Bifel That in That Sesoun on a Day: An Essay on the Chaucerian Parade

In the 14^th Century Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories that describe a troupe of pilgrims traveling to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at the Canterbury Cathedral. The Canterbury Tales, the most famous writing of Chaucer, is considered by scholars to be a literary masterpiece. Through these tales that describe a knight, a miller, a reeve, a cook, a man of law, a wife, and others, Chaucer paints a comical and ironic portrait of English culture and economics during his time.

Though the act of busking is filled with vagaries; the sidequest of people watching is a constant joy. As a buskologist, I know that any of my pitches, through which any potential consumers pass, present vista and vis-à-vis portraits, an empirical anthropology of all layers of society, including myself. A sub-title Inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer, An Essay on the Chaucerian Parade, I shall offer some one-dimensional highlights of my consumers in just a one-hour busk this past week.

-The plain-clothes security guard flips, with his thumb, coins into my banjitar case. Should be a good game tonight, he states. He is referring to the World Junior hockey game between Russian and Canada.

-Your music always sounds so nice, says an elderly lady as she tosses me some coins.

-.Two young ladies, dressed to the nines pass by. One gives me a big smile.

-A panhandler walks up. Got a light? he asks.

-Hey, Neil, how’s it going? shouts a former colleague from across the way.

-Too bad you’re a Boston fan, states a middle-age fellow. He is referring to my Boston outdoor classic jersey. Number 4, Bobby Orr, I reply. Number 4, Jean Belliveau, he quips.

-A young man throws a mitt full of change into my case.

-A little girl offers me a toonie. She is with her father who says he used to busk on the Causeway in Victoria, British Columbia. He was a sailor, and he busked with his bagpipes on weekends. (And that makes a community of four who live in Regina and have been busking on the streets in Victoria: Devon-guitarist, Allan-bagpiper, Baron-bongaro, and myself-banjitarist.)

-A car pulls up. It is the two young ladies who were dressed in the nines. The one who had previously given me the big smile asks if she can take my picture, after which she hands me five dollars.

-A police officer, Kevin, stops by for a quick visit – We were both, at one time, members of the scuba diving community.

-A camera and one-person crew from Global approaches me. He takes my picture and states that I look and sound great. (Over the next few days people stop and tell me they’ve seen and heard me on a television clip; they say that I looked and sounded great – I watch for it, but to no avail.)

-I break a string. I stop my busking for the day and go over to B Sharp, where the technicians give me a free fix. As I am visiting, Dustin, of the Dustin Ritter Band, gives me a copy of his latest CD – for free.

I have read that those consumers with higher education offer more coins than consumers with lesser academic learning, suggesting tony versus troglodyte I suppose. This, in my busking experiences, is not true. I have also read that buskers provide, for those who galumph or glide by, a tonic to relieve the stress of consumerism in general. This, I believe as I thrum, is true. And so

Bifel that in that sesoun on a day … Redy to wenden on my Buskingdom …

Busk a Little Bit Closer: An Essay on the Concept of Love

The sun is a smudge in the smokey colored sky and the temperature is plus 1 degree. Cap-a-pie I'm clad in a black and yellow toque, a Boston Bruins classic outdoor jersey (under which a warm ski jacket), lined blue-jeans, scruffed and worn work boots, and half-gloves (like those on the hands of Dickensian characters depicted in wintertime). As usual, my thumbs are cold! Here is my routine: Play two songs, warm my thumbs, play two songs, warm my thumbs. My actual playing-time is less than my warming-time. Come Spring I’ll know more about the correlation between playing-time vs warming-time and coin in the buskpot.

As I busk I’m reminded again and again what a small world my pitch really is. Busking on a regular basis in a city of 200,000, I keep bumping into the same people over and over again. Today, I’ve chatted with the owner of the nearby gas station. I always purchase my petrol at his gas bar and we always chat about the local weather and local politics whilst I pay the bill. I’ve also chatted with a fellow who volunteers every day at the Wascana Rehabilitation Center. Our band, The Grand Trunk Troubadours, frequently performs there and he is always in the audience. A school-mate, Marcie, whom I’ve known all of my life stops and chats. Neither of us is from Regina, but we both have resided here for years. The security guard from Extra Foods stopped by, as always, to donate and chat. An elderly lady who always states that I play such delightful music drops, as always, a few coins into my case. And this consumer list goes on and on and on and on.

