Yo…
Morning: Welcome To Zephyr
One of my favourite novels is Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life published in 1991.
I’ve read it…maybe half a dozen times or so? It’s got a heartful Wonder Years vibe to it.
Set in the town of Zephyr, Alabama in the early 1960s. You’d think Alabama and the ‘60s would be far removed from me growing up in Scarborough in the big city of the Toronto but what bridges that obvious gap is…magic.
“You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it.
See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand.
But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that?
Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.”
See? Magic. Boy’s Life continues:
“After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly.
Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.
That’s what I believe.
The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good.
Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.
These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.”
Heavy sigh, right?
The I speaking is 12-year-old Cory Mackenson. The novel begins as Cory’s father, Tom, takes Cory on his daily milk route early one morning. Yes, Cory’s father is a milkman.
As we contemplate AI and all the ramifications there’s always one loud critic who says jobs will be lost. Maybe he’s right. But truthfully? We don’t mourn the milkman.
Before cars we were a horse driven society. And as the number of city horses swelled so did the peripheral (and lucrative) industries that supported them: teamsters, streetcar operators, carriage manufacturers, groomers, coachmen, feed merchants, saddlers, stable keepers, wheelwrights, farriers, blacksmiths, buggy whip makers, veterinarians, horse breeders, street cleaners and the farmers who grew grain and hay.
Most of those industries are…gone. (I hadda google what a farrier is. Foot doctor for horses.) And I can’t imagine how scary it was to face that transition. If your business was horses (and business was good!) you’d be cursing cars.
Of course…horses mean horse poop. Evolving away from horses made our cities better: better sanitation, order, safety and, above all, efficiency.
And that’s why we don’t mourn the milkman.
Nothing says forever and it all changes way faster than we’d like.
In Boy’s Life Cory Mackenson and his father are driving by Saxon’s Lake (an old quarry filled with dark ominous water) when he watches a car drive straight into the lake and sink to the bottom with a dead man inside, beaten viciously, and his only identification is a tattoo of a skull with wings sprouting from the head.
Cory’s father jumps in and tries to save the driver of the car, only to discover that the man is actually a murder victim, handcuffed to the steering wheel.
And suddenly, innocent is lost. While magic realism is gained.
There’s a triceratops that roams Route Ten. It’s already horned a Greyhound bus.
Old Moses is a Loch Ness like creature that lives in the Tecumseh River near Zephyr.
An elderly man claims to be The Candystick Kid, a retired wild west gunfighter. His name comes from meeting Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday after the gunfight at the OK Corral as a kid.
There’s school yard bullies.
And of course because this is the South in the ‘60s there’s KKK members.
Oh and the ghost of Midnight Mona and Little Stevie Cauley haunts Zephyr’s roads. Stevie was a street racer killed during a race and is now a phantom with a black dragster named Midnight Mona. (Of course it has bright flames painted on the sides…)
Ghosts and dinosaurs and cowboys mixing with the real life horror of Southern racism and a dark murder.
It’s hard to hold onto the light.
Morningside: Welcome To Scarborough
It takes about 3 minutes into the Scarborough inspired movie Morningside for somebody to suck their teeth.
And honestly? That took longer than I expected.
Growing up that sound was the Scarborough Anthem.
Located in Toronto’s East End this boisterous borough has unleashed a spectacular wave of impressive creativity often rooted in colourful communities.
Any ghosts and dinosaurs and cowboys? Well, magic is in the eye of the beholder.
You probably already know Brooklyn and you probably already know Compton even if you’ve never visited these places. They’re featured in so many movies plus all the music.
(On Californication Anthony Kiedis the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers sings: “Well, everybody’s been there and I don’t mean on vacation.” Which is true of Hollywood as well as Compton and Brooklyn and Scarborough.)
The hoods we grow up in…the streets we walk…yeah some are dangerous yet they all offer a distinct magic.
We flow among diligent magicians who are providing inspired illusions.
Scarborough is a fearless tribe of dreamers: visionaries who retain their magic eyes and can see beauty when others only view ruin or despair.
In Scarborough you cope by navigating hope and wearing dope gear.
In Scarborough we claim Mike Myers who made you laugh either on Saturday Night Live or with the Austin Powers movies.
In Scarborough we claim the Weeknd who faces the Blinding Lights head on with all the bold courage of a Starboy. (Starboy is Jamaican slang, yeah?)
In Scarborough we claim actor Alex Mallari Jr. who has been on My Summer Lair twice. When we talked about his role as the Bad Guy in The Adam Project (a Ryan Reynolds Netflix movie) I asked him if gave Ryan (who hails from Vancouver) a proper Scarborough welcome. Alex and I laughed. Hooray for shorthand!
You can see Alex Mallari Jr. in Morningside along with Fefe Dobson. (In the movie Fefe as Steph is Alex Mallari’s boyfriend.)
In Scarborough we claim Fefe Dobson who often shares the contents of her heart in her music.
Filmmaker Ron Dias describes Morningside as a love letter to Scarborough. Morningside the movie Ron directed and co-wrote follows a group of Scarborough residents grappling with violence in their community, a rapidly changing city laced with fear and the loss of their local community centre to gross gentrification.
One of those Scarborough residents is Steph, a nurse played by Fefe Dobson. As you’ll hear in the attached MSL conversation Fefe maintains a fierce pride for this borough. For our borough.
She clearly was able to express that pride in her Morningside performance.
You know Fefe Dobson as the singer-songwriter with popular hits like Bye Bye Boyfriend, Stuttering and Ghost.
In this My Summer Lair conversation we talk about growing up in Scarborough where she attended Wexford Collegiate, a creative arts high school. (In Scarborough it’s like our Fame school if you get that reference.)
(I went to L’Amoreaux Collegiate for high school, about 7 KMs from Wexford. Wexford got Fefe Dobson. At L’Am we got Maestro Fresh Wes. I can’t articulate why but that tracks. It works. It fits.)
Fefe and I get into hustling, how her leather jacket is her armour and the fight for the light in overwhelming darkness.
We end this local and often personal conversation with the power of manifestation. Manifestation is simply refusing to accept your current circumstances as fate. Crystal balls are only destiny if you choose to believe in Predestination. Otherwise the future is yours to craft.
Morningside is playing in limited release at select Cineplex cinemas.
Like Scarborough’s best and brightest, this movie is going places.
If you know Scarborough; you’ll wanna check out Morningside starring Alex Mallari Jr. and Fefe Dobson. #PantsWorthy
It was a pleasure to talk to Fefe about Scarborough, to hear about her experiences.
Because this borough is my borough, a subtle subplot that runs through a handful of My Summer Lair episodes is Scarborough.
Stand up comic Nick Reynoldson
Actor Alex Mallari Jr.
Ed Robertson, the lead singer of the Barenaked Ladies
Rapper Maestro Fresh Wes:
They’ve all shared their Scarborough experiences with me. Their street slang.
The joyful mischief that Fefe and I talked about.
In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger a 2016 non-fiction book he writes:
“The mechanism seems simple: poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities.”
Closer and I’d add…cooler communities. It’s why “we” represent―when was the last time a rich person represented their hood?!
There are no Bridle Path t-shirts. And yet there are a variety of Scarborough t-shirts. Tribes, yo.
I Am The Real McCoy…
Sammy Younan
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Sammy Younan is the affable host of My Summer Lair podcast: think NPR’s Fresh Air meets Kevin Smith: interviews & impressions on Pop Culture.
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