Why I Can’t Hear “Send In The Clowns” without Hearing The Ocean.

       It was August of 1975 and I was standing at the gate of a house on Addison Road in the town of Manley. An hour earlier I had got off a plane from New Zealand and now I was staring at a rather run down house on a quiet street of middle class homes. Homes that were all trying to better themselves except for this one. It seemed to have quit trying some time ago and now was happily drifting into decrepitude. The whole theme of the place was summed up by a Volkswagen Beetle that sat mouldering in the front yard. It was filled, front seat and back, floor to roof, packed to the 'gunnels with empty beer cans. Weeks later when we emptied the car we disturbed a small city's worth of cockroaches living off the stale beer but now as I passed this empty Fosters container I wondered what I was getting myself into. The trepidation deepened as I opened the screen door and entered the porch. It too was filled at one end, floor to ceiling, with empty cases of beer. There was a kings ransom to be had in empties between the porch and the car. Even as an avid beer drinker I was astounded at the number of empties in one small house. I knocked, or I should say we knocked. I was traveling with Linda McNeely, a nurse I had known in Toronto and had met in Auckland after friends we were both writing to told us of the others address. So we'd met, hung around together, traveled together and were now standing at the door of this house in Manley. She had worked with the lady who lived there and was told to drop in if she ever needed a place to stay. 

    So here she was, here we were. No one answered the door. We tried it and found it unlocked. Well she did say drop in and so in we went. The house was what you might expect from the outside. It was clean, well, cleanish. Dishes were piled up in the sink in the small kitchen but the rest of the place was not one that induced revulsion. It was just run down. There were a couple of chairs, a TV and an old leather sofa that was propped up on one end by a couple of bricks. It could have used a brick or two more as the sofa sort of ran downhill. Anyone who sat on it tended to lean a bit to the left. It was dingy inside but then I was used to that. Middle class Australia homes  that I had been in weren't noted for their cheery ambiance. It was as though paint, or at least colourful paint, was an unheard of entity. Most homes seemed to be done in institutional colours, depressing greens from the psych ward or browns redolent of nicotine stained pubs that had last seen paint after Gallipoli. This house was owned, or rented, by a woman and her two grown children. This woman, Shirley, was perhaps in her late forties or early fifties and her children were a boy in his late teens and a daughter in her early twenties which was about my age at the time. The son had embraced vegetarianism while the rest of the family were rabid meat eaters but the food wars that occupied meal times were all done in good fun. To this day I still think of meat as “bad veggies” in the parlance of the son and his grain eating, dope smoking, beer swilling and totally likeable friends. Shirley was the star of the house. There is a class of people in the world who are often just getting by on long hours of work at poor paying jobs, who have had their fair share of bad luck or missed opportunities but who embrace life with a sense of fun and with open arms. People who welcome in another mouth to feed, another body to house in an already cramped dwelling and do it with a joy. People who immediately make you feel welcome and part of the family. Shirley was one of those. The most striking thing about her was her hair. It was a coif that had last seen it's popularity peak before the late nineteen forties. It was dyed jet black and swept up in a wave at the front and long down the back. Service men returning home after the second world war were greeted by girlfriends with this hair. Benny Goodman played his clarinet to young women with this hair. And then it went away. But not with Shirley. Through the hard times of the conservative fifties, through the turbulent revolutions of the sixties and now into the seventies she had stuck with the up swept hair, the heavy lashes and the ruby red lips. She had her look and she stuck to it.

   She was a bar maid in a lawn bowling club. That is to say she had an enviable job. Lawn bowling clubs in Australia are not just sporting clubs. They are that, but as well they are social clubs, a home away from home, a second family, a place where everybody knows your name. A popular bar maid at a club has status, has arrived at the height of bar tending. At one time in her life she had tended bar at a yacht club in northern Australia, in Queensland. There she met the actor Ernest Borgnine who was on a fishing holiday. They had, she claimed, had an affair and so began one of my slight claims to fame. I now have had the honour to have shook the hand that held Ernest Borgnine's…..well, you get the drift. 

