It sometimes astounds me the circle of friends I developed while I lived in this strange house. Casey next door and I quickly renewed our friendship. She seemed to see me as a support, almost as a caretaker and I did find this a bit odd. We were very young: I was turning twenty-three and she would soon be twenty-two. I was her only close male friend and given her intense involvement in her lesbian-feminist collective it was only natural that I should count this an honour. My being a good and eager cook made it very easy for her to rely on me for meals but I didn't mind: she didn't eat a lot and I enjoyed having company for dinner. I did find her a bit formidable and scary at times. She could be very intense and I have to say that she is one of the most disarmingly transparent people I have ever known. I have known few people so nakedly honest as Casey.
In the meantime the Great Canadian Artist and I were forming an interesting friendship. She was the same age as my father and lived in as modest but nicely appointed house in Kitsilano with a beautiful garden. Her house was also her studio and she was turning out some of the most interesting works of art, be they panels of canvas covered with details from her flower garden or giant ceramic cabbages. We would go out sometimes to a concert or for dessert and coffee. She was in a way teaching me and helping to form me because she was so wise, experienced, cultured and educated.
One Sunday while waiting to visit her at home at the appointed time I had an hour of free time so I sat at the communal table in the Naam where I met Michael, a locally prominent folk musician. We strangely hit it off right away and became close friends for years to come. He also lived just two blocks away from me. We were a regular feature in each other's lives. He often took me to his performances and concerts and venues where I met a lot of his friends. He was also a frequent visitor in my little housekeeping unit.
Jeff and I remained good friends. He was wise enough to leave Diliram well ahead of me and was not subjected to the wrath of the living Dan Gardener when he returned from Quebec. He would frequently take time out from his studies for a visit and a chat. Jeff very much mentored me and thanks to him I was able to develop a good, lasting and viable concept and theology around Christian peace-making and social justice matters. It turns out that I was not the only one he mentored in this way. Some thirty years later I met another friend, a teacher in the theological college where he was a student with Jeff, who has since become a very dear friend. Recently we both learned of our mutual connection to Jeff.
My little housekeeping room, for its limitations became very much a place of hospitality and I enjoyed many dinners, potlucks and coffee and tea visits from these and many more of the diverse and wonderful folk who were so kind to befriend me during this challenging time of transition for me. I still remember this time and these people with deep and profound fondness.
Wednesday, 14 October 2015
Tuesday, 13 October 2015
Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 1
Mount Pleasant is quite a large jurisdiction in Vancouver. I had the good fortune of finding a place to live in the most beautiful part of this district, in a neighbourhood of small mansions on streets lined with towering trees. In this tall dark green house of Edwardian vintage I came to rest in a small housekeeping room. It was simple, basic and beautiful. It once served as a bedroom for likely a succession of young sons and young daughters of the immediate offspring of the founding bourgeois of Vancouver. The white walls and the bare wooden floor held the mysterious invisible traces of unknown feet and hands that had been there before me. A huge bay window of the second floor room dominated the wall and looked out to an enormous spreading tree. To the left of the window a small alcove had been covered in square blue ceramic tiles surrounding a counter, sink, gas stove and white cupboards. The fridge was on the other side of the room near the door. I would again be sharing the bathroom with other tenants but the rent was almost scandalously cheap.
I was recovering from Dilaram. I was recovering from being on call and on duty twenty-four/seven, and I was especially in need of recovery from trauma. I had been expelled, dishonorably. I was thrown out on the street in the middle of the night and all because the leader of this so called Christian community was a nasty little Napoleon who must be obeyed and whose will would not be questioned. I also suspect that he was a closet case, in love with me, and enraged by my rejection of him. Not only has hell no fury like a woman scorned. I was very fortunate that my mother was available and ready to take me in that night.
I stayed with her for six weeks, the longest I had lived with her since I first began to live independently five years ago. My supervisor at work helped me move and he joked that this would likely not be the last time I would be living with mumsy. How wrong he was. It wasn't much of a job. I was delivering flyers fulltime for minimum wage but it was honest work and it helped get my mind off of my sadness. I felt like a complete failure leaving Dilaram, and this is a splendid example of the twisted and perverted power of cults. I felt that I had left of my own volition, that I had disobeyed God and that the only way I could restore my broken relationship with God would be by returning in repentance and putting myself under the authority of Dan Gardener. I knew this was both irrational and toxic. I felt unable to appreciate nature or beauty because I no longer was walking with God. I had to force myself to rebel against this thinking. I was getting plenty of news about Dilaram on the bush telegraph. He had turned into a particularly harsh, vicious and nasty dictator and lives were being ruined by him.
I remember my first evening there. C. had taken the rooms next door and once again we were neighbours. I had her over for dinner, my first meal there: home-made whole wheat flour chapattis filled with spinach and melted cheese and chai to drink.
