Reflecting on The Vinyl Café

The Story

Stuart McLean is a storyteller and CBC radio host, with a show called The Vinyl Café.  The following passage is from one of McLean’s short stories in print, “The Secret of Life”, published under the title Stories from The Vinyl Café, in 1995. 

Sean said he wanted the car to go to the station to buy a train ticket for Bishop’s.  And Mike said, “Why not just take the car?  You’ll need it more than us down there.  We got the truck.  What’s the difference?  We don’t need two cars.”

And so he did.  Take the car.  On Labour Day weekend, with all his possessions piled into the trunk and the back seat of the family’s blue ’81 Impala.  Stereo, tapes, records, clothes, posters and books.  At the gate he paused and tooted the horn twice at his mother and father as they stood in the yard.  Then he lurched about ten yards further and stopped and got out and waved.  Then he disappeared around the corner.  (Mclean, 1995, p.190)¹

The story is one of family communication.  Sean is preparing to leave home to attend college, an experience completely foreign to his father, who wishes that his son would take over the family dairy farm.  The story is rife with tension over Sean’s growing independence and his parents’ hesitation to trust him with important decisions.  As Sean struggles to establish his own identity and his own place in the world, Mike struggles to communicate his love for his son and to pass on important life lessons that he himself took years to learn.  Many of these mixed feelings about independence and control seem to be expressed in conflict over use of the family car.

Occupying Space

This passage describes the arrival of a time when Sean finally moves physically from his parents’ home.  Though there remains a material connection to his parents (the family car), and a level of dependence on them, Sean begins to occupy his own space in the world by moving away for college.  This is not space in a strictly corporeal sense, rather in the sense of having a living area of one’s own, the sense of being in control of the space and how it is organized and how it is used.  Sean has been entrusted with his own space and with ‘ownership’ of the car, and after driving around the corner, he is no longer controlled by or even visible to his parents. 

Loving and Being Loved

At different times in the story, Mike attempts to communicate intimate thoughts to Sean, and fails to do so in every case.  The inability to express himself in words leaves Mike feeling frustrated and inadequate as a father.  The relationship between Sean and Mike becomes more strained and apparently more distant with time. 

In some ways this passage clarifies Sean’s feelings for his parents, and in other ways leaves his feelings a mystery.  His love, concern, gratitude, appreciation and need are all expressed in his actions as he drives away from his childhood home; beeping a car horn in farewell may be a common gesture in Canadian culture, but Sean’s action of stopping again, getting out of the car and waving to his parents shows more about his feelings than many words could.  The exact contents of Sean’s feelings remain unclear, but with the gesture, Sean has rendered knowledge of them irrelevant; the closeness of Sean’s relationship with his parents is clearly preserved. 

But Really …

The amazing thing to me about this passage is the depth of feeling that McLean has conveyed with a simple gesture.  I suppose this is a reflection of what attracts me to phenomenology; our empathy for others is rooted in understanding something of their experience, even a tiny part of their experience.  There seems to be, in this field, a sense of personal connection to other human beings.  This is not to disparage other forms of research, but here is a way of knowing that seems more deeply connected to the human condition than many more conventional ways. 

¹McLean, Stuart. (1995).  The secret of life.  Stories from the vinyl café (pp.179-191). Toronto: Penguin Books.