Being a buskologist, whilst warming my thumbs I am woolgathering on the concept of love. In a city of 200,000 people I seem to meet the same consumers repeatedly on my busks. For example, when I set my pitch at Extra Foods, I know pretty much which people will likely bump into me. When I set up at Safeway, I know, too, whom I’ll likely see again. Downtown busking is less predictable, but to a point I know I’ll greet at least a dozen consumers with whom I’m familiar.

It’s a small, small world for a local busker searching for coin, just as it’s a small, small world for anyone searching for love. Think about this. In a city of two hundred thousand people, I find my coin in the most predictable places; places that I’ve established myself for a variety of reasons, safety being among them. On a planet of 7 billion people, how is it that I can find my true love within minutes of where I live or where I work or where I play.

What are the odds? When in fact everyone on the planet is a potential mate, how is it that I my true love has always been right next door? I’ll tell you why.

Consider Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This comedy is about three distinct sets of characters and their concepts of love. There are royals and a band of fairies and a troupe of bumbling craftsmen, all romping about in a forest setting, falling in and out of love because of Puck’s potions and pranks. Generally, the theme of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been accepted as the difficulty of love (The course of love never did run smooth -- Lysander, a character in the play).

This widely accepted theme misses the mark. The real theme of A Midsummer’s Night Dream is simply: We are, all of us, capable of falling in love with anyone at any particular time given the right circumstance.

The only reason we fall in love with the girl or guy next door is because of convenience. The only reason we run off with that gal or guy we’ve met at work is because of convenience. The only reason we fall madly in love with anyone is because of convenience. And Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream presents the physical transmogrification of such a meme and reality.

Most of our choosing of mates, rather than projecting the true concept of love, are adumbrated by the following criteria of colloquial gots:

-my mate has got to have heart (displays kindness and generosity toward me)

-my mate has got to have a sound mind (displays curiosity and interest in me)

-my mate has got to have money (displays a stable income with the means to help pay my bills)

-my mate has got to have a beautiful body (displays my svelte or zaftig physical tastes)

Along with the statistical evidence (fifty percent of us die within 100 miles of our birthplace, and by chance we also find our perfect mates, our true loves, within 100 miles of where we live), anyone in the workplace has the empirical evidence as well (who does not know couple who met one another in school or at work or by chance in the neighborhood).

Is giving hand to your sweetheart that really an emprise, really that adventurous? Especially if we can muster up the courage and the wildcat within us to travel the planet and find a true love anywhere we so desire?

Again, I answer: We search our true loves out of physical convenience and physical attraction. If our destiny is for physical convenience, our psychological risk is low (not having to experience the anxieties of job or resident or habit changes). If our loving eyes seek physical attraction, our psychological ids are high (after all, we imagine a beautiful body to be the Annie Oakley to rodeo pleasures forever).

Come (busk) a little bit closer, you’re my kind of man, so big and so strong …

Phantom Secrets: An Essay on Busking with the Ghosts of Christmas Past

Yes. Christmas came and went just as it always does, and New Year’s Day followed Santa’s suit.

No. This blog entry is not to be of redemption and resolution. It is an entry about Psychology and Busking a la wordswords.

