Out and up for Down Under

So I am heading to Australia. And I have not been blogging. The things are vaguely connected. I didn't mean things to go this way, but there it is.

The trip to Australia was planned months ago ... a long-delayed visit to my sister's adopted homeland of over 30 years. Summer is always exhausting for me, as the conscientious reader of my poultry scratch will know. And I was just pulling out the miasma when ... well, when tragedy struck. I want to be delicate and not name precise names for the sake of the peace of mind of those closest to the tragedy.

My 27 year-old nephew, who suffered for more than a decade from a debilitating case of chronic fatigue syndrome, took his own life. He would be my Australian sister and brother-in-law's older son; he has a younger brother who is hale and hearty, and crushed by the loss of his brother, as were his parents.

So the trip to Australia has a deeper, more sober, undoubtedly more reflective tone than was promised by the original plans. It turned out this way, and it turns out that I can be there for those I love, grieve with them, look to the past and future together with them.

Kris was the first descendant of my parents to pass from this vale. Counting my parents, there were ten of us across three generations. Now there are nine. It's been a rough passage.

His death knocked the last bit of wind out of my sails, and eventually I gave in to my writer's block and let the blog go on hiatus. But that will be over now ... I plan to blog furiously on this trip which will last until September 28. I even forked over $7.99 to tmobile for a 24-hour airport pass that I will use for one hour to get this post written.

I enjoy travel blogging ... wish I traveled more so I could do more of it. This one will be mixed ... the joy of reunion, the fascination of the new, and the irreducible sorrow of a young man gone before his time and by his own hand.

So to wrap it up for now, here is what I wrote to be read at his funeral; I will post over the next week or so the writings of all of us that were read as his family and friends said good-bye.

Remembering Kris

I am Kris's uncle in San Francisco. I last saw him when the whole family came to my annual gala Christmas party in 1998. All my friends still remember my fabulous Australian family, and they all remember the quiet teenage boy who smiled and did not say a lot.

That Christmas in San Francisco and later in Winchester was the last time I saw Kris. I wish I knew him better ... but I feel that what I do know is that he was one of us, the brave son of my sister and the love of her life, the boy who did not say a lot, but who persevered as long as he could.

His passing has given all of us here great pause. My friends have given me their time to reflect on life and choices and the difficulty of imagining what it is to be in someone's else's place. We must learn even from tragedy, and Kris's moment now strives to teach us not to judge what others find necessary no matter how much pain we feel.

Even so, nothing reduces the quiet, the hollowness of loss. I am reminded of a Malay poem I have long loved:

The angel’s trumpet blooms flowery white
oysters lie stranded along the beach
I want to embrace the mountain, its might
what’s the use, the hands don’t reach

Our lives and loves and learning are founded in striving. But there are some things we cannot touch, we cannot reach, we cannot understand. In remembering Kris, I think of that. I think of what he understood about what he could and could not do. I wish he had made another choice. But who am I to say. Who are we to say.

May he rest in our memory, beloved, so long as we have memory.

Art and Hanging Out

I am in the midst of my annual MRU course catalog production madness ... this year we are implementing a new software called Author-it and that is challenging and exciting and daunting. Have been working a lot from home which is very efficient, but also has the curious effect of failing to shield me from the immediacy of my emotions. Today I had a little meltdown that would not have occurred if I had been at work. So I took an early lunch, watched an hour of 48 Hours and then returned to the fray refreshed if not actually happy. By the by, that 48 Hours featured the sad story of a 16-year-old who slaughtered two friends in a drug-induced haze with a shotgun. He got double life. Meanwhile, in Canada, the Globe and Mail reports that Canada released a 42-time hit man killer and child molester on compassionate parole because he is dying.

Saturday Night: Found myself at an art opening for a fascinating young gay and deaf painter by the name of Philip Chanin, a friend of mine. There's a strange YouTube experience here. I am a skeptical art opening ingenue ... by proclivity if not by reason of any depth in the art critical genre ... but Philip won me over in the course of three or four meanders through his work. He favors a certain amount of glitter in the combination of bright and glowering colors ... I think his greater success is when he uses it in moderation. Many of his paintings are large heads, frequently earless, that confront the viewer starkly and opaquely, notwithstanding the vivacity of the rendering. It was the eyes, I think, that drew me in ... staring and demanding, windows into meaning and moment, the emotion apparent but not decipherable. His faces are demanding, not inviting. My encounter with them required that I give in to them, and perhaps that is how they came to grow on me as I submitted to their silent imposition.

