Remembering Stan

Yesterday was my birthday. Yes, if I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken much better care of myself (Eubie Blake at 100.) I bought myself an impromptu birthday present this week (two actually, more on the second one later.)
I was taking a short cut through my local record store (rapidly evolving into a DVD and bookstore as iTunes has remove touch as one of the senses with which to enjoy music), and I saw a new cd of old songs. It was a tastefully done 'best-of' style CD by Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers, a personal favourite. I snapped it up. I have most of the songs on it on other CDs but the idea of having a good selection is one place appealed to me. Now the connection. Stan and I were born in the same year. The year I got married, Stan died under freak circumstances. He was returning from a folk festival in the US when a fire broke out on the commercial air liner he was on. He and 22 others died of smoke inhalation.
The CD - The Very Best of Stan Rogers - is playing as I type this.
Stan lived on Canada's East Coast, a place where the land is part of your body and soul. You don't visit there but it seeps inside you and you're never the same. Stan let it soak into him and it came out as some of the finest folk songs the country has ever produced. Despite the sadness and loss, I smile when I hear anything he ever produced. He can be tender, he can be poignant, he can be raucous; but there is always the twinge of pathos because that's the way it is back there.
When I was on the East Coast, I visited a small fishing village called Blue Rocks and heard a story of one fishing season where all the men in the village went out to sea and none returned. Imagine the consequences of that? All up and down the coast were abandoned and falling houses of fishermen who went to sea and never came back. I walked through graveyards with only women's names on the tombstones. Where were the men? They went to sea and never returned.
That colours life out there in the rural Maritines and it colours most of Stan Roger's songs.

In Make and Break Harbour the boats are so few
Too many are holed up and rotten.
Most houses stand empty, old nets hung to dry
Are blown away lost and forgotten