Sha Sha

 Sha Sha        

                   

Good morning.   Thank you for coming, merci d’etre venue.   My name is Cinimod Noslouc , and Brian was my uncle, and godfather.  Before during and after his adventures, some of them, a good deal of them, thankfully, mutual, I was lucky – we all were lucky - enough to accompany him, among them in Metis as I caddied for Brian for some of his Molson Cup golf Championships at the Cascade, learning not only his fitness tricks , which were well ahead of their time, and also and just as important the ‘psy-ops’, the psychological operations that you can’t learn on the practice green. 

 

And you learn longevity.  I had to draw a breath when I saw the heading of the e-mail from the Cascade Club last week, with Brian’s dates 1934 to 2024, now that’s some long longevity, where these days and it’s 50 is the new 70, Brian was at Year 90.  Please.  He put the ‘Pow’ in Powell, didn’t he.

 

          And with numbers like these it’s not all glory, because of math that four-lettered word.  ‘  I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career’, basketball’s Michael Jordan said it better,  ‘I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’  It’s a hard lesson and Brian taught us that too – behind every victory the hard hard work – as rugby teaches us that, and the stoic meme on the internet, who knows that someone who has fallen 10, 000 times knows too of 10,00 ways to recover.  You fall down, you get up, and if you’re lucky at the end it might end up as six goats as our fly-half Andrew says, for seven glories. 

 

There was that roller-blading Brian trip we had at Downsland school Down Under in Australia ;  the family Coulson skiing trips in our own Gatineau Hills, where Brian cajoled Dad to compete in this wild 24-hour cross-country Loppett ski race up and down the Gatineeaus, as always with Brian not only by shouting encouragement and platitudes like Rainier Wolfcastle from The Simpsons, because anyone can do that, but by shouting encouragement and platitudes from behind you, and beside you, because he went on these adventures with you, because Brian put his money where his mouth was.  And that could mean a lot of money in that analogy because he could have a lot of mouth when he put his mind to it, fueled sometimes by the packets of sugar I would watch him empty three, four at a time into his steaming mug.

 

There was that time he drove down to see us during J-Term at College back in the 20^th at Club Midd, showing up in that convertible white Mazda Miata he had in the minus 20 Vermont weather with the ‘sha sha’ license plate and the roof down - for those who don’t know, sha sha was Brian’s slogan, ‘sha sha’ translates from the Nascapie language as ‘go for it’, it means swing for the fences,  it means go / nuts, it was Nike’s ‘just do it’ before its’ time, and as prelude to the punchline ‘we’ll rest’ as another basketballer Kobe Bryant said it better, ‘when it’s done’ - and taking us out to the Dog Team Tavern as part of one of his more surgical strikes, the one-day or two-night local trips taken any season of the year, any time and any place, and including later at our Rugby Club matches at Twin Elm in Ottawa, giving pep talks as we do before during and after matches, sometimes seemingly and somehow in the middle of the scrum, sometimes in the middle of the game, sometimes the middle of the pitch.  He was everywhere. He kept you on your toes.

 

 

And the time that we met Sha Sha – by that time Brians nom de guerre because it fit, it fits - at Radio City Music Hall in New York’s Midtown Manhattan, with Brian arriving with the Rocketters to greet us with a cigar box for sundry expenses filled with crisp Banjamins in U.S. currency.  Legendary he was, and of course Brian returned to New York the day after 9-11 in 2001, racing down the I-87 from Montreal as we do, and offering to help in any way that he could, it was how he rolled.

 

And yes there were the times when Sha Sha retreated, when it was not always a battle to be fought, when ‘the thrill of victory’ - as the ABC Wide World of Sports segment from television had it better back in the 20^th, – gave way to the ‘agony of defeat’, times when Brian had the good grace and sense to return to Church Hill and to rest his bones. 

 

Earlier it was to take care of his Mum and Dad Cliff and Doris between the round-the-world trips, in parts of the trip often with them in tow, not to mention the aunts Mildred and Phyllis, and Alice- and please give Kat a hug on your way out for doing the same thing now, it’s so important  - and for that matter so many others all around the world, folks we may never know about, as vocal, verbose, vociferous and generous as Brian could be in the telling of his stories of others and about others and to others, from all around that world, this world.   

 

You tell the Metis stories because you can, once we were canoeing on the river – a good distance out, maybe because we could see what was coming, though you don’t always see that – when Brian, who was practicing his iron shots on the lawn as we do, espied us from the shore, and started landing 6-iron shots, you know, 180, 190 yards out shots, and all landing like incoming artillery with a plop within 10 feet of the canoe , as we paddled away, laughing first at the audacity, and then faster, wondering whether to call the Royal Canadian Navy.  But Brian took care of everyone, like the former local caddy Jean-Marc in Metis who, two summers ago and forty years after he last caddied with Brian, remembered not only the shots taken with me – and they were dramatic enough because legion , they were dramatic because they were so legion - but also and more importantly how Brian had gone on afterwards and for many years to follow to help out Jean-Marc and his family in all kinds of ways, life-changing ways.  Brian gave so much, and asked for so little in return.

