Lyrics
When I was a boy I was quick but I lived in dreams,
Of Kukri knives, transistor radios, and gaucho boots,
Cat whiskers, secret potions, and Sergeant Preston,
Fresh ironed shirts,
And a gun that shoots
Now I’m ancient, I move so slow,
My memory is a stranger,
Who follows everywhere I go.
I tried to get away,
But I fell down fast,
As the wind filled my head
With these loving voices from the past.
They sang oh oh oh
There were Christmas songs
With the scent of Jesus
On the straw, in the cold.
Snowbells rise
Beside the driveway
Where the Prince of Night’s last story will be told.
Oh, oh, oh
I do remember
We all forget
The silent breath
The cigarette
The smoke, the ashes,
The numbing chill.
The kitten purring through this darkness we will never fill.
When you called my name,
You knew I would not answer.
I am out on the breakwater,
Lost in the seabirds’ cries.
I saw you holding hands
With your salsa dancer,
Touching those expensive muscles,
Looking into those dark Romanian eyes.
I wandered desperately
Through the drought of your pity.
I would have traded my old soul to see
One real tear fall from your eye.
Now I’m watching a nighthawk
Swoop down over the city.
First he swallows the moon,
Then the stars,
Then the whole night sky.
Oh, oh, oh
Ah, ah, ah
Love, love, love, love.
When I was a boy, I was quick but I lived in dreams.
The Story
1×
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-12:20
Behind our home on Spruce Street in Cabbagetown, Toronto, was a dull brown flat roofed apartment building where nighthawks nested.
In the early evening, the Summer sky was graced with the beautiful birds, also known as nightjars, soaring and turning and calling out, fluttering and plunging through the humid air above the streetcars and fire trucks and damaged patrons of the Gerrard Street Tavern. With cries of joy many millions of years old, the feathered acrobats cleared the warm night of flying insects.
They have Egyptian eye shaped patterns on the underside of their wings, and sometimes swoop low over farmer’s fields to capture lumbering beetles around grazing flocks. In ancient times they were called goatsuckers, believed to be drawing milk from the small horny headed bearded little ruminants. Oh suspicious, superstitious mankind, quick to accept fantasies, reluctant to sit and observe, faithful in our ignorance.
Some nights, under the aerial display, I would sit at the end of our long narrow garden, facing the setting sun, grateful for our good fortune, but feeling trapped by the giant city and planning my escape.
Here, above me, was proof that even though the city had claimed much of their habitat, the long line of primeval genius birds had adapted and were seemingly thriving in the degraded world,
But I wanted out.
I finally decided to make a run for it, my plans plotted during January sojourns in the hot houses at nearby Allan Gardens, and one freezing February day in 1989 I left for Vancouver Island in search of a new home.
The birds here are different, there are eagles and towhees and ravens, Anna’s hummingbirds and juncos that pass way too close, wing tips nearly touching an ear in a dangerous flypast, many hawks, jays, owls, robins, herons, herring gulls, scoters, ducks, geese, swans, fox sparrows, wrens, chickadees who ride on my head and sneak into my shed in search of seeds, finches, cross bills, bush tits, all descendants of the great dinosaurs who once were the Kings and Queens of Earth roaring and copulating with ground shaking vigour.
It wasn’t until many years had passed in our new home that one night I heard the familiar old cry of the nighthawks, and looked up in surprise to see a large flock, their wings glinting in the early evening sun, the kohl rimmed wing eyes visible and still magic, and I watched them for an hour or more as they rose and fell, wheeled and dived through the salty wind above the Saanich Inlet.
What insects had hatched I could not tell, for they were floating on a high thermal, well above the tree tops, but there were plenty, and the birds hunted well into the dark.
I thought back to our skinny yard in Cabbagetown, with ailanthus, the Tree of Heaven, an odour like the Tree of Hell, spreading uncontrolled through the abandoned laneway, and knotweed, advancing under the fence from the derelict garden next door, the air so often foul with diesel from the Parkway and the stars obscured by dust, smoke and sodium lights shining to protect parked cars from crackheads.
Here, I can watch the sky, name the clouds, listen to the wind in the firs and smell the sea, home to seals and whales and all kinds of fishes, and know that I can launch my little boat and row for days and nights among the rocky Gulf islands, time determined only by the sun, the moon and the tides.
The birds know this too, their schedules fixed by hatchings of gnats, the spawning of herring, and the turning of the earth, and so the nighthawks had returned, and still do, every few years, to soar and sing and prove that all is beautiful if we learn to let it be.
In my song Nighthawk, an old man. like me, is watching the sky from his evening lookout on a breakwater protecting a small harbour from the swells and storm waves of the rolling sea, endlessly rocking.
Looking through the mist, he sees one nighthawk separated, from its home flock, seeking food and perhaps shelter.
In the southeast is a new moon, a crescent of pale silver.
