The Vinyl Café Rides Again

Stuart McLean passed away two days ago. It made me sad to learn it for many reasons, some of which are:

• He was only 68 and
• He reminded me of the time when I lived in Ucluelet.

When I lived there and worked at Pacific Rim National Park, there were only two radio stations that came in clearly: a soft hits station from Washington State, and the CBC. So on my drives to and from work each day and on the weekends, I listened to a lot of the CBC that summer. The Vinyl Café was on from time to time, and it always seemed I started listening in the middle of one of Stuart McLean’s stories about Dave and Morley and their family.

Moving back to Victoria and then on to other things, I didn’t listen to the CBC as much, and didn’t listen to the Vinyl Café except on rare occasions.

This morning, I was sitting at the breakfast table with Ian (Tammy and Miranda were still abed upstairs) and I ran across yet another obituary piece on Stuart McLean, and Ian asked me who the man in the picture was. I started to explain, but thought it would be easier to show Ian. The CBC has a podcast stream of Vinyl Café episodes and I started up Overcast and found an episode that looked promising.

At first Ian didn’t know what to make of it. It was boring him. But then the story started to get rolling and the situation was getting ridiculous. Soon Ian was laughing at the table as we listened to the master storyteller work his magic. That was only the first: later we listened to the second half of the episode where Dave’s kids go to camp, and this evening on the way home from Sobey’s and then at the dinner table we listened to the classic Dave Cooks a Turkey. Then we all listened to the story that Ian and I listened to at breakfast. Tammy and Ian were crying with laughter by the end.

It looks like it might be a new thing for us. I feel good to have passed along something to Ian and in a way, helped the memory of Mr. McLean to endure.