I don't think I have ever lived in such a simply or spartanly furnished place. I had for a bed a foam mattress covered with my single remaining Indian bedspread against the far wall. Facing the bay window was a large solid desk and a white wooden and black leather old fashioned farm chair. The desk was a gift from friends. The chair came from the Famous Canadian Artist. I kept my dresser in the large closet. Covering the left and right panes of the bay window were highly coloured old fashioned drapes with designs of palm leaves and flowers. The walls were adorned with
Chagall's Blue Violinist:
and Van Gogh's Sunflowers:
The wall above my bed was covered by a square hanging of Fijian tapa bark cloth:
I was really cool! ;-}
The wooden floor was partially covered by two straw tatami mats. In a corner I also had a make-shift bookshelf for my literary treasures.
I bought a pentagonal crystal that I hung in the window. The afternoon sun would shine in through the leaves of the tree and cast rainbows all over my room.
While writing on my typewriter (remember those?) at my desk I would observe the tree outside as the buds became swollen and long catkins began to descend from the twigs. I didn't know what kind of tree it was. Small red flowers appeared and then the leaves began to grow and swell and break out of the tender buds. Small birds would appear on the branches, especially house finches: (see image at bottom)
It eventually became clear that the tree was a black walnut or butternut tree.
The nuts were edible, delicious and hard to crack but worth it. There was Bartlett pear tree in the back yard and in the fall I would harvest the pears and stew and spice them. There were also delicious plums growing there.
I remember the huge thunder storm during my first spring there and the most powerful thunderclap I had ever heard. It shook the house and I found myself on my knees in awe and reverence before God. I knew then that already I was beginning to heal from my trauma.
In early July I lay on my bed napping while listening to classical music on the radio. The most wonderful fragrance, a heavy, musky but not oppressive and incredibly delightful smell of perfume. I lay in the most delicious delirious torpor. The afternoon sun filtered through the summer leaves and cast golden white lozenges and ovals of light on my ceiling, embroidered by little spectrums of colour from the prism in the window. The music was perhaps Vivaldi or Telemann. I did not want to move. But I had to find out the source of this incredibly intense perfume. I pulled myself up, put on some shoes and went outside, following the fragrance. I traced it, two blocks away. The glorious smell was coming from a linden tree in full flower. I was overcoming trauma:
Here is an image of one of the many house finches I saw perching in the branches of the butternut tree just outside my window:
I was recovering from Dilaram. I was recovering from being on call and on duty twenty-four/seven, and I was especially in need of recovery from trauma. I had been expelled, dishonorably. I was thrown out on the street in the middle of the night and all because the leader of this so called Christian community was a nasty little Napoleon who must be obeyed and whose will would not be questioned. I also suspect that he was a closet case, in love with me, and enraged by my rejection of him. Not only has hell no fury like a woman scorned. I was very fortunate that my mother was available and ready to take me in that night.
I stayed with her for six weeks, the longest I had lived with her since I first began to live independently five years ago. My supervisor at work helped me move and he joked that this would likely not be the last time I would be living with mumsy. How wrong he was. It wasn't much of a job. I was delivering flyers fulltime for minimum wage but it was honest work and it helped get my mind off of my sadness. I felt like a complete failure leaving Dilaram, and this is a splendid example of the twisted and perverted power of cults. I felt that I had left of my own volition, that I had disobeyed God and that the only way I could restore my broken relationship with God would be by returning in repentance and putting myself under the authority of Dan Gardener. I knew this was both irrational and toxic. I felt unable to appreciate nature or beauty because I no longer was walking with God. I had to force myself to rebel against this thinking. I was getting plenty of news about Dilaram on the bush telegraph. He had turned into a particularly harsh, vicious and nasty dictator and lives were being ruined by him.
I remember my first evening there. C. had taken the rooms next door and once again we were neighbours. I had her over for dinner, my first meal there: home-made whole wheat flour chapattis filled with spinach and melted cheese and chai to drink.
I don't think I have ever lived in such a simply or spartanly furnished place. I had for a bed a foam mattress covered with my single remaining Indian bedspread against the far wall. Facing the bay window was a large solid desk and a white wooden and black leather old fashioned farm chair. The desk was a gift from friends. The chair came from the Famous Canadian Artist. I kept my dresser in the large closet. Covering the left and right panes of the bay window were highly coloured old fashioned drapes with designs of palm leaves and flowers. The walls were adorned with
Chagall's Blue Violinist:
and Van Gogh's Sunflowers:
The wall above my bed was covered by a square hanging of Fijian tapa bark cloth:
I was really cool! ;-}
The wooden floor was partially covered by two straw tatami mats. In a corner I also had a make-shift bookshelf for my literary treasures.
I bought a pentagonal crystal that I hung in the window. The afternoon sun would shine in through the leaves of the tree and cast rainbows all over my room.
While writing on my typewriter (remember those?) at my desk I would observe the tree outside as the buds became swollen and long catkins began to descend from the twigs. I didn't know what kind of tree it was. Small red flowers appeared and then the leaves began to grow and swell and break out of the tender buds. Small birds would appear on the branches, especially house finches: (see image at bottom)
It eventually became clear that the tree was a black walnut or butternut tree.