The best of the head paintings were in his bedroom, the private collection of his lover Bob Ostertag, a musician, composer, and performance artist of long acquaintance. I snuck a photo of one of them, but I am loathe to upload it here without permission.

But it was another painting that came to represent the evening for me ... I noticed it right away in the hall because it had a sticky beside it ..."SOLD". But that clue to its uniqueness did not cause me to stop and examine it. I am afraid that sometimes I am too beholden to unexamined prejudices in matters in which I am not expert ... o what a terrible confession, and one that exposes me as not as unique as I might prefer in my phantasmagorical and internal perorations ... and I just missed what had made this at-that-point anonymous buyer stop by that painting. Later he told me that his mother, who is by his description a successful buyer of unknown artists, advised that when he buys young artists, he should look for the pieces that are different from the others for they will be the ones sought after if the unlucky young artist becomes a lucky old artist.


I felt that taking a pic of the bought painting would be wrong and I did not do it. Later I wished that I had because it became such a moment.

My roommate RL brought his friend Daniel ... also a painter ... and it was he who turned out to be the buyer. I was as impressed by his thoughtfulness about art as I was by his evident bitterness. Take "impressed" to mean "made an impression upon me" rather than "favorably impressed." Notwithstanding the bitterness and my own tendency to scowl at bitterness, I liked Daniel, and made a point not to indulge myself in any fury if our discussion turned confrontational. A good plan, as it turned out.

RL, Daniel and I decided to leave after a couple of hours of the meander described above. Bob asked me to stay because a musician friend of his planned to perform, but hunger stemming from a delayed dinner drove me out. I am such an emotional sop ... I still feel bad that I left early. Oh well. The three of us wandered along Valencia looking for eateries that were open, not crowded, not loud, and not yuppie. Ended up at a sushi place on Church near Market.

It's been a while since that discussion, and I should have written the details down a little sooner. I wanted to cue Daniel into telling me why he paints, but we ended up talking about the state of the gay movement. I said above that Daniel was bitter, but I would prefer to say the more precise notion that he proffered a bitter stance. I should not really comment about whether or not he actually "is" bitter ... and I do mean that in the Clintonian sense of it depending upon what the meaning of "is" is. At one point he complained that he didn't like Gay Day because he doesn't see why people should have sex in public ... I told him I thought that was a profoundly conservative approach to looking at gay politics. He didn't like that, but we continued the discussion ... in fact he pressed to continue it up to the moment where we parted company with him at the foot of our hill to home. Then he told me that he appreciated our discussion because I had not caved to him as many evidently do.

I like the guy and I hope he becomes more a part of our circle. I describe the discussion briefly, and perhaps not as favorably to him as I should, because it got me to thinking about youth and age, in particular gay youth and gay age. I remember in my much more activist youth that I was very bugged by old guys who countered my steadfast and frequently un-nuanced political views ... more than bugged, it enraged me and I would get yell-y and obnoxious. I got the more enraged when they proffered a sage stance, as it were, treating me benignly. So I was playing a game on my old self and not being fair, I guess ... perhaps I should have argued more passionately.

But Daniel is a young gay man in an era when the movement is something that has been taken away from them, something alien to them, in the form of an establishment even if it does not have the power of an establishment. I think the gay rebels of this era mistake that establishment-like behavior as having actual social power over them, and they associate the only gay community that exists in a physical with that political establishment. So if the gay guys in the Castro are an aging bunch of householders, and the political movement is a bunch of Democrats slicing up a tiny pie, then gay life and gay community is illegitimate. In my, alas, angry way, I think that is a lot of what I was trying to say in the my piece on Gay Day. Young gay men live lives, increasingly, that have nothing to do with gay community ... they can easily come to straight friends as community, and see the Castro-gay-guy-Demo-establishment as alien, and by back formation fail to remember that the fight for gay liberation is still very young. So, as I noticed at Gay Day, the young gay guys who came tended to be coupled ... perhaps they see in the current movement the advantage of marriage rights. (And, as I noted, the young lesbians hung with themselves in more exuberant modern rendition of the separatism that has always haunted our movement.)

