Remarkable People I Have Known: Little Miss Hurricane

She was a force of nature.  A very faithful devout Christian; a dynamic personality; a heart that wanted to invite and hold everyone in her warm embrace; a young woman struggling with her sexuality; a saint, or a wannabe saint; a small person who could never sit still.  I don't think she knew how to relax.

We were both very young.  I was twenty-one and she was two years younger.  I never knew anyone so connected to others.  We knew each other from the Baptist coffeehouse.  She was dating a guy who didn't seem to love her.

She gave me a book titled "Be Not Afraid", a selection of poetic meditations by Jean Vanier, the founder of the L'Arche community.  This book helped me focus my spiritual journey with its emphasis on our human frailty, of God's absolute love for us and of how his strength is made perfect in our weakness.

She fell brutally in love with a friend of mine who didn't reciprocate.  She wasn't pretty, while he was.  A couple of years later she came out as a lesbian.  Then she came into some money and flew off to India where she hung out for six weeks with Mother Teresa in Calcutta.

She ended up marrying a church minister, a man.  I was not invited to the wedding and I never saw her again save for once, about six years later in a church we were both visiting.  She introduced me to her husband, we exchanged pleasantries.  I haven't seen or heard of her since.

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Great One

I have sometimes compared him to the planet (not the Roman god!) Jupiter and all his many sad friends as the moons of Jupiter caught in his great gravitational pull.  For years I was one of the sad friends of the Great One.  I was one of Jupiter's moons.  For about six or seven years we knew each other casually from the Baptist coffee house where we both frequented.  We didn't talk much and several had warned me that he was trouble.

When I was twenty-four and Jupiter was thirty-two we coincided at a home Bible study and we began to hang out.  We both believed that we had a calling to a ministry of Christ's presence in the local gay community.  For about three years we were inseparable.  In my desire to move on I left some very precious Christian friends and Jupiter became for me during that time my only real friend.  I left my church to attend his because he said the Lord was telling me to do this.  I went a lot of places to suit Jupiter because he said that was the Lord's will for me.

He was every bit the loser that I am here portraying him.  Then how, you my gentle readers must be wondering, could I ever come under the influence of such a sad individual?  Well, we were both sad individuals, lonely, frightened, insecure, and consumed by our own self-hatred.  We also each wanted to be someone, to be someone great, admired, loved and respected.  We wanted to be celebrity Christians.  He had a toxic charisma but also played a very convincing loving Christian act.

I don't think it was all act.  He was an authentically kind person but with poor boundaries and a wounded ego.  He was incredibly welcoming and anyone who crossed his threshold was his new best friend forever.  It is easy to demonize an easy target.

He lived in a West End rooming house, long ago replaced by condos, and gave me the key to his housekeeping room.  I often met him and various other friends there.  We were kind of an unconstituted Christian community.  We also all swore like truckers.

Our parting of ways began in 1983 when one evening while visiting me in my place (I think I had had him over for dinner) he tried to push me into going downtown with him for a night of "ministry."  For the first time ever I raised my voice to him and announced that I am no longer getting caught in his personal vortex.  He never forgave me.

For a few more years we continued side by side, but no longer attached to each other.  We both relied on each other's insight and discernment and even though we were often accurate and mutually helpful we also unwittingly set each other up for some very nasty traps.

We gradually grew apart from each other.  I had for a couple of years, till I was twenty-seven, aped some of his poor lifestyle habits.  Separating from him also helped me get my own ducks in a row.  He did not seem to know how to take care of himself.  His nutrition was always poor, his clothing dirty and dishevelled, his home a trap for bugs and filth.  He was usually chronically unemployed and poor.  He was eventually diagnosed with a mental health condition and went on a disability pension.  We still, even into the 2000's drifted in and out of each other's lives, but the intervals were longer and the visiting time shorter.

In 2007 I sent him an email.  I said that if I didn't hear back from him in a week I would assume that he had ended our friendship and would not bother him again.  He never responded.  We still run into each other from time to time.  Most recently just two years ago we even stopped to chat a bit.  But the friendship is over and now that I am doing well in my own mental health recovery I would say that it is not likely going to be resurrected.

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Blind Girl

I first met her when I was fifteen and we were both regulars at the Jesus Peoples' coffee house.  I had never met a blind person before and I have to say that she intrigued me.  She wore sunglasses all the time which enhanced her mystique.  I wanted to see and to know the person behind the shades.  She was nice to talk to, a bit timid and hesitant and after a few months we disappeared from each other's lives...till she resurfaced about six years later. 

She became a feature visitor at the house I shared with the Bucolic One and Taxi Driver.  We all convened together at the same coffee house, a different one, run by a Baptist church downtown.   We were trying to pray for a restoration of her sight, and for a while it almost seemed to be happening.  She feared that her lack of faith would be an obstacle as well as the judgmental comments from the various Pentecostals and charismatics who simply couldn't accept that God is still a loving God even though he lets bad things happen.  She had also participated in some of the Cursillo-style retreats and became part of the adhoc Christian community that had formed around them.

The Blind Girl resurfaced yet again, when I was twenty-seven and she would have been in her early thirties.  She somehow obtained my phone number and called me.  We hadn't seen each other in perhaps six years (is there a pattern here?).  While I felt a bit nervous about feeling responsible for a friend with a disability it seemed like a good idea that we be in contact with each other. 

We became a regular feature in each other's lives.  The Blind Girl was interested in the ministry work I was doing downtown and frequently accompanied me for café visits in the West End.  We also took walks together in the neighbourhood and on the seawall.  She appeared to have a remarkable gift of discernment.  We would walk by certain areas that appeared to be troubled and she would each time give me a remarkably accurate report of what was going on.

She was very independent though she still had a tendency to cling to people, likely a result of having been very dependent on the care of others in an era when very little was expected of blind people.  She navigated the bus system independently, using her cane as a guide.  Unfortunately older people (we were still in the early 'eighties)  didn't appear to see things that way. 

On one occasion as I was seeing the Blind Girl to a bus stop following church, an old Italian man tried to physically attack me when I let her get on the bus on her own without accompanying her.  He didn't have a clue that being blind for her was not an obstacle and that I was not some cruel douchebag who was abandoning her to a nasty outcome.  I suppose it was good of him to want to stick up for the disabled, but still, what an absolute idiot!

Another time when we were on the bus together a sweet dear little old lady who likely has now been dead for years, asked me in a dear twee little voice, "Is she BLIND?"  The old dear, having likely been born at the turn of the century, simply didn't have a clue, it would have been impossible to explain to her, and when I said that she shouldn't be asking me but my blind friend she seemed completely confused and befuddled.  And when the Blind Girl did reply "Yeah, but I'm not deaf" the old dear looked even more pathetic.

I introduced the Blind Girl to the Snooty Church and she felt very at home there.  She also loved the music, being herself a classically trained and gifted musician.  I attended one of her recitals (piano) and was simply blown away.  We didn't always sit together but I always helped her to the altar rail for communion.  One Sunday as we were standing for prayer I noticed her seated a couple of rows in front of me.  At that time I often had a sense of two angels accompanying me in the form of beautiful bronze coloured panthers.  I beseeched one of my panther angels to go over and comfort her and I looked and saw in the spirit as my guardian went over to her and put his forepaws up on her shoulders from behind.  After the mass the Blind Girl confided to me that she had been going through a dreadful funk and then suddenly, during the prayers she felt something very warm and comforting cover her and she had been feeling much better ever since.  I told her about the panther angel, since it was just at that time that I had sent him over to her.  We were both of course amazed.

She was very social and gregarious and had a lot of friends, having herself a gift for friendship.  There was of course always getting past the stigma of having a disability.  Even my mother who visited for coffee one day when the Blind Girl and a sighted friend of hers were over afterward asked me if the sighted woman was her paid companion.

We eventually had a falling out.  I was frankly exhausted from listening to her stream of consciousness whining and complaining and when I refused to put up with it she hung up on me.  Our lives took decidedly different directions.  The last time I saw her she was already getting quite grey.  She confided to me that a mutual friend, a man recently widowed tried to rape her and she was of course completely traumatized.  This was different from our friend's version who suggested that she was reluctant but ultimately willing.  I never had the opportunity to tell him afterward, "Dude, you raped her, you should be prosecuted and you owe her restitution.  And our friendship is now over."  How easily we disappear out of each other's lives.

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Protestant Monk

That was not my nickname for him, if you must know, but the invention of another Remarkable Person I will soon be profiling.  I think I first really saw him when I was eighteen years old, a teenage hippy-Jesus Freak, hitch-hiking in East Vancouver.  I got a ride in a car crowded with five or six odd sorts of fellows, the Protestant Monk among them.  He was then just over thirty, balding, with wispy reddish hair, wire-rim glasses and the modestly dishevelled look of a beat poet. 

I was twenty-one when our friendship began to gel.  We became friends through the Cursillo-style retreats we participated in.  We would lease a Catholic school for the weekend, live there, serve one another, pray and worship and learn how to share our lives in a climate of pure Christian love.  These  retreats were a very powerful, and for many participants, an epiphany experience.  We became a kind of community and continued meeting together every week for years, singing, praying and bearing one another's burdens.

