This Canada Day, I missed my friend.
Well, maybe “friend” is the wrong term.
Let me explain.
There’s a word that’s been going around lately. The word is “parasocial,” a term that refers to the one-sided, non-reciprocal relationships we as members of the public tend to strike up with celebrities and other notable figures. On the internet, you’ll see the term bandied about when it comes to influencers, those figures who make their living by being, or appearing, accessible on the internet, but who are usually just as distant as any other notable individual is from the public at large.
Stuart McLean was, by any stretch, a notable individual. An uber-Canadian, if you will. McLean was the longtime host of CBC’s The Vinyl Cafe, and before that a researcher and contributor to Morningside, and one of my personal idols.
He was not, I should stress, my friend in any real way. Ours was a mostly parasocial relationship, but after spending years listening to his voice on the radio, and then by way of The Vinyl Cafe podcast, he was almost as close to my heart as many of my true friends are.
I met him, once. After a Vinyl Cafe show in Windsor, Ontario, I spoke with him, poorly, too starstruck by this titan of legend to say much of anything, and he signed something for me.
I wrote him, once. As part of my journalism education, we were to interview someone about the art of interviewing. Being in Toronto at this time, and knowing McLean was still teaching journalism at Ryerson University, I emailed him and asked if I might interview him about how to conduct an interview.
“I would love to meet you for a face to face,” he wrote back. “But I am not going to be able to manage that.” It was, he said, the busy time of year where he was finishing one tour and preparing for the Christmas tour and was, unfortunately, unable to make the time for me.
But it was through Stuart McLean that I have learned more about Canada, learned to appreciate more about our country, than I think I have by any other means. McLean’s Canada was a place of wonder, a place where history lived next door to the everyday Canadians who make their way through life. Through him I gained a better understanding of parts of this country I have never been to, but feel like I would recognize in an instant, like the Gander Airport in Newfoundland, or the dome cars on VIA Rail’s legendary Canadian. McLean’s Canada was a massive, mythic place, one full of joy and wonder and curiosity, but not, critically, one devoid of flaws. Our past is not a perfect one, and our present is hardly any better, but the lesson that shone through his words were that, if we put our minds to it, we can make our country a better place for everyone by the same grit and determination that we have achieved any great feat of art, engineering and technology in Canada’s past.
So this past Canada Day, I missed my friend Stuart McLean, the voice on the radio who, in some form or another, is as much a reason I’m sitting in the chair I am today as anyone else, and I thought about that Canada, McLean’s Canada, the one he saw in his travels across the country that isn’t real, not in as many words, but is there waiting for us, if only we make the effort to realize it.
– Ken Kellar, editor