The nuts were edible, delicious and hard to crack but worth it. There was Bartlett pear tree in the back yard and in the fall I would harvest the pears and stew and spice them. There were also delicious plums growing there.
I remember the huge thunder storm during my first spring there and the most powerful thunderclap I had ever heard. It shook the house and I found myself on my knees in awe and reverence before God. I knew then that already I was beginning to heal from my trauma.
In early July I lay on my bed napping while listening to classical music on the radio. The most wonderful fragrance, a heavy, musky but not oppressive and incredibly delightful smell of perfume. I lay in the most delicious delirious torpor. The afternoon sun filtered through the summer leaves and cast golden white lozenges and ovals of light on my ceiling, embroidered by little spectrums of colour from the prism in the window. The music was perhaps Vivaldi or Telemann. I did not want to move. But I had to find out the source of this incredibly intense perfume. I pulled myself up, put on some shoes and went outside, following the fragrance. I traced it, two blocks away. The glorious smell was coming from a linden tree in full flower. I was overcoming trauma:
Here is an image of one of the many house finches I saw perching in the branches of the butternut tree just outside my window:
Monday, 12 October 2015
Places Where I've Lived: Dilaram, 3
Leaving Dilaram was not quite as difficult as I thought. When Skip and Pam left in disgrace David and Debbie Shute took the reins. David was the worst kind of homophobic intolerant fundamentalist Christian. He was rude, disrespectful of others, controlling, bossy and dictatorial. He was a jerk. An asshole. And yes, Dave, I am using your real name. SO SUE ME!!!!
I basically coped. I was not able to continue with my college education. I had run out of money and my father, wanting to save money to build a new house, was not exactly forthcoming and Canada Student Loan did not seem very promising either. I began looking for work. The only thing that looked promising was doing yet another turn at the post office for Christmas, my third and last time there.
I lay low. I read. I did my shifts on the crisis line (usually the only one willing and available), did my time at the counselling centre in the West End as well as in a similar venue in Gastown. I behaved myself and kept my mouth shut. People I thought of as close friends began to move out. I was feeling alone, unsupported and nervous.
I was reading Canadian literature, notably the novels of Margaret Lawrence. This was interesting and hugely useful to me. I really got a sense of what it must have been like for my parents, notably my mother, growing up. I was also intrigued with how infused her books were with evidences of God's grace and of how no one else in Dilaram save those who had the forethought to leave in good time would understand or appreciate, much less agree with me.
Under Jeff\s positive influence I became increasingly interested in Christian social justice work, peace making and activism. With his help I was introduced to the Mennonite House Church where I would be worshiping every Sunday for another year, literally from New Year to New Year. My life was changing and I knew it. I was seeking employment and a place to live, both fruitless searches.
Dan and Helen returned January 16, 1979. I was less than enthused to see them and I think they knew this. Dan became particularly hostile and dictatorial. I was rudely chastised for not being on hand to help with moving furniture (no one had informed me that I would be needed and I was busy looking for a job). On the following Saturday a friend of mine invited me to Whistler with him for the day. I returned in the evening and was immediately called into a meeting. It turned out that the leadership of Dilaram and discerned together that I was a threat to their community and that I must leave immediately, that very same night, so the contamination I carried with me would be cleaned out. They quoted me some scriptures out of context and told me that my life would always be fruitless and bleak. They put a curse on me. I phoned my mother. She asked me to come that evening and stay with her for as long as I needed.
I am still carrying scars from the trauma.
I basically coped. I was not able to continue with my college education. I had run out of money and my father, wanting to save money to build a new house, was not exactly forthcoming and Canada Student Loan did not seem very promising either. I began looking for work. The only thing that looked promising was doing yet another turn at the post office for Christmas, my third and last time there.
I lay low. I read. I did my shifts on the crisis line (usually the only one willing and available), did my time at the counselling centre in the West End as well as in a similar venue in Gastown. I behaved myself and kept my mouth shut. People I thought of as close friends began to move out. I was feeling alone, unsupported and nervous.
I was reading Canadian literature, notably the novels of Margaret Lawrence. This was interesting and hugely useful to me. I really got a sense of what it must have been like for my parents, notably my mother, growing up. I was also intrigued with how infused her books were with evidences of God's grace and of how no one else in Dilaram save those who had the forethought to leave in good time would understand or appreciate, much less agree with me.
Under Jeff\s positive influence I became increasingly interested in Christian social justice work, peace making and activism. With his help I was introduced to the Mennonite House Church where I would be worshiping every Sunday for another year, literally from New Year to New Year. My life was changing and I knew it. I was seeking employment and a place to live, both fruitless searches.
Dan and Helen returned January 16, 1979. I was less than enthused to see them and I think they knew this. Dan became particularly hostile and dictatorial. I was rudely chastised for not being on hand to help with moving furniture (no one had informed me that I would be needed and I was busy looking for a job). On the following Saturday a friend of mine invited me to Whistler with him for the day. I returned in the evening and was immediately called into a meeting. It turned out that the leadership of Dilaram and discerned together that I was a threat to their community and that I must leave immediately, that very same night, so the contamination I carried with me would be cleaned out. They quoted me some scriptures out of context and told me that my life would always be fruitless and bleak. They put a curse on me. I phoned my mother. She asked me to come that evening and stay with her for as long as I needed.
