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.

On the Verge

This may be the last post I write about moving. (Although it may well not be--such is the enormity of this transition in my scale of things.)

My ex's--my dear, dear friend's--father died this week. I have spent several days with him upmost in my mind, and yesterday we gathered around his funeral in the Jewish cemetery in White Rock where Susan's mother is buried, and we acknowledged and honoured his life and the emotion of those who loved him most. We returned to Susan's to eat and talk. We took breaks, more people came and others left. We ate more, and prayed the Kaddish.

Though I have seen him little in the last several years, Susan's father has been a nearly daily part of my life as I listened to her tales and heard her struggles in supporting a spirited, stubborn man who was in his hundredth year when he died. Now he is dead, and while the prayers continue, and the legal and practical work awaits, there is something gone from our lives that will never be again. There is, amidst the clatter of dishes and the singing of psalms, a silence profound and permanent. Philip is gone. Susan's parent is no more.

In the face of this, my own transition seems small, and yet for me it is substantial. In two days the contents of the garden will in large part be moved, and three days later everything else I own will begin to find its way to my new home. It will take years to sort it out, I'm sure. But not so terribly long to make the bed, put the toothbrush in its holder, figure out where to put my books.

In both of these transitions, people have gathered. Not dozens, not hundreds, not necessarily the ones we might have expected in every case. But they have come together although they did not have to and have made what seemed impossible something of beauty and gratitude.

One friend who joined in the first round of moving (to the place I never quite moved into), had not been in touch for years. But somehow I thought, what the heck, and asked, and he came, girlfriend in tow. Another brand new friend who is helping--boyfriend in tow--is the woman who is moving into my old dear apartment. How amazing is that?

Two of my nephews, my friends, people I see seldom, people I see often--one woman I have not seen in forty years, but she is coming with her truck, and we can smile at each other again.

This is community. We can feel so damned alone sometimes, can feel and be isolated, can feel and be imperfect friends. And then some huge transition comes along, cancer, or childbirth, or moving, or death, and suddenly we see reflected in the faces around us the love they feel, the generosity they hold, the meaning of people living our lives together in a difficult world.

I am grateful. I am profoundly moved. (I hope I don't really take years to unpack everything.)

The blessings of this rich and varied life, revealed once more.

The Ever-Sad Thrill of Death

Saman Kunan

Each time I hear about the diver who died after bringing O2 to the kids in the Thai cave yesterday I feel so sad. 

I live in Vancouver, BC. In our province we have many high mountains and rushing rivers, snowfields and waterfalls. We rest against a broad ocean and there are endless tracks in our forests. Ten minutes from the city you can go off the trail for an adventure and find yourself hopelessly lost.

Three young adventurers, who made their living filming themselves doing daring thngs in nature, died this week in falls I have camped near several times. Their friends and families are mourning and in shock. When these things happen, as they do so very often here, amongst the tears I hear expressions meant to console--that they died doing something they loved.

Saman Kunan died because a group of children, led by an adult, went on an extremely dangerous lark as the result of a dare. He may have been doing something he loved, but he wasn't doing it for fun, and he wasn't risking other people's lives to enjoy himself.

He isn't the first rescuer to die in the attempt of saving other lives.

I didn't know Saman or his family but I am feeling grief for him which is accentuated by years of hearing stories like this on the radio, over and over again, of people going unprepared into the backcountry or of difficult, heroic attempts to peel daredevils off of cliff-faces. I do also grieve for the young people who have not yet learned that they aren't invulnerable, whose joy in their strength and physicality and the thrill of risk is not tempered by sufficient belief that staying alive is thrilling, too. It was one year ago to the day from the death of the three vloggers at Shannon Falls that the young Irish footballer, David Gavin, drowned when he dove into the churning waters of a river near Golden, BC. He knew he could handle it. They knew they could handle it.

What is my point? That people shouldn't take risks? That we should leave them to it if they do stupid things that risk their lives and our own?

I don't know that I have a point, actually. Sometimes when I hear these things, some guy in flip flops who decided to leave the designated trails and ends up with a three day all out search through the mountainside, I get huffy like my parents would and grumble, "Leave him up there! Make him pay for the rescue!" and other such sympathetic things. So sure, the sheer waste of it angers me, too.

