Remarkable People I Have Known: Mrs. Daft

It was the Very Nice Young Man who gave her that nickname.  Mrs. Daft was of course the lady I have otherwise indicated with the name "Dopey" because, well, she was rather.  I think that we, the Very Nice Young Man and I, both agreed on the nickname one evening when I was showing him in my basement studio a painting I was still conceiving.  It was a large canvas of three peacocks in a stylized landscape.  I was adapting this from three peacocks I had seen in a formal garden with a small black feral rabbit.  I thought the black rabbit added a certain edge so I tried to adapt it to the composition.  As soon as Mrs. Daft saw what I was doing she exclaimed like any daft bourgeois matron, "Ah! You put in a little bunny wabbit!"  This was said of course without any irony at all.  I immediately painted out the rabbit.  When I explained this later to the Very Nice Young Man I mimicked Mrs. Daft about the "little bunny wabbit!" and from behind the closed kitchen door upstairs we heard her mutter "I heard that."  We had lots of fun.

Mrs. Daft really wanted to come across as a progressive, modern with-it and hip granny.  It was so pathetic.  She would say "I like the Beatles", or "I like Van Gogh" or "I like the herb basil", as though trying to impress on me that she was someone other than she was.  Pathetic really but she was also a very good and faithful friend till she eventually ended our friendship, so maybe not so faithful after all.  But we did put up with each other for a good sixteen years or so.

I first met her at the local Anglican parish church when I moved to Richmond in late 1987.  She seemed a rather nice, not dreadfully bright woman in late middle age.  Within a year she was a regular visitor and soon asked to be part of our community.  I found her incredibly kind if controlling and eventually overcame my initial distrust towards her.

She was a grandmother, isolated from her daughter and grandchildren by geography and the professional circumstances of her son-in-law's career.  She was a nurturing maternal presence and I knew that she would be exactly what the people downtown we were trying to support would be needing.

Mrs. Daft sold her condo and found a house with Dippy in East Vancouver.  They were going to provide a house of hospitality and friendship to the many dispossessed, lonely and unwanted misfits we appeared to attract.  From the modest old bungalow with a basement Mrs. Daft and Dippy were lied to, stolen from and defrauded by sad soul after sad soul and their endless sad stories of endless woe.  They had earlier scorned my advice and desire to help and now that I was busy caring for my dying mother I was not going to be available even though Mrs. Daft had already repented of her stubborn and obstinate pride.  Too late and from my mother's deathbed I winced as I saw the community and ministry I had helped conceive spiral downward to its inevitable conclusion unable to do a blessed thing to undo the damage being done by inexperienced novices..

When my mother died Mrs. Daft remained supportive and close.  For a week she lived with me in the house in Richmond which I basically signed over to her before I went off to Europe.  She never became for me a mother substitute even though being friends with someone with her would make this the most likely appearing explanation for our friendship.  But I also think that her presence as a woman of my mother's generation did have a grounding effect on me even if I didn't depend on her to care or do things for me.  Mrs. Daft met my mother only once.  We stopped by to visit her.  She had perhaps four months left before her death.  When Mrs. Daft came into the living room my mother ran over to her to hug her.  She said to Mrs. Daft "You must have been very pretty when you were young."  I was also aware that she was consigning me over to Mrs. Daft for after her death.  Mom was determined to see that I would still be okay.

Mrs. Daft begged me in her letters to return from Europe since Dippy had been creating problem after problem for her and it appeared that their safety and possibly there lives would be in danger.  When I returned two and a half months later there was a frightful mess to clean up and police were involved in getting rid of this violent young drug addict with whom Dippy had been having sex.  Dippy, Mrs. Daft and I ended up all living in the house in Richmond together.