It is a sunny -18 degrees. I am cold and bored and ghosts are coming to mind (and I know exactly why). My childhood friend, Brent, came by over the holidays and we visited for eight hours, the equivalent of number of hours in an ordinary moiler’s working day! I have mentioned Brent in previous blogs: Strum and Dang and Oom Pah Pah: An Essay on Guitar, Banjitar, and Accordion Busking, February 27, 2011 & Canines and Coins: A Shaggy-Dog Essay on Busking with Bowwow, December 27, 2011. Whenever visiting with Brent, my woolgatherings always take me back to my teenage years in Vanguard, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Foot (Brent), Race Car, Skin, Gin, Chief, Parson, Pretty Boy, O’Toole, Bear, Toe Head, Radar, Smitty, Stoney, Curly, Fuzz, Teeter, Shane, Carbon, Lash, Weasel, Say, Grooby, Javaman, Teeter, Cork, Honk, Sam, Jimbo, Hooker, and Baiter (self).

These are some of people that we grew up with in Vanguard. These are some nicknames of people from my past. These are my ghosts. Rather than accursed, these are friendly ghosts, and these were their assigned nicknames of affection. They are nicknames of which only those who were there would know the origins, mostly Aesopian in their nature, having meaning only for such spectre members as Brent and myself.

Of these ghosts, wherever they physically may be, I have secrets of them I will never tell. And knowingly in return, these faraway ghosts have secrets of me that they will never tell.

This should be of no surprise for anyone, because by degree, all of us have secrets. All of us have work secrets (of which the public will never know); all of us have family secrets (of which the neighbors will never know); all of us have secrets so secretive (of which not even a spouse will ever know). Such are the secrets of these aforementioned ghosts, those nicknamed phantoms of my past.

These kinds of secrets, of course, would be developmental secrets -- secrets of first love experiences -- personal, interpersonal, heterosexual, bromosexual! Ouch! Have I hit a nerve! Without getting into gritty detail, most of us, in our sexual development, have had far-out and nearby real sexual experimentations, both fantastical and real.

Today, I really don’t know the present condition of these people whose nicknames I have scrivened, other than that all of them are still alive. Of these ghosts, I’ve only had a steady haunting with one – and that is Brent. He still has family there, whereas my Vanguard family has been long gone.

Whenever I am busking and my business is not brisk I often think of my ghosts. I love these thoughts: I am eleven years old and playing Knocky Knocky Nine Door (Bunny Bunny White Tail). I am twelve years old rafting on a slough, swatting mosquitoes, swearing and laughing. I am thirteen years old hiking canyons, riding my bicycle down the highways on bottle hunts, and constantly thinking of sex. I am fourteen years old, rolling about midnight swards, kissing girls in the dark. I am sixteen years old driving around and around and around our town, searching for sexual adventure in my 1960 Chevrolet. I am seventeen years old driving to other towns, flirting with strangers, hoping for back-seat adventures with zaftig fraus. I am eighteen years old and going drinking down the line, starting in Ponteix and ending in Gravelbourg, all the while still hoping for back-seat adventures with flirty zaftig fraus.

All of these things I did with others, others who had nicknames. No, we were not (fill-in-the-blank) ophiles. All of these acts I have mentioned very much represented normative transitions of teenage sexuality. Even all of the acts that I did not mention (and that would be many in number, and too secretive and horriblarious to even write about), were, too, normative transitions of teenage sexuality. Each of these most secretive of acts, save for those bracketed under the covers as personal, were done in the company of those with nicknames. (In fact, about the only idiosyncratic transition I can recall would be that I, and I alone in a village of 400, was raised by my grandparents because … my parents were divorced!)

I really do pity those among us, leading their troglodyte lives, never admitting to such verboten pleasures of teenage angst. As for myself, attempting not to winkle from such a sordid past (humor intended), I shall emphatically state that such teenage amorous adventures really seem rather will-o’-the-wisp. Afterall, they did take place on some adolescent swivet, some forty years away from this present frosty buskapade.

As I daydream of ghosts in my Christmas past -- I cannot help but wonder if ever a ghost of Christmas present daydreams of me.

Canines and Coins: A Shaggy-Dog Essay on Busking with Bowwow

Yesterday. The sky was bright and the tunes were cheery, and on my morning ramble about the outdoor plaza, I tossed a coin into the fiddle case of a winter busker. The passers by were very scattered and the temperature was just above the freezing mark. Though he was bundled for the cold with his toque, parka, and snow pants, I couldn’t help but notice his red and white mittens beside him on the stones, and his mutt, a Chocolate Labrador, asleep at his feet.

