Like I told my niece, Carolyn, I’ve been reluctant to write this, since I realize it’ll make me sound crazy.
“Aunt Cath, that ship has sailed,” she told me.
So here goes.
Two Saturdays ago, it was day three of the Canal Bank Shuffle weekend, with one more day to go.
Bob and I were getting ready to close up Holy Rosary Hall around 2 a.m., when we found out our friend Willie Shane Johnston had lost his wallet.
Now, anyone who’s been to a Shuffle in the last 17 years knows that Willie—formerly of WSNB, now renamed the Red Dirt Revelators band—is an all-time fan favourite, as voted by Shuffle fans in an online poll.
After hanging out with Willie and the boys—Clay, Jason, and a changing roster of guitarists, in Thorold, Memphis, and Montreal—we’ve come to really love those guys. Not only as musicians, but as friends.
So when we heard about the missing wallet—filled with U.S. cash we’d paid them for their two nights of packing different halls—Bob and I were sick about it.
And so was Willie, who was plagued with the added guilt of feeling like he’d let the band down, as he texted Bob in the wee hours of the morning.
We arrived home, super late and exhausted for the third night in a row, and still, I couldn’t sleep. (My insomnia’s becoming so bad, I’m considering asking Bob to drive me around in the car like a baby—since that’s the only place I seem to sleep—and leave me in the driveway until morning).
So there I was, wide awake, as always, at 3 a.m., worrying about Willie’s wallet.
And then it hit me.
As long as I can remember, my Mom used to magically find missing things by praying to St. Anthony, patron saint of lost items. She’d tell us kids to try it, too, but it only seemed to work when she did it.
This was the first time since her death I’d decided to see if it would work.
I found out the next day, that while I was asking Mom to work her magic with St. Anthony, two other things were happening, all at the same time—3 a.m.
First, Bob, who seemed to be innocently snoozing beside me, was actually dreaming, that (get this!) my Mom, St. Anthony, and Willie walked into a bar (I know, it sounds like a really bad joke) and my Mom said to St. Anthony, “Give him his damn wallet.”
The second thing that was happening, as we found out the next day, was that Willie found his wallet. After combing the streets and searching high and low in every Shuffle venue and Thorold restaurant, he suddenly got the idea to stick his hand under his hotel bed, at 3 o’clock in the morning.
I know, it sounds ridiculous. Especially because Bob—with his Presbyterian upbringing and super Spock-like logic—is the very last person to embrace St. Anthony’s treasure-finding powers. And my Mom, who escaped becoming a nun when my Dad “rescued” her from the convent, is the very last person to swear at a saint. I spent most of Sunday laughing at that part. But that was his dream!
Adding to the string of coincidences, when we showed up for the Shuffle wrap party at Donnelly’s Sunday, hosted by the Red Dirt Revelators, Willie burst into one of the band’s biggest hits, the first line of which is: “Three o’clock in the morning, ….”
As he told the packed pub, filled with loyal RDR fans, “This song now has new meaning for me.”
I always knew that Mom—AKA “Ti Jeanne” (Little Jeanne)—was magical.
On her deathbed a few years ago, we spent weeks watching her dwindle into lifelessness; forced to break out our rusty French to communicate, since she’d reverted to her native language.
My memory flashed back—the other morning—to the time she told me years ago, “I like that singer, Gordon Brubaker.”
It took me a minute, but somehow, our minds melded and I realized she was talking about Roger Whittaker—and possibly confusing him with Gordon Lightfoot (who, incidentally, had a big hit with If You Could Read My Mind).
For the rest of her life, Mom was always a good sport whenever we teased her about it (which was often).
Decades later, I pulled the same stunt, of mixing up two men’s names. In my defence, it was back in the late 90s when they both used to visit us at the Thorold News office on Front Street.
Tom Astley, who is not overly tall, and has grayish hair and a striking moustache, would come in on a fairly regular basis, with his report from the Thorold Legion, which we would publish in the paper.
Scott Cronkwright was quite tall, had black hair, no moustache, and used to help us with photography.
This past summer, after not seeing either of them for years, I ran into Tom, and referred to him as Scott Cronkwright.
Like in the poem I wrote for the day we placed Mom’s urn beside Dad’s at Lakeview Cemetery, “Your DNA is strong; it lingers. It courses through our crooked fingers…”
Jeannetically speaking, never underestimate the strange power to communicate with the ones you love.
