I truly believe the universe gives you what you need, when you need it. I also believe that everything happens for a reason, which makes me pretty popular with friends who are looking for a positive outlook on a situation and more than a little irritating to those who prefer to marinate in the negative. So this weekend when I received an email saying this would in fact be the last week of my column for The Telegram, I immediately saw the good side. Truth is there have been so many instances over the years, whether I was traveling in Africa, Afghanistan, or rural Newfoundland where the sheer stress of trying to find an internet connection to meet my deadline nearly killed me. Or the days I had to steal away from a writing or studio session to try and finish my column, only to stare at the computer screen, worrying that I used up all my words for song lyrics. Depending on what was going on in the world and in my life, I have spent as much time trying to edit down wild, novel length thoughts into a 400 word piece, as I have racking my brains trying to come up with something, anything at all that could possibly be mildly interesting to you all. Something that hopefully, I hadn’t already written about! I truly have felt a huge responsibility to those of you who faithfully read my column every week and stopped to ask me if I got my sister’s wedding dress home safely, or if Willie Nelson really is that nice, I simply haven’t wanted to let you down. I will continue to write blogs on my website dav-net.com, but I will do them without a deadline, with less commas (if that’s even possible!) and hopefully with a lot less stress. I remember how excited I was when I was first asked to write for The Evening Telegram and how proud I felt to be a part of its rich history in our province, a pride I will carry with me forever. I am also grateful to this column for giving me the opportunity to have you all in my life, but am even more grateful to you all for choosing me to be a part of yours every week and for that I thank you.
I have been in a bit of a tizzy the last few weeks finishing and polishing up songs before my band goes into the studio next week - mostly because I thought they were pretty perfect before we went in there digging around the dirt. Writing a song is a bit like buying a new coat, putting it on and knowing it was made for you. It’s warm, it goes with everything, you feel like a warrior when you put it on and are more than a little sad when you have to take it off. You admire it as it hangs on its hook and wish you’d found it sooner, because it’s the one thing you can put on, that makes you happy. Then out of the blue, you get invited out for the evening, you show up and everyone is dressed to the nines, in suits, dresses and high heels, and there you stand in your winter jacket. Only it doesn’t seem as warm or as beautiful as it did the day before, in fact you can’t help but feel a little embarrassed by it, because all those times you loved it so much and never wanted to take it off, meant you wore it to the dinner table and inadvertently dunked your sleeve into your bowl of pea soup, which has dried into a pronounced crust. It also had a little tear peeking out from under the pocket where you hitched it on the fence when you went ice skating and because you never noticed it before, it has turned into a massive tear from armpit to waist and to top it off, it smells a little like a fire pit ( which was your single favorite smell until someone walked by and turned up their nose). So you take your jacket off, walk around the party and forget about it, you may even in fact admire someone else’s coat and ask where they bought it and wonder if they have any in your size. You have a great time, stay out too late, grab your jacket and put it under your arm planning on putting it on once you grab a cab, only to walk out into the street and find a blizzard waiting for you. The high heeled women with their flimsy wrap eyes your winter jacket like it’s the hope diamond, they’ve been waiting for over an hour in the snow and there are no cabs for miles. So you pick up your jacket, give it a little hug and say you’re sorry, put it on and wave goodbye. You are going to walk home in the blizzard, because you can.
In the long days since a massive earthquake devastated the country of Haiti, the onslaught of video, stories and pictures of the aftermath have proven to be sickeningly sad. Yet somehow today, something affected me more than anything else I’ve seen, an image of police shooting at ” Looters” in Port Au Prince. I guarantee you, if I lost my family right before my eyes, managed to climb, or get pulled out of a rubble of concrete, had to spend the following week looking up at the sky, praying for the circling planes to land and bring medical supplies to those with festering wounds in the streets, orphanages and nursing homes, where people who don’t believe that help will ever arrive and hope for death to take them soon, I would break a window or two. If I had not eaten for over a week and the only drop of water I put to my lips was riddled with parasites, disease and filth and made me sick instantly, I would grab a stale loaf of bread I could not pay for ( because I lost everything single thing I ever had in the quake), from the store where I broke the window. If journalists were the only foreigners I saw, because the UN was too afraid to come to my neighborhood, claiming it’s too dangerous and my child lay dying in my arms, I would eat the glass from the broken window, if I thought it would help. Now, the same people that are impressionable enough to listen to and believe in Pat Robertson (who last week addressed the American people and said the Haitian people were getting their just desserts after making a pact with the devil centuries ago), have another dirty weapon in their arsenal when questioning why their government is helping a ” lawless” country, instead of lowering taxes. Why some of the aid money isn’t to buy out the stores filled with food, soap, diapers, and toilet paper and to hire security to distribute it, instead of trying to keep them away, is beyond me. The Haitian people are not ” thieves” , they are desperate, starving and thirsty. More importantly they are sons, fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters and brothers and they are doing whatever they can to survive, and survival should never be considered a crime.
Tonight is a big night for the Doyles, a big night for the Private Investigating industry in Canada and a big night for Newfoundland. I have lived my whole life with people getting in my face and asking me ” your name is what?” or ” How do you say that for God’s sake? Damanit, Damanah, Damnbrat?” and when they do attempt to spell it, a swear word is jammed in the middle, or at the very least a ph. So outside of the island and even though it too has been mispronounced, I have clung on to my last name as some sort of personal ID, like a life preserver. I should at this point disclose that after twenty years of pronouncing my name ” Davnet” , I learned from a friend of my mothers that my first name is actually pronounced “Downith” and that in Ireland, ” Damhnait” is the patron saint of mentally ill people. Doyle, however is a name that means a lot of things, it means family, good times, occasional brushes with the law and a bucket load of love. So I am proud to see it plastered over every single bus shelter, billboard, television station and website in this country and I for one cannot wait until tonight to tune into ” Republic Of Doyle” on CBC. To see the culmination of months and months of hard work by the best film crews and actors in the country and to know it’s as pure, true and 100 % Newfoundland as Purity biscuits, is spectacular. By this point it’s safe to say that after seeing him get punched in the face eight million times in the trailer for ROD that everybody knows who Allan Hawco is, but besides for being the creator and lead actor of the show, he is someone who gets the impossible done. Like anybody who has ever met him, I know that the only thing that has ever truly mattered to him is family, friends and of course Newfoundland and to see someone go after their dreams and slam-dunk it, is inspiring beyond belief. I am buttering up the popcorn, cracking a beer, sitting down on the couch and turning on the TV and I can’t wait to watch with you all.