We survived two years more in this house together till it was requisitioned by the owners and then we found a place in southeast Vancouver.  While Mrs. Daft and Dippy remained close friends to the bitter end we still found ourselves colluding together against her, if only to make life bearable while living with such a self-destructive idiot.  We eventually persuaded her to move out.  That was when things got particularly tense between us.  I did not want a mother substitute and she appeared to be projecting her dead husband onto me.  We went through two successive new roommates, both young males.  The first was an absolute loser, the second meshed well with us and we actually all coexisted well, despite my annoyance with the way she often treated us like her resident servants.  Of course she was aging rapidly and getting frail but I also felt too depended upon for which reason the Very Nice Young Man, our second roommate following Dippy, was a breath of fresh air.

I want to take care not to demonize her.  She was as I have already indicated a phenomenally generous and caring woman, someone who really wanted to live out in full her Christian faith.  I learned a lot from her as I found her to be a very grounding presence in my life.  I learned a lot from her about plants, flowers and gardening, but also absorbed much of her fine civilized British sensitivity.  I learned much from her about how to deal with difficult people and with demanding situations.  She taught by example. 

We all moved to different places.  We remained friends.  I began helping her regularly in her home.  Seeing that I was struggling financially she opted to pay me for my services.  When I came under the care of a psychiatrist our friendship began to deteriorate.  My shrink warned me about this and that one of the inevitable consequences of therapy was going to be losing all my friends and eventually making new ones.  I was emerging in therapy into a strong, confident and self-possessed man.  This was someone that Mrs. Daft was not prepared to reckon with and I certainly had transformed into someone other than the fragile, wounded young man she had befriended.  In hindsight I marvelled that not one single male friend of hers was what I would call emotionally or mentally healthy.

I confronted her about some sensitive issues of our relationship.  She dropped me like the proverbial hot potato.  I never saw her again.  Four years later she was dead.

Remarkable People I Have Known: D

There is so much I could write about this one.  We for a long time were very much like brothers.  Me met in 1985.  He was very intrigued with me and spent an evening following, almost stalking me.  The connection was instantaneous.  With such a friendship there were also problems.  He was an alcoholic with a certain predilection for certain illegal drugs which he bought in Vancouver for friends of his who lived elsewhere in Canada.  He was a failed ballet dancer with mental health issues and a strong interest in the occult and in astrology.  He also felt strongly drawn to my spirituality and thought of me as being psychic.

He stayed in my place for a while after I'd helped him get booked into detox, then disappeared mysteriously.  When he returned three days later from a drunken romp he was wroth upon learning that I had gone through his envelop full of personal documents.  I justified the intrusion out of my need to find the contact information for his next of kin, as I didn't have a single idea of what had happened to him.  Then he went home to his father in another province and we corresponded over the next several months.

He returned in the spring of 86.    By this time I had already moved to an apartment downtown.  He stayed with me for a few months, until August.  It was a most intense time.  He was drinking with riotous abandon and creating for himself and sometimes for me quite a few problems.  I was giving intense palliative care to a client under my watch, requiring twelve hours or more of my attention at work every day.  During this time D claimed that he often saw me surrounded by light.  He often attended Snobby Church with me.  One Sunday morning while we were walking there, near Christ Church Cathedral I noticed a tiger swallowtail butterfly resting on a flower and a mother with her two young boys looking at it from a respectful distance, absolutely enthralled.  I approached the butterfly, got it to perch on my forefinger then presented it for mother and children to enjoy up close till it flew away.  Only when D mentioned that I had just provided this family with at least six weeks worth of dinner table conversation did it occur to me that anything unusual had happened.

Following the death of my client D went into a downward spiral of drinking and riotous living.  I eventually had to ask him to leave.  I believe my last word to him as he was opening the door to leave was "Irresponsible!"  As relieved as I was to have my living space back I did find myself missing him.  He had a cool dark intelligence clad in warm colours and our conversations went all over the world and across the spectrum.  He was one of the very few people with whom I could engage in hours and hours of conversation without deteriorating into boredom or ennui or the kind of sad cynicism that almost always ends up hobbling unusually bright and sensitive souls.