These are generalizations based on observation but not study. I want the Daniels of our world to be modern gay liberationists. Not my choice, and the forces at work on them seem to press in another direction.

So back to where we started in this post. There did not seem to be any ideological content in Philip's work, but there was a straining to see and to project. Notwithstanding the seeming horrors of distorted and wrenching figures, this work is not dark and it presents an optimism and vivacity and screaming for life. I'd like to see Daniel's work ... I rather suspect that it features a darkness, but one that might also be deconstructed into life and urging ... just a guess. He prefers large canvases, and the painting of Philip's that he bought was one of the most narrative of the works on display, so I suspect that they have a narrative quality. I am permanently fascinated by active minds ... and this evening of art and hanging out was a rather too rare excursus into two new fascinating minds in my life.

Top photo by Arod of Philip Chanin and one of his pieces. Middle photo from Philip's web site; click on the photo to go to a slide show of his work. This piece actually was written in several sittings, not a good idea for blogging. The pressure of this year's course catalog work is sitting heavy, and I go back to my labors soon after I hit "Publish Post".

Blogging Winchester: Birds and Tulips

I have not finished last night's screed ... I crashed out in the middle of the third period of the second hockey game, and when I awoke just in time for Malcolm in the Middle at 12:30, I did not have the writerly urge. So that post, which will probably be below this one when I finally finish it, will have to wait a bit.

Mother, Father, and I are at the round breakfast table with little Hershey on the pillow watching the birds and squirrels at the feeder outside the window. It has been off-and-on light snowing or raining, but the birds are busy at work, of course. There is a small black bird that looks like a Junco to me, and Mother and I get out the bird book. Sure enough, it is a Dark-Eyed Junco .. and there is another one and another one. We are swarmed by the little things. There are plenty of grackles, and the robins are back, the odd mourning dove. We've seen a few Downy Woodpeckers as well. And lots of Common Redpolls.

I am sure that anyone with aging parents can empathize with this ... I am so happy that Mother and Father are in a secure little complex with a bunch of sweet old ladies and men who are friends and support. And I love their picture window on the little parklette. Father gets tired as the days waxes and wanes, so the long breakfast is the best time. A care worker comes daily, always at a different time, to bathe Father, and Mother gets to read the paper and clean up.

Father says that he once spoke about tulips at Carnegie Hall and made what amounts to a minor faux pas by forgetting to thank one of the organizers. He still remembers that moment. He was speaking on behalf of the Ottawa Tourism Board of which he was three times President, and which had rented Carnegie as part of a tourism marketing push. Father addressed the idea of a Friendship Garden which he says, went from country to country. After Ottawa, its next country was Greece and the Greek Ambassador was present. One of Father's friends and colleagues had huge paintings of tulips in honor of Ottawa's famous Tulip Festival.

This discussion arose because of those tulips. The Tulip Festival is in a donnybrook with the Ottawa International Writers' Festival because the former, under the rubric of its Celebridée program, invited Salman Rushdie to speak and because they "stole" the writers' tagline which is "This is Where Ideas Live", as opposed to the new Tulips' tagline "Where Ideas Bloom". A nasty cat fight in a tight corner. I tend to side with the writers because writers are not getting the financial benefits of the busloads of little old ladies who like the spring flowers. But this is certainly a case of "surely we can all get along."

Dad was once very involved in all those sorts of things in Ottawa, and he still follows its every in and out very closely. I think it is hard for him not be in the thick of things ... I can feel that.

I wish he could let it go and watch the birds a little more. But the drive that makes a mind like his go is not something that can be discarded. Stroke or not, he is still a sharp observer of the human condition. In that, he is my model and the one who sparked my mind to be whatever it is.

Shortly after breakfast and bath are over, Father puts the House of Commons on the television when it is in session. He listens to it closely ... he has the personal and political history of most of the members down pat. Old Canadian that I am, I find a spirited Question Period more fascinating by a long shot than virtually any aspect of American politics. I doubt that 5% of American politicians could handle Question Period. Ooops, being a Canadian snob, an occupational hazard, here deep in Ontario.

Photo by Arod, the view from the parental picture window in January 2007. The view today is so gray and messy that I cannot bring myself to photograph it.

