A friend of the family, who’s known my father for fifty years, once told me, “Your dad is at his best when he’s out of character. And he’s always out of character.”

On this day, when my father celebrates (or tries to ignore, more likely) having lived for three-quarters of a century, I think that peculiar insight is as good an angle as any on the way my dad lives his life.

My father’s best instincts have taken him to places that must have made him uncomfortable. He was a kid from the wrong side of Toronto’s Don River who never let it stop him. He grew up to be a successful professional who made a life working in small towns. Raised in poverty, he worked his way into comfort, and never took it for granted. He took on responsibilities in his family, his church, his community and the world at large in proportion to his success.

Here’s an example of my father’s way of being in the world: When I was a teenager, we once went to give blood together. It was my first time; he already had a certificate from the Red Cross to thank him for having done it dozens of times. I thought he was at ease with the process and I respected him for it. Then I watched as they plunged the needle into his arm and he flinched like crazy. After that I respected him even more. It obviously bothered him every time and he did it anyway, time after time.

He’s a guy who listens more than he speaks, sometimes laughs at the wrong time, but says the right thing in just a few words when the chips are down. And when he doesn’t say anything, he’s setting an example. It took me a while to figure that out. He may or may not be aware of it himself.

Women tend to love my dad: he’s quirky and attentive, and endlessly charming in a self-effacing way. The ladies in his office once gave him an award for always being cheerful and cleaning up after himself. Men admire him, because he’s smart and successful and easy to get along with. He doesn’t measure his masculinity by macho standards, but he doesn’t shirk being a gentleman, either. I have to resort to trickery to pick up the tab at a restaurant when he’s at the table.

My dad’s great with money but still generous. He’s hard-working but loves to relax. He loves his home but travels the world and enjoys it. He loves his kids but gives us tons of room to grow. He’s a rock-solid husband to my mother, and always a caring big brother to my uncle Bill. With his grandkids—a teenager and a baby—he’s at his best just being there. It’s a gift.

Here’s a curious fact worth considering: my father claims to have a terrible memory but never forgets anything important, and never remembers anything hurtful. He seems to thrive entirely in the moment.

My dad is an unlikely hero, I suppose. You might not guess it to look at him, but he’s a terrific athlete. Over the decades he won more awards at tennis and racquetball than I can count, and only stopped when his ankle went on him a few years back. He still plays volleyball and slo-pitch—he was team MVP last year. He’s a keen competitor, but a perfect sportsman on and off the field. I cannot recall ever beating my dad at any sport.

In fact there aren’t many endeavours at which I can out-perform my dad. Carpentry and computers, I’ll grant, and possibly public speaking. But I owe him a debt in all those areas. For a guy who’d describe himself as all thumbs, he managed during the course of our childhood to build a playhouse for us kids, a doghouse, a goalie net, a basketball backboard and a casket for our cat. And what he couldn’t show me about carpentry in the process, he got his best buddy to teach me in exchange for doing his tax return.

Despite an abiding loathing of any device more advanced than an adding machine, my father bought my sister and me a Commodore 64 computer when we were teenagers. It was a visionary purchase that wound up giving me a huge head start on half my generation, and largely defining my career path.

And every time my dad has had to make a speech, whether at a church function, or the Lion’s Club, or a family event, it’s been humble, spontaneous, and bang-on. At his retirement party he started out his remarks by saying, “Anybody who knows me knows I look forward to speaking like I’d look forward to an enema.” That combination of humour, honesty and brevity is dynamite.

I suppose I must be better at playing music than my dad is, but that’s partly because he made a small misstep: when he was sixty-five, and wanted to learn an instrument to augment his life-long love of singing in choirs, he took up the violin. If he’d taken up the ukulele, he’d likely be better at it now than me.

But I wouldn’t be any more proud of him than I am. I couldn’t be.

My dad still does my tax returns every year, and gives me the best advice I get from anyone, on finances, love, and life. “Anything that sounds too good to be true usually is,” he’ll say, or “Common sense is anything but common,” or “No one ever went broke taking a profit,” or “A job worth doing is worth doing well.”

I hated that last one when I was a kid, but the truth of it is plain to me today—like so many things my dad said and did, and says and does.