He sent me a letter from the small coastal village where he had moved to and invited me to visit which I did several times.  Eventually he moved back, staying in a completely inadequate room in the Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest postal code.  He had a cat and she had kittens and we were fascinating watch the tiny helpless life forms freshly emerged from a feline womb.

He went on the wagon, joined AA and moved in with me for a couple of months.  I was in a bachelor apartment in the West End.  Despite the lack of space we got on splendidly and it was with some sorrow that we had to part ways when I opted to move into a farm house in Richmond.  It was through the agency of D's sister that I found this place.

We continued in contact and the friendship maintained for us both an enjoyable edge.  We could simply be in each other's presence and say little or read privately or we could engage about politics, global affairs, spirituality, entertainment, the environment, human nature, art and literature, all laced with wit, humour and laughter and come out hours later still stoked and still inspired. D had said that he and I were the same kind.  He was the lynx.  I was the panther.

Our friendship did eventually come to an end.  He moved to Central Canada where he began to drink again with reckless abandon.  His correspondence became hostile and irrational.  Twenty-two years have passed since and I still haven't heard from him.

Remarkable People I have Known: Awesome Girl

She was just twenty-one and I was twenty-eight the first time we met.  I was visiting a friend in Victoria for the day in a local trendy coffee-shop.  She was a friend of his who joined us.  I was immediately impacted by her energy: as though a clear, pure and uncompromising light was shooting out from her.  I was fascinated and the friendship was immediate.

About one month later we met in Vancouver on Commercial Drive in a store where we exchanged contact information.  She was briefly sharing an apartment with a friend, a young gay artist with whom she was in love.  They moved out of the apartment and she ended up in a shared house off Commercial.  We saw each other frequently, often visiting each other for coffee or tea.  One day I took down a poster for a theatre event that I saw stapled to a fence.  There was featured on it a beautiful Renaissance drawing of a tree of life that I knew that she must have.  It lifted her dark mood when I gave it to her.

I didn't know for sure, but suspected that she had a mental health condition.  She tended to be easily annoyed and offended by others, perhaps very irritable.  She also spoke with highest praise of a gay couple she lived with in Victoria, especially as they would astutely remind her that she was not the centre of the universe.  She lived on a jagged edge, without support or stability.  She inhabited and lived in a kind of fine, pure air and her sense of immediate impact and impactfulness made her one of the most inspiring people I ever knew.  She was like a German Expressionist painting come to life.  She had the innocent spontaneity, joy and appreciation of the immediate present of a little child.  Living surrounded by darkness she both craved and emitted the purest light I have ever known coming from another person.  It would also be impossible for her or anyone to live for very long on such a pure high frequency.

She spent time in a homeless shelter to which I was then professionally connected.  She dressed in white and danced around proclaiming that she is an angel.  We eventually lost contact and I saw nor heard nothing of her for many years to come.

I didn't see Awesome Girl again until 2007.  She was a client of the mental health team where I worked.  We worked together one to one for a few weeks.  She had gained a lot of weight and her medications had slowed her considerably, but there was still that beautiful light trapped behind the medicated mask that her face had become.  Our visits were enjoyable, if professional.  Soon she asked to end our arrangements.  She never explained why.

I will always remember Awesome Girl as a young woman and as a middle aged matron.  Same person, same mind, same light.  No longer wild though the light whirls about still inside her head like a wild solar flare.  I only hope that she doesn't burn herself on her flame.

Remarkable People I Have Known: Kanga And Baby Roo

She answered the front door when we came to look at the basement apartment.  It was a good size, nicely done and very very cheap.  She had a little girl, two years old, she was a single mother.  Even though our first few contacts were tentative, even a bit officious in flavour, I found that I liked her right away.  There was something very reserved and understated about her, but also a gentle and incisive intelligence.  I hoped that we would be friends.

