Shades of Influence: The Creative Journey of the Bastard Kid from Timmins

By Paul Cade

Shades of Influence, a memoir by Paul Cade. Paul has had a fascinating and unpredictable creative life. He has been able to capture it all – from his childhood memories of growing up in a somewhat non-conventional home to an incredible wide-ranging career in the creative arts, and his remarkable cancer journey. The focus on his working years, in particular, and the detail with which he goes into while recounting the film shoots that he worked on, is unique in this genre and makes for a very entertaining read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781779412218

Paul Cade

"Through all the writing and rewriting, I became aware that all my troubles, like the bullying, the rejections, the failures, being fired, and the unkind and insensitive words, helped me develop the resilience, toughness, courage, vulnerability, perseverance, and thick skin that were necessary to give me he tools and courage to live a full creative life. I learned that hard times are not bad times. It is how you react to them that makes the difference. They can become roadblocks or the fuel to propel us forward. My cancer diagnosis fourteen years ago is a prime example." Paul lives with his wife and their little dog in the Beaches area of Toronto. Paul has a small studio where he works as an artist and writer.

Book preview

Shades

of

Influence

The Creative Journey of the Bastard Kid from Timmins

Paul Cade

Shades of Influence

Copyright © 2023 by Paul Cade

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Back Cover Photo – Cais Mukhayesh

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-1-77941-220-1 (Hardcover)

978-1-77941-219-5 (Paperback)

978-1-77941-221-8 (eBook)

I dedicate this book to my wife, Jean.

And to my children,

Ken, Kimberly, Emily,

Lauren and Samantha.

I also want to give thanks to all the people

and influencers in my life who

helped me navigate my long and winding creative path,

especially Allan Kazmer, Stan Olthuis,

Shawna Ross, Concetta Principe

and my angels.

Contents

PREFACE

A LITTLE POEM

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CONCLUSION

PREFACE

I love trains. I have always loved trains. Trains were how we travelled to see my mother’s mother, Viola, when I was a kid. I am seventy-nine and I am on a train with my wife on our way back home from visiting my sister and her family. It is the summer of 2023. I looked at this trip as a perfect opportunity to start writing the preface for this book. This book is like a train ride, making stops at key points of my long creative journey with all of its peaks and valleys. The last fourteen years I have been living with cancer and it has been five-plus years since my angels told me to write. The order to write came during a session with Shawna Ross, a shaman and medium whom I had started seeing as part of my approach to healing my cancer. While working in the advertising business I heard a lot of crazy shit, but nothing like this. This was the craziest idea that I had ever heard. I had failed English all through grade school and barely scraped by in high school. I can just imagine all of my English teachers turning over in their graves at the thought of me writing a book. So, when I asked the angels what I was supposed to write about, I was told to write about my creative life, about the creative way that I had approached the healing of my cancer.

Writing these seven chapters was not the hard part; the hard part was reading. I am an excruciatingly slow reader, partially because of my touch of dyslexia and my ADHD. Neither of these conditions has ever stopped me from reading—I just need more time and more reading breaks (I read about five pages at a time). I love researching, even though it requires stacks of reading. Whenever I found myself in an area that I knew little about, I would read everything I could get my hands on. Like when I was diagnosed with cancer in December of 2008. I was sixty-four. I read all about healing cancer—traditionally, holistically and organically—and even considered the various ancient modalities. Five years ago when I was told to write, I started to read books on writers writing. I read writers who were recommended (I was curious to see how they worked with words) and I even attempted to read some books on grammar, which was a disaster. Five pages into the grammar book, I thought my brain was going to explode. I shut the book and decided to get help.

Enter Concetta Principe, published author, teacher of contemporary writing and writing coach. Concetta became the latest in a long line of influencers who have shown up in my life. One of the first things she did was recommend that I read James Joyce’s book, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Reading James Joyce helped me to loosen up and have more fun with words. I also read Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self and Joan Didion’s A Year of Living Magically. With their help and the act of showing up, day after day, and writing, and cutting and rewriting, I started to see writing as painting with words. I was going through the same process in my writing as I did when building a painting.