I am still carrying scars from the trauma.
Sunday, 11 October 2015
Places Where I've Lived: Dilaram 2
I nick-named our community "Delirium House." Dan met a couple in Oregon whom he invited to live with us. We were at a Christian music festival, a series of outdoor concerts attended by thousands of middle class white young evangelicals who wanted all the trappings of sex drugs and rock and roll without having to actually sin in order to get them. In a word I found them all pathetic. I got hit by heat stroke and was sick for a couple of days when we returned.
Jeff moved in, whom I have already written about. He was the Idealist and later married Beryl
or Bright Eyes. She would not be appearing on the scene for another couple of years. Jeff had spent nine months in the original Dilaram community in Kabul, Afghanistan and like me was quite alarmed at the mess Dan and Helen were making of things. What had begun as a beautiful and gentle vision of a welcoming Christian community that was more interested in caring for people than proselytizing was being degraded into a cruel and judgmental cult by Dan, a rabid fundamentalist with the most hideous Turn or Burn mentality.
In September Dan and Helen were gone and Skip and Pam moved with us from Oregon with their three kids in tow. They were lovely people, kind, affectionate and simply fun to hang out with. They were very good with people who had been traumatized, gentle and nonjudgmental. The children slept in the basement. I found myself doing a lot of childcare and actually enjoying it. Then Dave and Debby moved in from the YWAM (Youth With A Mission) "base" in Hawaii, apparently to correct the "errors" of Skip and Pam. In one single day they kicked an entire family, Skip, Pam and their three, all younger than eight years, children. They justified it as doing God's work, that they were corrupting the community, that they were hindering the work of God, or maybe that for reasons undisclosed, Dan Gardener simply did not like them and would brook no challenge to his authority. So, presuming they were God's instrument doing God's work they threw a vulnerable family with three small children out on the street.
We carried on. People were already beginning to move out. They didn't say as much but it was clear they wanted to be out before Dan and Helen returned in January. I stayed on though I felt a strong need to get out as well. Still, I was curious. I wanted to see what would happen next. One of my major character defects.
In November 1978 I had a dream that still sticks with me now. I was in some kind of valley surrounded by very poor people wearing rags. We were all lined up together with our empty bowls to be fed from a trough. It was a kind of green pea soup, very flavourful and very nutritious. I held out my bowl to receive my portion. I knew that this was where I must live and this was where I was going to grow. Just a few months later I was to learn just how true and meaningful this dream.
Jeff moved in, whom I have already written about. He was the Idealist and later married Beryl
or Bright Eyes. She would not be appearing on the scene for another couple of years. Jeff had spent nine months in the original Dilaram community in Kabul, Afghanistan and like me was quite alarmed at the mess Dan and Helen were making of things. What had begun as a beautiful and gentle vision of a welcoming Christian community that was more interested in caring for people than proselytizing was being degraded into a cruel and judgmental cult by Dan, a rabid fundamentalist with the most hideous Turn or Burn mentality.
In September Dan and Helen were gone and Skip and Pam moved with us from Oregon with their three kids in tow. They were lovely people, kind, affectionate and simply fun to hang out with. They were very good with people who had been traumatized, gentle and nonjudgmental. The children slept in the basement. I found myself doing a lot of childcare and actually enjoying it. Then Dave and Debby moved in from the YWAM (Youth With A Mission) "base" in Hawaii, apparently to correct the "errors" of Skip and Pam. In one single day they kicked an entire family, Skip, Pam and their three, all younger than eight years, children. They justified it as doing God's work, that they were corrupting the community, that they were hindering the work of God, or maybe that for reasons undisclosed, Dan Gardener simply did not like them and would brook no challenge to his authority. So, presuming they were God's instrument doing God's work they threw a vulnerable family with three small children out on the street.
We carried on. People were already beginning to move out. They didn't say as much but it was clear they wanted to be out before Dan and Helen returned in January. I stayed on though I felt a strong need to get out as well. Still, I was curious. I wanted to see what would happen next. One of my major character defects.
In November 1978 I had a dream that still sticks with me now. I was in some kind of valley surrounded by very poor people wearing rags. We were all lined up together with our empty bowls to be fed from a trough. It was a kind of green pea soup, very flavourful and very nutritious. I held out my bowl to receive my portion. I knew that this was where I must live and this was where I was going to grow. Just a few months later I was to learn just how true and meaningful this dream.
Saturday, 10 October 2015
Places Where I've Lived: Dilaram 1
Those of you who speak Farsi will wonder why I would live in a place called Dilaram or Peaceful Heart. It really was a beautiful concept but where I lived in Vancouver a concept conceived and interpreted in a form most ugly. Moving there was really one of the big mistakes I have made in my life and the damage and trauma that resulted still in some ways cling to me this very day almost forty years later.
