"Picked up a few Pearls!"
I came late to the, ‘Brown’, table, only becoming an enthusiast with his collection of essays, “What I meant to say”, published in 2005. This book highlighted not just his own work, but the essays by 25 other top Canadian male writers, on just how they viewed and pursued their own individual concepts of masculinity. An enthralling collection, edited by a father overwhelmed by the continual crisis of raising a child with a severe, rare genetic condition.
More recently I read, “Man on the Moon”, which outlines the life/ordeal of, Walker, Brown’s second child, and only son. It amazed me with a vision of just what a modern couple can endure, and, ultimately, what it cannot.
Walker Brown was born with a genetic mutation so rare that doctors call it an orphan syndrome: perhaps 300 people around the world also live with it. Walker turns twelve in 2008, but he weighs only 54 pounds, is still in diapers, can’t speak and needs to wear special cuffs on his arms so that he can’t continually hit himself. “Sometimes watching him,” Brown writes, “is like looking at the man in the moon – but you know there is actually no man there. But if Walker is so insubstantial, why does he feel so important? What is he trying to show me?”
In a book that owes its beginnings to Brown’s original Globe and Mail series, he sets out to answer that question, a journey that takes him into deeply touching and troubling territory. “All I really want to know is what goes on inside his off-shaped head,” he writes, “But every time I ask, he somehow persuades me to look into my own.”
More recently I read of his third, and ultimately successful, attempt to traverse the Canadian Columbia Ice field on skis at age 56. It’s great to see a Canadian writer who just keeps going and going. This morning I read the first part of his series on, “Eating Canada”, where, for two months he’s travelling across our country sampling local cuisine. Here he commented on a 2008 Niagara region Chardonnay which scored a 17.5 out of a possible 20 points at a London England tasting; “That’s like,” said Brown, “Ron Jeremy saying you’re good in the sack!”
I find it difficult to take seriously a writer who doesn’t, at least occasionally, raise my hackles! I was reassured in my estimation of Ian Brown when he managed that trick neatly in his, “Man Overboard”. He was talking about the North American tendency to give meaning to our existence through our choice of automobiles, and claimed the ultimate, ‘codpiece’ car was, in fact, the modified van.
“But the strangest zone of Manliness in the car business was occupied by van conversion enthusiasts. Van conversion was a mid-Western eccentricity. The men who bought converted vans claimed they needed one for “vacations” – that is, for two weeks of the year. A converted van was an ordinary child-, pet-, wife-, and grocery-friendly van with a fancy door jacked into one side, four to eight swivelling, “captain’s chairs” installed next to coffee tables and multiple drink holders, and every surface upholstered within an inch of sanity, often in shag carpet. A couple of bunks ... all manner of floodlights and pot lights and spotlights and map lights ... a toiler ....gimbaled stoves ...converted vans were yachts on wheels.”Up to this point I could almost agree with him, but, he went on:
“I had a secret theory that converted vans were the car of choice for former acidheads, after they had kids. Acidheads were total systems guys.”Now wait just one testosterone pickin’ minute! It’s true I’m a ‘systems’ guy, and that I’m long past having kids, but, really ... ‘former acidhead’ ... that really cuts to the quick! Not only are my feelings hurt, but my sense of ‘tenses’ as well!
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