The Protestant Monk had become kind of a local legend.  He was very devout, and in equal parts gentle, respectful, whimsical and compassionate.  He was slightly introverted, an intellectual devoted to reading, prayer and study, but equally focussed outward and a loyal friend and helper to many.  We spent many hours visiting and talking together and I think he was one of the most powerful human forces in my early twenties for molding and shaping my spirituality.  He had a soft, gentle and rather halting way of talking, as though he was carefully thinking and praying about each and every word before letting it proceed out of his mouth.  He was one of few Christians who didn't appear to find my edginess offensive or frightening.

He went away for eighteen months to join an intentional Christian community in Scotland, believing this to be his life call.  I must have been twenty-eight when he returned, dejected, disillusioned and disheartened.  We had coffee together.  He said that he left the community on not entirely friendly terms.  The director wanted him to stay and serve God through a single and devoted life.  There was a woman, a Baptist minister, here he was sweet on.  He wanted to marry her.  The director of the community tried to forbid it and he left the community and came home feeling broken, shamed and guilty.

I tried to persuade the Protestant Monk that for me there was no issue here.  That to me marriage is every bit as honourable as celibacy and that both ways of living are gifts and callings from God.  Little did I then realize that it wasn't my judgment that he feared and that how critically and gravely he was being hobbled by his own self condemnation.

He distanced himself and I came to believe that somehow I reminded him of a spiritual perfection of which he had fallen short.  He did not need me around to remind him of his failure even if only by my inconvenient presence.

I accepted that I was not going to be part of the new life he wanted to build for himself.  It was saddening because I have never been one to easily leave a friendship.  I don't know why, but I have always been hopelessly and pathetically loyal to my friends.  I still don't know whether to view this as a virtue or a liability.

We briefly encountered each other a few times when we both lived in Richmond within a mile of each other but he always seemed less than enthusiastic about even having a quick coffee with me.  Perhaps as he had also morphed into a respectable bourgeois, the presence of someone like me for him was something of a social liability?  Well, probably.

For a few months in my mid forties I was attending his church.  We had some pleasant conversations but it was clear he was simply acting out his Christian duty of being civil.  Then, one day about five years ago, I saw him on the new Canada Line Skytrain, on his way to his home in Richmond.  We knew each other all right.  We both opted to say nothing.

We will likely never be friends again as our friendship occupied a past that he became eager to leave behind and which I could only move forward to inform the life in Christ that for me is perpetually growing and developing.  Still, I will always honour this Protestant Monk for all that he taught me and I only hope that I have internalized and made real and alive the deep love and faith that he so faithfully role-modeled for me.

Remarkable People I Have Known: R

She was the girlfriend/lover of the Radical Lesbian Feminist.  Seventeen years old, bright, intense and primal.  R was no blushing schoolgirl.  She grew up in New York City where she lost her virginity at the age of twelve to her stepfather.  It wasn't long after that she was on her own.  Stocky and slightly hunched she had a face like a boxer moonlighting as a trucker (or vice-versa) and a rather hoarse raspy voice that spoke with the most intense urgency and speed.  We liked each other on first impact.

She borrowed my book of the writings of Simone Weil, French-Jewish philosopher and Christian mystic.  She admitted when she returned it a few weeks later that she was more intrigued by the portrait of the author on the dust jacket and she had trouble penetrating her writing.  On the invitation of a friend we visited an ashram for a screening of Franco Zeffirelli's film of St. Francis of Assisi, Brother Son And Sister Moon.  I don't think she was intending to become a Christian, neither had I an agenda of converting her, but I did sense that light in her: a tender, loving child trapped in her pain and struggling to triumph but on her terms.  I wanted to summon that light forth in her.

R. joined an all-lesbian punk band and moved into a shared house near my workplace.  I would sometimes visit her during my lunch break.  We didn't stay in contact.  Our circles and our worlds were very different.  We often saw each other on the bus and the friendship was there if muted.  I don't thing I've seen or heard of her in at least thirty-five years.

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Radical Lesbian Feminist

I was kind of expecting to meet her.  After I left the house of the Bucolic One, I stayed with my mother for the balance of April 1977 then moved into a very cheap one bedroom apartment in an old building in East Vancouver.  I enjoyed this place.  It was spacious and had a certain charm.  I somehow knew I wouldn't be there very long.  I balanced unemployment insurance benefits with earnings from short term jobs while looking for stable employment.  But I also enjoyed myself, treating myself to interminably long walks in scenic neighbourhoods throughout the city and visiting friends.

In September I gave my notice and began seeking new accommodations.  I was not unhappy where I was, but felt restless, like it was really time to move on.  I only began to start looking when I came across a fat, modestly dimensioned rundown mansion on Fourteenth and Oak with a housekeeping room for rent sign.  I wrote down the phone number.  I moved in at the end of September.

It wasn't a bad little place, simply a room with a kitchen and a bathroom shared with three other tenants, all for the whopping amount of $145 a month.  On my second day the Radical Lesbian Feminist moved in across the hall.  We said hi to each other in the hall.  She introduced me to some of her friends, particularly her lover.  We quickly became friends.

A couple of days later RLF confided that she had just been raped.  She was calm about it but for a few days I hardly left her side, so concerned I was that she was okay.  She wanted me there despite my being a male and expressed appreciation for the time we spent over coffee and visiting together in the house. 

She was twenty then, a year younger than me, very thin but carried an unpretentious elegance.  She had been in a mental institution in another province but didn't seem ill to me.  A young woman with a ferocious intellect and almost unimpeachable integrity.  I found it interesting that just two weeks before we met I had been praying for the opportunity to meet lesbians.

We became a kind of team or unit together and together we saw that two very troublesome tenants were evicted.  One was a young man of twenty or so whom she called "Body Beautiful."  They shared the same kitchen.  He was a good looking pest, but still a pest.  He would wander back and forth between our respective rooms garbed only in skimpy jean cut-offs.  He did have a marvellous physique.  He would bug us to rub lotion on his back and in my case would linger as though expecting something extra.  He never got lucky with me.  He also allegedly tried to poison RLF's little dog.  RLF discovered rubbing alcohol in a vitamin supplement for her miniature Schnauzer.  We reported him and he left.  Likewise a young eighteen year old downstairs who loved playing his stereo very loud very late in the evening.  We simply complained to the landlady together.  It was like magic.

She stayed only for two months then moved out.  I took her room which was nicer than mine, but cheaper, just $100 a month and contained a beautiful antique fireplace that worked complete with an ornate brass shield.  The one drawback was the shared kitchen.  The cheaper rent was a boon for when in January I quit my warehouse job and began my studies in a community college.

Life kept on happening, I ended up moving three times including six weeks with my mother, and in March, 1979 (I was a freshly minted twenty-three) RLF and I again became next door neighbours in a rooming house in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.  It was a beautiful street full of mansion sized elegant houses and big trees.  This was when she had actually become a Radical Lesbian Feminist, a member of a collective working to support rape survivors and to bring down the patriarchy.

We had not seen each other in almost a year and a half and again we seemed inseparable, but for our strong mutual need for solitude.  She never quite figured out that I had at least as strong a need for alone time as she did.  We were both aspiring writers.

She often thanked me for not permitting her to spiral down into a mindless irrational hatred of men.  She respected my resistance whenever she would male bash around me.  I also learned from her, seeing as much through her eyes as I could, just what it is like living as a woman in a world still dominated by men.  My friend helped me transform into a strong feminist.  Even when we fell out of contact less than two years later as we both moved and went our separate ways, to this day I am grateful to her for what she has taught me and also how we both helped each other embrace our authentic androgynous selves.

She also thanked me for giving her a new angle on Christianity and Christians.  Through the woven fabric of our friendship we in many ways laid our souls bare to each other.  Apparently she saw something of my spiritual experience and life in Christ that gave her pause and developed in her a new and unexpected appreciation and respect, if not for my religious faith, then at least for my stumbling efforts to live it out and for the one who came to us in human form as the God of love made manifest.

Remarkable People I have Known: Taxi Driver

He looked rather like Bob Dylan, but younger, though due to his cigarette habit and poor nutrition, he appeared ten years older than his real age. He was in his mid-twenties.  I liked him for his brutal ironic wit and his equally brute honesty, except for when I was on the receiving end.  He did play the guitar rather well, and was an unabashed Dylan fan.

He was the rebel son of very conservative missionary parents and spent much of his childhood in Venezuela.  He was fluent in Spanish but rarely spoke it.  He aspired to being the coolest dude in the 'hood and the world's most righteous Christian.  He was one of the most relentless critics I have ever known.  No one and nothing was right so far as he was concerned.  He was negative and seemed at times to hate almost everyone yet really cried out for friendship and understanding.

We lived together with the Bucolic One and the Amazing Mr. M for a while in the tiny two room house.  It was, to say the least, a very intense living arrangement with at least some household drama.  Even though I didn't seem able to do anything right or well enough for Taxi Driver (but no could, really) he often expressed great admiration for me, for my spirituality, my writing and my humour.  I did seem to have a habit of making extemporaneous comments.  One morning, just as I was waking up I heard the Taxi Driver and the Bucolic One talking about some car that must have run into a pole on our block.  Just waking up I muttered: "I thought we were in a predominantly Italian neighbourhood."  Well, they thought it was funny.

The Taxi Driver worked as...a taxi driver, usually at night.  There was a friendship between him and the Bucolic One that I had no part in.  Feeling increasingly shut out I was only happy to move out after being there for four months.

The Taxi Driver and I still maintained a rather remote friendship.  The Bucolic One and I saw nothing of each other.  Within two years I was living in a different neighbourhood again, but just a few blocks from a place where the Bucolic One and the Taxi Driver were sharing an apartment.  From time to time I would run into one of them.  I was always invited to drop in sometime.  I never did.  Their friendship was my exile.  When I saw that neither of them seemed interested in initiating contact with me I concluded that I simply wasn't worth their while.

