Dippy and Dopey came on board with us in August 1989. We met them both at the local Anglican parish. Dippy was a youngish forty-five with thick wild iron coloured hair that flew and grasped in every direction. She was kind of like a left-over hippy but she wasn't really. For all her lovey-dovey aren't I the nicest, sweetest, kindest, most loving and self-sacrificing angel claptrap she really was a damaged, anxious and controlling harpy. She was messy, undisciplined, erratic and had absolutely no sense of boundaries. She actually put her arms around Flippy and me during a potluck following a special church service and started to sing to us. It didn't take too long, nor a genius, to figure out that what she really wanted was to get laid. Safe target us: Flippy was gay and I asexual!
She lived with her fat, socially inept and poorly educated Ukrainian boyfriend in a basement apartment in southeast Vancouver. She had a young adult daughter and was divorced from a Japanese-Canadian husband who used to beat the crap out of her. As much as I find spousal abuse to be heinous, horrible and impossible to justify I still to this day regret that I never heard her ex's side of the story, of just what it must have been like living with darling Dippy.
Dippy was also incredibly gifted in the crafts sense and made exquisite Ukrainian Easter eggs, a craft learned from her Ukrainian boyfriend's aged Ukrainian Mama. She also made using a wheat flour base a wonderfully done Nativity scene. She talked nonstop, often sounded breathless and weak, and had a stainless steel will that would challenge the most stubborn donkey.
Dippy decided that God was calling her to join our little community. One morning she appeared at the crack of dawn at our doorstep. We were only just waking up. I asked her if she could please come back in an hour or two. She was indignant and insulted. And the idea of going somewhere for a coffee was something she had simply never heard of. We decided to accept her, given that her nurturing and maternal energy might be just what some of our friends downtown would be needing.
Dopey, was a bourgeois matron of sixty-one. She was the parish secretary and hankering for adventure. It turned out that she was one of those flakey charismatics who hated order unless she was instituting it. She lived alone in her lovely garden apartment pining for her absentee daughter, son-in-law and granddaughters who lived far away in England's green and pleasant land. Dopey was short, verging on plump, clearly once a rather pretty young woman. She believed that God gave her a vision that she would have a Christian community cottage in the country and when she laid eyes on the house on Ferndale decided that this was her vision, tailor made.
I was so weakened and exhausted and burned out from grief about my mother and grief about the many accumulating deaths of people dear to me, and of chronic extreme poverty, and of coping with Dippy's violence and manipulation that I no longer had the will to say no.
What a nightmare!
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