Following its scimitar shape, the eye winged bird swallows the moon, in a blurred spiral spin breathes in all the early evening stars, Venus among them, and then with a feathery gasp, the whole night sky is gone, leaving only the deep throbbing of a distant giant galaxy.
The song took shape over many years, the words, the music and the performance changing with each revisit. For the present recording, I played and sang as if I were someone else interpreting a newly found song.
The first verse contains some of my memories of gifts and events that mattered to me as a boy in my attic on Glencairn Avenue.
My father, Hab, brought me a very dangerous kukri knife from India, a huge razor sharp curved bladed weapon in a stout leather scabbard, with two tiny knives hidden in a pouch at the top, reportedly poisoned to kill one’s enemy should a battle be waged in very close quarters. Just why I was allowed this wicked chopper at age 9 or so I do not know.
I also cherished a white transistor radio which not only allowed me to hear my favourite songs like Walking To New Orleans, the plastic overheated and gave off a delicious electronics roasting odour that served as a drug.
From Argentina, Hab, who travelled the world, brought us child sized brown leather gaucho boots, also with a powerful odour, which I wore proudly to the Ex, walked for hours. and gave myself terrible blisters. Suffering for fashion.
We had three cats when I was little, and finding a stray whisker meant good luck to me, I would keep the whiskers in a little box by my bed.
I made ointments and salves using oils and alcohol and kitchen spices such as nutmeg, cloves, and basil, foretelling a tendency to imbibe odd home made fermentations. I did not drink my secret potions, though, I used them on my hair, trying to look and smell my best. It took so long to get ready to go somewhere with my family that my Mother would shout through the bathroom door:
”What are you doing in there, emulating?” What a question for a 9 year old boy!
Of course I was emulating……..Elvis!
Sgt Preston was the hero of the North West Mounted Police, Master of the Tundra, King of the Snow, and I wanted to live as he lived, in constant cold and adventure with a dog sled, but maybe pulled by cats.
On a cold Winter’s night, up in my attic, which had a long corridor with a big front room which was mine, two smaller rooms off the corridor, one for scientific experiments and interrogations, one for medical examinations, and a bathroom with a clawfoot tub and raccoons who peered in the window, I would open all the windows wide and turn the top of the house into The Arctic.
After a hot bath, I would run, naked and wet, down the windy hall to my room, the air as cold as Baffin Island, and leap into the shelter of my bed, whispering Sgt Preston, Sgt Preston, Sgt Preston.
Sometimes I would be joined by my cat, Taffy, who would nose his way under the covers, purring with excitement.
Life in the Far North!
When I woke in the morning, the attic was filled with hoar frost, the water in my bedside glass was frozen, and the heating bill was beyond measuring.
My poor father!
Mornings, my mother Esmé ironed while watching soap operas, and on the days when I played sick to get out of writing an exam at school, usually a Monday…..
“Hack hack, cough cough, I don’t feel well”…..
I would hide in bed until it was too late to be chased off to the bus and then appear in the living room to smell the hot iron on linen and cotton and listen to the terrible music and worse dialogue on the TV.
We had a gun, but without a firing pin, it having been removed by a wise adult, so it did not shoot bullets.
It was my Grandfather’s .38 caliber service pistol, in a beautiful leather holster, and I figured out how to pull back the hammer and load in about 20 caps and fire it with a huge bang, excellent smoke and flame.
It was effective in the interrogation room when a captive like Stewy The Wart was reluctant to reveal the whereabouts of the chocolate Easter bunnies. Or the collection of hood ornaments Andy and I had amassed was missing from The Fort at the end of the garden.
Along with the Kukri knife and the pistol, I also had a blow gun I fashioned from copper plumbing pipe.
The projectiles could be as simple as a wad of toilet paper soaked in gentian violet to fire from the attic bathroom across the driveway at the eyes of my neighbour Tom, when he was foolish enough to spy on me, or as sophisticated as an amazon style dart made from a nail, a golf tee and a cotton ball, not poisoned.
Unfortunately for me, my younger brother got a hold of the blowpipe and fired an amazon dart at my back through the balustrade from the attic stairs.
It stuck beside a vertebrae half way down from my neck, which I think was his actual target.
I staggered around, trying to pull the bloody dart out, and he ran away in terror.
He was in no real danger.
I was quick, but I lived in dreams.
Thanks for reading Patrick Godfrey Musician/Writer! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
wow .. covering 6 decades of life in 5 minutes of song .. you have covered a lot of ground here Pat .. it will be interesting to see how your further work frames shorter timelines .. keyboard work reminds me of rain falling .. nice
Nighthawk Song and Story
This is lovely. Very poignant words and melody. And yes, music like raindrops.
wow .. covering 6 decades of life in 5 minutes of song .. you have covered a lot of ground here Pat .. it will be interesting to see how your further work frames shorter timelines .. keyboard work reminds me of rain falling .. nice