I felt particularly shut out by the Bucolic One.  The Taxi Driver and I visited sporadically, perhaps twice a year, if that, but I was already wounded by a lot of his unfair and unwanted criticism of me and his expectations of perfection.  My life moved on and his deteriorated as he succumbed to chronic alcoholism.

He phoned me a few times in the nineties, often while drunk, and usually to tell me to forget about painting (he hated my art) and write instead.  I finally got sick of this and hung up on him.  That was our last conversation but one, when I was still in my early stages of learning Spanish.  We ran into each other on the Skytrain and chatted a bit in Spanish.  He insisted that since I didn't learn it as a child I should never expect to speak it well.  I am fluent now.  If only he was still alive to hear me tell him off in the Language of Cervantes.

Just a few years later I was having a conversation with a woman who knew him.  She told me that he had died a couple of years ago of a heart attack.  It was like losing a close family member.  His life was such a dark void, I hope only that he has finally found something of the light, peace, love and joy that he never seemed to know in this life.  I hope that now he can finally know for himself what he seemed never prepared to hear from anyone: that God is love.

Remarkable People I have Known: The Amazing Mr. M.

He was a classical guitarist with an amazing lust for life.  A life support for an appetite...for everything.  He is probably one of the most intense, brash and absolutely brazen people I have ever known.  He was Jewish by birth and Christian by confession.  A smart dresser with a smart mouth for whom everything was now and not a second could be wasted.

He was a friend of the Bucolic One.  I lived with them both and another when I moved in following my less than fulfilling seven months in the Boys' House of the Church of the Straight And Narrow.  The three of us lived together for only one or two weeks.  The Amazing Mr. M. found other living arrangements and our friendship continued.  I was just shy of my twenty-first birthday.  He was six years older.

He had a strange fascination with me and I think he was for a while in love with me.  He was an admitted bisexual but because of the kind of Pentecostal Christian fundamentalism he subscribed to he was very torn and conflicted about his sexuality.

He was in many ways an Enfant Terrible.  We coincided at a Christmas party at the Boys' House of the church of the Straight And Narrow.  Just three weeks earlier I had been kicked out so I invited him along for protection.  He had his guitar with him and from the middle of the living room began to sing one of his songs, based loosely on Elvis Presley's "Blue Suede Shoes.":

Well, it's one for the money,
two for the show,
three to get ready
and four to go,
Do the Pentecostal Boogey (woo-woo)
Do the Pentecostal Boogey(WOO-hoo!)
We'll roll all over the floor,
Do the Pentecostal Boogey.

Well, I went to church and I fell on the floor,
rolled all over and I did it once more,

Do the Pentecostal Boogey, etc.

Well, I fell off my pew, rolled down the aisle,
rolled round the altar,
guess I rolled a mile

Do the Pentecostal Boogey, etc.

Well, the pastor's wife, she's really a dear,
last night she swung from the chandelier,

Do the Pentecostal Boogey, etc.

He was funny, volatile, irreverent and very sensitive.  While he worked driving a food delivery truck for restaurants he invited me along one rainy February morning to ride with him throughout his rounds.  We ended up in a greasy spoon in New Westminster that served up gigantic cubist bran muffins.  Then he showed me the music library in the local public library and I sat for some time listening to Mahler through headphones.

Another time he introduced us to a basement café/cabaret run by immigrant Bosnians and for three hours we were in another country listening to music I never knew existed.

Our friendship couldn't last.  He was too intense and too volatile.  He was increasingly bringing up sexual innuendo between us and I found myself creating distance.  On our last visit in a restaurant in a mall downtown, he could feel the growing chill and lashed out.  I will not quote him verbatim, but what he said was brutal and obscene and he tried to compare God to an inflamed rapist and that I had no busines daring to refuse him his due.  I exploded, I swore at him and he left in a righteous snit.  I never saw him again.

Remarkable People I have Known: The Bucolic One

I didn't know what to make of him when we were first introduced.  He was tall, with shoulder length brown hair and a bushy beard and wearing a rather snug looking crimson velvet waistcoat.  We often saw each other in church and soon became friendly.  He invited me to live in his tiny house near the church as a roommate. 

It was a tiny cottage with two rooms, heated by a wood stove and set back on a long sprawling front yard.  We slept in the same room, on floor mattresses.  I had never been at close quarters with someone like him.  The year was 1976.  I was twenty and he was twenty-eight. 

At first sight he suggested a hillbilly or a mountain man.  He was from California where he had earned a bachelor of arts degree, in what I can't remember.  He had a taste for bluegrass music and free-lanced fixing foreign cars for a living.  Often strewing the front yard would be found a Volvo, a Porsche and a Mercedes-Benz, all in various states of repair.

He had a talent for finding the interesting, the exquisite, the odd and the beautiful, in people as well as objects.  He brought home some of the most wonderful examples of hand blown glass I had ever seen.  There was always an interesting stream of visitors coming through the house.  He was an accomplished cook using natural ingredients and a selection of spices and sauces I often found dizzying.  He also had a wild and earthy wit.  He told me of the single African American he saw at a party one night in California, happily smoking a joint while sprawled on the couch.  "And who would you be?"  he asked him.  The African-American gave him a huge wide and beautiful smile as he replied, "I's....The Tokin' Niggah!"

Another anecdote was of a rather despised university professor he had studied under.  Bates was his name, or, "Master Bates."

One night we had an earthquake.  It was small but we felt the house shake and heard a loud and roaring noise rather like a semi-trailer truck going by.  It was past one-thirty in the morning and we had been hanging out in the kitchen chatting about things.  I was impressed by his absolute nonchalance about the tremor.  He had lived many years in California where tremors like this happened often and were generally not much noticed.

What I particularly valued about living with him, despite the lack of privacy, was how relaxed he was and his way of helping others feel at ease.  Anyone who walked in through his door was made welcome and treated with honour and friendship.

The church community in the neighbourhood thought otherwise.  They saw him as dirty, unkempt and rebellious.  The church had once been a thriving and loving charismatic fellowship but was rapidly mutating into the Church of the Straight and Narrow.  The
Bucolic One would not submit to their authority, you see.  They saw me as booty to be rescued from him.

I lived with him for only one month.  A room opened up in the boys' communal house associated with the Church of the straight and Narrow.  I reluctantly accepted their invitation.  It was of course a mistake but I knew I was vulnerable and that my options would always be limited.

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Goddess

She is really one of the most amazing people I have ever known.  I think the first time I ever really clued into her was when I was on my second acid trip.  I was nineteen and had been given three hits of blotter by a fellow who seemed to fancy me.  The first hit I did alone which took me on a wild ramble through the forest at night.  This time I did it with a friend of mine and we went downtown together for an evening of hallucinogenic bar hopping.  We ended up in a rather notorious gay establishment at closing time during the small hours of the morning.  We were invited back to the home of a friend of a friend. 

She was there with him and his brother and actually visited with us briefly before she left.  She had the look of a film star and dressed and carried herself like a supermodel.  Yet without arrogance.  She was very direct, very positive, friendly, truthful and gracious.  A highly intelligent and creative person who seemed to endue everyone and everything she touched with light and grace.

We never became particularly close, but there was a connection between us, and a mutual fondness.  We always, it seemed, had time for each other should we find ourselves in the same place.  She was very tall and there were features about her bone structure and the way that she carried herself that suggested not merely androgyny but a possible sex change.  That is what we used to call them anyway, before political correctness made it impossible for anyone to let a word slip without the thought police coming down on them hard.  Mutual friends and I would whisper and wonder among ourselves.  She, a goddess in her own right, revealed nothing and no one dared to ask her.

I remember one day when I visited her in the morning.  I was twenty, looking for work and living in a house full of intolerant Christian fundamentalists.  I myself had just found my way again as a penitent young Christian following my two dissolute years of drugs, partying and bad living.  But I met the Goddess during this time, a callow nineteen year-old whacked out of his gourd on LSD.  And she not only fascinated me.  In a way, she was me, but a higher, more refined and purer me.  Or that at least was what I seemed to be touching in her.  She was living in a shared turn of the century house long since converted to a bed and breakfast in the West End.  She represented something precious and of infinite value about myself that the Christian fundamentalists all demanded that I lose and I knew that if I lost that I would gain, not Christ, but a psychic abyss that contained no bottom.  My friendship with the Goddess was like a bulwark against this looming tragedy.

She was studying dance and theatre at the time and was dressed in a fuchsia body stocking.  She joked with me that people in her class were all trying to pressure her to convince them that she wasn't a sex-change (oops! sorry, politically correct thought police.  I believe the word you want is transgender, or better, trans woman.  But this was 1976 and we all were very young and callow.)   I dared not ask the question.

It was just months before in Toronto when I had just returned to the faith when I would meet her sometimes in a hip basement café called the Ritz.  A couple of months previously I had become locally notorious for sitting in the back, rolling joints and selling them.  This time I was reading the New Testament.  The Goddess looked over my shoulder and mentioned, "Oh!  You're reading Romans."  It was either then, or on another day soon after when I gave her a book titled "The Problem Of Pain" by CS Lewis, in my opinion his masterwork of Christianity (far better than "Mere Christianity" if you must ask).  It was a bit later on that I discovered that the Goddess was herself a Christian, a very faithful and committed Christian, but free and unfettered by the ridiculous self-hatred that often passes for piety and humility; someone for whom life was a cause for gratitude, celebration and the enjoyment of beauty.  I needed to be converted by her.

