Stranger Than Fiction, 13

Three significant things occurred for me in 1993: I became an artist; I turned into a vegetarian; we lost our house.

I had been doing a lot of drawing over the last several years, mostly with pastels and felt markers.  They were mostly abstract doodles with therapeutic value, rather a means of gauging and charting my wellbeing and my life journey.  I was given a couple of sheathes of unbleached cotton, which I hung in one of the bedrooms and began to do very well-rendered felt tip drawings of tropical birds.  Flippy, by his own admission always envious of my intelligence and creative gifts, said the art was lousy but I knew then as now that it was actually very good and I only had to consider the source.

Following my mother's death I executed a whole series of drawings of growing complexity and artistic merit.  In early January I showed some of them to a working artist I knew.  He told me they were not only good but that I should start painting and really explore and develop my artistic gift.  I tried to argue and he sternly told me to shut up and just do it.  I did.

I started with small pieces of canvas board and hand crafted surfaces and cheap acrylics.  Most of the work was abstract and I don't think it was very good but I persisted.  I began to paint birds and abstract works, then bought stretched canvases and began to develop very quickly and soon, within about nine months, was ready for my first show.

I really became vegetarian by osmosis.  Sometime in the summer I realized suddenly that I had gone nearly a week without eating meat, and realized that I didn't at all miss it.  I proceeded with the experiment, first giving up red meat, then poultry, and finally fish and seafood.  I still have not bothered to turn vegan.  I prefer to eat intelligently.

In October, on Halloween, we moved.  Our landlords wanted to take occupancy of the house.  I found a three bedroom bungalow with a basement in southeast Vancouver.  Dopey loved the house, Dippy hated it.  It was the moving day from hell.  Dippy and I fought constantly and it became so harsh that I had to separate myself from her altogether.  This created a lasting wound between us that never healed.

Once we moved into the new house I gave Dippy the silent treatment for two weeks.  She eventually lost it and began weeping, to which I responded that I at least had the decency to apologize for my part of our quarrel.  She didn't.  I never ever heard from Dippy, the great angel Christian she purported to be, so much as the words, I'm sorry, or please forgive me.  When she dumped us completely and went off to the fundamentalists, where she really belonged, she was not at all missed.

I continued to paint, hoping that this would open for me a new pathway in life.