Paying tribute to Stompin’ Tom’s philosophy

As published in The Erin Advocate

The newly installed monument at the grave of Stompin’ Tom Connors at Erin Union Cemetery is a testament to his love of Canada and his philosophy of trying to stay in balance while travelling through life.

The memorial includes an image of the famous songwriter imposed on a map of Canada, the lyrics of his favourite song, “I Am the Wind”, a red granite maple leaf on top of a chess piece and his own epitaph that says, “They haven’t heard the last of me”.

Thomas Charles Connors lived in the Ballinafad area and passed away on March 6 last year due to kidney failure, at the age of 77. Buried with him are the ashes of his mother Isabel Sullivan (nee Connors), who died in 2007. Until the tombstone was installed, the location of the gravesite was not widely known.

Stompin’ Tom was known for his down-to-earth songs about Canada, achieving wide popularity with dozens of albums, and as a passionate advocate for Canadian culture. He was also a spiritual thinker who believed in reincarnation, writing these words for his tombstone:

“The body has returned to sod,
The spirit has returned to God.
So on this spot, no need for grief,
Here only lies a fallen leaf.
Until new blossoms form in time,
The tree is where I now reside.
But with this poem, as you can see,
They haven’t heard the last of me.”

“He believes that we come and go as a spirit,” said his son Tom Jr. in an interview, always referring to his father in the present tense.

“We enter a body this time around, and when the body's done, then the spirit goes back to the tree of life, so to speak, and then the tree blossoms again the next year and you become a new leaf. It's a cycle of life that he's getting at.”

The maple leaf on the stone is engraved with “101”. It does not refer to that number value, but to a way of thinking about life. Instead of competing to be at the top on a 1 to 10 scale, he favoured zero as an ideal at the centre of the range of possibilities.

“He would always say he's a zero, because you can go on the plus, or you can go on the minus, but the zero keeps you even. Don't drift too far away off the centre because you'll become unbalanced,” said Tom Jr.

“The 101 simply represents his philosophy that he came up with to be able to stay on the straight and narrow. The more balanced you can stay, the more successful you can be in your life. He ended up being proof positive of that concept.”

The stone includes a quote from the Book of Genesis: “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” Enoch was a patriarch, the great-grandfather of Noah, who is believed to have been taken directly to live with God, without having died. Tom Jr. said his father read the bible frequently and considered that passage an example of becoming closer to zero.

“When God finds that you understand what it is to be nothing, nobody, you put all your feats behind you and you become one with God. You can go plus or minus once in a while, but stay straight and narrow and if there is a relationship we have with God, God will recognize that and take you as he did with Enoch.”

Before becoming known for his songs and his trademark rhythmic stomping on stage, Stompin’ Tom struggled to survive. He grew up in poverty in Saint John, New Brunswick, and lived with an adoptive family in Prince Edward Island before leaving to hitchhike across Canada at the age of 15.

“Growing up not having really any family and no money and no home, and you're just a drifter, you see the world through different eyes,” said Tom Jr., who himself has a son named Tom, born last July. “When you have no friends and no family to talk to, you start to talk to yourself inside and you start to get the answers you need from life inside, instead of finding them on the outside.”

Stompin’ Tom’s tombstone was created by the Little Lake Cemetery Company in Peterborough, the city where he received his nickname. His memorial service was held there last year.

The lyrics engraved on the tombstone are as though the wind is speaking as it travels, saying it is, “Here to serve my Maker’s end.” The wind says it goes, “Around the Door, between gods and men, And if you see how I go in, You’ll have the Key, and know the wind”.

“That was his favourite song,” said Tom Jr. “People can take that as a nice song, or they can try to meditate on it a little bit.”

While The Hockey Song is one of Connors’ best known songs, he “never really clung on to sports”, said Tom Jr. He’d always cheer for a Canadian team and like many Maritimers grew up as a Habs fan, but he never had the luxury of playing the game. In front of his tombstone fly three miniature flags, two Canadian and one Canadiens.

The chess piece designed into the stone is a reminder of the game that he did play with great passion. “He was a tough cookie to beat because he was capable of thinking several moves ahead, and he used that way of thinking in his own life too when he would plan his career,” said Tom Jr.

Universal Music Canada recently released Volume 01 of a collection of unheard recordings by Stompin’ Tom called Unreleased: Songs from the Vault. It includes old-time country songs from his repertoire in the 1950s, recorded starting in 2011.