We did become friends, quickly, once I got rid of my destructive roommate and his sad lost friends and cleaned and restored the apartment and proved myself to be a responsible and coveted tenant.  For the five years I was there we would chat and visit casually in her apartment upstairs or mine in the basement.  Her child and her little cousin next door were also visitors and at times I babysat.

She was a journalist by training and when I lived downstairs from her she taught English as a second language.  She was from Sweden but her English was flawless with but a hint of an accent.  I had some rather unflattering nicknames for her little girl: Baby Storm Trooper, Little Miss Logging Boots, and Miss Six Point Eight On The Richter Scale.  She was a very energetic toddler and play dates with her little cousin were for me akin to living downstairs from a very busy bowling alley, or perhaps an eternal buffalo stampede.

We otherwise got along well and learned more or less to co-exist with each other's noise.  She liked my taste in music and my singing and I learned to appreciate the daily noises of her and her daughters as a kind of daily rhythm of normal life.  I would hear Mommy go to the bathroom upstairs and pee with rather a robust piddle followed by her little girl with her little girl piddle.  All part of normal life.  I would hear in the evening Mommy's big gargle followed by her little girl's little gargle.  One day when they were visiting me downstairs the little girl ran upstairs to use the bathroom.  Little girl piddle followed by a flushing sound rather like being right underneath Niagara falls.  My friend/landlady said with a shocked expression on her face, "You mean this is what you have to endure listening to every time we flush our toilet."  I replied benignly "Oh, that's nothing.  You should hear yourselves when you gargle!"

She came to appreciate and respect my spirituality and my active Christian faith and we had many long and meaningful conversations.  I became to her a kind of spiritual adviser.  Her mother, a glamorous sixty-something from Sweden, while visiting, thanked me in flawless English for being there and being supportive and in a sense protective of her daughter and granddaughter.  I could only reply with an ironic smirk "Oh yes, Greg Greenlaw (my former name), guardian of female virtue."

The last year was less than idyllic.  As sometimes happens with attractive single mothers she fell in love with a man and I found myself getting rather annoyed with the sound of their energetic rutting just upstairs from my living room.  Her boyfriend was a churlish boor, apparently jealous of me (why, I still do not know) and began to threaten me.  He moved in.  I moved out.

Kanga came by to visit me several months later in my new apartment downtown.  We had an enjoyable visit.  She apologized on the late side for her awful boyfriend, whom she had recently dumped.  We never saw each other again.  I have always harboured the hope of seeing her again.  She was a rare and pure soul and her kind are not common.

Remarkable People I Have Known: K

When I first met K. I would have been nineteen and I think he was already twenty-eight.  Later he claimed to have never remembered meeting me then.  At that time with his partner he sold Persian carpets in a loft on Robson Street, long before it was degraded to a mega-mall full of chain stores.  He must have made a deep impression on me because a year later, back in Vancouver from six months in Toronto, I decided to contact him.  I found his rug store, re-introduced myself and we passed a couple of hours chatting over a pot of tea seated on one of his carpets.  I cannot remember all of what we discussed but there was a sense that we needed to continue this conversation, and indeed we did end up continuing the same conversation for the next thirteen years.

He was quite promiscuous but accepted that there would be nothing sexual between us and we were easily able to move to a mutually acceptable level of friendship.  We didn't see each other all the time, more sporadically.  During this time I was twenty years old and living in that communal house full of intolerant fundamentalists.  Seeing K for me was like taking a break and breathing fresh air.  He was also a Buddhist.

I would say he was very kind, gentle, complex, generous and very, very reserved.  He had an air of passivity but maintained an iron grip of control over everything in his sphere.  Possible owing to his Buddhist practice I found him to be one of the calmest and most rational persons I had ever known.