One day I sat with her and her boyfriend in a tearoom long banished from Robson since the ugly chain stores took over.  He was an intellectual, intense and powerful sort of individual.  He didn't seem to like me and during the conversation declared that I was a delicate flower that would be destroyed by others because of my frail sensitivity.  I was shocked, then outraged, then I swore at him and left.  Sometime later the Goddess expressed remorse for his behaviour.  I was still just twenty.

Another time she had no time to talk as we ran into each other in passing and simply announced after giving me a hug with her usual joy that she was flying off to Europe today.

I think the last time we saw each other I was in my mid or later twenties.  We were on the bus, where we'd just encountered each other and she told me about her experience in a local Russian Orthodox Church during a mass.  She was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the liturgy that she suddenly fainted.  She then told me that she was rehearsing with a local theatre company where she would be the first woman to play the role of Hamlet.

I do not know what has happened to the Goddess since.  We haven't encountered each other in at least thirty years or more.  She would be in her sixties now.  I just did a Google search for her.  Nothing.  I only pray that she is well and happy wherever she is and that one day I can thank her to her face for the gift of beauty and grace with which she touched me, how she helped prevent me from losing myself when I was living with people who wanted every life to be as impoverished as theirs, and how she has helped me in my journey of becoming the person that God created me to be.

Remarkable People I Have Known: Big Bird

"You remind me of Big Bird on Sesame Street", I said to the woman dressed in a long Moroccan robe. 
"What!?" she replied.
"You remind me of Big Bird.  You have his eyes."
She gave me a rye smile and laughed.  I was sixteen and we were both visiting a Christian communal house following an evening church service.  Instead of taking my "compliment" seriously (the nickname stuck and soon every one was calling her or referring to her as Big Bird) she gave me her address and invited me to drop by sometime.

A day or two later I visited.  She lived in the back of a mansion in Kitsilano very near to the beach.  Long ago this house was torn down for townhouses.  Big Bird lived in a two bedroom apartment with two levels and still her suite took up a tiny part of the big house.  She was always taking in strays, travellers, people needing a day or two or a couple of months lodging.  I don't know what or whether she charged but there was a steady and impressive stream of eccentrics and others.  There was the man from the US who hated it when we talked during dinner.  One evening he blew up at me and took his plate of food upstairs.  He was married but having an affair with another guest, a comely high school English teacher from New England who moonlighted as a stripper.

One day during dinner while Big Bird was out for the day the New England Stripper gave us an impromptu performance.  We were four: me, a boy four years my senior, another guest, who I'll call Tilly and the stripper.  She suddenly got up, went over to the ironing board and took off her white blouse which she proceeded to iron, doing not a thing to conceal her rather modestly proportioned breasts.  Tilly ignored her.  The other boy and I were both distinctly uncomfortable and went to sit on the back doorstep with only the vegetable garden for a view.

Big Bird seemed to live inside her own personal euphemism-free zone.  She swore openly and liberally.  She had a lethally sharp tongue and a gift for sarcastic wit that would have given Joan Rivers a run for her money.  She was also profoundly sensitive and fragile.  I saw her weeping openly about her failed marriage as we were praying together one day.  She also sang beautifully in a clear crystalline soprano.  Had she gone professional with her music I am sure she'd have done very well.

When she lived in California she was involved in the radical militant left.  Not even her rediscovered Christian faith softened or modified her political zeal.  She was strongly involved in the local counterculture and alternative community and was one of the pioneers in our local food co-ops.  She was also a marvellous cook, all vegetarian (till a year later she got a job in a local meat market).   We would pick much of our dinner from the backyard garden and she would work wonders with brown rice, corn meal, beans, cheese and much more.  Big Bird taught me about good nutrition, eating well on a budget and vegetarian whole foods.

I particularly recall one bright summer day when I was taking a walk on a nearby secluded beach.  Before my eyes, lying butt-naked on the sand, a man and woman were having sex.  Not approving of such scandalously public misbehaviour I handed them a tract.  The woman, while her man was continuing with his end of the business, accepted it from me and began to read it.  When she saw that it was about Jesus Christ I heard her swear "TaberNAC" in good Quebecois French.  I scolded them for what they were doing and kept walking.  When I returned to Big Bird's house she was entertaining a group of visitors, all Christians.  I told them what I had just encountered and they all burst out laughing.  Big Bird dubbed me "The Impetuous Sixteen Year Old".

If truth be told, such spontaneous, serendipitous encounters had already ceased to surprise me.  So many strange bizarre and intense experiences had already befallen me in the last two years that I had come to experience such things as perfectly normal, often funny, and well worth telling others for a good laugh.  I felt often as though I was walking in and living a dream and my life was already unfolding in a surreal landscape.  Big Bird was one of many Virgils guiding me along the way.

Remarkable People I have Known: The Cockney Jesus

Well, he wasn't really Jesus, but he sure looked like him.  Jesus talking in a London Cockney accent.  Nothing unusual.  I was still but fourteen and wandering around downtown just four days past Christmas.  I was spending gift money and I simply wanted to be downtown and far away from the dull boring mall in dull boring Richmond.  It was damp and chilly and threatening rain. 

There used to be an Eaton's department store over where I met him, an attractive heritage building on Hastings Street between Seymour and Richards.  I slipped in through the front doors, only to feel somehow pulled back out.  I didn't know it at the time but the Holy Spirit was leading me, directing me to a chance encounter that would dramatically transform my life and hugely alter the direction I would be taking.

Because of his accent I didn't quite understand what he was saying.  It sounded something like, "Do you know the direction to Seven Cheeses?"  I had to ask him to repeat himself three or four times before I heard what he was really saying: "Do you believe in Jesus (pronounced 'Jayzuz"). 

He was a bit on the tall side, dark shoulder length hair and beard.  He looked almost exactly like Jesus, speaking like a London Cockney.  We stood on the corner and talked for several minutes.  He had a big, sincere and earnest smile on his face and was describing to me with great animation of how God through Jesus Christ had transformed his life.  There was no doubting his sincerity and I accepted what he was telling me.

Because I was feeling cold and a bitter wind had picked up I asked if we could move the conversation to a coffee shop nearby.  He directed me to a basement café across the street.  We must have sat there talking for almost two hours.  What really struck me was his candor and what I can only recall as authenticity.  This was a man who would speak only the truth and describe as transparently as possible his experience of the truth.  He swore sometimes, which actually endeared him to me.  There was with this man absolutely no pretence of holiness or moral or spiritual superiority.  And, to my great surprise, he talked to me not as though to a kid, but to an adult, a peer.  He was twenty-one years old, I was fourteen.  I also learned that our birthdays were but one day apart.

The Cockney Jesus invited me to his house for dinner, where he lived with several other young men, all Jesus Freaks.  The atmosphere of the house was something I had never before encountered.  It was a very simply furnished tall old house in the Fairview slopes.  The dinner was simple but tasty and the people kind, good-humoured and genuine.  I felt as though I had just smoked a couple of joints as I became almost delirious with such a sense of wellbeing I had never known before.  I commented about this and the Cockney Jesus replied that I was experiencing the Lord's presence.  That evening I heard and accepted the call that God had on my life.

We continued in contact, frequently meeting for coffee.  Throughout these visits I felt always treated as an equal, with complete camaraderie, respect and tact. Twice he visited my home.  The first time was New Year's Eve, falling a watch night service I had attended in a church in the Strathcona neighbourhood.  The Cockney Jesus and one of his comrades drove me home to Richmond.  I invited them in to visit, since my mother was away for the night and my brother out partying.  My brother came home soon after with a friend.  They were mocking and dismissive of my new friends, but after they left my brother couldn't stop commenting about the sweet fragrance, like perfume that he could smell in the house.  I could smell nothing but to this day I suspect that he was picking up on a sense of the presence of the Holy Spirit that my new friends had left behind.

They came over again the next day, New Year's Day.  There had been a baptism at English Bay, despite the cold weather.  I declined being baptized having converted but three days ago and feeling in no way ready to seal my commitment.  The Cockney Jesus and friend gave me a ride home to Richmond.  Mom and my brother had just eaten dinner and she greeted with hostility my new friends.  The Cockney Jesus' friend called her an evil woman, but CJ was considerably more tactful.  after they left she admitted that she liked him and found him pleasant and intelligent.  She couldn't stand his friend, seeing him as stupid and rude, which he was.  She also forbade me to have anything further to do with these people.  Of course I disobeyed and my ordinarily strong and powerful mother soon found that she was no match for the will of God.

I became more involved with the Jesus People but had less time for the Cockney Jesus.  We were both okay with this.  We liked and respected each other but as he admitted he was simply God's instrument for seeing that I got saved, for which he felt tremendous honour.  I greatly admired him for his ability to let me go and set me free to walk the path that God set out for me.

Eventually, the Cockney Jesus became involved with the dangerous apocalyptical cult that swallowed up the Jesus People.  This for me was saddening, since I was able to see through them right away and made a quick escape.  He was frail and imperfect but this made him no less a channel of God's love and peace.

The Cockney Jesus has left me with a lasting legacy.  I learned from him early in life and at the very beginning of my Christian journey the vast importance of candour, sincerity, unpretentiousness, and courage.  Especially I learned from him the supreme value of respect.  I strive to this day to honour what he has given me.