Why write a memoir? The reason is simple: besides being told to do it, I had a deep-seated belief that I had a responsibility to share what I have learned along my creative journey. I believe that as an artist, I have an obligation to share the ups and downs and the joys and heartbreaks, as honestly, humbly (I may have puffed up a little here or there) and as passionately as my skills allow. I have spent the last five years writing with the hope that something that I have experienced might inspire somebody who is struggling to keep going, not quit, to believe in themselves and to ignore the negative voices (both internal and external). In telling my story I committed myself to not sugar-coating my failures or aggrandizing my successes. It was important for me to show the endless trying and failing, my dogged adherence to my dreams, and to not shy away from sharing my humanity and my vulnerability. I have shown up and put in the work; I have had lots of fun and I have benefitted from a legion of mentors and influencers. Now I see it as my turn to mentor, to encourage, to help show that obstacles are new doors to be opened and new lessons to be learned.

When I asked the angels, Why me? Surely there are many other truly gifted writers, the angels agreed that there were many writers who were more skilled, but it was me and my life that they wanted me to write about. When asked about my art, they said that my words would touch more people than my art. That would be nice.

I resisted writing for months, stewing about it—could I do it? Could I write about my life? Could I tell stories that would engage an audience? The questions were endless. Then one day when I was moaning and groaning about writing and my lack of skill, my wife, without lifting her eyes from her iPad, said, Shut up and write. That was the kick in the butt I needed. I jumped in and at seventy-four started writing anything that came to mind, no matter how obscure, insignificant or how painful it was.

One day when I was sitting in the living room writing, I noticed a baby bird on a porch roof across the street. The little bird, frozen in fear, was considering its fate when Momma Bird landed beside her baby. Then an amazing thing happened. Momma Bird, ever so slowly, started to nudge her baby toward the edge of the roof. Then, in the next instant, the baby bird was in midair. The falling baby bird started to desperately flap its wings and it started to rise. It was flying. Momma joined her baby, and they flew off together. It made me think of a quote from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

That little flying scene that played out before me and Vonnegut’s wisdom describe so much of my life. I have had amazing mentors and teachers appear to me at the exact moment that I needed a little nudge to jump off the cliff and grow my writing wings. Jean, my wife, and Concetta, my coach, are the latest in a long line of ‘nudgers."

Where these words will land, I have no idea but wherever they find a home, I hope that they enjoy the ride.

A LITTLE POEM

I wrote this poem after the first year of trying to write.

My Words

My words seem crude and insignificant

in the shadow of the great poets.

My words are plain and awkward

in the face of Walt Whitman’s

fluid beauty.

My words lack the alchemy

of the blessed and gifted greats.

But like grains of sand

my words hold their place with

a humble dignity and strength

adding to the whole

of what is.

Though they may fall

on indifference,

they hold their heads up

grateful for the chance

to breathe.

CHAPTER ONE

"The question is not

who influences you,

but which people

give you courage."

–Hilary Mantel

BORN TO BE ADJUSTED

At times, we all need a little adjustment in how we view the world, how we see our dreams, how we comport ourselves. In my case the adjustments started early, at birth to be exact. I was born in a small mining town in northern Ontario, during the end of the war, and was adopted seven weeks later. This was the beginning of my long and capricious creative life. It is also the start of many rejections, which is not about having any ill will about being adopted but more about facing life’s struggles. This beginning introduces the people and events that informed the first eight years of my life, from the time that I was adopted. It would take years for me to find a situation in which I felt completely at home.

These first few years show how I would grow to love my alone time, without feeling lonely. It also recalls my intense dislike of crowds and my compulsive drive to prove myself worthy. From an early age I had a penchant for jumping in first and learning the how (to swim) afterwards. In some cases, it is amazing that I am still alive. My über-curiosity, imagination and impulsive nature had free reign in these early years. Our family moved four times by my fifth birthday, which in later years made me comfortable with change. My first words were French, my mother’s tongue. At five I had to make another adjustment: I had to learn English or I couldn’t go to school in this new city. When I turned six and began school, I was introduced to bullying and ostracization. Except for the bullying, these early years were joyous, partly due to my maternal grandmother, my first influencer.

HE WILL NEVER BE PEOPLE

Late 1943, in Timmins, a small northern Ontario mining town on the banks of the Mattagami River, Irene Caron, mother of two small girls, removed her legs from the stirrups and sat up on the edge of the examination table. Her stomach tightened as the doctor’s words confirmed what she already knew. She was pregnant and her husband, who was stationed somewhere in France fighting the Germans, was not the father.