Just what is with this age-old covenant between humans and dogs? Could it be that the bond between master and dog is stronger than any that exists between humans? Could it be for protection or emotional security? Personally, I have never owned a dog, but some of my best friends have had best friends who were dogs. No, I am not referring to the imaginary hound havens of Rin Tin Tin and Lassie and the Littlest Hobo; I am referring to the real Fidos and Towsers of my past, at least as real as my romantically nostalgic memory allows.

I remember Patches, who belonged to my friend, Brian Smith. Or it could be that Brian belonged to Patches. Brian’s dad owned the Massey Ferguson dealership in our town, and Patches spent endless hours snoozing by the front entrance of the shop. Sometimes when it rained, Patches would move inside to snooze. Patches was a patched black and white terrier. Patches never barked, just yipped a bit when rudely awakened. Everyone in our town knew Patches.

I remember Mac, the golden brown slobbery St. Bernard that walked my buddy Ricky Percival to school each and every one of the 200 school days of the year. Mac, the giant, would waddle alongside Ricky, and then lay in slumber on the sidewalk at the edge of the school yard waiting for Ricky’s return at recess and lunchtime and end of the school day. Like Patches, everyone in our town knew Mac.

And I remember Sandy, the sandy-colored Cocker Spaniel, who belonged to my best friend, Brent Hopfner. Unlike Patches and Mac, Sandy endlessly scrambled about following his master, Brent, on hikes, bottle hunts, and just generally hanging out.

Reminiscing, Patches behaved more like a cat than a dog. I suppose a stranger walking into the Massey Ferguson shop and seeing Patches would have cause to be wary, but strangers were very few and far between in our village.

Certainly not then, but curiously now, as I remember Mac, mountains and brandy barrels come to mind. And with little effort I can even hear yodeling songs across the cliffs.

And I remember Sandy, jumping up and down, chasing sticks, his ham-like tongue lolling out his panting and wide open mouth, his bright-eyed nary-a-care manner, loving every minute of anytime his master would venture him attention.

Over the years I have seen many a dog and busker together, and the partnership they project is dependent upon whether the master is a tony or a troglodyte. (Buskers regarded by the masses as troglodyte transfer that same condition to their dogs -- the people passing assuming these canine mates to be curs, mongrels, and fleabags.) Whether they be high-brow or low-brow, such busker-bowwow pairings always present a sylvan lifestyle, representing a rustic and idyllic presence amidst the urban hustle and bustle. Buskers with their canines are always closer to ragtag than riches, and this hardly goes unnoticed amongst their shopping middle class consumers.

By busker design, this performing partnership between human and dog can be a kind of stratagem, a mercenary maneuver to attract that hound-loving segment of the consumer population and, as well, for personal reasons:

-to draw the focus away from the ineptitude of the busker over to Bowser

-to attract children who always want to pet the dog

-to attract phatic chats from parents of these children, and then coin, of course

-to act as a heater for a chilled busker

-to act as audience on a sparse consumer day

-to attract the sympathy coin for the pouting pooch

-to offer protection and companionship and unconditional love

I guess in the big scheme of things we are indeed, featherless creatures who love furry companions. It is certainly well documented that our best friends can be dogs. And for those who have as best friends, dogs, it must be psychologically comforting to have four feet trotting in front or alongside or meandering and sniffing behind them.

To close, I guess it is rather sad that an arrogant blogging buskologist can only imagine the true gladdens of a wagging tail and a wet nose ... ruff ruff.

Project Mercury: An Essay On A Bar Band Experience

1961-1962. Yuri Gagarin was the first man into space. He was a Soviet. Alan Shepherd, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn soon follow. They were Americans, members of Project Mercury, the first human spaceflight program in the United States.