    Linda was shown to a bed in her daughters room and I was given an old chesterfield on a back porch to sleep on. Although we had traveled together for months we were just friends. Linda was a  person who, I imagine, had been the homely confidant of pretty girls relating their exploits with handsome boys and had listened patiently when those relationships went bad. That and her job as a nurse seemed to create a no-go zone when it came to men. She was fun to be with but was, for all intense and purposes, a-sexual. It was a perfect traveling relationship, free of fights and jealousies and expectations but based on a need for occasional companionship and the pleasure of having someone to talk to over a meal or on a train going somewhere.

     I loved living in this house with its comings and goings of a variety of young people and the constant laughter of youth. Linda got a job waitressing at the Steyne, a popular bar on the beach and I found employment working in a garlic processing plant where my job was to cut the roots from heads of garlic with a pair of spring loaded shears. At the end of the day I'd ride the bus home reeking of garlic and with a hand so sore I couldn't uncurl it from the shape of a claw. Later I took a job at a warehouse for Avon where I packed boxes for sales ladies all over New South Wales and rode the bus home smelling of every scented Avon product there ever was. Women would move closer to catch whatever odour I was redolent with that day and men eyed me with suspicion. It was a good time in my life, filled with parties and noisy evenings at home watching the telly. There were walks along the beach and night time strolls through the little town just a ferry ride away from Sydney but a world removed from the hustle and bustle of that city. 

     When I lived there, Manley was an old persons town. It was filled with tottering, grey haired seniors going to the chemists or coming from the take away clutching containers of  fish and chips or soggy, gristle filled meat pies. The Corso, Manley's main street, a traffic free mall, was all but empty after nine in the evening. Years later when I went back it had changed. It was now filled with young south east Asians, the meat pie shops replaced by Thai and Cambodian restaurants and at eleven at night the place was hopping. I think I liked it better in the old days. The Styne was still there, unchanged. But the serious Aussie drinkers had been replaced by a younger and more ethnic diverse crowd. 

    But this isn't about Manley or any of the people in my life at that time. It's about Judy Collins singing Send In The Clowns

    

    I had been in love once. Oh not just in love but in capital L, pulse racing, mind swirling Love. I had lived and breathed love. I had worshiped this woman with a passion that all but stopped my heart. Poets write about such love, painters paint it. People die from it and die happy. We had lived in an apartment on Walmer Road just off Bloor Street in Toronto. There were autumn walks through leaf strewn streets, bundled up against the cold, the feel of a mittened hand in yours. There were nights at the Brunswick Tavern drinking draft beer and singing along with the patrons who staggered up on stage to belt out a tune. Summers were spent on Toronto island eating food from a picnic basket or savouring good ice cream at that old fashioned ice cream parlour near Honest Eds. We hosted parties, went dancing and people smiled at us we were so obviously smitten, so much in love. But then it ended. To say I was heart broken is a cliché and very much understates the turmoil I went through. I would have welcomed death. I drifted through months of despair. My world had collapsed inward and I could hardly breath. I changed jobs, carried on living, pretending I wasn't dying. Over time I slowly resurfaced. I now worked at Mount Sinai Hospital, met Terry Allen and had one of those years that decades later I can still tell stories about. It was one of my better years. But underneath it all I was still in love. The mention of her name could send me reeling. I hated her happiness and I thought peace was lost to me. I resumed my plans to travel that I had harboured since my youth and so bought a ticket to England beginning the great adventure of my life. Months went by, I flew to Singapore, caught a boat to Perth in Australia and long after that I was sitting, reading a letter on the veranda of a bar in the town of Port Villa on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. Mail had found me here by way of general delivery and a letter from friends in Toronto had made its way to this small island. Buried among the small talk was the news that she had gotten married to a man twenty years her senior and had moved to Edmonton. Now she was lost to me, now it really was over. Now she was someone else's. The  acute pain wasn't there but still, I thought, it should have been me who was the happy groom. We should have been the storied couple. I hoped for failure, for pain and recrimination, for regret at having left me. I hoped she lay in her bed at night, awake as her husband slept, wondering where I was and what I was doing. I stared out over the aqua marine sea, past the palms, looking far beyond the horizon to the other side of the world. To that cold and colourless city where part of my heart  lay fading into memory. 