Abortions were illegal, dangerous, back-alley affairs in those days. For nine months, as her belly swelled, my mother would have to live with feelings of shame, guilt, abandonment and regret. Irene’s sperm donor, my father, vanished with the news that she was pregnant. There was a rumour that he was Italian, but I seriously doubt that. While I loved the thought of being Italian, mainly because I love Italy, its artistic history, its inspiring architecture and its variety of cuisine, my DNA test did not support the rumour. My genetic testing suggested that I was Scandinavian, English, Irish or Scottish—I am a Viking.

During WWII, the streets of Timmins were lined with tarpaper shacks. People didn’t finish the outside of their houses because if the house was incomplete, you didn’t pay property tax; hence, the endless rows of unfinished houses. The winters were brutal. I was told that snowdrifts could reach ten feet. Imagine waking up in the morning and having to dig yourself out of a ten-foot wall of snow. Irene knew all too well that like most small towns, everyone made it their business to know everyone else’s business. She knew that there would be no escape from the merciless scrutiny of family, friends and neighbours.

On July 2, 1944, the front page of the Porcupine Advance, the local Timmins newspaper, declared THE GERMANS MOVE TO STRENGTHEN THE EASTERN FRONT! This was the same day that I entered this world, ending nine months of shame, guilt and aloneness for my mother (things that I too felt from the second trimester on, or so I have been told). Born Gordon Francois Caron, I was put up for adoption immediately upon my birth. Seven weeks later, I was adopted and christened Leon Paul Cade. My new parents were Jacqueline and Kenneth Cade. My mother was French, and my dad English. My dad converted to Catholicism to marry my mom. That was a big deal back then, especially in Northern Ontario.

Viola Duhamel was my mother Jacqueline’s mother. Viola was a French peasant woman, who at the first sight of me exclaimed, "Il ne sera jamais un people (he will never be people)." I was tiny, weighing just four pounds, which must have been a shock to Viola and was plenty of reason for her impulsive reaction to her first grandchild. My grandmother never honey-coated her words—she said it as she saw it. A trait that I would learn was one of my grandma’s many endearing qualities. That story and refrain became part of our family folklore, along with stories of my grandmother carrying me around on a pillow because she was afraid of breaking me. She told everyone that I was so small that she could put her wedding ring around my foot. Enchanting as these stories were, Viola, bless her soul, was prone to passionate exaggeration from time to time. The truth is that she did not break me. Quite the opposite: she became the glue that kept me together, and her love gave me the strength and courage to be myself. Viola was the first of many teachers and mentors in my life.

My dad’s mom, Christina, was another story. She was a very proper English woman who could not accept me simply because I was adopted, or was it because I was French and Catholic? In Northern Ontario, at the time, the English did not like the French and to make things worse, the Quebec French did not accept the Ontario French as French.

Christina and Viola were a study in opposites. Viola was my buddy and Christina was not. Viola was a Catholic, Christina was Protestant. Viola had a face like a dry riverbed, a ruddy complexion with the hands of a labourer. Christina had a face that was porcelain white, almost transparent, and had never seen the sun. Her hands were smooth as silk and delicate. Viola was a no-nonsense person, worked hard all her life, was self-reliant, tough-minded, and yet she was warm, generous, forgiving and impulsive. Christina was self-absorbed, kept everything close to her vest, and I am not sure that she ever worked a day in her life (I am sure she did, but I never saw it). Viola loved a good party, loved to laugh, and she loved her whiskey (rye and Coke). Christina was a humourless woman who I doubt ever let loose and kicked up her heels. Viola spoke French and a broken English that she had learned off the side of cereal boxes. Bilingualism was not a thing back then; because of that she never learned to read or write French, as she never went to school. Christina, as I understand it, was an educated woman and only spoke very proper English. Viola didn’t trust doctors and only went to the hospital once and that was when she died. Christina was at the doctor’s office all the time and her medicine cabinet looked like a pharmacy. My parents said that she was a hypochondriac and most of the pills were sugar pills. Viola Duhamel died in her mid to late seventies and Christina Cade was rumoured to have lasted past one hundred (she never communicated with our family after my dad died).