I returned to church after a hiatus of almost a year. I was twenty-two and getting my Christian fellowship fix out of a weekly charismatic prayer and worship meeting in the home of some of my friends. It was really a lovely community of care, love and friendship that grew out of the Live-In retreats of which I have already written. I visited the Canadian Bible Society one day in March, 1978, just as I was preparing to move into the elegant house of my most recent post. A friend who worked there whom I knew from the retreats told me in all earnest sincerity that I really ought to return to church.
He suggested Burnaby Christian Fellowship, a splinter group that formed out of St. Margaret's in the early Seventies, then in the past year attracted a huge following due to the widespread disenchantment with the new pastor's dictatorial and hierarchical style. While I didn't care much for the long and onerous bus ride into darkest Burnaby I was happy to reunite with a lot of friends with whom I had lost contact. Something though had changed and I wasn't sure if I liked it now. They were becoming almost American-style fundamentalist and I really should have run the other way fast.
It was there that I met the leader of Dilaram, a good looking and charismatic young man just twenty-five years old. He seemed extraordinarily attracted to me and fairly insisted that I must start visiting his little Christian community. I began to visit regularly, became acquainted with people there and concluded that they had what I was needing. I moved there in June.
Our first project was getting a storefront Christian counselling centre ready. It was on Robson near Denman. After spending my first day working there till late in the evening I returned to my new home ravenously hungry. I had missed dinner but one of the women there found me something to eat. It was then that the wife of the leader confronted me, insisting that I was not allowed to eat since I never called to say I wouldn't be home for dinner (no one had informed me of this rule). That's right, I was being punished. Through food deprivation. Signs of a cult, don't you think, gentle reader?
The house was, I would say, inconveniently located, in a spanking new suburb full of tacky monstrosities in the remotest southeast corner of our fair city. It was a "modern" brown wooden bungalow from the front but a two storey behemoth from behind. Everyone had to share a bedroom which I did not much like. There was an interesting assortment of people, or as interesting as it can get with a group of young white middle class people trying to serve God in community and through mission. They loved my cooking, like everyone else, and I worked hard under pressure to perform and ingratiate. This soon burnt me out as I certainly had no sense of being valued for anything outside of my usefulness.
While attending classes in college part time I also was the most constant presence in the storefront counselling centre. We had taken a course on counselling and I seemed to shine in this area of work and ministry. I was very reluctant to proselytize and was very welcoming to others which seemed to make me quite popular and sought after. There were two easy chairs in the front and this made for a cozy ambience and I throve on serving tea and coffee and talking about whatever with whomever came in. There were challenges, especially with people on drugs or with mental health issues but I was very open and eager to learn.
We also had a crisis line. The phone was directly across from the bedroom I slept in. It became known as "Greg's Private Line." (you will remember gentle reader that Greg is the name I was given at birth and kept until I legally changed it to Aaron in 1995). I was taking calls at all hours, especially suicide calls in the small hours of the morning. I also became acquainted with a middle aged man living in a mental health boarding home. He called frequently out of loneliness. I sometimes visited him in his boarding home, situated in a mansion in Shaughnessy Heights.
So I passed the summer at Dilaram. It turned out to be a front for the fundamentalist Christian missionary organization "Youth With A Mission", a society that I really wanted no part of. I grimly accepted that that was where I was going to be for the time being. In September Dan and Helen Gardener (their real names. So sue me!) the dictatorial leaders, took off to Quebec for four months for some kind of extended training session. This was for me and others in Dilaram delightful news and we all breathed until the following January one huge and extended collective sigh of relief.
I returned to church after a hiatus of almost a year. I was twenty-two and getting my Christian fellowship fix out of a weekly charismatic prayer and worship meeting in the home of some of my friends. It was really a lovely community of care, love and friendship that grew out of the Live-In retreats of which I have already written. I visited the Canadian Bible Society one day in March, 1978, just as I was preparing to move into the elegant house of my most recent post. A friend who worked there whom I knew from the retreats told me in all earnest sincerity that I really ought to return to church.
He suggested Burnaby Christian Fellowship, a splinter group that formed out of St. Margaret's in the early Seventies, then in the past year attracted a huge following due to the widespread disenchantment with the new pastor's dictatorial and hierarchical style. While I didn't care much for the long and onerous bus ride into darkest Burnaby I was happy to reunite with a lot of friends with whom I had lost contact. Something though had changed and I wasn't sure if I liked it now. They were becoming almost American-style fundamentalist and I really should have run the other way fast.
It was there that I met the leader of Dilaram, a good looking and charismatic young man just twenty-five years old. He seemed extraordinarily attracted to me and fairly insisted that I must start visiting his little Christian community. I began to visit regularly, became acquainted with people there and concluded that they had what I was needing. I moved there in June.
Our first project was getting a storefront Christian counselling centre ready. It was on Robson near Denman. After spending my first day working there till late in the evening I returned to my new home ravenously hungry. I had missed dinner but one of the women there found me something to eat. It was then that the wife of the leader confronted me, insisting that I was not allowed to eat since I never called to say I wouldn't be home for dinner (no one had informed me of this rule). That's right, I was being punished. Through food deprivation. Signs of a cult, don't you think, gentle reader?