2010. The Mercury Café in Regina opens its doors. Outside on the roof there is a silver rocket. Inside there is décor of the 60’s, complete with paintings of rockets and astronauts mounted on the walls. The café colors are mainly red and silver, similar to many of the diners in the 1960’s.

The Mercury menu is deliciously 1961 -- Big fat juicy beef burgers with dill pickles cut in half, sliced tomatoes and shredded lettuce, plates of big fat fries with the right amount of crunch, and big thick chocolate milkshakes with thick straws in silver mugs.

It is Christmas Eve and I am woolgathering our gig debut at the Mercury Café. Each Friday night at 9:30 the Mercury Café converts into a bar. We played there from 9:30 ‘til 11:30 a couple of Fridays ago. As of late it has been bitterly cold in my marshmallow buskingdom of the Canadian Winter Wonderland, and so I booked an indoor gig at the Mercury Café.

Whenever I play indoors with just one or two other musicians, I do so under the nickname, Friday Harbor. (Friday Harbor is named after an American sea station where my daughter, Natika, had studied). This particular Friday Harbor was a boy-band scrabble: Hoe Down Eric with his fiddle, Surfer Nick with his acoustic, Bongo Baron with his cajon, and my thrumming self with the twelve-string. Nick and I prepared the song list from 60’s folk and rock charts, Johnny Cash to Bobby Dylan to Ian Tyson, and a dozen or so folk originals. We were hoping to appeal to the Mercury barflies, erroneously thinking they would be of the 60's zeitgeist ilk.

Performing at the Mercury Café was the tramontane of busking. As a practicing Buskologist I can state with authority: Milquetoast musicians do not busk; and only buskers who sea change into meshuggeners prosper on the bar stage. We galumphed into the Mercury Cafe at 9:30 in the evening, with zeroth being the number of times we had played in a bar. In daytime, the Mercury Café is a Cathedral area conversazione, filled with the chatter of university students, philosophers, and neo-beatniks. Come nighttime on Fridays, the Mercury Café transforms into a parley romance of guzzling, guffawing, and flirting.

The patrons in the parlour that night were noisy, yet gracious (they clapped after each of our forty some songs), and the Mercury staff was awesome (a special thank-you to Mikayla and Mike for their continuous all eve encouragement). Our Friday Harbor gig proved to be a worthwhile emprise, all of us hoping to replicate the performance sometime in the New Year.

Back to busking. In spite of the bitter weather, my frequent buskmate, Trent Leggott of Trent’s Guitar Studio, and I have decided to duo-banjitar busk for some social cause during this Christmastime. I am thinking, of course, for maybe the Canadian Mental Health Association, or the Schizophrenia Society of Saskatchewan, or SEARCH, or Phoenix Residential Society, or the Carmichael Outreach Center.

And to all buskers and consumers in every buskingdom on the planet …

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Come And Trip It : An Essay On The Light Fantastic

Come, and trip it as ye go,

On the light fantastick toe.

John Milton (1645)

When I was younger I travelled light. As an emerging adult I was on survey crews doing pipeline work in Western Canada (West Coast Transmission, Trans Mountain, and TransCanada in the North West Territories, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba). Those days I worked seven days a week, sunup ‘til sundown, until the contract was completed, then go to wherever I wanted and wait for the next call. And when that call came, I’d stuff a week supply of clothes into my duffle bag and drive my beat up Datsun station wagon or fly Air Canada to Calgary or Edmonton or Kamloops.

I didn’t own property; I didn’t have a wife; I didn’t have kids; I had only myself. I wore only blue jeans and tee shirts and hiking boots. In winter I wore a sewer coat and in summer a jean jacket. I ate either at diners or out of a can. I had no anchors; I was rudderless; it was glorious.

Then the stuff came. Pretty soon I had a wife, kids, a steady job, and then property. I bought a reliable car to drive on family vacations. I wore dress slacks, collared shirts, and sports jackets to work. I shopped at the supermarket on a regular basis. No more beckoning telephone calls. I was grounded; I had a compass; with nary a regret I sold my soul to the company store.

