A Walk on the Mild Side

I woke up this morning to a beautiful day, and though I had lots of things I had to get done today, what I really wanted to do was go for a walk around the park next door to enjoy the last moments of golden light and shirtsleeve weather before autumn refuses to release its hold. I've been so busy since moving in, and I've been longing to explore the neighbourhood more.

But I didn't. Deadlines are crushing in, I have way too much going on and am getting so little done because I am absolutely wiped. So I got up and started my day.

Since last night, though, I have been feeling very yukky. So tired I feel ill, and so ill I feel very tired. Naturally, this is a perfect combination for neither being able to sleep nor able to work. After dragging myself around and feeling increasingly unwell, trying to figure out how to stop feeling sick to my stomach and get some real work done, I phoned Susan, She Who Knows All (except when I know better). After a careful assessment she prescribed rest.

So I lay down for almost a minute, in which time I felt even worse because of the pressure on my body, and decided, what the heck. One little walk. How long can it take to walk around the park?

A very long time, apparently.

I started by going into the courtyard, something I seldom do because I still feel like it isn't my yard to walk in, and I smelled the ripening pears where they hung unblemished from the tree. Then I went across the yard to the extended care wing, because my neighbour told me today that there is a chapel in there that we can use, and I wanted to check it out. I eventually found a way in, and was shown the way to the chapel (no holy water in the fonts!) where I spent a few minutes looking around and then sitting quietly. Unfortunately sitting did not help my nausea, so I travelled on.

Out to the front boulevard where the bus was pulling out with residents seated, on their way to some adventure. Past the gardeners mowing lawns and bagging up leaves. Off the sidewalk and onto fresh green grass, speckled with late flowering plants. I was already in a different world. Such a pretty park, undulating up from one playing field to another, gulls squawking as they landed on the towering playing-field lamps. The upper field extends out to a lane behind a row of houses, several with old garages or tiny caravans. Tall trees grow across the rising land from west to east, and more fringe the fields. In the lower part of the park on the eastern side, instead of a playing field there are well-ripened, raised community garden beds. I walked among them to enjoy the company of the plants and earth and wood and string, making mental notes of things I might do in my own garden next spring.

A hummingbird, smaller than an Anna's so I am guessing a Rufous, landed in a sunflower next to me. When the hummingbird left a chickadee took its place, burrowing its face into the seedhead for a coveted treat. Mental note: plant sunflowers. I don't want to eat them necessarily, but I do want birds in my yard.

One of the plots belongs to a Montessori school group--a new revelation. The Italian Cultural Centre is not only responsible for starting the community garden (whose first rule is "Be excellent with each other") but it has a Montessori school (0-grade 7) within its walls.

Having spent this wonder-filled time in the park, I was feeling less sick. I stopped a woman to ask if she recognized the structure I was looking at. Was it a kiln? Was it a pizza oven? (It was a pizza oven.) She had just picked up her Fresh Roots vegetables for the week from the Italian Cultural Centre. These are grown by students at Van Tech, just up the street. You pay in January and pick up your veg all summer long (till 10 October). The kids are totally into it and she figured it worked out to about $20 a week for veg. Not organic, she thought. But good. She also buys her grains from a farm in Agassiz--whole, organically grown grains--on the same basis: pay in January, pick up through the summer. If the farmer loses the whole crop to bad weather, you lose your contribution. Fair enough. (This applies in all three cases. Makes the whole food thing more real, it seems to me.) She has the same deal with a woman at Trout Lake Farmer's Market. Unfortunately my memory couldn't hold all of that.

By the time we were done talking I felt gross again. But I still took time to look at Women’s Work : Reflections upon the History of Women in Textile, the exhibition on at the museum in the Italian Cultural Centre from 12 September to 30 December. There are a couple of pieces I quite like, and most of them I at least enjoyed contemplating. And a few more minutes to peek in at the Bocce rink and the Osteria (both closed) at the Centre. This is such a happening place, and so much of it comes down to the Italian Cultural Centre. Who'd have thunk it?

So here I am. Feeling vile and not having accomplished a thing today, with those deadlines not getting any further away. But what a lovely walk I had, and how amazing to live in such a place, where there is beauty right outside, and so many threads between the people here--a real community.



Images: Beaconsfield Park, City of Vancouver site.
Il Forno Community Oven, Italian Cultural Centre site.

Minstrel, Play Those Gay Melodies

Yesterday I heard in my head a song I knew in the '70's. (Gather round, ye young ones!)

When I was a child the word homosexual was loaded with bad associations. Homosexuals (all of whom seemed to be men) were either bad, evil, or mentally ill; either way, they were not people anyone knew or sympathized with, let alone people any of us might be. Love songs were exclusively about heterosexual love. The gay world, once learned of, was portrayed in depressing movies like The Boys in the Band (which I got my mum to take me to at twelve years of age--Dad refused to drive us so we took the bus).

My interest in the subject eventually revealed itself to be more personal than theoretical. This complicated matters a great deal.

It was a lonely, scary, dangerous time, and opportunities for connection were very rare.

Then 1977 came along. I moved back to Vancouver from Ontario and discovered the women's movement, and a little known (entirely unknown outside of that community) record company called Olivia Records. They were women musicians and music producers, and feminists, and mostly lesbian.* For the first time in my life I heard songs--wonderful, often beautiful songs--celebrating women loving women. They touched my heart. They enshrined my identity as a meaningful, real, creative, joyous, worthwhile thing. And very rarely, they were really funny.

Such was this song, one of the two or three from that era that returns now and then and whispers in my ear.

Ladies, gentlemen, and humans of other gender identities, I give you Meg Christian’s "Here Come The Lesbians."

Finally, I'd like to offer you a more recent rendition of thesong, introduced warmly with some of the history I am touching on here and participated in enthusiastically by the attending crowd.

Enjoy, my friends. For we are all one.

*At the time, you were either one or the other. Bisexuals, once they surfaced onto my radar, were generally held in low esteem by gays and lesbians and were seen by most of the straight community either as untouchables, like homosexuals, or as kinky sexual opportunities. So I assumed I must be a lesbian, and over time had to go through an even more painful second coming-out, as bisexual. Bisexuals REALLY weren't okay among lesbian feminists. They slept with the enemy. They were blamed for AIDS. I lost a whole community when I came out as bisexual, which had not happened when I came out as a lesbian.

Related Article: "How Should We Archive the Soundtrack to 1970s Feminism?" by Bonnie J. Morris, Smithsonian Magazine, March 30 2018.

Image: Casey in 1977 (ish), by Vida Boyd Kindon.