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.