forest trail halfway to Algonquin Park.  Peter limped back around four in the morning, after walking all night. While he wolfed down leftovers he related how terrified he’d felt when, dazed and lost, he’d passed for the second time an old broken chair abandoned out there in the woods, and realized he was going in circles. He fell into bed exhausted, while we drove into Huntsville to call off the police search, dogs and helicopter, scheduled for dawn. Then, still wired and unable to sleep, polished off dregs from a whiskey bottle someone had left in a cabin cupboard.

Now he’s gone for good and I miss him.  Sorely.  But what a treasure to have had in my life for half a century!  I tuck his memory into a box on my fireplace mantel, a small gilt chest covered with sequins, or maybe studded with jewels.  I take it down from time to time when I’m dusting--which I do more than HE ever did!--and the lid pops up and out he springs, a jack-in-the-box in a red velvet cap with a pompom. “Here comes a candle to light you to bed. Here comes the chopper to chop off your head! Chip, chop, chip, chop--!” He growls the last lines from “Oranges and Lemons,” that gorgeous cacophony of London church bells he taught me years ago and we often sang together. Including the last few times we spoke on the phone, singing being one sure way we could still connect.

The chords ring with Peter’s laughter down long hallways in my heart.