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Now that he was entering his teens the serious problem came up: what was he going to do?  At that level of poverty children have to start earning their keep.  In England in early industrial times, children of eight and nine were already old hands, and worked ten and twelve hours a day in dreadful factories and in coal mines for a shillling a week.  The opportunities in Balobos-chine for a boy to earn even a few kopeks were to say the least, scant,.  But father was rather gifted with his hands -- he could make and mend things even wthout tools or proper materials.   Like the Eskimos who with an old knife and a chunk of soapstone carve the most astonishing things, father could whittle and carve remarkably well, when you consider that he had never even heard of a work of art.  It remained for us, Gordon, to enter that world and make it our habitat.  I could never repay father for giving me that opportunity, but of that, more anon.  Oddly enough, father also liked music, and later in life taught himself to play the violin!  Where do these mysterious impulses come from ?  In the family tree I recited earlier there was not one word about art.   As far as I could gather from father no one ever played, or sang, or wrote, or painted, or carved, or danced.  Like the lines in Yeats' little poem:
        Seventy years man and boy,
        And never have I danced for joy.

When father once tentatively suggested to his parents that he would like to have violin lessons -- VIOLIN LESSONS! -- a sickening silence followed -- if he had suddenly kicked his mother in the shins and punched his father in the nose they would not have been more stunned.  To be a fiddler!  To their orthodox, pious, and benighted ears he might just as well have said that he aspired to be a pimp!  The shock was great, and they suddenly realized that the sooner he was put to work at some honourable trade the safer they would be.

They soon heard that a wood-turner in Mistislavl (which they still pronounced Umtseelev) was looking for a helper, an apprentice, and father was taken there.  And for the next seven years, until he was called up for military service, he lived in Mistislavl and became a first-class wood-turner.  Having watched father often in later years working at his electric-powered lathe, I used to shudder, and still shudder at the appalling amount of energy spent in working at a lathe which you turned by foot power!  How they did it I can't bear to think -- I suppose it either killed you or made you very strong.  But a foot-powered lathe was all father knew until he came to Canada in 1902.  Carving a specific design on a quickly spinning length of wood requires great skill, and years of practice.  And it's to those years that I owe my existence.  For it was in Mistislavl that he met the young woman who was to become my mother.  How strange!  Father's dream of perhaps being a musician had to die so that I could be born.  How often something desired has to die so that something else can be born.  Even father, in time had to die so that you could be re-born.

Fran's parents had to die so that we could live in the most delightful little house we would ever want.  How happy they would have been to hav seen us in it.  But they couldn't -- if they lived we couldn't have it -- they had to die first.

The mystics must be right when they tell us that what seems tragedy to us would not be so if we could see reality.  But how can we get to do this?  I think of William Carlos Williams' meditation on this very point.

The line -- "No defeat is made up entirely of defeat ..." -- haunts me like a kind of aura.  Of course the idea is not new -- Heraclitus in 500 B.C. said: " The way up and the way down are one in the same."   Beethoven wanted to be and expected to be a piano virtuoso, when his hearing failed him and he went down to defeat.  Schubert practically never earned a penny, lived on the charity of his friends, and died of a stupid and needless disease at 31, leaving behind a vast pile of manuscripts -- another total failure.  I wonder if our whole way of looking at success and failure isn't a heap of malarkey.  I have had a wonderful life -- wonderful by no standards of my time or place -- living in the magical world of art, constantly preoccupied with artistic problems (a Copland once said:   "We musicians think of music twenty-four hours a day.") -- having occasional breakthroughs, and much more often coming up against brick walls -- making no money but enough to manage a simple life.  By assiduously spending more each year thatn we earned, Fran and I even managed to transcend the simple life and enter somethng very close to and suspiciously resembling luxury.

We never owned any stocks, bonds, securites of any kind, or any property, and until Fran inherited some money which enabled us to get started on our little house we always lived in rented quarters.  In Toronto we lived for years in a small but delightful apartment in the Hambourg Conservatory where our rent was, if I remember rightly, $35 a month -- and we would have been quite glad to live there forever.   In Vancouver we lived for eighteen years in a converted army hut and would have been perfectly happy to stay there until curtains.  A photographer who happened quite by accident to see our hut promptly asked for permission to photograph it for Western Homes magazine, which gave it a 3-page spread.  We never had a car, or a TV, or an automatic dishwasher (except Fran), or a freezer, or a phonograph, or a cleaning woman (except me), or a gardener, or a garden for that matter, and not even a radio until 1938 when we began to do a lot of broadcasting and wanted to hear how we sounded.  (I bought a second-hand one for $25 and still use it 40 years later.)

We never had any clothes by Pucci or Saint Laurent, or Givenchy, and not a trace of jewels or jewellery of any kind.  But we always has more paintings, sculpture and pottery than we had room for, and thousands of books in four languages, and for some years we went to Europe every year for six months at a time.   And once we lived for a year in New York, and once for a year in London, and Fran lived for two years in Paris where I joined her in the spring and summer, and you, Gordon, lived for a year in England, and travelled for more than a year in France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Spain, etc., sleeping in hostels for 30 cents a night and living in art galleries by day, and hearing 30 operas in 31 nights in Vienna (of course you have to be young  and have a strong stomach fot that kind of nonsense, but no one forced you to do it!).  We've always had a grand pianos and beautiful violins, and tons of music, old and new.

In other words, we unknowingly obeyed Frank Lloyd Wright's injunction to the letter: "Give me luxuries of this world, and I'll do without the necessities."  And this beautiful life became a possibility because of father's failure to become the musician he wanted to be, and his being apprenticed to a wood-turner instead.  "Father, are you listening to me?  Are you listening? YOUR FAILURE HAS BEEN A GREAT SUCCESS!"