The house was, I would say, inconveniently located, in a spanking new suburb full of tacky monstrosities in the remotest southeast corner of our fair city. It was a "modern" brown wooden bungalow from the front but a two storey behemoth from behind. Everyone had to share a bedroom which I did not much like. There was an interesting assortment of people, or as interesting as it can get with a group of young white middle class people trying to serve God in community and through mission. They loved my cooking, like everyone else, and I worked hard under pressure to perform and ingratiate. This soon burnt me out as I certainly had no sense of being valued for anything outside of my usefulness.
While attending classes in college part time I also was the most constant presence in the storefront counselling centre. We had taken a course on counselling and I seemed to shine in this area of work and ministry. I was very reluctant to proselytize and was very welcoming to others which seemed to make me quite popular and sought after. There were two easy chairs in the front and this made for a cozy ambience and I throve on serving tea and coffee and talking about whatever with whomever came in. There were challenges, especially with people on drugs or with mental health issues but I was very open and eager to learn.
We also had a crisis line. The phone was directly across from the bedroom I slept in. It became known as "Greg's Private Line." (you will remember gentle reader that Greg is the name I was given at birth and kept until I legally changed it to Aaron in 1995). I was taking calls at all hours, especially suicide calls in the small hours of the morning. I also became acquainted with a middle aged man living in a mental health boarding home. He called frequently out of loneliness. I sometimes visited him in his boarding home, situated in a mansion in Shaughnessy Heights.
So I passed the summer at Dilaram. It turned out to be a front for the fundamentalist Christian missionary organization "Youth With A Mission", a society that I really wanted no part of. I grimly accepted that that was where I was going to be for the time being. In September Dan and Helen Gardener (their real names. So sue me!) the dictatorial leaders, took off to Quebec for four months for some kind of extended training session. This was for me and others in Dilaram delightful news and we all breathed until the following January one huge and extended collective sigh of relief.
Friday, 9 October 2015
Places Where I've Lived: Elegant House
I saw the ad on the community bulletin board at Life Stream natural and organic food store on Fourth and Burrard. This store is long gone and was a hub, mainstay and meeting point for all the local hippies and other progressive folk during the Seventies and Eighties. The location now is occupied by a furniture store. I had given notice in February and was eager to get out of the faded pink mansion. There was something about sharing a kitchen with a succession of strangers that did not sit well with me and if I was going to share facilities it would have to be with people whom I knew, liked and trusted.
The ad was for a Christian shared house on Twentieth and Yukon. I bit. It was a beautiful house, Edwardian vintage and full of wooden ceiling beams, wainscoting, stain glass and one of the most elegant dining room fireplaces I had ever seen. My room was on the second or top floor. The closet had a window and there was a door opening on to a balcony. I was only able to claim the room after two weeks spent in a basement bedroom and at times couldn't help feeling whenever I slept down there that I was being held for ransom.
The house was shared by a single father with a noisy five year old son, a rather witty and engaging Englishman in his twenties and a young woman self-employed in the oldest profession. She was a paid escort, my age, twenty-one and if not especially beautiful was still more voluptuous than a young Mae West. It was her room that I inherited when she moved out at the end of March. She was one saucy flirt prancing around wrapped in a clinging small bath towel or asking me to zip up her little black dress as she prepared for one of her dates. I found her in equal portions ravishing, frightening, intelligent, witty and ridiculous. I was not sad when she left.
A lovely hippy couple had also just moved in with their three year old daughter. They had been living on one of the Gulf Islands in a commune and the wife was six months pregnant. I really enjoyed them and they were lots of fun to hang out with. They moved out a little too soon and were succeeded by a pleasant young woman living with a mental illness. She was attractive with short red hair but looked so vulnerable and mistreated that sometimes I just wanted to wrap my arms around her and protect her from the same horrible cruel world from which I was also seeking refuge. Her boyfriend, another mental health sufferer soon moved in with her. This man was decidedly surly and unpleasant. We met together, the single father, the Englishman and I to decide on what to do and we were unanimous. Girlfriend could stay but boyfriend had to go.
No one else would do it so, as has been often the case, I was stuck with having to perform the unpleasant task, or, kind of like how I ended up being the one left stranded and alone scattering my mother's ashes from the stern of a BC Ferry, but here I digress. I broke him the news, told him he had to go since he was not a tenant in our house nor doing anything to contribute, except perhaps his DNA in various parts of the house but we won't get any grosser than that. He challenged me to a fight and I just told him to get out now and stop arguing. He left. The Englishman afterward, while I was recounting the situation to someone on the phone, was sarcastically flexing his bicep towards me with the cheesiest smirk on his face.
I did not all but a lot of the cooking. They seemed to like whatever I was able to whip up for them, and really for a twenty-one year old guy I was really a very good and well-organized cook. While childcare was not my purview, one Saturday I did get the son of the single father out of the house before he drove him nuts. We went to a park a few blocks away, hung out for a while and then returned home to his much calmer and oh-so-grateful daddy.