Blogging Winchester: Father

Talking with Dad at the breakfast table. Mother and Father spend a long breakfast every day here enjoying each other's company and the idyllic view through the picture window. The little dog, Hershey, likes me well enough, but protests that I have stolen her chair in the sun, so I set up another one with a pillow for her morning doze.

Dad and I get to talking. Despite the stroke, he is the same man who has regaled his friends and family over the decades ... the stroke just seems to make it a little more difficult to get in gear. There is a pause before he speaks, but I am accustomed to it. We spoke about Winchester ... he noted that the town had raised millions of dollars at the behest of the provincial government for the local hospital. The fate of regional hospitals will tell a lot about the future of places like Winchester, and the tendency of the modern way of thinking is that these places are inefficient. But a town like this raises the issue of whether efficiency that destroys simple living is really efficient. And it is the more germane given the aging population, and particularly the aging population in little towns and the countryside.

Dad says, "The very nature of this area ... I would say that seniors form the biggest chunk of this population ... how they look after their seniors is pretty wonderful ... each community has a center that caters to the seniors ..." Government needs to understand those natural confluences and use them to advantage. The ultimate truth is that the electronic revolution makes that easier not more difficult ... but government thinks with its feet and its hindquarters ... it goes where it is chased by the loudest and richest of its tormentors.

Dad has this idea to create a Heritage Society in Winchester that could help in things like this. He has spoken about how the annual Winchester Dairy Fest has become little more than a craft fair now, and it ought to have things like a triathlon and a softball festival and a gospel festival. The first two are pretty obvious ... why not add some events to increase participating and excitement ... but the gospel idea is actually quite inspired. Dad thinks that a Heritage Society would be the ideal organ to plan something like that. And I think that the newly renovated "Old Town Hall" which has a community theater and various offices would be the perfect center. Of course, these sorts of organization need a mover and shaker, and that takes someone a lot of their time.

Back to the gospel festival ... like a lot of old towns, this place is lousy with churches, and at least two of them are quite spectacular. And the area surrounding has dozens of gospel singers ... albeit, an aging population ... that would be ecstatic to perform for a festival crowd. Remember, again, that George Beverly Shea came from here. Dad says that he never saw a place with so many pianists. When they do the annual mid-winter Festival of Lights parade down Main Street, there is a women in a bubble who plays the piano. And he added that it is pretty difficult to sing a hymn that he hasn't heard, but they had a couple in the common room here last week who pulled one out. Dad listed a bunch of people he thought he could approach to kick off the idea ... I tossed in the notion of calling it "Gospel and More" so you could invite a bunch of folk singers. Of course, you'd have the perfect venue with these churches ... maybe have a series of nights first in one and then in another.

Odd, of course, that an old atheist like me would be shilling for churches, but churches and their music played a big role in our family and where I come from. As in the notion that theology is bunk but the history of religion is fascinating, I would say that the social agenda of churches is noxious but the community aspect fills in often for what is lacking elsewise.

Dad is a lifelong atheist ... at least since he became an adult ... but like so many in his generation, he was raised in the church, and from that he knows all the hymn. When we were kids, he'd pile the family into the car ... there are six of us all told ... and we'd sing songs as we drove around in the country. Once we had cleared the non-hymns which the kids knew, Mother and Father would carry on singing hymn after hymn from their childhood experiences with religion. Sure we squabbled a bit as human beings will do, but those long drives are a deep part of our family memory.

So Dad and I got to talking about his childhood religious experience. He tells me that they didn't have a church in Kirkland Lake where he grew up, but that they rented the Oddfellows Hall. Wednesday prayer meeting was at their house ... but my grandfather, whom we called Papa and whom Dad calls Pop, was an atheist. Dad says that the bedroom was right off the living room, and Papa would just lie on the bed with his legs crossed and not say a word. Dad says that he had to sing solos while Mrs. Robinson played the pump organ. Old John B. Cunningham would arrive carrying this old organ by a handle like a suitcase. I've been to Kirkland Lake only twice, and flew over it once. I'll write about those visits on another occasion.

My grandmother was known to her five sets of grandchildren by five different names: Mudder, Minnie, Nanna, Grandma, and Meemee. We called her Meemee. Dad says she was a member of a breakaway sect called The Regular Baptist Church, led by Dr. T.T. Shields who was pastor of the Jarvis Street Baptist Church at Dundas or Gerard, Father thinks, in Toronto ... and they were much more right wing than the mainstream. I am not sure if this link on Wikipedia refers to the same group which appears to be focused on Appalachia.