The following year he was managing the carpet department of Eaton's.  It was summer, I was unemployed and enjoying it so often, while "looking for work" I would stop in to visit.  He got me in touch with a friend of his who ran a construction company, giving me ten days of back-breaking work.  Another time we coincided in a fancy café that used to be on the edge of what is now called Yaletown.  He had two young friends with him who quickly befriended me.  We later went to his apartment for coffee and drinks.

He disappeared for a few years when he moved to New York City, where in one of the steam baths he caught AIDS.  We re-encountered in 1983.  He and his boyfriend became good and close friends.  He lived in different interesting places, usually warehouses converted to studios and was in the habit of adopting artists who worked their craft in these places.  I phoned him one day to wish him a Merry Christmas, since it was Christmas Day.  He said he hardly noticed that it was Christmas but then held me captive on the phone for the next two hours.  I did not expect him to admit that he was feeling perhaps a little lonely and needy?

When the Community of the Transfiguration was just in its beginnings, I encountered him again, now quite frail from his AIDS condition.  We spent a lot of time together and we became auxiliary members of his AIDS society, till we were drummed out for being a little too Christian for their liking.

He moved away to one of the Gulf Islands.  Soon after a mutual acquaintance informed me of his death.  It was like grieving the loss of a close brother.  Especially given that just a couple of months before he invited us to his home for dinner.  That was also the day of my brother's wedding.  Not being close to my brother, and given that we didn't like each other, I skipped the wedding to have dinner with K, knowing also that I wouldn't be seeing him again.  My brother never accepted my excuse, perhaps especially because K had been to me ten times the brother that he ever was.  Such is family, eh?

Remarkable People I Have Known: Torn Between Two Genders

He was still sixteen when I saw him singing and playing his guitar on the sidewalk.  The lyrics were Christian, it was his own material and he was good.  We inevitably ended up talking to each other and became friends.  I was still living next door to the Radical Lesbian Feminist in the house full of creative eccentrics.  I had recently turned twenty-four.

He lived with his single mother, an alcoholic, and sister in the suburbs.  He was precociously independent, Christian and gay.  He soon was frequently staying with me and we became quite inseparable in an enmeshed fraternal sense.  We also were fervent about our Christian discipleship, but still both damaged and highly sensitive and absolutely frustrated that it was so difficult to penetrate thick-headed church people with the essential reality of the Gospels.

As we were soon practically living together and my place was tiny we found a spacious apartment in a house.  Not a wise move.  He was already moving in a bad direction and soon became addicted to drugs while subsidizing his habit as a street prostitute.  He became disruptive and impossible to live with and I ended up kicking him and his friends out of the apartment.  He became a transvestite hooker and soon was living as a woman.  We lost all contact with each other. 

Six years later we encountered each other in a café and visited a few times.  He had taken up tarot cards and gave me a couple of readings.  Nothing special but still very intriguing.  He also had a huge interest in Chinese astrology which he taught me.  Then he suddenly turned unpleasant and disappeared again.

He played in a couple of rock bands and seemed apparently determined to stay clean.  We ran into each other yet again four years later.  He wanted to apologize and ask forgiveness for the grief he had caused me.  I accepted and also considered that he was doing this as part of his twelve step program.  I still took the apology seriously but I also considered the source.  The last time we talked to each other, aside from a few chance encounters over the next six years or so, I told him in a coffee shop that my mother was dying.  As he left he said "Have a nice death."  I felt like killing him.

I still often came across him in the area.  He was almost always with the same friends and they appeared to be a kind of support group.  I imagined that he was suffering but I had no idea from what.  Neither would he tell me anything except for a civil hello.

I learned of his death a few months after the fact from a mutual acquaintance.  AIDS.  I wasn't surprised and rather kicked myself for not figuring it out sooner.  I only wished at the time that I could have seen him just one day before his passing, if only to tell him goodbye with these four sweet little words: "Have a nice death!"