I do recall only one evening there when I did feel somewhat creeped out. I had just arrived home, I think from an evening class at college nearby and a walk in the April dusk. When I came home the atmosphere seemed decidedly strange. The hall was dark and there was a lurid glow of candlelight coming from the adjoining living room where the single dad was massaging his topless girlfriend, lying on her back on the floor. We'll say I hurried very fast and very quietly up those stairs.
The single father and the young Englishman were members of rather a weird quasi-Christian cult, the Holy Order of Mans. It's on Wikipedia if you want to look it up, gentle reader. I couldn't quite relate to them, they seemed just too New Agey and pompous for my more conservative Christian leanings. I attended one of their meetings and decided that there would be no need to return.
I fondly remember one Saturday afternoon when I had the house to myself and the young Englishman. Three of my friends, including C., my lesbian friend who had just moved back to Vancouver, and we had a marvellous game of tag throughout the big lovely Edwardian home: five rangy young adults unable to hold still.
The house did close down rather quickly and suddenly. Everyone move in different directions. It was the end of May. I was the last one to leave. I brought my foam mattress and bedding down to the dining room where I slept my last night in front of the fireplace. The next day I sat on the front steps nursing a bottle of Guinness while waiting for my ride and moving truck to transport me and my few earthly possessions to my next dwelling place.
The ad was for a Christian shared house on Twentieth and Yukon. I bit. It was a beautiful house, Edwardian vintage and full of wooden ceiling beams, wainscoting, stain glass and one of the most elegant dining room fireplaces I had ever seen. My room was on the second or top floor. The closet had a window and there was a door opening on to a balcony. I was only able to claim the room after two weeks spent in a basement bedroom and at times couldn't help feeling whenever I slept down there that I was being held for ransom.
The house was shared by a single father with a noisy five year old son, a rather witty and engaging Englishman in his twenties and a young woman self-employed in the oldest profession. She was a paid escort, my age, twenty-one and if not especially beautiful was still more voluptuous than a young Mae West. It was her room that I inherited when she moved out at the end of March. She was one saucy flirt prancing around wrapped in a clinging small bath towel or asking me to zip up her little black dress as she prepared for one of her dates. I found her in equal portions ravishing, frightening, intelligent, witty and ridiculous. I was not sad when she left.
A lovely hippy couple had also just moved in with their three year old daughter. They had been living on one of the Gulf Islands in a commune and the wife was six months pregnant. I really enjoyed them and they were lots of fun to hang out with. They moved out a little too soon and were succeeded by a pleasant young woman living with a mental illness. She was attractive with short red hair but looked so vulnerable and mistreated that sometimes I just wanted to wrap my arms around her and protect her from the same horrible cruel world from which I was also seeking refuge. Her boyfriend, another mental health sufferer soon moved in with her. This man was decidedly surly and unpleasant. We met together, the single father, the Englishman and I to decide on what to do and we were unanimous. Girlfriend could stay but boyfriend had to go.
No one else would do it so, as has been often the case, I was stuck with having to perform the unpleasant task, or, kind of like how I ended up being the one left stranded and alone scattering my mother's ashes from the stern of a BC Ferry, but here I digress. I broke him the news, told him he had to go since he was not a tenant in our house nor doing anything to contribute, except perhaps his DNA in various parts of the house but we won't get any grosser than that. He challenged me to a fight and I just told him to get out now and stop arguing. He left. The Englishman afterward, while I was recounting the situation to someone on the phone, was sarcastically flexing his bicep towards me with the cheesiest smirk on his face.
I did not all but a lot of the cooking. They seemed to like whatever I was able to whip up for them, and really for a twenty-one year old guy I was really a very good and well-organized cook. While childcare was not my purview, one Saturday I did get the son of the single father out of the house before he drove him nuts. We went to a park a few blocks away, hung out for a while and then returned home to his much calmer and oh-so-grateful daddy.
I do recall only one evening there when I did feel somewhat creeped out. I had just arrived home, I think from an evening class at college nearby and a walk in the April dusk. When I came home the atmosphere seemed decidedly strange. The hall was dark and there was a lurid glow of candlelight coming from the adjoining living room where the single dad was massaging his topless girlfriend, lying on her back on the floor. We'll say I hurried very fast and very quietly up those stairs.
The single father and the young Englishman were members of rather a weird quasi-Christian cult, the Holy Order of Mans. It's on Wikipedia if you want to look it up, gentle reader. I couldn't quite relate to them, they seemed just too New Agey and pompous for my more conservative Christian leanings. I attended one of their meetings and decided that there would be no need to return.
I fondly remember one Saturday afternoon when I had the house to myself and the young Englishman. Three of my friends, including C., my lesbian friend who had just moved back to Vancouver, and we had a marvellous game of tag throughout the big lovely Edwardian home: five rangy young adults unable to hold still.
The house did close down rather quickly and suddenly. Everyone move in different directions. It was the end of May. I was the last one to leave. I brought my foam mattress and bedding down to the dining room where I slept my last night in front of the fireplace. The next day I sat on the front steps nursing a bottle of Guinness while waiting for my ride and moving truck to transport me and my few earthly possessions to my next dwelling place.
