The premiere of Charlie at the Fair, in a theatre at the Canadian National Exhibition, was postponed on the night of the blackout. So was the whole CNE. It was disappointing for artist Charlie Pachter, with whom I’ve been friends since we were eight, more than 50 years ago.

In 1947, when he was four, Charlie beat out a hundred other kids for the role of Johnny in a National Film Board documentary, Johnny at the Fair. He played a kid who loses his parents at the CNE and wanders around meeting celebrities such as prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, skater Barbara Ann Scott, boxing champ Joe Louis — and being awestruck by futuristic products like rubber. Charlie at the Fair, which finally premiered Wednesday, shows Charlie glancing back at Johnny.

He looks a tad different but retains the impish aspect. He has spent much of the time since producing a series of (in my unbiased view) lasting Canadian images: Toronto streetcars, painted Canadian flags and, best known, versions of a moose, many with HRH the Queen on, beside or near the beast. That’s his metal sculpture at the corner of Harbord and St. George streets.

“Unfortunately, at a very impressionable age, I got the idea that Canadian means glamorous,” he says. The skater, the leader and the boxer — okay. But the moose? There was a carnie type named Joe Laflamme who used to tour with a moose. They were in the film but didn’t make the final cut. That moose seemed “awkward yet noble and delicate, a figure we rarely got a chance to see,” Charlie says. Much like the Canadian identity.

It was a shock for him to stumble on the long-forgotten little film, years after his path as an artist had been irrevocably set. There’s something rueful in the self-awareness he gleaned (“Unfortunately. . .”). He doesn’t really think Canada is so glamorous, but no matter. All the choices had been made — for him as it were — back then.

Yet career choices are inherently absurd. None of us is old or experienced enough to make them until after we’ve had most of the career. The same goes for other crucial life decisions. We live fundamentally in the wrong direction; we should start from the other end, like Merlin in the T. H. White stories. My own trajectory (I say ruefully) may have come from Mr. Macnab, an exchange teacher from B.C. who was knocked out by a little composition I wrote in Grade 7 on a car trip through the Rockies.

Charlie’s early enthrallment may have led him astray, but so what? It’s just bad existential engineering. In such matters, you can’t really be responsible for what you do or why you do it. But you can be responsible for how you do it: the vigour, verve, talent or insight you show, whatever trajectory was foisted on you.“Come on,” enthuses Charlie, rushing past. “We’re all going outside to see a guy tightrope across the whole CNE.”

And there he is, far away, like a sequined fly, atop a 200-foot tower. “He was at the movie,” says Charlie. “A blond guy in a dark suit and tie. Like an aging Tab Hunter.” His name is Jay Cochrane. He’s 59, from Sudbury. He’s famous in China for crossing the Yangtze River endless times. His posters, which he signs at the end of each walk, donating all proceeds to sick kids, are half in Chinese. And he’s miked! “The wind is especially treacherous tonight,” he says from up there.

Indeed. The Canadian flags on both towers whip stiffly southward, like Pachter paintings. “I don’t see what you see,” he says poetically. “I walk in the shadow from the light below.” It takes him 35 minutes to gingerly step the quarter or half mile, holding a pole that grows heavier. The mere climb up would exhaust and terrify most of us. He does it twice a day, three times on weekends. A four-year-old says, “He’s not a tightrope walker. He’s an astronaut.” More in control at least, than the “space monkeys” Tom Wolfe once described. “The things people choose to do with their lives,” says his mother, thinking maybe about the movie.

I think, too, of my friend, John Lang, also from Sudbury. Son of a miner and union militant who had died in a workplace accident, John spent much of his life working in, and trying to avoid, the labour movement. He studied for the priesthood, then trained as an academic and then — following a distinguished career as a labour leader, went to law school and practiced law.

But he found it wasn’t right for him — so, bravely I’d say, he left the law and took early retirement at 60.

Once — and I can’t remember if it was a good moment or an awful one: when we had won a strike or lost one; or perhaps during the battle against free trade, when it looked as if we might succeed or when we realized we would fail — anyway, what John said was, “At least we aren’t pissing our lives away.” I’m not sure you can do better, and you can certainly do worse.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.