I’m back at the Ellice Cafe, eh! On this last real (and real hot, I’m hopin’) week of summer, I’d like to go back to two earlier summers:

First, the summer of 1978 in the imaginary (to us) world of Jack Lovell, the character from my novel ‘Except My Love For You’. Jack graduated from Glenlawn Collegiate in 1968, as we all gathered when we read the book’s chapter ‘Crossroads’. That chapter concerned the characters’ Graduation Dance. Jack and the other characters’ childhood is the topic of Jack’s song ‘Across the Norwood Bridge’. After high school, Jack drifted to a BA (History) from the University of Winnipeg. Both of his best buddies, Gordon and Jerry, took Commerce at the University of Manitoba. Although the boys spent a lot of their free time together, Jack’s days at the downtown campus were lonely times for him. He never really clicked with any college clique - didn’t want to and didn’t try. On top of that, Jack’s romantic life during these (and later) times was topsy/turvy, and start/stop. As a teenager and young adult, his heart had followed confused signals. He pursued the girl he thought he loved - to no avail. The girl he really loved? Well, that’s in the book.

Anyway, after college Jack eventually fell into an entry level job at the Winnipeg offices of a multi-national agri-business. For no particular reason, he found himself with a career in Human Resources. Jack found this fact, like so many others in his life, to be ironic. Behind the charming smile on his softly handsome face, rested a secretly reserved personality - one that tended to introspection when healthy, but one that drifted, too often for anyone’s good, into near morbid self-absorption. Not positive self-absorption, like rock stars and other narcissists, but dark, self-deprecatory brooding. Oh, and drinking. Bit by bit and year by year, booze became the driver of Jack’s taxi. He met and married Lenore during a bout of absent-mindedness. In due course, they produced children - two boys that even Jack could see, appreciate, and cherish. But in the way of this unkind world, that did not free Jack from his shackles.

So, one summer’s evening in 1985, Jack was killing time by strumming his guitar and mumbling words that came from somewhere unknown inside, and which both comforted and scared Jack. Comforted, because the truth, however dark, always is more bearable when faced, and not hidden from. And scared because the words were not about a difficult past, or a hard present, but about an imagined future. Jack imagined himself carrying on his present life, as is, from now until the end. Dwelling on the future is not good. But that’s what he found himself doing, singing words that came from the mouth of an old man who was at the end of his rope, out of resources to even carry on, never mind get better. And the old man was pleading to someone, anyone, for mercy.

But time runs out here at the Ellice Caff, so I’ll sign off now, but leave you with the words that Jack eventually wrote down:


MERCY MILD
Intro:
In so many ways
I’ve wasted my days.
You could say I deserve what I get.
Still, I’m faced with past dealings,
With terrible feelings:
Of guilt,
And of loss,
And regret.

I’ve managed to burn through
The saints, and the saviours I knew.
So, Father Time, Mother Love,
I turn, once more, humbly,

To you.

Verse:
Mercy Mild
Why don’t you come to me?
Tap on my shoulder?
Mercy Mild
I am an old man.
Make me a child.

Chorus:
I’ve been living in the shadows.
I wanna stand in the light.
I’ve been wandering in the wilderness.
I wanna come inside