Thursday, 8 October 2015
Places Where I've Lived: The Faded Pink House
I moved from my first one bedroom apartment after five and a half months occupancy. It felt like time to move and I believed then as I do now that God was leading me. I was also wondering how effectively I would heat it, given there was an oil heater in the living room and nothing else. I wasn't confident I would be able to get it to work well and even if it worked okay I wasn't sure about an even distribution of heat throughout the apartment. More than that I felt deeply that it was time to move. I began pounding the pavement and within a couple of days I walked by the Faded Pink House.
It was kind of a smallish dumbed-down mansion that had clearly seen better days. There was a house-keeping room for rent sign on the door. I wrote down the phone number. A small Asian woman of ambiguous provenance met me at the door with her large Caucasian male partner. I looked at the room and kitchen and liked them right away. It was situated on Fourteenth near Oak Street, a "nice" neighbourhood and the rent was affordable. I would be sharing the bathroom with three other tenants.
I have already recorded in these pages that I had been praying for an opportunity to meet and befriend some lesbian women. I didn't know why I had this desire but it seemed to be the next direction I would be going in. I met C, a young woman a year younger than me who moved into one of the rooms across the hall. We became instant friends. She was vulnerable, frightened and angry, given that she was raped the first day she moved in. She was also formidably intelligent and witty. I found her perhaps a little bit frightening but I felt honoured to have her friendship. Her lover, a teenage punk girl and I, also connected well and thus began a new friendship. My fondest memory of her is the evenings we would hang out together in the local greasy spoon diner munching on cheap coffee and cut-rate pie.
During this time I worked in a florist warehouse and I was saving money for college. At the end of November C moved and returned to Ontario (or maybe Manitoba?). I inherited her room which had a beautiful working fireplace that I lit almost every cold night. The young body builder who was a nuisance and subtly hitting on both of us moved out. He apparently tried to poison C's Schnauzer (whose high-pitched squeaky bark understandably drove him to extremes) and was evicted. A boy my age, but unused to living alone replaced him. He was nice, but a slob in our shared kitchen, but we did try to befriend each other and he unsuccessfully tried to teach me chess (a game I still seem to have no real aptitude for, perhaps because in order to play chess well it helps to be naturally competitive and this is something I'm not)
I think he was negotiating depression, and he moved back with his parents in White Rock. He was succeeded by a tall athletically built inarticulate young working class lout, freshly divorced, though he wasn't older than twenty-four (I suspect that he probably beat his wife) and I simply made every effort not to be in the kitchen when he was. He moved out shortly after I gave notice and a very ordinary looking pudgy young woman, possibly a lesbian, moved in. I rather liked her but within two weeks I was already moving into my new home, a room in a shared house, in March 1978, already opening a new era in my life.
It was kind of a smallish dumbed-down mansion that had clearly seen better days. There was a house-keeping room for rent sign on the door. I wrote down the phone number. A small Asian woman of ambiguous provenance met me at the door with her large Caucasian male partner. I looked at the room and kitchen and liked them right away. It was situated on Fourteenth near Oak Street, a "nice" neighbourhood and the rent was affordable. I would be sharing the bathroom with three other tenants.
I have already recorded in these pages that I had been praying for an opportunity to meet and befriend some lesbian women. I didn't know why I had this desire but it seemed to be the next direction I would be going in. I met C, a young woman a year younger than me who moved into one of the rooms across the hall. We became instant friends. She was vulnerable, frightened and angry, given that she was raped the first day she moved in. She was also formidably intelligent and witty. I found her perhaps a little bit frightening but I felt honoured to have her friendship. Her lover, a teenage punk girl and I, also connected well and thus began a new friendship. My fondest memory of her is the evenings we would hang out together in the local greasy spoon diner munching on cheap coffee and cut-rate pie.
During this time I worked in a florist warehouse and I was saving money for college. At the end of November C moved and returned to Ontario (or maybe Manitoba?). I inherited her room which had a beautiful working fireplace that I lit almost every cold night. The young body builder who was a nuisance and subtly hitting on both of us moved out. He apparently tried to poison C's Schnauzer (whose high-pitched squeaky bark understandably drove him to extremes) and was evicted. A boy my age, but unused to living alone replaced him. He was nice, but a slob in our shared kitchen, but we did try to befriend each other and he unsuccessfully tried to teach me chess (a game I still seem to have no real aptitude for, perhaps because in order to play chess well it helps to be naturally competitive and this is something I'm not)
I think he was negotiating depression, and he moved back with his parents in White Rock. He was succeeded by a tall athletically built inarticulate young working class lout, freshly divorced, though he wasn't older than twenty-four (I suspect that he probably beat his wife) and I simply made every effort not to be in the kitchen when he was. He moved out shortly after I gave notice and a very ordinary looking pudgy young woman, possibly a lesbian, moved in. I rather liked her but within two weeks I was already moving into my new home, a room in a shared house, in March 1978, already opening a new era in my life.
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