This comparison of my two grandmothers is decidedly one-sided due to the sad fact that I never got to spend much time with Grandma Cade when we both could speak English. The language barrier meant that I never got to know her: she may have had a great heart, an infectious sense of humour or she may have been a master pie maker, but I never got to experience it or taste it. All I remember is her yelling at me to get out from under the dining room table where I was hiding from a petrifying thunderstorm. I was screaming that we were going to die. There were no cuddles, just yelling and her sourpuss glare.

We moved to North Bay after I had turned one. My mother, pregnant with my sister, moved us into her mom’s house, a two-story building of fieldstone with wood trim. It was hand-built by my grandmother and grandfather. My dad did not make the move with us. Though the details are sketchy, the word was that he had suffered a nervous breakdown and was in a hospital. I don’t remember him at all during the early part of my life, but other than family photos that show him holding me in front of our house in Timmins, there are very few photos of him in North Bay in those early days. I was in a household of women: my grandmother, my mother, her sister Lucile, and my baby sister, Joann. This certainly contributed to the fact that I grew up with a well-developed feminine side. My mom and her mom were always busy in the house, which meant that I had oodles of free time to explore. Later in life I cherished and was very protective of my alone time.

The house on Copeland Street had an undeniable warm and inviting spirit. I always felt safe there and, in a way, it became a touchstone in my life. In fact, I would buy a house that was fieldstone, board and batten, just like my grandma’s. Even later we would build a fieldstone board-and-batten cottage on a property that reminded me of the northern landscape (rock and water) that I grew up in. After we moved from my grandma’s house, we would spend almost every Christmas and Easter there. In my case, I was lucky enough to spend a good portion of several summers with Grandma Duhamel when I was young before summer camps started.

LEON’S GARAGE

Leon Placide Duhamel, my grampa, whom I was named after, died eight years before I was born (I never met either of my grandfathers). In fact, there were very few men in my family: I wonder if that was a result of WWII. There were not many photographs of Leon. The two sepia-coloured photographs that did exist were stiff and formal, typical of that period. In one of the photographs, he was dressed in a grey wool suit, white shirt and paisley bow tie. He had a warm face, was clean shaven and had black bushy eyebrows that floated above his little round eyeglasses. He had a studious look. His hair was short and black. He had a trim build and appeared to be about five feet ten inches. He died, just two months shy of his fifty-sixth birthday. In a second photo, he had hunting gear on with a large, brimmed hat. He cradled a rifle in one hand and held his pipe just off his face as if he had just taken it out of his mouth for the photo.

One of the family anecdotes was that my grampa was in the seminary, intent on becoming a priest, when he abruptly walked away. Why he left the seminary is a mystery. No one talked about it. The romantic side of me liked to think my grandmother had something to do with it. She was a special human being and maybe that is what he saw in her. Lucky man. Ironically, many years later, I had my heart set on becoming a priest but rather than walking away as he did, I was shoved away by the church. Why? Because I was born a bastard, and that meant I wasn’t acceptable according to the church’s canon law.

The garage was just outside my grandma’s kitchen, sandwiched between the house and the upper terraced garden. It was a rickety old wooden structure that leaned to one side and groaned in the wind. It had not seen a car in years; only large patches of oil stains remained as evidence that a vehicle had been there. The garage, like the house, was hand-built by Leon.

I was about five years old when I first stepped into it. The two front doors were sealed shut by a massive, rusty lock whose key had been lost years ago. The side door hinges cried out from neglect and the absence of my grandfather whenever I opened the door. A single light bulb hung from the rafters. Inside, a treasure trove of goodies that my grandfather left behind awaited me.

I spent endless hours in that magical place where I explored every nook and cranny that I could reach. The exception was the cornucopia of stuff stored in the rafters, which were off limits to me. For a young boy with an inquiring mind, Leon’s garage was an enchanted place, and it was all mine to explore. My grandma only came in on occasion, most often to get her gardening stuff, shovels, a pitchfork, a hoe, a couple of rakes, garden- shears, and old bushel basket, all of which were stashed just inside the side door.

Every time I stepped into the stuffy dark interior, I was met by the thick pungent smell of oil and old pipe smoke. Soon it would become a