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Famous Canadian Artist

Yes I had for a friend a Famous Canadian Artist.  This was long before I even conceived of myself as being capable of better than a few rather good drawings in my sketchbook.  I really aspired to be a writer.  I struggled at a few badly done short stories and dreamed of writing a novel.  But an artist?

I first met her at church.  I was just shy of my twenty-third birthday.  It was a small, eccentric gathering of highly creative and intellectual Mennonites within an old East Vancouver heritage house that several of them owned and lived in together.  There was an antique church organ crammed into the living room full of art objects and curios.

I thought she was much younger than her fifty-one years and even then there were many flattering press reviews about her and her art, always mentioning her youthfulness.  I said nothing but began to observe her carefully only to find that she really did look fifty on a good day.  She wore interesting clothes, many of them sewn by her friend from the church (the artist didn't live in the house but her friend, later her life partner, did).  They both dressed alike, suggesting Medieval and Renaissance fabrics slightly modernized.  Her friend never liked me.  Now that they are a lesbian pair I assume there might be jealousy.

The Famous Canadian Artist was also a talented musician and played her violin in our church services as well as commanding a fine soprano voice.  She had a tiny grey poodle cross, a delicate, gentle and affectionate little dog who loved to be petted and cuddled.  She also suggested to me anyway Dorothy Parker's little poodle whom she tellingly named "Cliché."

The Famous Canadian Artist at first appeared to flirt with me, playing a kind of coy hide-and-seek behind a stairway curtain.  I felt a little disturbed about this, not caring about becoming the fancy boy of a woman more than twice my age.  Somehow a friendship did kindle between us.  She invited me to her openings, to a concert, to dinner, to chat.  She was witty, very bright, well-read, highly cultured and very down to earth and practical.  I loved talking with her and our conversations were always varied, diverse, interesting and taking every possible direction.  She had a strong sense of visual beauty and aesthetic, naturally, being an artist, the only artist I knew who made not only a living at art but lived very well and comfortably.

She loved my concept for an onion soup party I was going to hold in my little housekeeping room.  I had each guest provide me with an onion.  I did the rest.  It was delicious and my little home was full of warmth and laughter as I fit four (maybe five?) adults and a child together.

I stayed in this church for exactly a year.  Then I moved on to an evangelical fellowship where I lasted for maybe another year.  I never heard again from the Famous Canadian Artist.  I had initiated most of our contact, as I appeared to do at times with almost everyone, and I determined that if FCA was serious about keeping my friendship then she could make the effort to pick up the phone and call me at least once.  I never heard from her again.

I did bump into her and her friend some fourteen years later.  I was painting then and was just finishing a commission that would pay for my first trip to Costa Rica. When I showed her some photos she said "Oh, birds," with just a hint of cultured disdain in her voice.  She was by this time living with her partner/friend in the area.  I asked if we could stay in contact.  Reluctantly she gave me her phone number while protesting that they get unwanted contact from all kinds of people.  I replied I guess fame has its price to pay."  They didn't care for my little insult and I never called her.

We ended up again in the same church, an Anglican parish in her neighbourhood.  The rector liked neither me nor my art.  Neither did FCA.  She simply recommended that I go to a "Nice" art gallery with my "Nice" art.  We coexisted in this church for not quite a year.  She was of course a coveted parishioner, being a Famous Canadian Artist, and I had just survived homelessness and was reeling from symptoms of PTSD so I didn't exactly have any rank to pull.  After months of snubbing me the FCA approached me one day at the end of the service.  I was sitting with my head bowed in quiet prayer, wanting to be left alone, feeling hated and unwanted in this cauldron full of vicious hypocrites.  I told her to please leave me alone because I wasn't feeling well.  She reeled back as though I had punched her.

We never spoke to her again.  The last couple of times I saw the two old women I pointedly ignored them.  They are both well into their eighties now.  I have concluded that she is a third-rate painter and that she owes her fame to her good connections and schmoozing skills.  I don't think we'll ever see each other again.