Strange Way to Live. Carl Dixon
without an adult male. At first they applied to go to the United States, but the application was rejected because my grandfather, who’d started the war as an officer in the Estonian army, had technically, albeit unwillingly, also served with both the Russian and the German armies.
After six years of hardscrabble refugee life, the reunited Magis were accepted as immigrants to Canada. They arrived in 1951 to start life over in peace. We who have always lived in North America, where there’s been no large-scale conflict in almost a hundred and fifty years, can’t truly appreciate the profound importance of that idea. Peace is a primary component of happiness. Without peace, there is no security, no prospects, no planning for the future. If you don’t have it, it’s all you seek. People will leave behind their precious things, friends, and familiar surroundings just to have a chance at attaining peace for themselves and their families. This is why so many Estonians after the Second World War wanted to get as far away as possible from Europe.
The Magis landed at Halifax with their possessions in a few sea-locker trunks. Once processed at the government of Canada immigration docks, they again made a long train journey, inland to the fertile farmlands of Southern Ontario. A family of willing workers, they established their first household in their new land in the town of Fruitland. It was a one-room shack, provided by a farmer to the fruit-pickers who laboured there in the harvest season. Rudi, Hella, and the three children all went to work in the orchards to earn a little money to get them started.
My mother was enrolled in the local school and was humiliatingly placed in the grade one class at age thirteen because she knew little English. She made a supreme effort to catch up and within a month or so was promoted to the age-appropriate level.
It was my mother’s lot to have the same limitations placed on her as on most young women of the time. She was expected to go to work as soon as possible to help the family, while her two older brothers were to go to university and take on professional careers as engineers. This they all successfully did. Marje began part-time in the workforce at thirteen and full-time immediately upon graduating. Her intelligence did ensure her rapid advancement through a long professional career. She never was without a job until her retirement from Employment Canada after many years.
There was also an expectation that my mother would meet a nice Estonian boy in their émigré community and stay within the culture. This did not interest her; she found those boys dull. Along came my father during one of his many job stops, this time as an inspector for the Workmen’s Compensation Board, where my mother worked as a secretary. She was eighteen, he was thirty-one. They were both smitten. Some people were agog at the difference in their ages, and the Magi family had their doubts about the wisdom of the union, but Ron made Marje laugh, and he was not dull.
They married a month after Marje’s nineteenth birthday, and I was born thirteen months later. Fifty-two years of dedicated matrimony followed. I have a sister, Christina, a little over thirteen months younger than me. My sister’s birth apparently made things a little awkward for my mother. The males of the Magi family had been prepared once already to fetch their daughter and sister home on the train from far-off Sault Ste. Marie, convinced that Ron was proving unreliable as a husband. Marje was certain her mother, who had already questioned her daughter’s choice, would now tell her that she’d only compounded the mistake by having a second child. Marje didn’t want to hear it, so she didn’t tell her.
In later years Grandma Hella would tell the story of going to the Soo to visit her daughter and grandson in spring only to discover this unknown newborn sleeping in the home. “My goot-niss, who is thiss?” Grandma exclaimed. Her anger at being deceived must have been softened by the joy of seeing the newborn Christina. Perhaps Marje had counted on that.
I was probably a typical older brother in my treatment of Christina. As wee ones we were great playmates, and then as I got to eight or nine, I grew very self-conscious that I couldn’t be seen with a girl. My poor little sister had to put up with her mildly mean old brother. I had to take her on the bus every week for a year to the doctor’s office in Sault Ste. Marie for her allergy shots when I was nine and she was seven because Mom was working and Dad was off in some other town. I’d make her sit in a different seat and then tell her to walk far behind me, as if we didn’t know each other.
As we matured into high school Christina followed a similar path to me in her own way with music, athletics, and the arts. In time I was able to more openly show the love I’d always had for her, and she has always been an enormous supporter of my music career. Christina is the kind of fan every artist needs.
this is how it starts
“The way you see me when I am playing, that is the way I really am.”
— Israel “Cachao” López Valdés
My path to being a musician was really a series of unconscious decisions driven by my compulsion to organize my thoughts and my reality around musical sound waves. Growing up in 1960s Sault Ste. Marie, I was continually pulled toward music as the expression of my inner self. When I was three, I started playing along on our piano to the early morning national anthems, Canadian and American, which began each broadcast day. My parents signed me up for piano lessons when I was four; I still have that first method book, Teaching Little Fingers to Play. My kindergarten report card was the first of many to describe my strong aptitude and response to music. It was also the first of many to describe how “Carl would do much better in school if he would only pay more attention.”
When I was a boy, my father dreamed I’d grow up to be a concert pianist. He played a little himself and was something of a frustrated artist. There’s no doubt he was an intellectual with enormous artistic gifts. Under my father’s expectation and my mother’s supervision I practised the piano almost every day, when I wasn’t outside playing “army man” or riding my bike or playing in the snow. For five years I progressed through the levels of Conservatory music study. The springtime recitals put on by the Kiwanis Club were my first public performances, and I remember them as a terrifying three-minute climax to months of preparation.
Why terrifying? Well, to become a performer I battled shyness and self-consciousness, which are really forms of fear — the fear of being laughed at or judged unkindly. I finally realized that shyness stood between me and getting better results. Fear is a big bully, but if you stand up to it you’ll scare the bully away. In time, I grew quite comfortable standing at the front of a room with everyone looking at me.
My mom ensuring that I practised piano after dinner.
Photo: Carl Dixon
I think many people would look at the path of my life and assume I had dreamed of being a rock star, and my dream had come true, more or less. That’s not how it happened.
I don’t know if the word “dream” is equal to the weight of the concept of having a goal or a need or a compulsion. There must be a more accurate word to describe the all-encompassing, untiring effort required to reach a difficult objective. In fact, the record indicates that I could not have been other than what I have always been; my character would neither acknowledge nor accept any obstacle.
Sometimes, as we look back, a certain experience at a young and impressionable age seems to have had a formative effect.
My father kept a piano. Though he played infrequently, when he did tickle the ivories, it was a sound of gentle grace and elegance. Dreamy things like Debussy were among his favourites. I suppose I was following in his footsteps when I started picking out the tunes of the national anthems on the piano keys when I was three. Sometimes as a young lad I’d wake in the wee hours to the sound of symphony albums playing on our old Grundig Majestic record player. I’d stumble out sleepily and find my dad in the living room, ferociously conducting the orchestra. There was unreleased passion for music in him.
When I was about nine I didn’t like my piano teacher, Mrs. Shumpski, for some reason. Probably she was trying to make me work harder. I got mad