And now, metaphorically, I’m reclaiming my youth. My kids have grown and gone. My working persona wears blue jeans, collared shirts, and work boots. My dwelling is a downtown two-bedroom apartment. I drive a used Ford van. I’m a busker.

As a busker, I’ve discovered the lighter I travel the more joy I experience. When I first began to busk I was not aware of this, and chose to be encumbered with a music stand and sheet music. This over-preparedness proved to be inconvenient and clunky, especially when a breeze came along. Paper clips were very necessary to keep everything contained.

At long last I’m able to trip on the light fantastic toe. Now when I busk I take only my banjitar and case. I thrum original tunes and make up new riffs as I go along. My buskpot is simply my banjitar case and that is that. Rarely do I sing and I never take requests. Busking in such light and simple fashion makes my sidewalk life so very, very easy and pleasant.

However, I could not have appreciated this simplicity had I not the intimate knowledge of workplace and recreational complexities. In my middleclass workplace I am crisp and professional and my income is more than substantial. But there is a trade-off. I have to endure meetings, meetings, and more meetings. With those meetings came paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. With that paperwork there is an accountability in the form of more meetings and paperwork. This is corporate bureaucracy at its finest.

All of this I can compare to my musical recreations. I’m one of the founders of the eight member band, The Grand Trunk Troubadours (the GTT). On the road we have amps, microphones, microphone stands, music stands, sheet music, and sound checks. We have protocols surrounding our playlist, our personal song choices, our start and end times, our venues. This, too, is bureaucracy.

Both in office and on stage, the degree bureaucracy is directly related to the number of players involved. However, such bureaucracy need not be pejorative. With professional people in best practice there needs to be accountability in order to ascertain certain progresses of the endeavor. We write smart goals for the office; we write play-lists for the stage.

I love my work and I love my band, even though both are rather Aesopian in their natures. To an outsider, the office looks terribly inviting. Office workers are cut and clean and push pencils. Being a scrivener seems better than being a digger of ditches. And to audience members, those on stage seem ever smiling, ever sweating, everywhere an oyster. Being an entertainer seems better than being a scrivener.

Having entry into the residency of either scrivener or entertainer, offers valuable insight into the political behaviors of the member drones and their agendas. Often such epiphanies prove to be transmogrifications. Both the workings in office and stage are usually steady as she goes in wonderful synchronicity. However, parts can crack, control centers can crash, and mechanical members can run amok. To reiterate, I love my work and I love my band. To jettison either or both will no doubt offer certain autonomy of effort and freedom. This, however, is totally at the discretion of the self. Such a decision could easily translate into more effort (working harder) and less freedom (working longer). With busking, this is hardly the case.

For me each busking day begins with lifting weights at the local gym, followed by an American Decaf at the coffee shop nearest my next pitch. Under the sun I am dressed in my tee and my blue jeans, sometimes wearing sunglasses, always wearing ankle laced work boots. For me each busking day is a dream of strum and thrum to the hundreds of passers by from the Chaucerian sidewalk parade. Every buskingdom is a day filled with chat chat and chuckles.

Busking gives me carte blanche travel with Annie Oakley tickets to boot. Also, fortunately for me, busking is but a bivouac from which to pitch my musical wares, an opportunity to bask freely beneath bright and sunny foreign skies; an opportunity to distance myself far and away from the carceral surround of tiny windows in office towers, the moil of meetings and microphones, the scratching of papers and playlists.

Two Thumbs Down: An Essay On Brrr Busking

November 22^nd. It is warm for the season but not for busking. I decided to busk on 13^th Avenue and take advantage of the unseasonably warm temperatures (plus 4 degrees C). My pitch was a lambent portion of the parking lot near the Safeway west entrance and in front of the adjacent bagel shop. I bundled myself in my high visibility orange Helly Hanson ski parka, and deposited hand warmers in the hip pockets. These warmers, I thought, would keep my frailing fingers toasty. My plan was a simple one: Strum for a minute, squeeze the hand warmers, strum for a minute, squeeze the hand warmers, strum squeeze, strum squeeze, and so on.

