In the course of time, the house was finished, I met Steve, and we began one of those friendships that will save you in ways you can't predict. Steve, a few decades my senior,was born in Dublin, Ireland and remembered The Troubles. He'd come to the States in the seventies, managed make a fortune for himself, managing musicians and the like and drank it all away. By the time I met him, he'd been clean and sober for two decades, had married, started a subcontracting business and had begun playing music down at Tommy Condon's. As he tells it, some two decades before I met him, he strolled into Tommy’s with a guitarist, some songs in hand written tabs, and a bodhran, and announced that the pub needed a musical act. Only in the last year or two has he stopped being a regular performer there.
A short time after we became neighbours, he invited us to go watch him sing. Long story short, I went as often as I could and nowhere near as often as I'd have liked. Steve Carroll and the Bograts released about half a dozen CDs after I met him and I was often the first to hear and critique the demos. He'd come over to my house with the audio cassette and we'd sit in my 1996 Saturn and listen to from beginning to end. I have all those songs on my iPod now.
The Fields of Athenry, Dirty Old Town, Dixie, Sweet Sixteen, The Unicorn Song, Spancil Hill. On his last CD he included Farewell to Nova Scotia as a nod to my little Canadian family. Of course, by that time my family had shrunk. My wife moved out and, thanks to her crazy nursing schedule, I had my two kids, much of the time, then most of the time, and then virtually all the time. This arrangement, lucky as I was to have the kids, did not involve any kind of financial help from her and, as a teacher working in South Carolina I had to work on the side as a DJ to scrape by. I worked all the time and still it was only with financial aid from my bishop and almost endless babysitting from an extremely kind family that I held it together at all.
About three years after moving into Village Green, my Saturn was repossessed, the house went to foreclosure, and I moved my two little ones into Georgetown Apartments. Somehow we managed to make ourselves happy there, but for several months we had drug dealers next door. Twice I had to rush into apartments from which smoke was billowing and screams were emanating, once to actually put out the stove fire and once to call the ambulance to come for a girl who had burned herself and much of her carpet with bacon grease. The third fire was in our unit, thanks to inept plumbers who let a glowing hot copper pipe come into contact with the dry wall. Oh. And one night as I headed out for some air I found the body of a neighbour by the side of the road, his oxygen tank next to him. Around this time my ex asked me to find a cheaper place so I could help her our financially. I declined. As it was, I often was down to less than ten dollars days before payday. No one knows what you mean when you say you have no money. They nod sympathetically and talk about how they had to dip into their investments and took a real hit. I finally told a friend that what I meant was, I had exactly one bank account and it has less money than I could withdraw at an ATM. The only one who really got it was Steve.
He'd watched the decline and collapse of my marriage and had been my mentor moving forward from one day to the next. And then there was Thursdays at Tommy Condon's. Not the weekend crowd, not loud, plenty of tables, and just the music. Breanna, Ethan, and I could sit just three feet from the stage and imbibe the music for hours and, I thought, for free. You can't order food when you have no money until payday. On one of those moneyless evenings one of the servers came over to take my order. I declined and said we were just there to hear Steve sing. She, quite appropriately, said that to sit at a table in the restaurant I needed to order something. I had Ethan on my lap and Breanna was in the chair next us. I looked at my kids and for the millionth time died inside as a failing provider. This evening had been a tiny break from the stress of being a single dad with no money. The whole evening, just below the surface of the fun, I'd felt as though my little family would somehow just come apart for sheer want of money. That feeling surged to the surface and I gave up. I was about to explain to Breanna and Ethan that we were leaving because we could not afford to order food this evening, but Steve leaned down from the stage and said to the server, “They’re with me. Take their order, it's my treat.”
I still cry sometimes when I think of that night. Steve once repaired my roof when our front yard tree fell and punctured it. He often lent me tools. He did many, many, generous things for my kids and me, but nothing he ever did meant as much as telling the server, “they're with me.” That little sentence, “they're with me,” transformed one of the worst moments of my life, having to take my kids out of a place because of poverty, to one of the most important moments of gratitude in my life. That he fed us was nice and the kids loved it, but “they're with me” meant we were not three luckless losers on the verge of being economic outcasts.
Of course I thanked Steve for the meal, but I never thanked him for saving us. I should have, but it was too raw for me to even mention in those days. It's been eight years since I moved back to Niagara Falls, Ontario. These days I see Steve on Facebook. He's battled cancer and had other struggles. It appears as though he still goes to Tommy’s, but hasn't the energy for much performing. I needed to write this before it gets too late to acknowledge one of the true Angels in my life. Just a couple of nights ago on a lonely drive from Toronto I listened to The Bograts all the way home. Of course I sang along, just as we always did at Tommy’s.. And I remembered that night when Steve and his music and the words, “they're with me,” kept me from giving up.
Thank you, Steve.
