When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I'd been out 'til quarter to three, would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I'm sixty-four?
I first heard this kooky song, a part of the Beatles’ drug-inspired Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in the spring of 1967. I was 19 years old and had taken the train from Toronto to Montreal to seek fame and fortune at Expo 67. On arriving in Montreal I put my pack sack containing all my worldly goods in one of those storage containers at the railway station under the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and set out to tour the city where I had been born and left at the age of 10.
On returning, I found it had been stolen. This was inconvenient, as I had left most of my money and, more importantly, identification in the bag. I slept on the steps of the Saint Patrick’s Basilica where I wasn’t alone, as kids were congregating in various states of affluence from around the world and across the country.
Oddly, the only identification I had was not mine. I had borrowed a friend’s unexpired Expo passport (including picture ID) to try to get into the Expo 67 site without paying to look for work. So the day after my arrival I became Michael Vaughan, who was not nearly as handsome as me, but he was all I had. Happily, I made it through the gate without incident and before nightfall had work at a German restaurant. I was a brand new bus boy. It was indentured slavery but they didn’t ask too many questions (like who are you), and if you hustled your butt the mostly European waiters would look after you.
I had read an article somewhere about a major investigation about restaurants not paying minimum wages to anyone at the Expo 67 site and they were talking about closing down some restaurants. Coincidently, the nasty fellow who ran the bus boy nation said I would be fired shortly for not speaking enough French. It is one of the mysteries of my life that I could survive on the streets of Ville d’anjou (East End Montreal) as a 10-year-old in broken French but fail miserably thereafter. My Rosetta Stone CDs are at the ready, but time is marching.
I played the only card Michael Vaughan had available to him. I told Mr. Meany-guts that one of the reasons I was so clumsy was that I was really an undercover reporter for the Toronto Telegram (well, I was a retired carrier boy) and doing a piece on labour unrest at Expo 67. It’s still one of the sketchier things I have done in my life. Shortly thereafter I was offered three tables in the corner as a waiter where they would ensure the customers could cope with my limited language skills. We got along famously until a transportation strike took the bloom off things and most of us were laid off. I’ve never made more money per hour in my life again.
A year later I went to Carleton University. The night before I left for the nation’s capital from Huntsville, Ontario where I had been working (yes, as a waiter), my VW Beatle (yes, Beatle) burned up with all my money from a summer’s work in the glove compartment and the rest of my stuff packed in. I arrived for school penniless but cheerful. There is a pattern here which I’ve tried at various times to duplicate in my business career, thankfully without success.
Five years later I came to Sudbury on a motorcycle by way of Thunder Bay and Manitoulin Island where we still publish Northern Life, the last mass distribution independent mass distribution weekly newspaper in the country.
Last month I was 64.
I’ve been lucky, blessed in a secular kind of way. I am struck by the comfort of a song I heard for the first time on my first big adventure on my country’s 100th birthday 45 years ago. The idea of being 64 was unthinkable. Cute at best. Pierre Trudeau as justice minister was revolutionizing our social mores, Charles de Gaulle was insulting us, America was in Vietnam, I was omnipotent for the first and last time, and through it all of Canada was celebrating in a way it had never done before or since.
Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four.
Turns out the lover in question that year was Canada. My wife would come later.