Here’s another peculiar insight to consider: I feel like I spent the first half of my life trying to be different from my dad. Now that I’m into the second half, I wish I was more like him.

I’m following in his footsteps as best I can, but he’s always ahead of me.

Happy Birthday, Dad. I hope I never catch up.

I first encountered Stompin’ Tom’s songs in true folk fashion: I learned them from live performances by another musician. The musician was my Grade 5 teacher, Mr. Caverhill, at Nobel Public School, on a hill along Highway 69 about six miles north of Parry Sound, Ontario. Mr. Caverhill, a tall, balding older man who wore Coke-bottle glasses and a houndstooth jacket, may not have looked like a folk singer. But he was beloved by a generation of students at Nobel Public for spending a half hour each day with his class, strumming his guitar and leading us in song. We sang everything from old camp songs like “Land of the Silver Birch” to contemporary country classics, like Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”. Mr. Caverhill, who had a fondness for tobacco himself, taught us all to sing “Tillsonburg” long before I’d ever heard a Stompin’ Tom recording. He told us about how Stompin’ Tom at the Foley Fall Fair, south of town, had packed the hall and pertnear worn right through a stomping board doing “Sudbury Saturday Night” and “Bud the Spud” and all the rest.

By the time I was playing guitar and writing my own songs in my late teens, Stompin’ Tom had been off the scene for ten years, but his work was ingrained in my consciousness. As a rural kid, I had only ever heard two musicians sing about the places of my youth: Gordon Lightfoot, and Stompin’ Tom. And while Lightfoot was a literary composer, weaving the landscape’s undulations into his works, Stompin’ Tom was a working-class poet belting out three chords and the truth. They were two sides of the same record: Lightfoot the internationally successful songwriter, mysterious and wistful; Stompin’ Tom, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking guy who played the Foley Fall Fair and wrote about places we knew, and stories we could relate to, in a simple, accessible fashion. I couldn’t write like Gordon Lighfoot, but I would try to write like Stompin’ Tom.

In the early nineties, Stompin’ Tom made his legendary comeback, urged on by the likes of the Rheostatics, and suddenly his videos were on Much Music and a whole lot of college kids were listening to his songs. I was one of those, too.

I remember sitting with a friend of mine in my car, in a tree planting camp in Northern Ontario one spring night after work. It may have been 1992. We were drinking Northern Ale brewed in nearby Timmins, where Stompin’ Tom had gotten his start at the Maple Leaf Tavern decades before. (We drank there on the weekends; his portrait was still on the wall.) My friend and I had the windows of my 88 Ford Escort rolled up to keep the bugs out, and a haze of smoke filled the vehicle. The rest of the camp was dancing to Cypress Hill in the mess tent, but we were listening to Stompin’ Tom on the car stereo.

There were brand new Stompin’ Tom albums by that point, but we were playing an ancient tape of Tragedy Trail. There’s a song on that album that name-checks Parry Sound, and another about the Don Jail, just up the street from where my dad grew up. Not to mention the Coal Boat song, a catchy classic with a hook any songwriter would proudly hang his hat on. I was waxing passionate about that, and my friend looked at me with the keen insight that sometimes arises in such moments, shook her head, and grinned.

Then she told me something that’s stayed with me ever since. “Dave,” she said, “There are two ways to listen to Stompin’ Tom Connors. Some people listen ironically, and some people listen sincerely. You listen to him BOTH ways.” I laughed out loud. She was bang on. To be a Stompin’ Tom fan, for me, was to wrestle with contradictions.

Not long before, I’d heard Stompin Tom on CBC radio as I drove out along the bush roads. He was railing against artists and others who moved beyond Canada’s borders, in subject matter or in fact. His opinions were boldly stated, and blunt. I heard the heart in them, but I disagreed. I though he was urging Canadians to distinguish ourselves from Americans with unquestioning Canadian patriotism, and I believed that was a narrow view. I still believe that.

I also thought some of Stompin’ Tom’s songs were wince-worthy. Some were just corny, but others betrayed a combination of earnestness and naivete that was uncomfortable in the light of contemporary songcraft, not to mention what was going on in the world. That’s where the ironic filter came in. Stompin’ Tom was a throwback to a simpler time. Even a just a few years ago, he claimed no one was writing songs about Canada; he was plain wrong about that, and it dated him. In some ways he seemed to present himself as the proud citizen of a cartoon Canada.

