Honoring Stuart "Moses" McLean...

Honoring Stuart “Moses” McLean

Stuart McLean, a longtime CBC producer and host of The Vinyl Cafe, was one of Canada’s great storytellers. His voice is silent now. Stuart died on February 15, 2017. He was 68 years young, and I say young because Stuart never seemed to be old to me from the first time I heard him on what used to be my favorite CBC show, Morningside, hosted by an another inimitable Canadian possessed of his own charm, the gruffly likable Peter Gzowski.

What fascinated me about Stuart McLean was his delivery, how he read his stories, which he wrote with such literary expertise that his books of stories from The Vinyl Cafe garnered him the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humor three times.

Unquestionably, his delivery was humorous; but it always sounded to me like he was coming down from the Holy Mountain with a message from God, and I ended up calling him “Moses” McLean because of the messianic intonations of his voice.

“Here comes Moses,” I’d say to Penny, on our Sunday outings; and as we listened to Michael Enright’s tribute to Stuart McLean on our way to Barrie to catch the movie Manchester by the Sea and dinner yesterday afternoon, I reflected on the irony of calling our great Canadian storyteller “Moses” because Stuart’s humor had more wisdom on the human condition than many sacred texts, not to mention poetry; that was his genius.

          “Humor plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat,” wrote E. B. White, co-author of The Elements of Style; but Stuart was so funny that we didn’t feel the heat until later, sometimes much later, which kept us coming back for more.

          “Stories bear the truth of the human condition, and the human condition is the story of our becoming,” I wrote in The Pearl of Great Price, and from what I heard in all The Vinyl Cafe stories over the years, and I heard many, all of those ordinary little moments that Stuart exaggerated with comic hilarity bore the truth of our becoming, and I’d have no trouble saying that Stuart “Moses” McLean was our own Canadian precious pearl, and I miss his voice already.