This Was Christmas 7

It is New Year's morning.  I have been up since shortly before eight.  As always this day is but another day, a day off from work.  I was already drifting off to sleep shortly after midnight, after staring in stupid reverie for a while at the coloured Christmas lights that adorn my window just above my bed.  I missed the fireworks but I still revelled in colour, did not freeze and didn't get annoyed by noisy crowds full of stupid ignorant people.  I regret somewhat not seeing the Northern Lights, but I do not regret feeling warm and comfortable while working on a painting of tropical hummingbirds.

My plan today is very simple.  I will begin in the local café where my paintings are on display and I would like to spend a good two hours working on my current drawing of a red-legged honeycreeper:
 Isn't he beautiful?  They are native to Central America and South American countries: Colombia, Venezuela, etc.

I imagine I will also do a long walk somewhere, then return home sometime mid or late afternoon to start dinner.  I have guests coming over so I can't complain that I have no one to celebrate the New Year with.

It still feels a bit awkward being alone during celebrations where togetherness is the expected norm.  I have also just lost a friend but this was inevitable and I suspect that this person has had it in for me for some time.  It seems, ever since I was discharged from hospital last May.

This is my theory:  Not all my friends are going to be able to handle seeing me sick, vulnerable and ailing, not if they have only seen me as being strong and robustly healthy.  I seem to have lost two friends since my hospital stay.  One is a young man from Mexico.  We were doing language exchange for about a year and got on actually very well despite not having a lot of interests in common.  When he heard I was in hospital he came by to see me bringing with him a young woman I had never met.  I don't know if she asked if she could come or if he wanted her there with him for moral support.  His young friend and I have since become close friends.  However the young man and I have not seen each other ever since.  He answered some of my earlier emails telling me he was too busy (common excuse).  I decided to contact him only every couple of months.  He still has not replied. (and yes, Gentle Reader, I am going to send him this blog post).  I believe that seeing me in a bad state, unable to walk without assistance, traumatized him.  A lot of people, especially younger men, do not deal well with illness and weakness, they tend to be far more fragile themselves than what they want themselves or others to believe, and will run away like frightened little children at the sight of someone sick, dying or incapacitated.  Young men, unlike young women, are incredibly selfish.  I  have spent the bulk of my adult life caring for and supporting people who are fragile, vulnerable, sick, dying and disabled.  I try to remind myself that I am an unusual case, that too many people who have not been or worked in a caregiving capacity simply feel too threatened and too helpless to know what to do when confronted with weakness and fragility in others.  They run away.

Similarly my friend, or should I say, my ex-friend, La Sombra Pesada, after seeing me in hospital became for a while strangely unavailable to see me, then we did visit a couple of times, but she was becoming distant, hostile and eventually hating.  It is a very sad and cruel fact of life that when we most need people in our lives is precisely when they are going to abandon us.  We can do better than this.  We can be better than this.  Surely we can.

So this being alone when people are supposed to be together is of course a natural feature of living in Vancouver, this Dumb Blonde of Canadian cities, full of lonely outsiders glued to their I-phones, or insular groups and cliques that exclude and hate strangers, or friends who never seem to be available when they are most needed as friends.  A city particularly negligent and unkind to its most vulnerable: the homeless, the lonely, the mentally ill, the poor.  Yes we have social services galore but they have been so gutted and hobbled that we can scarcely keep pace with the demands and needs that confront our services daily.  We lack political will and in many cases popular will to really become a community that is kind, inclusive and caring.

I am fine with being alone since I am not afraid of solitude.  I also hope that I can do something to make my city, my community a more welcoming and less hostile excluding place.  Gentle Reader, will you be so kind as to help me in this endeavour?  Will you be so kind as to forward this missive to five individuals whom you feel would be interested and equal to my challenge?

Happy New Year Gentle Reader.