Remarkable People I Have Known: My Spanish Teacher

I had two Spanish teachers in high school.  They were as different as croissants and bagels.  In their way they were both remarkable though I have elected the woman who taught me in grades nine and ten for this little post.  But first, a word about my grade eleven Spanish class:

It was my first year in senior secondary school.  My home room teacher, whom I will here name the "Silver Dollar Lady" was also my Spanish teacher and Spanish class would seamlessly follow our morning home room session.  My cousin sat at the desk in front of me.  He was often asleep in class and it was rather amusing having to poke and nudge him awake, as well as entertaining to the other students.  He eventually entered politics and became an elected Member of the provincial legislature (MLA), by which time we had long lost contact with each other.

The Silver Dollar Lady was, well, silver.  She had perfectly coiffed silver hair, wore silver toned makeup and eye shadow, and tons of silver jewelry that she bought in Mexico.  It was thought that she even ate silver dollar pancakes every morning for breakfast.  Spanish was her second language and every time my cousin would pronounce the c and z sounds as th in pure Castilian she would rudely and sharply correct him.

The Silver Dollar Lady had also a certain notoriety, shared with two other teachers in our school with whom she was friends.  They were likely hard drinkers and one girl in a class I was in mentioned running into them in a pub one day when she skipped classes, during lunch hour, getting three sheets to the wind.  They also played and took bets on horse races.  Illegally.  The Silver Dollar Lady, at the time of my class with her was in the middle of fighting a court battle or two as she had been charged with being a bookie.

What a contrast from my first Spanish teacher whom I would describe in one word as "enlightened."  She was perhaps in her late forties, beautiful in an understated makeup-free way.  She had class in the most unpretentious and authentic way: a calm, cultured, intelligent and focussed presence.  A kind, patient and respectful presence.  This was the first teacher by whom I'd ever felt treated with respect.  She loved us, but she also totally respected our autonomy.

She taught us how to work together, cooperatively in small groups.  At the age of fifteen I entered into mature relationships with my fellow students in her class.  We supported and backed each other up.  She always saw what was best in each one of us, and in her quiet, patient and gentle way would summon that beautiful essence to surface in each one of us.

This was the one single teacher who really inspired me, and I like to think that I carry with me still something of her influence.  She role-modelled dignity.

Thanks to her I opted to resume learning Spanish, properly and thoroughly, which I now speak fluently as a second language.  Thank you Mrs. Elliot, thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Lady Who Called Herself "Mom"

I have alluded to this illustrious woman in a previous post.  Here I would like to devote complete space to her.  I think I already have mentioned that the first time I saw her was when she picked me up hitch-hiking.  I was still fourteen years old.

I shall leave a reasonable pause here for your blood pressure to return to normal, Gentle Reader.

The year was 1971.  Everyone hitchhiked.  Even fourteen year old kids.  Was it dangerous?  Maybe a bit.  I got through it alive and met some fabulous and sometimes very bizarre individuals.  I learned a lot about reading people on the fly and how to get myself out of delicate situations and in retrospect I am absolutely amazed that my mother upon knowing these things about her darling son didn't lock me in a room somewhere and lose the key.  Hitchhiking was cool.  It was fun.  It was cheap.  And what a way to learn about the world!

So, in February 1971, on the cusp of my fifteenth birthday, I was hitching a ride downtown and this old woman picks me up.  She wasn't really old, just maybe forty-seven but to my fourteen year old eyes anyone over twenty was suspect.  She spoke with a Dutch accent and handed me a rainbow coloured shiny piece of paper with psychedelic lettering and the words "God Is Love."  Inside the tract was the full text of the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, the famous "Love Chapter."  The nice Dutch lady gave me some encouraging words as I got out of her car.  I was already a Christian having accepted the Lord thanks to a propitious encounter with some Jesus Freaks less than two months ago.

In the meantime the Jesus Freaks had arranged a weekly Bible study for young Christian converts who lived in my municipality of Richmond.  We met for three weeks in the sanctuary of a United Church building.  Then our leader (who himself was a ripe old nineteen) announced that we were changing quarters.  To my pleasant surprise we were suddenly meeting in the home of the Dutch lady who'd given me a ride hitch-hiking.

As well as having three grown and nearly grown sons of her own, "Mom" was a foster mother always taking in unwanted children.  There seemed to be no limit to her capacity for love.  We, the teenaged Jesus freaks suddenly in her care, gladly accepted her adoption of us and for a while we throve together.

When her dog gave birth she invited me to hold one of the newborn puppies.  I protested because I was afraid it would be unhygienic.  She retorted that that was anti-love so reluctantly I conceded and let the new life form, smaller even than a hamster, rest gently in the palm of my hand.

Throughout summer we would gather together in her home two afternoons a week.  It was easy for me to walk from summer school to her house, though it was a bit far, perhaps two or two and a half miles, but my fifteen year old legs were very strong and my need to feel loved unconditionally, even if it was a beautiful illusion, was nonetheless beautiful.  And who in their right mind would resist the compelling attraction of the truly beautiful.

We eventually lost contact.  Mom became involved in rather an ingrown group with cultish tendencies.  In a way I knew her home was still open to me, and would always be open, but my situation as hers had also changed.  I was in a new church, a refugee from a dangerous apocalyptic cult.  I needed to forge new bonds.  And I was leery of anything that resembled a cult.

I also found that a new space, or a new room had been carved out inside of me.  A welcoming place, a home that greeted with love and warmth all visitors, that offered coffee and freshly baked pie and acomfy place to sit and music to listen to and the genuine conversation of someone who actually cares. 

In a way I grew out of my need for my Dutch Mom, but also in some silent and miraculous process that my Dutch Mom had grown inside of me and already had begun in me a work of transformation towards love.

Remarkable People I Have Known, Prologue

I have been posting an awful lot about myself recently, not out of narcissistic self-adulation but simply to get the facts out while I can still get them out.  |Being childless I would like to leave some tangible record to those who succeed me that I was here.  I am also hoping that those reading these small essays will feel somehow intrigued, inspired, helped and amused. An alternative title to these posts might read "Learn From My Mistakes (Please!)

Now over the next several days I am going to write about other people, notably people whose lives, words, deeds, whose very essence, have somehow resonated with me, influenced, taught, inspired and transformed me.

I am randomly selecting these individuals, but primarily because they always seem to stand out in my memory, as though it were somehow destined that our lives touch.  Some have been like teachers and mentors.  With others it hasn't been quite so simple or obvious.  Not one of them is, as far as I know, a blood relative.

My choice of the word "Remarkable" is simply out of sheer intellectual laziness.  These persons, have been for me very remarkable.  To others they may seem quite ordinary.  When you think of it, really, every single one of us is remarkable.  Unique.  Irreplaceable.  There is no such thing as a boring or dull person since, the sheer act of being human is in itself sufficient to make one interesting!

I am not going to name any of these individuals.  I am also going to disclose selectively since I want to respect their privacy as well as having a healthy aversion towards litigation.  I might even fictionalize things a little, but only a little.  I am also sure that should any one of these remarkable persons (still living, of course) should stumble across this blog that they are going to be sure to recognize themselves in my portraits of them.

No Next Of Kin, 9

My father and I grew particularly close following the death of my mother.  My brother and I, not really.  He lived with his wife and coming child in a beautiful sumptuous house out in the suburbs and felt obligated to at least invite me for Thanksgiving and Boxing Day and sometimes Christmas.  We actually had met a few times in restaurants to talk about our family and there appeared not only amnesty between us but the possibility of friendship.  My father lived in a lovely rural community and often I would stay for a weekend for a place of retreat and simply to enjoy being with him.

In 1994 my father's mother passed away.  He began to drink again, unable to cope with his grief or loss.  We had a huge and ugly falling out which our relationship never recovered from.  This also impacted severely my relationship with my brother over whom I was already hanging the spectre of my need for an apology from him for his long term mistreatment of me.

When I changed my name this was another blow to our relationship.  He declared himself my ex-father, though we still saw each other and I still stayed at his place on some weekends.  I think that we both tried to maintain our relationship but it was like trying to keep a sand sculpture from collapsing while the tide was coming in. 

When my father took me in when I became homeless it also ended our relationship as father and son.  For the first several weeks it went fairly well, despite his tendency of yelling abuse at me in a high-pitched little old man kind of whine on some nights from behind the safety of his closed bedroom door, things he would not dare tell me to my face.  I was only staying with him three to four days a week, the balance of which I spent in Vancouver with various friends.  One Sunday evening as I returned to my father's following three days in Vancouver he was in the living room reading.  I paused to tell him about my last three days.  Grumpily he said "I want to read."  I knew already that he was getting eager to see the last of me.

Eventually we could no longer tolerate each other.  He became increasingly abusive and I still had no idea where I was going to go, only that I was no longer welcome.  When I finally found a place to live in Vancouver we resumed contact.  He guiltily gave me some money and I visited him to try to help him with his moving.  He had ended up in a very risky situation and I did what I could to offer him support.  Finally, we saw each other for the last time Thanksgiving Day, 2001.  He shunned further contact and became ill with Alzheimer's.  Then I could no longer contact him by phone.  My brother and I stayed away from each other and eventually I lost his contact information.  I do not believe that he had the same excuse because his wife had no difficulty contacting me a few times.