But right now I'm overwhelmingly sad. Sad at a world where peoples en masse are facing abuse and death trying to escape their violent and impoverished homelands. Sad at a world where men like he-who-shall-not-be-named are doing everything they can to roll back the rights of the environment and the humans who dwell in it. Sad at young people who throw their lives and those of their rescuers away for a thrill.

The Grand Old Lollipop of Life

How long has it been since I announced my new home? Six days? Well--surprise! I'm moving somewhere else.

You will remember that I had some regrets about the new place, mixed in with the relief and happiness I felt at finally putting my search to rest. I was happy about the mountains, and the sky, and the light. I loved the people at Anavets, Beth especially, who runs the office, and Ruby, her boss, but even the residents seemed sweet to me. I was thrilled that I could have an animal, if I chose to. But the size of the place was yet smaller than my own, with no balcony or patio, no garden, and reduced privacy. I was ready to make that compromise, and knew I could be happy there, but I was sad to say goodbye to my plants and the ability to fling open my door and just be outside. (There is only a small window to open there, though there is a larger non-opening window.

Well, I was very unexpectedly offered an apartment at the place I have been going back to every two or three months, pestering the manager and over time discovering what a lovely woman she is. The new place is a small one bedroom, with lots of cupboard and closet space, more privacy, spacious kitchen and bathroom (compared to most you'll find in tiny apartments, that is), a patio, and my own private garden. It is run by an Italian organization and is reminiscent of the Roman villas, with a courtyard in the centre--but not a paved, desolate coutryard, a grassy, treed yard with a small gazebo for barbecues and vegetable plots for the residents. And it is joined to an extended care home so once we get too rickety to take care of ourselves, we can move next door and not be separated entirely from our homes once more.

Before I left Erminia, I gathered my courage and asked if there might be a place there where I could plant my magnolia, because I didn't want to leave it behind to be mowed over when the building comes down. She was very understanding that I might want to keep this friend nearby, and said we would try to fit it in outside my place, and if not, in the central yard!!!

I am astonished. Shocked and gobsmacked and shaken and thrilled. There is only one sad note: no pets. I hadn't decided that I would get an animal, but I had a very good cry as I contemplated never ever having one again. I am lucky that I get to walk Susan's dog, Juniper. And that I get a cuddle now and then from Joani's kitty, my nephew, Albert.

Life continues to amaze me. I cannot believe I have obtained such a beautiful home. There is artwork in the hallways! And I'm halfway to making my first friend there--Dee, the woman whose place I will be taking. She is moving down the hall to a larger, more mobility-impaired-friendly apartment.

It has been an exhausting, horribly frightening two years (minus a month) since I first learned our building had sold. I have hit the depths on more than one occasion as I considered the housing situation in Vancouver and how unlikely it would be that I would end up somewhere I really liked. But I held out, and now I have three apartments in my possession, two of which I am in the process of giving up. (THAT was one of the hardest phone calls I've ever made--to tell Beth at Anavets, the wonderful, welcoming woman who rented me that lovely tiny home, that although I haven't even entirely moved in yet, I'm moving out.)

They say you should count your blessings. I have been doing that a lot today. An unbelievable number of wonderful things are stuffed into my own little, shivery life. For that I give enormous thanks.

Dark/Light, Low/High, Change, Change, Change

One foot is in one world, the other is in the next. Maintaining balance in such a stance is a challenge and an awakening.

This week my friends and I moved a number of boxes from here, my home of three decades, to the new place in a seniors apartment block a few minutes away. Half of my room seems torn away, a gaping hole with a few bits of detritus left in it, and a whole lot of antique dust. The other half of the room, ignoring a few boxes and an unusual untidiness on surfaces, remains as normal. The quiet continues. The trees stand in lush leaf as before. It remains my home.

Not far away, another room is coalescing, shaping itself out of bare walls and empty cabinets. An oak sideboard, scouted out in New Westminster long ago with a friend beside me, and an upright dresser that belonged to my neighbours Grace and Bill in the last home I lost to developers, now conspire to create the first margin of my coming home, both comforting and disconcerting me. Boxes of dishes and doodads have been lifted from here--towers I squeezed past for days--and lie open there, awaiting my attentions. Most of my books are already there on shelves. I feel the urge to bring more home here. What is a room without its weight in books?