 

And more recently he retired to Church Hill to spend time with caregivers  Reena, Lisa, and Jenna and of course all under the watchful eye of Diana and the rest of the Martins,  the ‘sha sha redemption’  I thought of it as for its’ grace, with brother Tim keeping track of the Benjamins in the shoebox.  Brian couldn’t have asked for a better brother, or sister in Ann, who has received enough postcards to wallpaper the Broadgreen and Killiecrankie kitchen both many times over, as well as more bonus wild hours long telephone calls than you would think humanly possible,  Brian kept us on your toes, maybe that’s the most important lesson, to stay alert, because the world needs ‘lerts.  Thank you all mille fois, un million fois.  Namaste.

 

 

Brian left everything on the pitch – apologies but there is no getting away from the sports analogies for the ultimate sportsman - ‘an exceptional person’ sister Julie called him last week, and it needs to be said, yes, and extraordinary.  ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world,’ Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘most people exist, that is all.’  And didn’t Brian live.  Who does what he did circumnavigating the globe any more?  Taylor Swift maybe, but even she stops for the Super Bowl.

 

           Pictures were taken during these adventures as we do, as Julie recognized that Brian was the original selfie,  though as record-breaking as the number of pictures – and subsequent postcards, often they were one and the same - Brian just preceded our own truly-digital age.  He would have frowned upon, or at least looked askance- though he would never say so, he kept it positive and over all of the years and despite it all I never heard him bad-mouth anyone - at the preceding generations addiction to our phones as life unfolds around us, ‘I don’t think you’ll find the answer’ Dr. Lecter says it better and for similar reasons to Clarisse Starling in the Jonathan Demme movie version of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs as she too looks down instead of up, ‘in those shoes of yours, Clarisse’.

 

 ‘Poetry in motion’ Brian used to call it – obliquely referring to himself as well as to the three published books of poetry that he wrote – as an author, and as a coach, and as a teacher above all, at LCC for the better part of a decade, before deciding – perhaps like Henry Kissinger, who passed earlier this year as well and who decided that after some years in academe at Harvard that waiting around for advancement dependent on the whims of an ‘egomaniac ‘ was not for him -  to take the show on the road at schools during his dozens of world-wide trips.  And now that he’s gone and as Bob Dylan sings ‘it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there’ couldn’t the world surely could use a little Sha Sha now, and Brian as its’ ambassador.

 

 Dying is easy, Ozzy and Sabbath sing it better, it’s living / that’s hard. Last May was the last time I saw Brian, and I didn’t, or at least not more than remotely, as befits these COVID times perhaps, after implementing what I thought of as a successful Sha Sha-style logistical adventure - because good timing seems more important somehow the older we get – checking the Via Rail train schedules from Ottawa, calculating, correctly as it turned out the hour’s walk from the train station to Brian’s place on Church Hill, , allowing for a likely-to-be-brief at that time visit and a final bit of ‘ remote work ‘ on the computer on the train back to Ottawa that followed.

 

Brian was asleep when I showed up at Church Hill that day and visible through the front door window.  And like the scientist studying sleep patterns in marsupials  - which Brian might have appreciated, as he surely loved Australia and all of its exotic flora and fauna and where we had the pleasure of visiting with him at Downsland with Doug  in the early aughts – I read about last week, and who has come to the conclusion that sleep in fact may be humans’ natural state, with us reviving only from hibernation when there’s a need, and I’m beginning to think that that scientist may just be right.     I espied Brian at rest and looked over by one of the saintly ladies present, and let him sleep, leaving the postcard on  the front door gates as he had left so many postcards at our gates, remembering him as I preferred to remember him, and as I imagine or maybe selfishly hope that he wanted to be remembered. 

 

Not everything is a production.  Though there was a great production and concert at the A and P last night in support of mental health and the local Douglas hospital here.  Let’s think about it. 

 

That’s pretty good.  Mental health, let’s think about it.  Not quite Sha Sha, but still .

 

And though it’s the poster of King Lear that hangs still in the living room at 38 Churchill – and where Mum and I have been staying and greeting well-wishers, and ‘telling lies’, as our Uncle Ken used to call it, on-line and off from Brian’s past amongst neighbors and friends and of course his many many students, and thanks again to Diana and the ladies for the upkeep – it’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the young Brian in the picture upstairs at 38 in well, his trophy room, that one from the Oxford University Class of 1962s-ish group portrait could tell you this too, and McGill before that, and who knew, one from the London School of Economics for good measure that we found today - Hamlet who gets the immortal exit line ‘Good night sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’

 

As a cat hunts by surprise, Brian left us the final news too of a bit of scratch from his cigar box of Benjamins, and as it’s been said that anyone who marries for money eventually earns it, surely the same goes for inheritance – in all of the forms that it takes, good and bad  - and though it’ll be hard to top any of Brian’s trips, all we need to know is that all the lights / are green, and like the winner of tomorrow’s Super Bowl, with Brian’s final gift to us, I’m going to Disneyland !

 

Thank you, merci.