When the choice came down to two difficult options: my mental health recovery or taking care of my father in his final years I made the selfish decision.  I needed to heal.  In 2009 my father died.  I found out in 2012.  I went through a kind of gentle grieving process.  Since then I have come to accept that I am entirely alone.

I have incredible freedom and I have friends.  I do not have the ballast of a supportive family nor enjoy the sense of being loved unconditionally.  But you know what?  There is no such thing as unconditional love.  It is a bogus concept and the deeply rooted guilt and obligation and fear of everything that holds a lot of families together has nothing at all to do with my idea of love.  At times, especially around Christmas, life for me can get incredibly lonely.  On the other hand I no longer have to suffer through holidays full of emotional blackmail, and now I can make myself freely available to others during the Christmas holidays.  It usually involves work, and I get paid for it, but it's better than nothing.

This is a time of learning in the healthiest way possible to be emotionally self-sufficient while never ceasing to reach out to others in a spirit of true friendship.  It is never an easy nor a perfect balance that gets established.  There is something about the ongoing effort and work involved that makes me grow and become each year a little bit closer to the person that God has called me to be.

Without Next Of Kin, 8

I last saw my mother alive just hours before she died in palliative care.  She was struggling to breathe and to maintain consciousness but we had our final conversation.  I told her about a dream I had about her the previous night.  We were sitting on an elegant café patio somewhere in Europe, drinking white wine.  The message of the dream was clear.  We were now fully reconciled, friends and she could go in peace.  The next day she died. 

Despite the grief, for me it was also a tremendous liberation.  Finally I felt in a new way completely free.  I did what I could to honour her memory.  My brother was reluctant to scatter her ashes as she requested and gave them to me.  He made up excuses for not joining me in this final celebration of our mother's life.

From the stern of a BC Ferry en route to Nanaimo I scattered my mother's ashes over the waters of the Salish Sea.  I felt honoured, more honoured than I could mention.  For months the box containing her ashes was in my bedroom.  It was rather nice having her there with me and somehow it made gentler this ultimate parting.

In my mother's absence my life took a particularly difficult turn.  I don't think I ever appreciated how much her presence supported me throughout my first thirty-five years of existence.  I did what I could to internalize and incorporate her essence but now I was truly on my own.  Yet the freedom was intoxicating.

I began to finally and truly come into my own as a mature human being.  I became an artist, a vegetarian and legally changed my full name.  Then I became ill.  There was no one really to help me.  My father, though he did harbour me in his home, was vicious and toxic and from his resident hatred I spiralled downward.

Mom prophesied shortly before her death that the family would scatter once she was gone.  She had great insight.

Without Next Of Kin, 7

My brother and I were fairly close till I was eight and he was eleven.  He was approaching puberty, was immensely popular and came to see me as a liability and began to studiously avoid me.  At home he began to beat me up regularly.  Puberty transformed him into a violent monster and soon I was making every effort to avoid him.

We experienced a brief rapprochement when we both were living at my father's.  He seemed to respect me as a peer (we were respectively seventeen and twenty then) and even enjoyed drinking sherry together before dinner and watching late movies.  This respite lasted little more than a month and my father kicked me out so my brother could live more comfortably in his house.

After this he didn't want to know me.  I eventually wearied of reaching out to him.  Later in life I became more fully aware of the extent to which his abusive treatment traumatized me.  I have since distanced myself completely from this person.  I am in my late fifties, he in his early sixties.  We will likely never see each other again.  I have stopped caring.

Good riddance.

Without Next Of Kin, 6

My mother and I were always close and sometimes our relationship was a battlefield as I struggled for autonomy.  She gave me a lot of freedom and independence from a young age.  From the age of ten I often found myself at home alone.  This wasn't always the case.  She would farm me out to babysitters from time to time but I recall that from grade five on I was more often than not trusted to be home alone if for just an hour or two.

In the aftermath of my parents' divorce (I was in my early teens) I was increasingly on my own.  I got into trouble but also learned how to negotiate with the world.  She was in hospital a couple of times when I was sixteen and visiting her there gave me an early and deep understanding of her vulnerability, as this had also done for me concerning my father two years earlier. 

When I became independent at eighteen, as she recovered her own life when she left Fat Studly Romeo, she did try to supervise me but I generally ignored her and was in contact with her perhaps twice a month.  I was determined to carve my own identity.  My living arrangements were often fragile and precarious as is often the case for young people and I did stay at her place for a couple of weeks on at least five occasions before I turned twenty-three and suddenly I no longer needed her as a harbour and I remained functionally independent for the rest of my life.

Our relationship was often rather a tense dance between mother and son and two good friends.  Selectively she confided in me a lot.  As I got over the fear and distrust I had of her at first, resulting I think from the childhood abuse she subjected me to, I came to enjoy hanging out with her, visiting, going for dinner or coffee together.

It wasn't all roses and when I turned thirty we did rather badly for a while and went six months without communicating.  I rather harshly tried to confront her about the emotional and psychological impact her beatings had on me when I was a child.  She freaked out and shut me out of her life for a while.

She never did actually admit anything or apologize but we established a kind of a silent truce and concluded we were better together than apart.  That was just before her cancer was diagnosed.  This did a lot to change and transform our relationship and eventually I became her principal care-giver.

Without Next Of Kin, 5

When I was nineteen my father and I had another falling out.  For the past year we tried to communicate with civility and he even helped me financially while I was waiting for my unemployment insurance to kick in.  I was invited to a barbecue at his home where my brother and some of his friends would be present.  I wasn't quite aware at the time, though it was very obvious, that my brother was daddy's favourite and it wasn't so much that I had done anything to offend him that my father kicked me out when I was seventeen but to make room for his precious son who needed a place to hang his hat while he looked for a job.  Being up against a house full of ignorant bigots, during the barbecue, did nothing to endear me to any of them.  I left in a rage and didn't speak to any of them for almost a year.

When I was twenty, with Mom's nagging and meddling, my father and I again tried to build a relationship.  Our first few visits for me were fraught with tension and stress and I often found myself hyperventilating and shaking after each visit.  My father became intrigued with me and found me to be unusually wise for a youth of twenty-one.  He was also trying to come to terms with his alcoholism and seemed intent on self-improvement.  He never did become for me a father.  We did seem to be developing a nervous friendship.

When I was twenty-two he helped fund my college education, since this was a condition laid by Canada Student Loan.  Twice a week, between classes, I would walk across the golf course to his apartment where we would chat and have lunch together.

When I was twenty-five my father visited me, as part of the conditions of his twelve-step program, to apologize for the things he had done to me.  He didn't specify which things but I accepted the apology as genuine.

So, throughout my twenties and into my thirties our friendship developed and even throve a little, but it didn't occur to me till long after that he never really did love me as his son, never had, never would.

Without Next Of Kin, 4

When I was seventeen I lived with my dad for three and a half months.  It did not work.  Mom had fallen in love with a most unfortunate individual whom she went to live with in another town.  She said I could come with her if I wanted or I could stay with my father and still live in the Greater Vancouver area.  Her new boyfriend and I could not stand each other (no one could stand him it seemed) and there was a growing consensus between Mom and me that my father and I should become reacquainted.  It seemed only fair, according to Mom.  For two years he had defaulted on almost all the child support he owed me, since he did want to set himself up with his girlfriend and her son in a stylin' big house in a spanking new subdivision.  The word blackmail was never, of course, actually mentioned!

He hated me.  There was nothing about me or what I did that he approved of.  The conflict began the first day I was there and climaxed when he tried to hit me.  I escaped, barefoot and hitch-hiked into Vancouver where I stayed with friends.  He was a miserable, ignorant alcoholic, making a new life for himself with his girlfriend and her pubescent son.  There was no room for me in his life.

I stayed away as much as possible to avoid conflict.  He railed at me for not being at home, where things would have gone from bad to worse since he hated the sight of me.  He kicked me out in October and I went to live with my mother and her Fat Studly Romeo in a small town on the Island.

Mom and I bonded as friends while her relationship with Studly went quickly south.  Another alcoholic, this time with violent tendencies and known to police.

Mom told me to get out when I finished high school and to try to live on my own.  She would be abandoning Studly a month later.  Without help or support from anyone, at the tender age of eighteen, I took my few earthly possessions with me and went to Vancouver where I struck out on my own.

Without Next Of Kin, 3

December 29, 1970,  while still only fourteen, I became a Christian, which is to say that God as Jesus became so real and immediate to me that this could mean nothing less than a complete change in my life.   My mother, who didn't see it this way, tried to convince me that I had been brainwashed by fanatics.  Over the following year, the daily irrefutable evidence of huge and positive changes in my life convinced her that this was not brainwashing and that if she was going to oppose my spiritual vocation then she would be opposing God.  She accepted it and even in her way became supportive of my faith.

From the Jesus People, who facilitated my newfound Christian faith, I was receiving a very dual message: I was to obey and honour my parents in all things; I was to forsake all, including my parents and family and follow Jesus.  When the pressure grew that I had to make this pyrrhic choice I left what was once the Jesus People Army.  I was still only fifteen and the first real family away from my family that I had known had become a toxic society-hating cult.  I knew I was too young to legally or sensibly leave my mother.  I also knew that she needed me as much as I needed her.  Independently I made the sensible choice.

My father remained absent during this time though Mom had been laying on the pressure that I had to see him sometimes, even if he didn't want to see me.  I visited him one Sunday afternoon after church in his apartment.  He was drunk and wouldn't get off the couch.  I tried to visit while he lay there sprawled and drunk.  I cut the visit short.  As I was leaving my father asked me from the couch if I'd kiss him on the forehead.  I said no and, feeling frightened, I  hurried out the door.  

