Owned by Bruce Maclean

Every now and then

If I’m lucky

Something happens-

That reminds me

Just how long I’ve been on this planet.

I watched this brilliant film for the first time 45 years ago in a theater (there were 3 people, including me watching that afternoon) in Halifax Nova Scotia. At the time, I was 20 and wasn’t sure what I’d just witnessed. Today, I rewatched this and have a much clearer understanding of what I’ve seen..

This film stands the test of time and is arguably the finest film ever made. Certainly the best war film?

It came to me, like sex or sleep.

A dreamy love that’s hard to keep.

A bridge between smoke and steep.

A zig, a zag, a Zim, a swerve!

A trick so sick, I don’t deserve.

And took it all to that last nerve.

I don’t know from whence it comes.

I just hear the beating of the drums.

And like the drink or drug that numbs…

I look around another glance.

Thanking God, another chance.

Love it all. This life earth dance!

The north coast of Nova Scotia is somewhere between the middle of nowhere and God’s country.

Somehow, I was still there when I was 18, and she’d been dead for 7 years. I would still look for her whenever I was in a crowd of people. Straining searching. Imagining that she had faked her death to get away from me. My mother. By the fall of 1977, I guess I figured she was really dead. All of this I kept to myself. Winding wrapped tight. In my tiny bedroom on a twin bed in a mobile trailer on an acre of land at the edge of Deception River is where the nightmare began…

I ripped out the window screen at the foot of the bed one night and the screen at the head of the bed the next. Screaming some nonsensical rage about “I’ll get you! You motherfuckers!” The next morning the fingernails were torn and bloodied from ripping out screens. Both windows smashed.

I could hear the breathing coming from something somewhere. I held my breath and lay still on my bed, making sure it wasn’t me. I looked under the bed and under the trailer. Nothing. I was alone… except for whatever was breathing. It felt like it was coming from inside me. I had never been so terrified. I forgot to pray. I forgot God.

After a few days and nights of this, I realized that I had to leave that bed, that bedroom,that trailer, that acre, that river.

I left and never returned…

He was looking for the answers.

Not for money, nor for fame.

Not brought down by love or cancers.

So informed by guilt and shame.

He lied about so many things.

Just to keep them on their toes.

The rich, they yacht. The poor they sing.

The lies are everybody knows.

Some said he was a poet.

Some said he was insane.

But they could never know it.

What was running through that brain.

He was looking for some answers.

Not for money or for fame.

Not brought down by love or cancers.

Not informed by guilt or shame.

There’s such a quiet in the morning.

It’s just a silent cooling still.

It’s hard to know what is a warning.

When you’ve calmed that urge to will.

Dennis Mantin