Deepest Regrets

“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh my friends –
It gives a lovely light.”

– Edna St. Vincent Millay, Figs from Thistles: First Fig (1918)

A.Böcklin/Isle of the Dead: “New York” version, 1880

Well, my friends, it is entirely too long since we last spoke. I had promised weekly despatches when we began, and I have not kept that promise. In my defence, the weeks since my last were filled with a great deal of travel, work, illness, and misadventures of one kind and another. But here I am, and I plan to return to our weekly chat.

So many things have happened that I would despair of giving you a coherent guide to what has happened. But I’ll touch on a few salient points. July 1 was the 30th anniversary of my father’s death at age 70. The truth is, Dad’s legacy has really been the biggest inspiration of my entire life. I received all of my intellectual interests from him, and I really can sing with Dan Fogelberg, “his blood runs through my instrument and his song is in my soul.” He taught me so very much, and left me so very much, that it chokes me up to think about it.

He taught me to love our French-Canadian heritage – and what a heritage it is. The Conquest put us under alien rule, and ensured that I write these words to you in the language of the conqueror. The French Revolution destroyed forever the ancient homeland from whence we had come. Even so, until we gave up our soul in the Quiet Revolution, we were a great people. We opened up a Continent; some of us fought for Bl. Pius IX for a decade, while a few years later others chased the Mahdi up the Nile. Through it all we gave saints to Mother Church, and built shrines as holy and as beautiful as any in the Mother Continent. Now we are a dying folk, mostly assimilated in the States, and self-destructing demographically in Canada.

But my Dad had a dollop of Scots blood; his eight-times-great-grandfather, Laughlin MacKinnon, had fought at Culloden. He loved Scotland as well, and the whole Jacobite thing. A former radio actor, he could do a perfect Scots burr; to my delight, he would use it to read young Johnny Fraser’s father’s account of that tragic battle in James Boyd’s Drums. A subscriber and devout reader of American Heritage, Dad’s encyclopaedic knowledge of history matched his huge library and omnivorous tastes.