Without Next Of Kin, 2

It wasn't such a huge leap living without Dad.  His absences from home on his commercial fishing trips came to average nearly six months a year and my mother dubbed herself "the Old Grass Widow."  My brother was deckhand for another fisherman and was also usually absent.  I wasn't being hit anymore, or so it seemed.

On Mom's insistence Dad tried to form a relationship with me.  I think there was also a court order in place that he was obligated to follow.  During grade eight, when I was thirteen and fourteen, my father would either take me out for dinner and a movie downtown, sometimes followed by a sleepover at his bachelor apartment in Marpole or a Sunday afternoon drive.  I enjoyed these times.  It was the first time we actually visited alone together and he became like a friend.  I looked forward to our outings together. 

The outings together of course came to an end in the spring when he went out fishing for another season.  This was the summer of my independence.  I was smoking pot with other kids in the park and wandering alone downtown.  I was exploring.  I was buying and reading the Georgia Straight, well before it became a free rag and during the tabloid's radical roots.  Reading the articles and columns I became informed and interested in a plethora of issues that had been surfacing during the sixties: the environment, feminism, abortion rights, gay liberation, anarchy and social and political revolution, among other things.  For the first time in my life I was breathing and thriving on a fresh, dense and oxygen drenched air that I'd never before experienced.

When I started grade nine I was rather different from the bloated child that the other kids had known in grade eight.  Everyone in my grade seemed already younger than me.  Kids who ignored or taunted me in earlier grades were almost lining up for my friendship.  Feeling that I couldn't really trust them I did hang out with them a little but always knew where to draw the line.
In the fall of 1970 my outings with my father came to an end.  He seemed distinctly uncomfortable with the changes he was seeing in me and it was difficult for us to have a conversation about anything without arguing.  My father was an alcoholic, uneducated, right-wing in his views, and generally very backward.  I was no longer the child he had never raised. 

I recall one of our last outings.  I was in the basement putting my shoes on while Mom and Dad were bitterly quarreling in the living room.  This had already happened too many times.  I couldn't hide my disgust.  I rushed upstairs, stood between them and started yeinged at them both.  I was crying.  To my surprise, there was no punishment forthcoming.  They agreed with me.  They stopped fighting.

Soon my father all but disappeared from my life for the next two and a half years.  The child support money dried up. leaving us almost destitute. We still saw each other at Christmas.  Otherwise he was missing in action.

Without Next Of Kin

Since my recent blog posts have been largely autobiographical I'd might as well proceed with the theme.  The information I am revealing here is as usual selective.  I don't want to unfairly implicate or embarrass anyone and besides there is some personal information that I consider sacred, not for shame or embarrassment but simply because it is too precious to put in the public domain.

I have lately been pondering the fact that I have no family.  That does sound rather sad, doesn't it?  Well, I've long ago put away my handkerchief and instead of lamenting over what has really become a boon for me I thought I would share with you, gentle reader, some historical elements of my solitary status. 

My family life was rather unremarkable during my early childhood.  My father was an auto worker and fisherman and my mother worked part time as a product demonstrator.  I had a brother three years older than me.  We lived in a two bedroom postwar bungalow in Richmond and when I was nine moved to an almost new three bedroom split level in a spanking new subdivision nearby.

My brother was the favoured son, particularly by my father who took him under his wing as my parents' marriage was beginning to founder.  My mother and I became close as he and my brother were absent during the summers as he worked with Dad as his deckhand.  Those summers for me were bliss.  No abuse from anyone.  My father didn't always keep his hands to himself where I was concerned (yes, it was that bad), my brother enjoyed beating the shit out of me and my mother's punishments became increasingly brutal and violent.  At my new school I was bullied.  So developed in me the roots of post-traumatic stress disorder.  With my father and brother out of the picture Mom became a lot calmer.  She treated me more like a friend than her son.  I could relax and enjoy feeling safe if only for two months as Mom and I hung together at home, or went for walks together, or out to eat Chinese food.

When my parents announced they were separating I wasn't particularly surprised.  My father moved out of the house.  I was thirteen.  Mom began to try to establish a life of her own, and began dating someone I liked and coveted for a stepfather.  She was treating me a bit like a confidant though fortunately she never told me anything.  My brother was rarely around.  My father went through a particularly bad time of it and was twice hospitalized.

I was the product of two immature narcissists for parents with not a lot of education struggling to raise too children they had had when they were themselves both too young for the responsibility of parenthood being both in their early twenties.  I grew up in a spiritual, ethical, moral, and intellectual vacuum.  Being diagnosed as a gifted child under these circumstances was for me a curse as both my parents were both at a complete loss as to how to help nurture the development of my gifts.

By the time I was fourteen I was already almost alarmingly independent.

Stranger Than Fiction, Now, 2015

This year I went to Colombia in March and in May I was in hospital.  I don't think the two events were directly linked, but one never knows.  I didn't feel well when I returned.  I had spent all my time in March in Bogota which has a high elevation of more than 8500 feet.  It was difficult adjusting to the altitude and I think that some of my underlying and as-of-yet undiagnosed health concerns.  I had very little energy during my visit there though I persevered and still managed to walk, sometimes uphill, a good fifteen miles a day, with many bench breaks of course.  Bogota has been one of my most meaningful excursions into Latin America, given the many great people I met and the opportunity of really immersing myself in the city and learning about the people there.  My Spanish also improved noticeably.

In early May I admitted myself into hospital emergency when I had the same flu as four years earlier.  I was weak, suffering from chills, could hardly walk and had double vision as well as partial paralysis to my hands and feet.  They kept me for almost a week, put me through a whole battery of tests, only to discover a large benign tumour on my pituitary gland that had been flooding my body with prolactin.  They also discovered an underactive thyroid and possible cancer but this so far still seems unlikely.

On my first day in hospital, even though I could hardly function with my hands for typing or writing purposes, I began a new drawing of a bird from Colombia.  To my surprise, I was drawing very well and this became my rallying cry towards recovery.  I began exercising my hands and feet and also my eyes, retraining them to focus normally.  The following day I noticed a slight improvement.  I was allowed to leave my bed and had graduated to using a walker.  The third day, there was improvement in my hands and feet and my eyes were able to focus normally for a couple of minutes at a time.  When no one was watching, while hanging out on the roof garden, I would go for walks without the walker.  I was a bit wobbly, but doing fine and there was no danger of falling.  On the fourth day I was walking with a cane, as a courtesy in order to keep the nurses and the physiotherapist quiet.  My eyes were focussing normally and I could keep them both open at all times.  My hands and feet were much better and I was feeling stronger.  On the fifth day, in part on my insistence, I was discharged from hospital.  I have never had to use the cane again and for the next three weeks while summer started early in May I gathered strength till I again was feeling normal again.  The doctors and nurses, by the way, were all amazed at how rapidly I recovered.

Many were praying for me.  And I was praying for myself and for others.  I also believe that art played a not insignificant role in my recovery; also standing up to a bullying nurse who tried to abuse her power with me.

I am on two medications, to shrink the tumour on my pituitary and to get my thyroid working.  So far so good.  My prolactin level is also down.  For those of you, by the way, who do not know what prolactin is it is the hormone that allows mothers to breastfeed.  Six, or was it seven, times in hospital, doctors asked me if I ever lactate.  I simply replied that I have never been in the Family Way.  I forgot to add that keeping my sense of humour also aided in recovery.

Last week I was informed that my housing provider is raising my rent, by more than $100.  Even though my rent is very low by Vancouver standards, since I live in subsidized housing, when you are on a low income a jump of almost $120 a month is nothing to sneeze at.  I was extremely wroth with my managers and we had quite an unpleasant showdown made all the worse by their unwillingness to hear me out or express empathy.  These people are evangelical Christians.  They are also anti-gay and they know that I, a Christian, am completely in support of equal rights and equal marriage rights for LGBTQ people, and I think this is another reason they don't like me.  That said, after three years of low-balling my rent it came out that BC Housing is auditing my housing provider so understandably they have to toe the line even if I have to suffer because of it.  I have worked out a new budget and my hours of work are increasing now and I have no reason to doubt that I will be able to make another trip to Colombia this coming March.

I have no idea what the rest of this year holds for me.  I dread nothing and I embrace the future that God has set at my feet.

Stranger Than Fiction, 34 (2014, Last Year)

Last year, 2014, I left the Anglican parish church of St. Happy-Happy.  I had been under the impression that I would be attending this parish for the rest of my natural life.  I thought of the struggles of trying to fit in or at least be accepted by the insular and snotty social cliques there as temporary hiccups.  I did volunteer work and was basically not well-treated.  I had befriended a lesbian couple who were immediately welcomed and had a stratospheric success in social popularity there.  I would flinch as parishioners who ordinarily ignored me or wouldn't give me the time of day would wave and greet us enthusiastically when we were together, only to note the discomfort and embarrassment on their faces when I returned the greeting.

Several things snowballed but it became abundantly clear that I had never been welcome in this church, was not welcome, and likely would never be welcome there.  I took down the three of my paintings that were on display in the parish home, tearfully walked home with them and have never since set foot inside St. Happy-Happy'.

I am at a different Anglican parish now, well outside of my neighbourhood and, despite some of our minor differences, I can honestly say that I'm happy there, I always look forward to attending and to seeing people there.  It's been over a year now.

