Good morning! It’s very nice to see you. I hope you had a great week.
Last Sunday morning I may have—a little bit—accidentally mis-numbered which issue of the newsletter I was writing. I was pretty chuffed to see I was at issue 290. “Getting close to 300!” I thought as I typed.
Well, I was wrong. It was issue 280. And this is 281.
Oh my gosh, I’m even boring myself.
Tea! Stories! Go!
Where’s Dave?
I was going through some old paperwork this week, when I came across this old newspaper ad. This ad ran in all the New Brunswick daily papers in the winter of 2002. I had barely turned 24.
Erin and I were married in our hometown of Leamington, Ontario the previous October. I was fresh out of college and had managed to find work at our local CBC in Windsor. I was what you might call an unconventional reporter. I was more likely to write a satirical song or skit about the story I was assigned to rather than write a straight up news story about it. I thought of myself as more of a storyteller than a journalist.
I was only ever going to be casual in Windsor, so I started applying for jobs elsewhere. On a whim, I applied for a reporter’s job in Saint John, New Brunswick, which I was totally unqualified for. After the interview, the boss called me up to say I hadn’t gotten it.
“But,” she said, “how do you feel about Fredericton?”
“Uh… good?” I said.
“Because while I can’t offer you the permanent job in Saint John, I need someone to fill a hole in Fredericton for a year. Interested?”
I called up Erin. We discussed it for a minute and decided to go for it. We knew nothing about the place, but we were excited for the adventure.
We arrived on News Years Day 2002. We had no idea we’d still be in the Maritimes 24 years later.
I started work shortly after arriving. I liked the CBC in Fredericton. I was still a very green reporter, but there were some amazing journalists there who were generous with their time and knowledge. It’s really only in this time I started to think of myself a journalist.
A few weeks into the job, my boss called me to her office.
“I hope everything is OK,” I said, sitting down across from her.
“Oh yes, everything is great,” she said. “In fact…”
She had been talking with her counterparts in Saint John and Moncton. They were each sitting on a bit of money in their budgets which needed to be spent by the end of March or they’d lose it. They decided to do something creative with it.
“We find we’re pretty good at telling the stories in our respective cities,” she said. “But we’re not always as good at finding those stories in all the little places. And New Brunswick is made of little places. Follow?”
“OK…”
She leaned forward. “That’s where you come in.”
For the next three weeks, I would become “Where’s Dave?” I’d go on the morning show in each city with the names of all the little places in the province in a hat. I’d draw a name, go to the place, and come back the next day with a story.
“Think you can do it?” she asked.
I smirked.
“I think so.”
Get the green Ontario kid to play tourist. I can see that now.
The first day, I met a lovely old guy who built his own house out of concrete and cordwood. We spent the afternoon making model airplanes in his living room with his grandson. I told the story the next day on the radio.
The second day, I ended up at a fork in the road in the Acadian Peninsula. There was nothing there but a house with a hair salon in the basement, so I went in to get a hair cut. The hilarious woman there spoke about as much English as I did French, but we got along great.
“Your hair is not so good,” she said, correctly. “I make you look like Ricky Martin.”
I told the story the next day on the radio.
The third day I met a woman who owned a quiet motel on the old Trans Canada Highway. The new twinned highway had just opened a few years before. Thousands of cars used to drive past every day, and business boomed for years. Now she saw just a few dozen cars in a given day. She cried as she told me how scared she was of the future. I told the story the next day on the radio.
The fourth day, I pulled the name of the community of Rogersville from the hat.
“Ooooh,” said the radio host sitting across from me. “Get some Brussels sprouts while you’re there. “They have a festival there every year.”
I could get behind a story about Brussels sprouts.
I drove to Rogersville. I went to the little cafe in town. I ordered Brussels sprouts in cheese. They were just OK.
“Can I get you anything else?” said the waitress.
“Well,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” she said.
I looked around the empty cafe.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
I had just spent the last few hours knocking on doors trying to find a story. The town seemed deserted. I couldn’t find anyone to speak with, let alone interview for a story.
“Oh,” she said casually. “They’re probably at Father Alexandre’s funeral.”
“Pardon me?” I asked.
Rogersville, I learned, was home to a Trappist Monastery. One of their beloved monks had just died at the age of 94, and today was his funeral.
“So if you’re looking for anyone, that’s where they’re going to be.”
I drove over to the monastery. Walking in, the first person I met was the abbot.
“Pardon me,” I said. “I’m with the CBC. I hate to intrude, but…”
“Oh, would you like to speak about Father Alexandre?” he said kindly.
“If it’s not too much trouble…”
Not only was it not too much trouble, I found out later he delayed the funeral by 20 minutes to finish talking with me.
Father Alexandre entered the monastery at aged 17. Other than a brief stint in Paris a few years later for seminary, he never left the grounds of the monastery. Ever.
“What can you tell me about Father Alexandre?” I asked.
“He was highly valued in the community as a confessor,” explained the abbot. “He was always highly sought after for confession.”
“Why was that, do you think?” I asked.
He winked at me.
“Well, he was very discreet,” he said.
After the interview, he took me into the sanctuary where hundreds of people sat waiting for the funeral to begin.
“Would you like to see him?” said the abbot loudly.
“Oh, I couldn’t bother you right before the…” I stammered.
“No bother!” he said cheerfully, dragging me to the front of the church.
We approached the humble pine box. Inside was the frail body of a very old man in simple brown robes.
“In the old days, we just sewed the naked body in a burlap sack and buried it,” explained the abbot. “It’s part of our vow of poverty. But now, there are regulations about these things, so we bought the cheapest wood we could to make him a coffin.”
The abbot rolled his eyes.
I looked at Father Alexandre. He wasn’t the first corpse I’d seen, but he was the first who hadn’t been touched up by the undertaker. He was just a very dead man in a box.
I had always been uncomfortable with death and funerals. Even a little scared. I realized in that moment, I’d always been bothered by the efforts made to make a body look too alive.
“He looks good,” we’d say. “Like he’s sleeping.”
Father Alexandre was definitely not sleeping. He was dead. And I didn’t find it scary at all.
The body that had carried this man’s being for 94 years had died. And there it was. I appreciated the honesty of this moment. And in that moment, I stopped being afraid of death and funerals.
I told the story the next day on the radio.
After the three weeks of “Where’s Dave?” was up, I was quietly asked to keep going. We kept it up for three more months. I became pretty familiar with the back roads of New Brunswick. We ended the whole thing with a remote broadcast from a place whose name we pulled from a hat. Lower Gagetown. I spent a week getting to know all the people in that town, and I introduced them all to the people of New Brunswick on the radio. It was a pleasure and a privilege.
All of this went through my head as I looked at that old newspaper ad. I was just a kid. If I’d been older or wiser or less naive, I probably wouldn’t have knocked on half the doors I did. And I wouldn’t have met half the people I met or learned half the things I learned.
It all happened at the right time.
Thank you so much for hanging out this Sunday morning.
I’ll have my regular extra story for members of my Patreon later this morning. You can sign up in the link at the bottom of this email.
It’s a Losers Guild week, so I’ll head to the studio today to record. Watch for it on your feeds Wednesday morning, first thing.
I hope you have a great week.
Great story about your NB 'Where's Dave', what a time that must have been for you! Thanks for making my morning tea a bit more interesting every Sunday morning.