And yet for all the elements of caricature in the persona he created and brought to the stage, Stompin’ Tom was also the real deal. It was plain to see, up close and in performance, and to my mind it’s a unique characteristic. The only other person I can think of who’s anything like him in a Canadian context is Don Cherry. As with Don Cherry, there were personality quirks that made me uncomfortable; some of them were the very things that made other people love him most. Likewise, though, the honesty of his effort, the depth of his experience, and at its best, the quality of his work, were worthy of the deepest respect.

Stompin’ Tom’s great songs – and there are many – are truly great folk art. They’re memorable, singable glimpses of real life as seen from his quirky, personal point of view. They form an essential chapter of the Canadian songbook. There’s nothing ironic about what it took to collect, to create and to and deliver those songs. Playing local Legion halls and watering holes, and writing songs about all the stops along the way, for half a century, is an epic task. When Stompin’ Tom played Massey Hall, where I saw him perform a few years ago amid Canadian flags a-flying, he filled that space with the spirit of all those places and people he’d seen and known. He carried them in his heart. That’s an amazing gift, and it’s something no one else has done on the national stage.

About eleven years ago, I took part in a Stompin’ Tom tribute at Hugh’s Room. I’d just hosted the Gordon Lightfoot tribute for the first time, and I heard a similar thing was going to happen for Stompin’ Tom, so I offered to host. Folk DJ Steve Fruitman—the world’s biggest Stompin’ Tom fan, and a perpetual supporter on his Toronto radio show—was organizing the event. He was gracious enough to accept my offer, sight unseen, and he let me play a couple of songs too.

When I got to the club and met the other musicians, a whole bunch of them had actually played in Tom’s band. That was nerve-wracking. Someone told me Stompin’ Tom didn’t like it when people deviated from his versions; that was worrying, because I’d worked out my own arrangements. Then I heard Stompin’ Tom would be in the audience, and that was just plain scary.

I chose two of those songs I mentioned before: ‘Around the Bay and Back Again”, about Georgian Bay, and “The Old Don Valley Jail.” When my turn came in the first set, I started with the latter, and I destroyed it. Not in a good way. I was trying to do too much: I was playing an electric guitar on stage for the first time, plus a harmonica in a rack, and the version I did was a kind of a finger-picked calypsoesque thing. All the other artists were on stage, acting as a house band, and when I began my song, they jumped in the way they knew it. It was an instant catastrophe. We restarted twice. I finally asked the band to back off and managed to get through it, but it was one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me on stage. From where I stood, publicly screwing up his song, I could see Stompin’ Tom’s unmistakeable cowboy-hatted silhouette in the audience. I was sick with embarrassment.

At the break, I went straight up to Stompin’ Tom’s table. He was smoking and drinking bottled beer in a room that usually caters to wine-drinkers and microbrew aficionados. (Incidentally, Stompin’ Tom and Joni Mitchell share the distinction of having been the only people ever to smoke in the restaurant section of Hugh’s Room. Who could ever tell them to butt out?) Anyway, I swallowed the lump in my throat and said, “Mr. Connors, I want to apologize for making a mess of your song up there.” He said, in a voice that was larger than life, “Christ, chum, I was bleedin’ for ya! Them guys jumped all over ya! They never shoulda done that. You done it your own way and you done a good version!” It was about the kindest thing a legend could ever say to a young performer, and I’ll never forget it. He could have crushed me, and he raised me up instead.

During the second half, I started out the show. I asked the band to lay out, and I laid into a version of Around the Bay and Back Again that combined all my love for Georgian Bay and all the nervous energy I’d built up in the first set. I could see Stompin’ Tom nodding and applauding and the audience was warm—God love a good audience, they always want to see you recover and they’ll help you do it.

After the show, I approached Stompin’ Tom again. I held out my hand and said, “Sir, I really want to thank you for what you said at the break. I think it made a big difference for me.” He gripped my hand like a bear, and said “Yer fuckin’ right it did! You fuckin’ nailed ‘er, buddy! I had tears in my eyes!” I’ve never received a higher compliment.