Here, I have been nurtured by darkness, living on the ground floor in the corner of an L-shaped structure, with only slivers of sunlight piercing the window at daybreak at certain times of year, not entering more than a few inches into the room. In summer, it is cooler here than anywhere else. In winter, the trees shed their leaves and the grey light moves close for several hours a day, mountains peeking out from between their ravelled branches.

I am close to earth here. I have planted the land outside my windows, and the smell of rain-wet soil brings pleasure on a dark winter day. I have spent many hours with cats in every corner of this yard, and met my neighbour skunks and raccoons and insects, and the flitting populations of birds that pass through this close embrace of dwelling and land. Sky has little to do with my home here. A tinge of gold on distant trees on special evenings, a glimpse of cloud if I crane my neck.

The new home is high. Highest. It is the top floor of the building--will I hear rain on the roof for the first time in years?--and earth is far below, and far off in the form of ball fields and mountains. Buildings, bridges, motorways dominate the view, with a busyness unremembered in my old place. Balconies and windows spread out below me, people busy on or next to them, men in hard-hats toil there every day. Above them the mountains hang, changing colour and distinctness with the shifting haze, and above them an ocean of sky, rippling with cloud or mist or stark with sunshine and Brandeis blue. There is a vastness of sky there. I will have no garden, no balcony, no little place outside to call my own.

There, the cotton wool of my urban woodland is torn away. The soft, familiar view is thrown wide to a frantic people and wild sky. Light floods in--still from the northern exposure, but bright, bright enough to light the farthest wall. When I sit on the loo with the door open, instead of a chair with books of poetry I look out at world and sky.

What will this shifting viewpoint do to me? Will I crawl out from under my cozy rock and hurl myself into the world? Will I draw the drapes and hide from the overstimulation all around? Will my writing change? Will my energy change? Who will I be when my environment is so transformed?

I am lucky. Lucky that I have found a home that appears safe and stable, that I can afford because of a government subsidy, that despite a loss of space and all that that implies, appeals to me. Lucky to have a building manager who likes me, and says so. Lucky to have neighbours who smile. Lucky to have friends who will carry boxes and furniture when I am in too much pain to do it. Lucky, so lucky, to have a friend who offered to pay an extra month's rent in my old home so I could move at a pace that lessens every kind of shock that leaving a well-loved home, leaving against my will, and packing and moving and figuring out and then being somewhere new can entail.

This way, I get slowly used to that foreign space. I make its acquaintance, make, perhaps, friends with it. I have time to see what I need to ask, get, change, what I can bring, what I must store, what I pass on. And time to move things over at a pace that allows me to unpack and integrate and order a bit at a time instead of landing with a crash in a tiny apartment filled to the ceiling with stuff.

I am lucky I get to stay almost in my neighbourhood--a short walk away--where I have friends, shopkeepers I am fond of, roots, my friend, roots.

Dark, light, low, high; change, change, change. With enough warning, two agonizing years, to have assimilated the worst of the shock, to know what I want and what I am willing to sacrifice, to be as ready as I can be for this turning in my life.

Where the changes take me, I do not know. Sad though I am, mad though I am, I am also happy, curious, ready--almost--to go.

That last look out at the yard will be a painful one. It has been my greatest solace through some awfully difficult times. But there is another vista waiting, with promises unrevealed.

Low. High. Dark. Light.

Change.

Change.

Change.





Image: "Bleeding Heart and Swordfern," Casey June Wolf (2018).

Homeward Bound

Well, my friends, it has happened at last, after nearly two years of panic and searching.

I got a place.

I feel compelled to tell you not to get too excited because of the deficits--less space, less privacy, no garden, no balcony, not allowed to feed my friends, the birds. I feel equally compelled to say I am hugely relieved, and feel hopeful that this can be a comfortable and happy home. The people seem lovely, the building is secure, clean, and well maintained (as is the yard), and I trust the organization that runs it. It's even almost in my old neighbourhood, so the wrench won't be so huge.

Thanks to the Army, Navy, and Air Force Veterans of Canada for building subsidized housing for aging folk.

Above is Beth, my new building manager, who is herself a breath of fresh air. Below is my (gasp) view.