Strange Way to Live. Carl Dixon
self-talk, accompanied by the pounding of my palm on the steering wheel, rang in my ears in the early evening of April 14, 2008. I’d got lost again during evening rush hour attempting to drive out of Melbourne, Australia. A mere two nights remained of my already shortened visit with my wife and our younger daughter in the small town of Daylesford. We would have no more time together until their scheduled return home to Canada, more than two months hence.
That April day I’d driven the hour-plus in the morning to Melbourne to work in a small recording studio. We’d planned a beautiful evening back in Daylesford, a sort of joyful send-off. Sadly, my return was delayed as I somehow bungled the directions and got turned around not once, not twice, but three times in the attempt to navigate the Ring Road out of Melbourne. I felt keenly the loss of precious time from our special night and was becoming increasingly distraught.
At six-thirty I pulled off the road after another wrong turn and called my wife on the mobile for one more try at sorting out my directions. This time, with her calming voice, it made a little more sense. I think high emotion is a block not only to thinking clearly but to hearing clearly. There was a Bottle Shop across the plaza from where I’d stopped, and it seemed wise to take a bit of extra time to buy a nice bottle of champagne for our little celebration.
The fact was my wife and I had ends to mend. There’d been months of forced separation as she chaperoned our daughter on the Australian set of the TV series Saddle Club, as required for our little girl’s new acting career. There was also a malaise in our then fifteen-year marriage, partly the result of my endless travelling as a professional rock ’n’ roller. This had been keeping me away from home fully half of each year. There was more wrong here than I knew, unfortunately.
I had sensed on my two prior visits to the set that for her, life on the other side of the world away from husband and home was actually a welcome change. When I turned up for those visits I felt, to quote a Fred Astaire movie, like “something of an igneous intrusion” in her freewheeling life around the TV production. On this third visit, though, I thought I had found a hope of renewal for our vows. April 14 was meant to be a tender, loving night to reflect that hope. For this brief time remaining, I just wanted to put everything aside and forget about the career, the ambition, and the spotlight I’d pursued for decades. All my life I’d been swept along by the trade winds of popular music. They were waiting to sweep me away again in a couple of days to the next show in America. This night was to be special ... if only I could find the bloody way there!
Angry self-recrimination was a bad habit of mine. To yell at myself was both an outlet and a form of punishment, to teach me not to make that mistake again. I realize now that it actually makes me weak and rattled instead. Though my drive to Daylesford was now finally on the right course, I continued to smoulder in self-reproach as I drove. About forty minutes later, there I was, far from home, this “rock star” in a strange land — a man who’d stood in the lights of thousands of stages around the world, now suddenly confronted by a blinding light far more glaring and ominous.
in the beginning
Let me tell you a little about what led me to here. I’ve been a professional singer and musician since I was sixteen. I’ve had some success, seen some things, and made a decent living, even a good living at times.
I come from a modest background, born in the northern steel town of Sault Ste. Marie in the last days of 1958. When I grew up in “the Soo” in the 1960s, the temperature always hit forty below in the long winters and stayed chilly in the short summers that came to that thickly forested country around Lake Superior. Idyllic, if you like that sort of thing.
I’m like most white North Americans, descended from Europeans who immigrated here to seek improved prospects or to escape calamity. My father, Ronald Francis Dixon, was born in Sudbury in 1925. Ron was the tenth of twelve children in a family of Irish-English descent, and the seventh son of a seventh son to boot. His father, John Albert, graduated in medicine from McGill University in Montreal in 1907. I was tickled to learn that, among other extracurricular activities, my grandpa was athletic enough to captain the McGill hockey team. Dr. John Albert “Bert” Dixon went on to a long career in medicine, notably as head of surgery at Sudbury General Hospital for twenty-two years. Bert also opened medical practices in the Ottawa Valley and on Manitoulin Island at different stages of his life. For a time, in the early years, he made house calls with a horse and carriage. Unsurprisingly, his role as physician in these small communities gave the family some slight standing.
My paternal grandmother was Agatha (née) Watters of Ireland. Agatha was a fierce Irish Catholic, which helps explain the twelve blessed arrivals to the Dixon home. I’m not sure of much about Grandma Dixon. She was trained as a nurse, but I don’t know if she worked in Bert’s practice. She was in her seventies when I came along. I was always a bit frightened of her when we went to visit.
My father told me that Dr. Dixon lost a large amount of money, the greater part of the family fortune, on a highly speculative mining stock investment during the Great Depression. This unhappy outcome reduced the family’s socio-economic standing, and on one or two occasions when my father’d had a few drinks, he would complain that he and all the brothers and sisters “should have been rich.”
The Dixon parents were strict with their children and kept things going with their huge brood along hard lines in those times of deprivation. They sent Ron to the CNE fair in Toronto, with its rides, midway, and variety shows, with a quarter in his pocket. Even in the 1930s there wasn’t much you could do with two bits. “Make it stretch” was the advice offered.
Bert and Aggie somehow found the money to place my father in a Catholic private school called Scollard Hall. They hoped this experience might lead him to God and the priesthood, or at least to taking life more seriously. The Catholic high school had rather the opposite effect, if it had any effect at all aside from instilling bitter memories. Ron used to threaten to send me to Scollard Hall on a few occasions when I showed signs of teenage rebelliousness or lack of seriousness.
Still, there were many stories of happy childhood memories. The task of raising twelve children must have been a strain, but my grandparents both lived long and well (to eighty-six and ninety-three, respectively). The family was a hierarchy; the eldest children were expected to manage the youngest and relieve Mama’s burden. Actually, this responsibility fell mostly to the daughters, while the eldest boys were out making their mark. Ron was tenth in birth order, and along with his little brothers Dick and Des was cared for by his older sister Mary. He always had a special love for Mary, as have I.
Many of the “Dixon dozen” served in the military in the Second World War or after. Ron, my father, was in line to be shipped to Europe with his army unit when VE Day arrived, thank God. When the VJ peace was signed on that battleship in the Pacific, my dad’s unit was again awaiting assignment.
There were ways in which my father could certainly be considered a sort of wizard, as befitting his seventh son status. Ronald Dixon was a brilliant, interesting, and artistic man who, alas, spent most of his life as the unwitting plaything of his powerful emotions. His working-life career was as wildly varied as his considerable talents and intelligence. Here was a man who was at different times an army officer, a miner, a logger, a steel plant worker, a radio DJ, a TV news announcer, a newspaper writer, an elementary school teacher and principal, a high school math, English, and art teacher, and a university professor in journalism. He was a poet, a writer, and a painter in oils, as well as an athlete and an animal lover. He was a gentleman with a refined sense of manners and gallantry. He would go to any lengths to entertain children. My own children adored him.
Ron’s restless spirit and relentless curiosity were part of the reason for his many lines of work. It also seemed to him that most people and most situations grew simply intolerable over time, and his efforts to raise other people to his standards of behaviour were not always appreciated. I guess he was a bit judgmental. This came out in his keen ability to home in on things that just weren’t right and then put that thought into scathing words. It was a trait that was to last throughout his life.
From watching