In the meanwhile I shall conclude this post with items from my travel journal.

Friday, 28 March 2014

The Bougainvillea Curtain

This morning in the kitchen of the guest house where I am staying I had a conversation with a guest who lives in Guadalajara.  I told her that while Canada has a high standard of living it has little if anything to match the charm of Mexico.  This country has a lot of charm, as well as history and culture and incredible beauty, natural and artistic.  It may not be an easy place to spend time in but to the senses it is intoxicating to the point of leaving one feeling completely sensorally overloaded.  Is it any wonder that so many Canadians keep returning here, despite the corruption, the pollution, the social inequality, the gang violence, etcetera.  As I have previously mentioned my social conscience does seem to have run ahead of my aesthetic needs and for this reason I do not feel I can return to this country, at least not in the next few years.  While I am back in Canada I will likely feel tempted, lured and seduced by the sweeter memories of this place, then foolishly return only to be splashed in the face with the reality of the toxic public water this country is notorious for.  I will make a point of rereading these posts whenever I feel tempted.
     Speaking of toxic water, during this trip I have been using hand sanitizer all the time, whenever water touches my hands, after using public transit, before eating, after using a computer.  It seems to be working as I go home in three days and I still haven't been sick (touch wood!)
     The sounds of a neighbourhood in Mexico in the morning can be very diverse, from the sweetness of birdsong to an incredible range of human dissonance.  This morning there was some fellow outside selling cooking gas from his truck, and he was out in the street hollering repeatedly, ''Gassss!!!!!!''  but it sounds like Waaaaauuuugh!!!!!, or as though he himself is suffering from gas. Meanwhile another fellow was whistling manically while directing cars.  Mexican men have this peculiar toneless whistle they use while directing cars to park that at first sounds amusing but after prolonged exposure can be very irritating.  Around the same time another fellow was riding a gigantic tricycle hocking what appeared to be tamales.  Attached to his tricycle was a recorded voice message announcing in a loud, metallic, almost robotic tone, ''Tamales oaxaquinos, calientes, deliciosos tamales, tamales muy ricos, tamales oaxaquinos,'' over and over and over again, which translates as Tamales of Oaxaca, hot, delicious, tamales, very tasty tamales, tamales of Oaxaca.
     You know, lately I have been trying to visualize the neighbourhoods I love here without the bougainvillea, and they don't seem that attractive after all.

Stranger Than Fiction, 33

In 2013 I was struggling with a reduced income given that the temporary supervisor and one of her coworkers appeared to have it in for me.  A new inexperienced worker, a male in his thirties suddenly had five clients to work with.  I, an experienced and highly skilled worker who had been there already for almost a decade, but now well into my fifties, suddenly had at best one client to work with, following a usual average of five clients.  Fortunately I was in the process of getting hired by another team that works with people with co-occurring disorders, addictions and mental health, and gradually my income began to go up.  Unfortunately, my situation at the other team has not changed significantly and I have little doubt that even after my usual supervisor returned nothing significant really changed.  The other young fellow left the team and another inexperienced and unskilled thirty-something male replaced him.  He now has five clients.  I still have only one.

Despite my lowered revenue I budgeted very carefully and strictly.  I had to give up certain luxuries, especially cocoa made from scratch every morning, because my weight had ballooned to over 250 lbs.  I am not able to calculate the metric for weight.  I was seeing a doctor at the community clinic and put myself on a diet.  I have lost almost thirty pounds, by the way, I am able to tie my shoes without asphyxiating and my knees and feet no longer hurt.  I also look a lot better.

In 2011 I finally got a home phone and internet.  At that time I was financially flush and was very weary from using public internet services, primarily in the public library.  It was often difficult finding a quiet place where no one was shouting next to me, even though the availability of free internet was a great boon to me.  It was  confrontation with one particularly rude woman in a branch public library (I had to call security to get her off my case) that convinced me that I was ready for my own laptop, which I bought on installments.  This having my own internet at home has done a lot to help stabilize my life, make it easier to stay in contact with others, do internet research, watch videos in Spanish and write this blog.

Those reading this series of blog posts will probably notice that my life seems to have become more stable and less interesting since I found stable housing.  I am not complaining.  In order to work well and to keep my job I have to lay low, rest, take care of myself and do everything necessary to keep my ducks in a row.

I did make it to Mexico again in March of 2013.  I will conclude this post with some of my travel journal:

Mar 12, 2013

I went to Coyoacan and stayed there for the afternoon.  I haven´t had a lot of energy after a touch of intestinal stuff but mild this time and I took some electrolytes just in case.  I´m working now on my fourth drawing still using the colour scheme of opals.  The worst part of the day was getting back on the Metro.  No matter how packed it was more people, especially testosterone charged young males kept pushing themselves on and I think there was a major safety hazard. There is no one around to regulate overcrowding unfortunately. And there are no facilities for people with disabilities.  There is no elevator.   I saw a man in a wheel chair get lifted up some thirty or more steps by three young men. And I walked slowly down the stairs just in front of an elderly woman struggling down with a cane.  This city is so overcrowded that people turn into trapped animals here and on the motorways.  Survival of the fittest I guess.  Not my idea of quality of life. I appreciate more each time I´m here how good we have it in Canada despite our lovely climate. Speaking of traffic, two evenings ago in the lobby I heard an older pommy Brit whine miserably to one of the staff, in impeccable Oxbridge English of course about the dreadful traffic driving out to the pyramids and back and how impossible it is to drive anywhere in the city.  You know the kind I mean.  Sounds a lot like Prime Minister David Cameron and probably also attended Eton or more likely a slightly lesser boarding school.  In which case with his (alleged) money why is he staying in a budget hotel? But here I digress.  I said to him, ¨Have you ever thought of taking the Metro?¨´ He replied Öh, is that one of the motorways?  Where would I find it?¨¨  I said, Ït´s the subway.  It´s very efficient.¨  He said emphatically, ¨But I want to drive around while I´m here.¨ So I told him in my best Gutterpunk, ¨Dude! You´re in Mexico City!  You don´t want to drive HERE!¨ Ah, the sweet little smile the hotel staff guy gave me.   The hotel was packed this morning which made breakfast noisy and very unpleasant so I bolted down my food and bolted out of here.   I have to admit I´m getting bored with the food here and kind of anxous to get home though I still feel entranced by the haunting beauty and sheer scale of Mexico City.  I didn´t go far, just did a coffee shop hop throughout the day working on drawing number eight.  Much of Reforma was closed for bikes and pedestrians today and the book fair was incredibly busy.  Everyone reads in this city, it seems, and I don´t mean Kindle.  In the parks in Condesa all the yuppies were out with their little and big dogs (all pure bred of course).  In the two parks there are dog training schools with as many as sixty or seventy pooches lying around ready to be taught to behave.  For me, not being a dog-lover, it´s hard to understand why people would pour out so much fuss and love (not to mention money which I think could be better spent) over an animal, especially given the absolute inconvenience of having a dog in a densely populated city.  It reminds me of Vancouver where there is this constant tension between dog people and no-dog people and I try to stay neutral except when it comes to vicious animals and dog shit on the sidewalk.But I still like friendly dogs and I will always stop to pet a dog that wants to be petted. There were bagpipe players in Parque Mexico today.  Two men with bagpipes and a woman and two men with drums.  No mariachi or merengue rhythms here and not even cumbia (hmmm..bagpipe cumbia, now there is a concept), just pure Scottish Highlands.  They were not wearing kilts.     Mar 29, 2013 It is la madrugada as we call it in Spanish, the dark hours after midnight before the dawn.  I went to bed shortly past eight last night and will try to retire earlier tonight in preparation for my early flight home in la madrugada of Easter Sunday.  So far so good.  This has been for me an intense, deeply meaningful and I hope life-transforming Lent while away here in Mexico City.  Some of you have commented or expressed concern of what a difficult vacation I have been having.  For me this has been only part of a necessary life-training and formation in my life of discipleship.  You see, I believe strongly now as I did when I booked my flight last fall that God was calling me here. Partly it was to improve my Spanish, partly for time to rest, take long walks, spend time reading and in my art work in cafes, but primarily to pray, think, reflect, contemplate and accept the challenges of a still unfamiliar environment as part of my own formation of my life into the character of Christ.  The risks, to my health and personal safety, have been miniscule compared to what I feel I have learned from my time here and I deeply hope that I can present to all of you when I have returned Easter Sunday and after a further transformed and renewed Aaron and I hope a more Christ-like and more loving Aaron.   I intend to visit the cathedral here today to witness in part the observances of Good Friday.  I am intrigued by the intense Catholic heritage of Mexico.  I also find it puzzling and somewhat bedevilling.  It has long, and remains still, my view that Mexico and Latin America in general, has been subjected to a particularly degraded and corrupt form of Christianity, the Catholicism of the Spanish Inquisition, and the absolute pillage and destruction of entire peoples and cultures that resulted have absolutely nothing to do with the One who still hangs on the cross in their churches and everything to do with those who nailed him there.  I have previously expresssed here my discomfort with being in the neighbourhood of the cathedral and the historic centre for this reason, and that for me the cries for vindication of the blood of the victims of the Aztec sacrifices are mingled together with the cries of the slaughtered victims of Spaniard soldiers and priests and their howl of outrage still sounds in the silence of this dawn of Good Friday.  It will be interesting to see what, if any steps, the church and the Mexican government will take to express repentance and offer reparation to the damage that still festers here.