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"Writer "

Robertson Davies

I heard a car approach and without much hope stuck out my thumb again. The car roared past but its brake lights came on and it backed up towards me.

The rear passenger door opened and there was Robertson Davies, the Canadian writer and novelist, sitting in the back seat of the Mercedes. Maybe my hypothermia contributed to my awe but he looked so serene and dignified that it was like sitting next to the Pope, his peaked hat resting on his knee and his long, impossibly white beard almost reaching down to it.

During the writers conference at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, I had approached the poet John Newlove for advice. I noticed he had nicotine-stained fingers and crooked teeth. Of course, I asked him where I could send my poems hoping that he’d take a personal interest in them. He mumbled the names of a few obscure literary journals and I thanked him.

But being an English Literature major and having only experienced writers through their books, it was still a novelty to see them up close and in the flesh so to speak.

Now Robertson Davies, world-famous Canadian author and novelist, was sitting right next to me.

I tried to control my nervousness and pretend a casualness I certainly didn’t feel.

“I really enjoyed your reading.”

“Thank-you,” he replied.

“Even though I was at the back of the auditorium, your voice carried very well. I guess it helps to have trained in the theatre.”

“Are you interested in the theatre?”

“I was. Back in high school. Now I write. Poems mainly.”

This was my chance to ask him not just about Canadian Literature and my own tightly-written, experimental poems but about LIFE. I was big on secrets and mysteries back then, and he looked the part of a seer.

Whom was I kidding? What could I possibly ask or say that would be of interest to him?

I took one more quick glance, saw the polite, inscrutable smile on his face and instead turned my attention to the woman who sat in the front seat next to the driver. I assumed she was Mrs. Davies though we hadn’t been formally introduced. “It’s really very cold tonight. Thanks for stopping and giving me a lift.”

“Where do you live,” she asked.

“On Royal Drive. I rent a room in the basement of a house.”

“Where should we let you off?”

"Just past the jet should be fine."

I was indeed saddened to learn of Robertson Davies death in 1995. I have mentioned the above story often enough in conversation that one of my friends gave me the Davies book Happy Alchemy and placed a dialogue balloon beside his cover photograph to make it appear Robertson Davies was saying, “Did I ever tell you my Philip Quinn story?”

The last time, my central nervous system crackled with electricity at seeing a famous author was when I passed Northrop Frye on the steps inside Toronto’s St. Clair subway stop. But there was something in his sad, wise eyes that made me pretend I hadn’t recognized him.

I stopped hitchhiking years ago. One of my last wintertime rides was with a Peterborough undertaker who perhaps thought I was a little too stiff from the cold.