     I continued traveling, continued having more adventures than I ever could have hoped for. I wandered through the Islands of the South Pacific ending up living with a family in Fiji and now almost a year later I was in Manley. 

    Music had been my companion through all these months. Songs heard on car radios while hitch hiking, background songs in restaurants and bars, songs heard on other peoples stereos. In Queenstown on the south Island of New Zealand I worked mornings in the kitchen of the Ramada Inn, or the ram-it-in as the staff called it. We lived in the staff hostel and afternoons were spent skiing the slopes of  the surrounding mountains. Nights were spent in the local pubs. It was a ski resort town, full of young people, full of fun and over and over again I heard Elton John singing “butterflies are free my love/ fly away/ bye, bye” and I thought that was me. Free, flying away to where ever and whatever my fancy took. I was the one to be envied, I was flying free into the welcoming, open arms of life. I was so glad to be alive and here and with a great unknown off into the future. Glad not to be tied down to marriage and conventionality. Now she was fading into my memory, on the way to becoming a part of my past rather than a constant part of my present.                                                         

   Another popular song of the day was Send In The Clowns. It was played in the background of a hundred places I had been. I liked the song but it had held no significance for me. It was just another pretty song whose lyrics I had never paid much attention to.

    At night, here in Manley I would settle into my somewhat uncomfortable bed on the back porch. I'd pull my sleeping bag and extra blankets up around my chin as protection against the cold night air of an Australian winter and I would drift off to sleep.. Behind the house, unseen through the brush and down a steep hill there was a small, sheltered bay and a sandy beach. Mothers with young children would go there during the day to sun bathe or swim in the safe waters of this little cove. At night I could hear the incoming tide washing up on the shore in a gentle swoosh, an occasional wave would break but it was a kind and peaceful sound. Someone, somewhere in this neighbourhood loved the song “Send In The Clowns” and it seemed most nights as I was drifting off to sleep, this recording would play. It was close enough that I could clearly hear it but far enough away so that it blended in with the sound of the ocean washing over the soft sand of the beach below. It seemed now to hold a significance to me. The lyrics, obtuse perhaps, without knowing the story of the play they were written for, spoke to me and my condition. I had been in love, had lost that love, had felt that peace and contentment were beyond me. Turmoil had reigned, ebbed and subsided into memory. I had come through the fire, not totally unscathed perhaps but not too badly burnt either. The scars were healing, no, healed and I was at peace, not just with the past but with myself. As I lay there, everything I owned in the world in a backpack beside me, I would not have turned back the clock and changed history even if it were within my power. I had an enviable life, had had enviable experiences and was looking forward with eager anticipation to the future. 

    The opening strains of the song wafted in the night air like a fragrance. A melancholic oboe played the opening bars, the almost ethereal voice of Judy Collins singing “Isn't it rich/aren't we a pair/ me here at last on the ground/ you in the air”, the sound of the incoming tide intermingling with the song. I wished she were here with me. Not to rekindle a now dead romance but to show her how well I was doing.  “Don't you love farce/ my fault I fear/ I thought that you want what I want/ sorry my dear”. The song, the ocean breaking on the beach, the smell of eucalyptus in the night air, the snuggled in comfort of blankets pulled up, all mingled in together as I drifted off to sleep.  Now when I hear this song I don't think of love lost and emotional stability regained but I remember a joyous time in my life and the sound of the ocean far in the background below. “Sure of my lines/ no one is there”. Sleep.