I’ve known a few people who have played with Stompin’ Tom and knew him well. I didn’t. I’ve heard a lot of stories about him, from folks who had real insight into his personal life and his character. I don’t. All I can say, as a fan, as a songwriter, and as a Canadian, is that Stompin’ Tom Connors, with all his faults and foibles, his gifts and his greatness, had a heart as big as this country.

The man is gone. He was one of a kind, and we’ll never see the like of him again. But he left a big body of work, a collection of Canadian songs, the best of which will live on for a long, long time.

And whenever we gather to strum and sing along to Stompin’ Tom’s songs, we’ll hear that mighty heart beat on— like a big boot stomping on a plywood board.

I bought this guitar, used, about a year and a half ago. It’s an inexpensive Yamaha nylon-string guitar I’ve become very fond of. As with my very first guitar (visible in the background of this picture), this a was a case of love at first sight in a pawn shop. I’ve learned to trust that feeling.

In fact, this new, used cheapie is the guitar I most love to play now, one that’s helped rekindle my passion for guitar after many years of focusing more on ukulele.

So for the past year, I’ve been gradually, and very shyly, coaxing this guitar onto the stage for certain gigs.

You get these feelings sometimes, like your work could so easily veer into a rut.

When that happens you sometimes have to shake things up a little.

Like, say, two hours before you’re about to go on stage with a guitar you’re shy about playing in public in the first place… and all you have is a permanent marker and a weird whim.

That’s how I started doodling on my guitar. A week later, after four sessions of following the tip of the pen where it led me, I wound up with the guitar tattoo you see here.

There’s some pretty strong energy in this image, and it seems to have done the trick. The gig was great. The guitar is alive with songs and full of rich, sensual vibes. It was already a good writing guitar. It’s going to be a great one now.

And despite confidence issues when it comes to drawing, I managed to let something happen that I really like.

I wonder how a tattoo like that might look on my own skin?

I’ve been looking for the right image for years.

Maybe there’s one lurking within, and all I need to do is let it flow out—like a felt pen across the face of a beloved guitar.

Try, for example, taking a winter walk to the coffee shop.

The people you’ll meet in a brief morning stroll will soon have you thinking out loud.

Still, I can’t help but notice a few differences between the big city, and the small town I now live in.

Seems the biggest of all is the sense of connectedness.

In a small town, you feel ‘we’re all in this together.’

In a big city, it’s easy to feel the opposite, and wonder where, exactly, is the heart of the city?

But that’s just me, thinking out loud.

It’s amazing how The Way We Feel has become a tradition, while continuing to grow and evolve and deepen each year.

Every show has its own special qualities; Sunday night, though, was among the greatest ever.

This scan of the running order I kept in my jacket pocket for the evening ought to give some idea why.

If NHL woes ever get you down, the cure is to spend more time watching games at the local arena.

In this case, the arena was in Montreal. The players were atom-level girls. The game was ringette.

That’s where the spirit of competition on ice is still alive and well.

And that got me thinking out loud.

Listen: Thinking Out Loud – Competition On Ice

I surprised myself last weekend. I didn’t remember how much I knew about making a snowman.

But there’s nothing like teaching to remind you what you learned long ago.

Showing a couple of kids how to make a serious snowman brought out the best of the long winters of my boyhood.

Sadly, the short winters of their childhood couldn’t keep the Big Guy intact for long.

I’m just grateful the memories won’t melt as quickly as this January’s snow.

Listen: Thinking Out Loud-The Big Guy is Gone

It just doesn’t seem right, does it?

A few weeks of hustle and bustle; carols and eggnog and gifts, and then…?

Somehow the symbol at the centre of the season to winds up tossed out with the trash.

We need to work on our rituals. Resolution required.

Listen: Thinking out loud – Kicking the Christmas tree to the curb

The shore of Lake Ontario on a January morning can be utterly foreboding.

Best intentions aside, it sometimes takes an effort of will to pay a visit.

Yet whatever the conditions, whatever the time of day or year, a mighty lake always rewards its visitor.

On this sleety Sunday, it wasn’t big wind or big waves, but little signs and symbols that had one curious ambler thinking out loud.

Listen: Thinking out loud – Along the ancient lake