But Meemee always felt a little used ... like she was always a soft touch for a free meal ... and she broke from them when she moved to Toronto. Reverend R. C. Slade (or perhaps Harold Slade) from Timmins joined Shields, and Meemee thought of him as one of those who had used her unfairly. That was the end of religion for Meemee, at least in the organized sense. But Dad, a teenager in high school after they moved to Toronto, got involved with the First Baptist Church in Mimico at the corner of Hillside Avenue and George Street with a short minister named Rev. Wentworth. Dad says the good reverend didn't think much of him ... he relates the story of how he wrote a column on Baptist youth for the local paper and he used the word "female", and that was a big no-no ... he got called on the carpet by Rev. Wentworth. He was involved with a network of young people from the Baptist church who tried to establish a Christian fellowship in the high school. They called it the Inter-School Christian Fellowship (ISCF) based on the college Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) at the college level.

I asked if he had ever discussed this with Papa, and Dad remembers only once saying "Well you have to admit that if people do subscribe to Christianity, it makes them better people," but Papa didn't agree with that. Papa worked for Ritchie Cut Stone where they cut stone for facades of buildings. Papa was a blacksmith, and he made the stone-cutting blades for detail work. Papa had been a blacksmith in the gold mines in Timmins and Kirkland Lake, but he was also an activist, likely a fellow traveler of the communists, and the family, deeply split, was driven out of Kirkland Lake after the strike of winter 1942-43. Dad thinks everybody was living in one house ... Uncle Lockie, who was a "loud union member" and Aunt Madeleine, and Uncle Dave, who was crossing the picket line, and Aunt Rose, and uncles Gene and Vic as well who were younger and unmarried. Dad remembers that Uncle Lockie was basically an apprentice to Papa in the mine blacksmithy. Later my mother helped Uncle Lockie with the arithmetic he needed to get a license as a crane operator in Toronto, a job he held until the day he died at work some time in the 70s.

Dad quit high school in grade 11 and got a job at Loblaws (a Canadian grocery chain) and then CPR Telegraph. The family moved to Alderwood at about the same time as Mother's family moved to Alderwood, and that is where they met. They started dating within a short while, and they have been together ever since. A nearly 60 year love affair.

Lucky for me!
Photos by Arod in Winchester today: Hershey at the window, the United Church, and a mural on the side of Shadboldt's Hardware Store at Main and St. Lawrence.

Blogging Winchester: Birthday

It's my birthday. I last spent my birthday with my parents 5 years ago when I turned 50. In most years recently, I have tried to spend the day alone, wandering my home town of San Francisco, taking myself out to an extravagant life of under- or uncooked beef or fish. Last year, I spent the day in Berkeley wandering the campus of the alma mater, and purchasing silly knickknacks like a bright yellow logo long-sleeved T-shirt that is still a favorite. I also bought shoes last year ... buying shoes is always a big deal for me since I have more than a slight paranoia about clothing shopping.

I discovered tonight that my father and I share the "counting" fascination ... counting things when they are there to be counted. Non counters would never recognize this, but for those of us who count, a collection of things simply demands a number. I never knew that father counted. It was a warm moment ... a little genetic crosscurrent. I don't know why I count. I have mechanisms to stop myself from counting when it becomes annoying or counter-productive. I no longer count the number of lights that are on in a room, and when I try to count things such that they interfere with thought, I think about random strings of numbers for a few seconds until I have interrupted the flow ... then I can return to the higher planes of thought that are the stuff of greater mental satisfaction. Father says that he counts Christmas lights ... I count Christmas ornaments, and I have taken photos such that I will be able to report accurately on the number of ornaments on my tree when I get around to it.

Sharing the counting thing, though, makes me think about the deep currents of family. We are a family in the western, Anglo-Saxon mode ... well as Anglo-Saxon as one can be when one's grandparental names were one each of Scottish, English, German, and Dutch. But the Anglo-Saxon thing is a good bookmark ... it represents a family that is small and less expansive, and one whose members drift into independent lives more readily. We are not like those families of those nationalities who count third cousins thrice removed as close as we do a brother or sister. No complaint there one way or the other. Family is as old as our species, and as variable as the mountains and plains, the valleys and shores which our species has occupied. I distrust the notion that family is first ... but it is certainly deep.

