Ceilidh in PEI

My parents have taken Rachelle, Jones and I, as well as my sister and her boyfriend, on a vacation to Prince Edward Island, and on Tuesday night we went to a Ceilidh at the Brackley Community Centre.

The structure was small and inside there were about ten rows of chairs spread before a modest stage. The girl who sold me the ticket at the entrance also worked the canteen, which sold water, ice cream sandwiches and chips, and played guitar on stage. It was just that kind of enterprise— a simple, family affair with everyone pitching in to help out.

And it was proably that, more than anything, even the promise of the music, that the audience really wanted to be a part of.

That feeling.

That call to home, wherever that might mean.

Regardless, the show started with just the keyboardist on stage. He was the one professional musician in the grouping and he wore his alt-country style shirt with a certain pride of accomplishment. His patter was goofy, corny and likeable. And as he asked the audience, virtually person by person, where they were from, what at first felt like obligatory shtick became something more than that. There was a sincerity and curiosity present that was undeniable, and it became truly interesting, even magical, to discover where all the people assembled had journeyed from in order to find themselves in this little community centre on a small island in eastern Canada.

The members of the band, who might occasionally rise from chatting with you in the crowd to take up an instrument on stage, were indistinguishable from the audience itself. Not only did they look like normal people, but they acted like normal people, too, and each song came with a specific story that was given as much attention as the performance of the song itself. It wasn’t fussy art where performers hid behind persona, but something spirited and fun and kind. It was their lives they were sharing.

At one point the grandfather was called up on stage. He was missing three fingers from a carpentry accident, and although he couldn’t play guitar like he used to, he strummed it while his grandson worked the fretboard for him. And sweet Jesus, that man had a beautiful voice. Lived-in and true, his voice was a timeless, and there was something in it that everybody understood in their bones. It knit things together, if that make any sense, and you could feel it’s gravity making us all one whole thing.

As the show came to the end, the keyboardist was again alone on stage. The song that inspired him to become a musician was Music Box Dancer by Frank Mills, he told us, and then he began to play it.

It was a huge hit at the time, but I hadn’t thought of it in 30 years. However, hearing it brought my life from that time back into acute focus. Both of my parents still immortal and in their primes, my sister and I watching TV while my mother hummed along to the song as it played on the radio…And that memory, and all the others that informed and shaped it, collapsed into the present where beside me I saw my mother swaying and keeping time to the music and my father smiling—all of us so much older now, but lucky, lucky and happy to be for a moment in this unexpected and beautiful place that took us a lifetime to find.