Lives

Lives

       by "Dip-em-in" Doug

when the fever strikes you that you must do something fast or lose it all and more

remember jesus on the cross who died for all of us and gave his blood for us who are not good

recall how churches told the world that all the poor and meek were just the ones who needed most

and so the whole conglomeration of the ones who had till then done nothing but for gain

found love and finding love they gave to all the chance to have a life except the ones who had till then had lives

The good thing about homemade jam is the way you dip your buns with it into tea and eat them soaking. The bad thing about homemade jam is making it. Making it is all right if you do not do it to excess. But those of us who are closet jam makers know this fact, that when the berries hang on the vines or boughs in great abundance and you begin to pick you pick too much of it and the jam making then never stops until it is all made and jarred and put away. Jam making is not like anything else in the world. It reminds me of nothing else. It is unique. No allusions clarify the act. No metaphors to hand enrich the understanding of it. A simile only reduces the suggestiveness of the process of picking, packing, transporting, stemming, washing, rewashing, measuring, buying, straining, bagging, jarring, storing, eating, presenting, and throwing away. Jam making is a story that begins in early morning joy and ends in evening weariness. I once made eighteen gallons of wild plum jam. My family ate it for six years until we threw the rest away. At the beginning we ate it along with other jams such as apricot, marmalade, raspberry and blueberry bought in tins from Overweighty. By the second year we ate half and half. Then we realized that we would waste fourteen gallons of plum jam at this rate and so began to eat it more often. By the third and fourth years we got to eating it exclusively. After six years, and with the crystals along the top warning us, we threw out seven gallons. I teach. I am a teacher. I give advice and know-how to students. My job is to take incoming information, synthesize it, prepare it, discard much of it, and pass it on to younger ones who themselves one day, some of them, will be in the profession of dispensing knowledge or wisdom. There are places on the prairie near Winkler where the wild plums grow and can be harvested if they can be found. How do you find wild plums? You go in May when the blossoms are coming out and make a map exactly where you see this tree and that tree. I had about two hundred trees mapped out for myself and guarded the information with solemn selfishness. How did I know which were plum trees? Could there not have been chokecherry and crab apple trees among the blossomers? No. There could not have been. Plums bloom first in spring, I found out. There were two sites that provided much fruit. One was along the Burwalde River a mile west of town and two miles north. A band of wild plums bordered a dike and a farmer's woodlot. These plums were mainly of the very small variety, about the size or a dime. I would shake the trees and crawl along and pick them up off the ground. Another place was west of Morden Lake up in the escarpment along a farmer's field. Forty or fifty trees lined a rutted access road and these were of a bigger variety. I picked them that year when they were so abundant into plastic grocery bags and when they were so full I was afraid the fruit would bruise I took them into the car. I came home with two dozen bags filled to the brim. I spent two weeks jamming. Now I do not jam anymore. Let the factories do it who know how to sell it. I thought then, stop making jam and devote yourself to love making. Less jam making, more love making. But that is not an inspiration any more. Well, less jam making, more guitar playing, more singing. That is, I must tell you, still a viability. So, when all is said and done, Freud was wrong in his estimation that it is sex that permanently drives our desires forward in an effective way. Sex malingers, music calls. Music never flirts with one. It always puts out. It gives one as much as one puts into it. If it wasn't for music, life would have been a mistake. That is what I have learned from jamming. Sex calls and disappoints. Music calls and satisfies. One can get better at music. One can only get worse at sex. When you, you old ones out there, get into your seventies and flaccid or wabbly, go out and spend some of your savings on a good instrument, preferably hand made (there are many good instrument builders in Manitoba) and buy a self-teaching tape and book from Long and McQuade and learn to play. After a while, when you are eighty-five, you will make fine music. You would have died at eighty if you had not done this. So, at ninety when you are playing at a dance and thinking about jamming and the sex the young ones will be partaking of outside among the cars and in the gorse, you can say to yourself, "Yes, I once thought sex was a permanence, but it is music rather. I am a musician. Yes, I play this guitar that I have owned for twenty-five years and learned to finger." Call my friend the musician. His number is (204) 772-0140. H will build you a wonderful instrument for twenty-five hundred. You will be playing at gigs around town at ninety-six or seven. At a hundred, people won't be able to stop you, you will be randy with the urge to get out of an evening and pick and finger.