Last night, all the locals met at the Country Kitchen. We missed our cousins from Toronto who could not make it. Since Dad's stroke, we have become much closer to them as they have been so kind and concerned for Ma and Pa. They normally arrive with a full passel of assorted offspring whom I have only known in the last few years ... an exuberant bunch who meld with the Ottawa/Winchester based offspring of similar age. We are all sometimes a little loud for sweet Mother, but that is to be expected when families gather in their dozens. I look forward to seeing all of them when my sister arrives, husband by her side, from Australia in October.

The Country Kitchen does all of Chinese, Italian, Greek, Canadian, and modern veggie food ... and probably a few more. I had the Chinese which was shall we say, gnarly. I envied my sister-in-law's souvlaki ... perhaps I will experiment with that the next time. Most of the young folks, and Mother and Father and I, had the Chinese buffet despite my brother's warning that no locals ever dare go there. The young folks are assorted nieces and nephews, and a few girlfriends. All the boys are in their 20s but one, now, and it is such a delight to know them as adults. Even so early in their 20s, they are mellowing ... perhaps learning that the old saw that being young is the best time is a a fraud ... it is adulthood that rocks. Still, the youngest among them, my niece almost a teenager, is smart and warm and a delight to be with.

Me blowing out the candles ... 9 of them which has no relationship to my 55 years. It took me 3 blows, but I am a little leery of blowing so hard as to spittle a cake, as it were. I think the crowd was unimpressed by my candle technique

Winchester gives me a sense of a calm that is not really there. It is hard to know how a little town like this perseveres, and it is frightening to think about how quickly it too could be dragged into the morass of the soulless present that most of us try to navigate without abandoning our souls. (A propos of that, the local news on TV suddenly announces that their weather report is sponsored by some Hummer dealership ... I suppose Hummer owners may want to keep an especially close track on the global warming to which they are indiscriminately and disproportionately contributing ... so I quickly flipped the channel to a French program about drama or something. I love listening to Quebecois French even when I am not paying attention.)

Today was about laying about. I never managed to shower. I left the little apartment only to walk the 9-pound Jack Russell, Hershey, and to get some bread and eggs for our eggs and pea meal bacon lunch with one brother. Supper was pizza with the other brother and his wife. Sweet niece all day long. All very relaxing.

And now I am relaxing in a reclining chair to the smooth music of father's snoring, while I write my web 2.0 blog. The chair probably vibrates if I knew how to make it do so ... but that would probably wake up any of the numerous octogenarians grabbing a few deserved hours of slumber only a thin wallboard away from where I sit.

I keep forgetting it is my birthday. I keep forgetting to be dark. I keep forgetting to speculate on history and the terrible future which present ignorance portends. I keep forgetting to be skeptical.

A nice break ... a sweet birthday.

Photos by Arod, except the birthday candle which is one of a series by Darren.

Dodge

The cartoon is courtesy of the blog you can reach by clicking on it and recommended by my dear friend Dodge who complains that I do not mention her enough in here. So I will take this moment to say that I desperately want a DVD of the biggest versions of all the fabulous pictures of our shared, lost youth that she has recently been scanning and uploading to Flickr. How about a cool dinner on me in exchange next time I am in Vancouver or you are here ... been a long time since you've been in fabulous San Francisco. And in that vein, to contextualize a few of those shots that I have brazenly appropriated ...

Dodge and I met at the Vancouver Vocational Institute (VVI) on Pender Street in Vancouver in 1975 when we both took a two-year course in printing technology. She got a job straight out of the program and has held it ever since ... the classic indispensable employee who basically owns the place. We discovered in each not only kindred spirits, but also, and more practically, inveterate indefatigable walkers. We used to perform a stunt called formation walking in which we walked as quickly as we could always abreast through the crowded underground Granville Mall while gandying about at lunchtime from VVI. We still have walks whenever we see each other ... either a long ramble through Stanley Park or particular "stations of the cross" type walk in North Beach. We missed each other last time I was in Vancouver.