For a few minutes it worked, but by my fifth one-minute set, my plucking thumb was achingly frozen. Without a thumb, strumming sucks.

Though it was cold and dark and my thumb was numb, a couple of customers made my busking evening sweet. First up was a familiar stranger, Janice the pan-handler. Janice is thirtyish and asks for spare change all around the downtown Regina. Even in such regard she is bubbly; she is pretty; she is gracious; she is momentarily fun to be around.

Chatting with Janice, she always tells her story. She shares space, a rented apartment, with four other people, none of whom have regular employment. Her job is to pan-handle all day long. She has a thirteen year old boy whom she hasn’t seen for twelve years. She has a three month old daughter who has just been taken away by Social Services. Janice always mentions that she’d been drug free for over a year. And lately she’s always stating that she been handing out resumes to many, many places. She is doing this, she says, because she really wants to regain custody of her children, but just for the weekends. Of course, from a buskologist point of view, Janice’s story of repine tends to gloze over her present afflictions.

I’ve chatted with Janice on Broad Street, on Victoria Avenue, on Scarth Street, on 13^th Avenue; these streets and avenues make up the borderlines of her pan-handling territory. My guess is that Janice resides somewhere near its centre and orbulates this working area on a twice or thrice daily routine.

On this particular evening, Janice, dressed cap-a-pie, had a blue toque pulled down over her forehead, her torso wrapped in a long brown woolen parka, and high black Arctic boots laced on her feet. She had just one complaint – her fingers were cold! (I gave her my 99 cent gloves I’d just purchased at a dollar store.)

Ironically, this same evening, one of my favorite people, Carole Eaton, Executive Director of Phoenix Residential Society, stopped and chatted. When I first met Carole, we were attending a Reality Therapy (RT) conference held at the Regina Inn. The founder of Reality Therapy, Dr. William Glasser, was the keynote. I remember his address. Dr. Glasser analyzed in RT fashion, the main characters from the movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was currently playing in the theatres at that time. Employing my Sherlock inductive reasoning skills, the year would have been 1994. (Carole, by your own admission I know you’re reading this blog, and so please correct me if I’m wrong, as my memory is often hazed by romantic nostalgia.) Carole Stewart is both a practitioner and instructor of Reality Therapy; she is also a university instructor in the Department of Psychology. Carole Stewart’s professional generosity and brilliance is quite in contrast to the collected view of her dim and purblind colleagues seated in the Chamber of Commerce.

The Phoenix Residential Society is a registered and highly reputable care-giving agency that provides an array of programs for the needy – people as Janice the pan-handler. The Phoenix Society has specific programs to accommodate people just like Janice: Phoenix House (a group home), PALS (a supported apartment living program), and Westview (a residential treatment program for those clinically assigned with the Dual Diagnosis of mental illness and substance abuse). The Phoenix Residential Society has more programs than I’ve mentioned, but it is these three especially for which I am most familiar.

Carole Eaton and her staff provide more than just room and board in peoples’ Lonesome towns. Carole and her staff are the laborers digging ditches for those in despair; Carole and her staff are the sailors scrubbing decks and setting sails for those whose hope is far beyond the horizon; Carole and her staff are the unsung saviors for many who wander the streets.

For reasons whatever, Janice is not a consumer of the Phoenix Society services. Because the Saskatchewan winter is not conducive to a pan-handling lifestyle, I can predict that before summertime arrives, Janice will have deteriorated in both her social demeanor and her personal health. Staying in Saskatchewan, she will suffer loss of hale, fade away into a sickness of sorts. To survive she will have to head west, first to Calgary (where she’ll find it uninviting), then on to Vancouver (where she could perish on East Hastings) or Victoria (where, given the politics and climate, she could last a considerably longtime).

Oh, so woe is me -- my cold and aching thumb. It is here that an asterisk is necessary.

* My thumbless winter busking could very well mean plying my trade two thumbs down on my penny whistle.