The Czech Embassy 1

Eccentric would be an understatement.  He was already in his late forties but looked twenty years younger with the body of an Olympic swimmer and a proclivity for tight and revealing clothes.  He filled some of the worst stereotypes of a successful immigrant.  As a teenager he came to Canada with his family, refugees from the Soviet winter that ended the Prague Spring of 1968.  He had become a successful slumlord.  He somehow scraped together the money to purchase an older apartment building on the corner of Thirty-Third and Quebec (so sue me Richard!) and converted each unit into a small cluster of tiny bedrooms, renting out each bedroom to international students, new Canadians, to anyone too new or too disadvantaged to understand, fight for or even care about their rights as tenants.

I didn't live in that building, but in another one block away on Main Street.  He had made a special arrangement with the building owner and rented a two bedroom unit which he promptly converted into a three bedroom with the kitchen and bathroom being shared between the tenants.  Richard occupied the living room which now had a door on it.  I and a fellow from Slovakia rented each of the two bedrooms.

I never, before my very recent experience of homelessness would have imagined my living in this kind of situation.  But I was desperate for housing, for a room of my own, for a door to close on the rest of the world with no fear of being turfed out anywhere for having outlived my welcome.  I felt like I'd gone to sleep and woken up in heaven.

I moved there at the end of April during the chilly spring of 1999.  Everything was blooming late.  My first evening, a Friday, I walked across the nearby Mountainview Cemetery to the Mennonite Central Committee Thrift Store on Fraser Street where I purchased a plate, a spoon, a fork and a coffee maker.  Save for the coffee maker these were more symbolic items than actually needed by me.  I rescued my beautiful Laurel Burch mug  

Here are three separate angles of my beautiful coffee mug all of which I just pulled off of Google images.  I still have it and yes I still use it every day.

That morning I woke at dawn and lay in my bed (a mattress on the floor) and gazed spellbound at the coppery blood red light of the rising sun shining through the blinds and casting its pattern on the wall.  I walked in the cemetery, then following breakfast walked on Quebec Street surrounded by the newly blooming flowering crab trees, suspended in a state of exultant awe of the mercy that God had visited on me.