Lloyd - On National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

My writing group gathered today and wrote from prompts that were to help us think about Indigenous folk on this National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. One prompt I had offered was “The First Time I Ever Met an Indian.” I chose to phrase it that way because we are all on the old side, and when we were young that is the word we used for First Nations people, so it might trigger memories. This is what I wrote. 

I'm not sure what was the first time I ever met an Indian, but I think probably my first native friend was Lloyd Gladstone. He was certainly the first gay Indian I met, and although I was not yet out of the closet as a bisexual woman, I was very grateful for that attribute in him. 

Lloyd was a lovely man. Soft-spoken, soft, self-deprecating smile, kind and gentle. Also very smart. I was 14 when I met him, and he was somewhere around twenty (with a much older man as his boyfriend). I ran away at 13 and had returned to very different circumstances than the ones I left. I had much more freedom, and I stayed over at my boyfriend's house in the West End frequently, a recently condemned house with mushrooms growing on the walls in the kitchen from the leakage down from the toilet. We were a band of hippies, only one of us working, until Lloyd appeared. I was madly in love with the beautiful Peter, his long flowing hair and his wide knowledge of literature and civilisation, his deep intelligence and terribly broken self, his habit of getting addicted to heroin. 

Lloyd told me one day that I was smarter than Peter, that I could have a better life, could value myself more deeply than I had ever guessed I might.

Many years later when a friend of mine was in rehab I visited him and to my astonishment, there was Lloyd, his mentor. Lloyd himself had suffered greatly in his youth and struggled with alcohol addiction all his life. At the time, he was several years clean and working for Together We Can. It was such a joy to reconnect with him and to see him doing so well.

I was talking with Lloyd in a park one day a few years later, when he had taken back to drink, and a First Nations woman came over to speak with him. She was much younger than him and was reverent in her approach, seeing him not just as gay and hurt and wonderful Lloyd, but a well respected and deeply loved elder.

The last time I saw Lloyd, he was living in the Downtown Eastside above the Ovaltine café. He wasn't drinking at the time, but he was wretchedly poor and his health was not good. He wasn't receiving enough money every month to feed himself, and he was ill and fragile. I bought him lunch, a bit worried about offering because I didn't want to offend him. He allowed me to give that to him, and I was very grateful. We ate at the Ovaltine and talked a long time. He could only eat half of his sandwich, and wrapped up the other half to take home. 

Lloyd was an anchor in my life, one of the very few people who had known me over so many periods of my sleeping and awakening. He never stopped being a gentle and brilliant and beautiful man and although I don't like ending on a down note, I say shame on us, shame on us for putting so little value on that man's life, on any one's life, that when they are hurt or ill and can't support themselves, we give them so little that all we are doing is letting them slowly die. Not our fault. We supported him. Where was his family? Why didn’t he work? 

For shame. For shame.

I love you, Lloyd. You are my well respected and deeply loved elder. Rest in peace.

A simple bowl of soup

 

When I was in my teens I was friends with an older, Catholic woman from Poland, who had been in a concentration camp with her family when she was young. That experience made her very very kind and understanding of suffering others couldn’t comprehend. It also made her unable to believe in the longevity of another’s friendship.

Wanda helped me survive a terrible time in my life when I was on my own and the world was very uncaring. She taught me to appreciate many things. She kept plants in her house, hundreds of them, it seemed to me, and her Saturdays were devoted to carefully moistening each one just to the degree that it needed, resting them in her tub in batches to soak up that necessary balm. All of this, and in fact much of what she did, seemed excessively careful and labour-intensive to me. At the same time it impressed me deeply, and somewhere hidden inside a part of me longed to live as she did.

She gave me my first house plant, a small coleus that I named Vanya, after my favourite character in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Such a beautiful and precious being deserved a beautiful name. But I was so afraid I would kill it. If not for Wanda and her confidence in me, I wonder if I would ever have discovered my love of plants. 

There is much more to the story, but I will end here, except to explain this picture.

One of the things Wanda introduced me to was the notion that boring food could be made delicious. One day at lunch she opened a tin of Campbell’s tomato soup, just like I’d had a million times as a kid, but Wanda didn’t just throw it in a pot with milk and water and stir. As it heated she sprinkled dill weed - a thing I had never heard of – into the pot. When she took it off the stove she added a big dollop of sour cream and a little more dill weed.

At last, she put the bowl in front of me and I tasted something fine. 

Every once in a very blue moon, in honour of my long lost friend, I make myself a bowl of her simple amended soup, and for a moment I am discovering life with her again.

Thank you, Wanda, wherever you are. May your dreams be kind to you.