“He just wants people to enjoy what he did in the time he was here, and if you're musically inclined at all, or any type of business that you may be in, to keep Canada high in your regards when you're doing your thinking and planning about what is the right thing to do,” said Tom Jr.

“It is a great country, and if you respect it, it will repay you back. He wants people to take the torch, so to speak, and go on forward and promote Canada the best they can. If they get a chuckle or two from some of his songs in the future, then he's done a good job.”

Erin doctor publishes powerful book of poems

As published in The Erin Advocate

Do you really want to know what goes through the mind of a doctor, facing a daily parade of human weakness and suffering? Consider that question and assess your appetite for ambivalence, biting metaphors and brutal honesty before reading Complete Physical, a book of poems by Dr. Shane Neilson. Then be brave, and read.

If you are a patient of Dr. Neilson, a physician with the East Wellington Family Health Team, you may be aware of his creative side – another career that does not pay as well, but which has earned him high praise on the Canadian poetry stage. Rest assured, too, that no details about you will be found in these poems.

Neilson is a New Brunswick native now living in Guelph. As a doctor he was attracted to Erin by a good job opportunity, and as a poet by The Porcupine's Quill, where I met him during a book signing session during the recent Doors Open event.

One of the privileges of being a publicly-funded Canadian publisher like The Porcupine's Quill is the mandate to seek out writers worthy of admittance to that respectable realm of ink on textured paper. Elke and Tim Inkster have succeeded at this for 35 years.

I went into a Coles bookstore recently and asked to see their poetry section. I was escorted to a shelf with one book, a greatest hits collection dating back to the Middle Ages. Their poetry section was about to be discontinued.

Still, there is an audience for poetry, and Neilson is ambitious for his creation, wanting to reach out beyond the readership of other poets and other doctors to the public – everyone who knows what it is to be a patient.

"The poems are based on a medical perspective," he said. "My aspirations for the book? I hope that people will actually care, and buy it and read it."

It is a collection of 43 short poems, some with a formal structure but most in a lyrical style, with rhythms controlled by the imagery. It is illustrated with quirky art from old medical textbooks that Tim Inkster found in an abandoned building.

There are a few local references. Here is part of the first poem, Standard Advice: "My practice amidst the one-horse town and faltering farms, a usual place where injury blossoms, pain is a boutonnière, when men know I will ask only if necessary, and women ask if."

The opening lines of Love Squawks Through Technology: "Dr Gear sits in his home study, listening to Ella Fitzgerald, tying flies, considering cancelling the New England Journal. Occasionally the intercom buzzes: Mr McGuire has lost a thumb in the thresher..."

Dr. Harry Gear was well-known in Erin village at the turn of the last century, building an Edwardian-style mansion in 1905 that still stands at 119 Main Street. He installed an audio tube at the front porch so patients could speak with him in the master bedroom. The poem imagines the mix-ups that could ensue from garbled communication.

The book shines a light on the amazing resilience of humans, on unrealistic expectations placed on doctors, on the emotional trauma of treating untreatable pain, on regrets for past errors, on impersonal technology, and on pessimism in the profession – as in Taking Charts Home after Work: "Charts snooze in the bag, kershuffle, and sing of lives awry in diagnosis, askew in drug, kerplunk in grief. I take the bag as homework, heavy in hand, and think the more you love, the more you lose."

It is heavy stuff, but achieves much more than therapy for the writer. In its fearless contemplation of pain and death, Complete Physical celebrates the pervasive beauty and power of love.

In his on-line commentary (porcupinesquill.ca), Neilson says his favourite poems are ambivalent – cherishing and despising a thing simultaneously. "The poems in the book freight complicity with beauty, they tend my flock not with judgement but with rueful wonder," he says. "The poems are exercises in answering the most important question the cpx [complete physical examination] begs: how are we to live in this world?"

Neilson published his first book of poems, Exterminate My Heart, with Frog Hollow Press in 2008, and now has four published collections. He edited a book of medical poems by one of his literary heroes, Canadian writer Alden Nowlan.

He also published a memoir about his tumultuous medical education, entitled Call Me Doctor. The Chapters-Indigo website sells that book, with a comment that Neilson "continues to be filled with a sense of wonder about how he made it this far as a doctor."

A prominent Canadian poet, Carmine Starnino, said this: "Doctors share one important thing with poets: an obsession with death. Shane Neilson has turned that obsession — and the special deathwatching vantage of his medical trade — into a collection of poems as beguiling and as brave as any I have recently read. In a clinical universe where suffering is distanced by language, Complete Physical becomes a kind of extraordinary talking cure. The human predicament has rarely found itself in such good hands."