Dodge also taught me photography ... she sold me my first Pentax SLR (which a long while later Gary accidentally left on our doorstep on Market Street in San Francisco from which it quickly disappeared into the ether.) Those were the days, kids, when cameras had film in them ... and film was expensive and time-consuming (we developed and printed our own B&Ws) ... so we had to be careful about shots. We shot each other a lot, and there are not a lot of photos of us together, so I guess this one will have to do. Gawd noze what foolishness led to this pose ... not even sure where this was taken.


We ended up living across the hall from each other in the still fabulous Banffshire on Jervis near the waterfront in Vancouver. We had what I would call a famous friendship ... not famous in the sense of Hollywood but in the sense of brilliant, celebrated, grand, peerless, splendid. I was a politically involuted (by which I refer to Clifford Geertz's notion of Javanese agriculatural involution as an intensifying of agriculture such that the continual addition of new mouths did not reduce per capita productivity ... the left was like that ... plenty of churn, faces added and subtracted, but the output remained the same both, paradoxically both per capita and in toto ... this is an idiotic digression born of my current reading of Roy Sorenson's A Brief History of the Paradox) so, back to it, I was a politically involuted gay activist and Dodge was a decidedly liberal non-politico. So our friendship was always a romp, an escape from the world-weary enthusiasms of the movement, and a space for being and reflecting and learning and loving.

I nicknamed her Dodge ... not sure why, but there was an car dealership called Plimley Dodge, and I started calling her Plimley and that eventually morphed into Dodge. She drove a small white truck (back in the days when small trucks were actually small), and I used to claim that you could actually count the putt-putts that it made as Dodge drove it ... we used to watch from the window of our apartment in the Banffshire as she drove up the alley ... and you could have a cup of coffee in the time it took her to drive a block. Not in a hurry behind the wheel, for damned sure.

Still not sure why I came up with the Plimley and Dodge nicknames, but they stuck. Leastwise the Dodge one did ... I used to string it out a little ... Dodge truck and wheel, Dodge duck and deal, and what not. No real meaning there either ... I just like doggerel and like applying it to friends.

Dodge and I were together through every great moment in our lives during those years, including the one pictured below when my parents and assorted siblings arrived one winter. This photo is my Dad, my lover of the time Gary, and Dodge crammed into the nether end of our tiny railway-shaped kitchen.


We had great trips too ... to Seattle a few times and to Victoria. Never made is to Saskatchewan whence Dodge originated ... she was a horsey person in her youth, and explained everything that I presently know about horses to me ... I think of you, Dodge, sometimes in the morning when the train stops at Hillside station which is right beside Bay Meadows race track, and the trainers are out giving the horses their daily dose of air and running and life as a horse should live.

But mostly we just walked and talked and talked and walked ... and entertained and sat around and talked. We had a great party one New Year's that actually had some undercover cop scope it out ... I recently stumbled across the leaflet we produced for that, and it is a real period piece. I'll try to scan it and upload it here at some point.

I used to joke that Dodge was the only person who bought tomatoes by the slice ... always frugal and never one to waste anything ... other than time spent wandering and wondering.

Vancouver and Dodge were my 20s ... funny how blurry-eyed we get thinking about the heroic periods of our lives ... and that is mostly our 20s. And anyone who mowed through Blogging Vancouver knows just how blurry-eyed one can get.

I miss you, Dodge. We gotta see each other more often. Photo below of two most beautiful people, Gary and Dodge.


Photos by Dodge or by someone else with Dodge's camera.

Three Polaroids by Gary Gaetano Bandiera

A post on the occasion of Gary's birthday here.

Gary Gaetano Bandiera

Today is Gary's birthday. Gary died of apparently HIV-related liver disease on July 1, 1993. I wrote about that in Three Deaths in Vancouver. The photo above, by our friend Dodge, is of us at our apogee.

I spoke with his mother last night as I try to do every year on his birthday, on the day of his death and at Christmas. She is a fine old lady who lives a fabulous life in the new high rises of Vancouver that arose more or less directly over the discos where Gary and I danced our tails off during the Vancouver days of our love affair. I met him when he moved in to the apartment under me in 1975. It was love at first sight for me, but I think he needed a little convincing. We broke up for a few weeks a year or so later, and then merged again by reason of a more expert campaign of seduction than I believed myself capable at the time. It involved a Shakespearean sonnet and then later a passionate kissing beside the coatcheck in the Playpen Central, a not so elegant Vancouver gay bar.

Gary was Gary in Vancouver, and then he was Gaetano in San Francisco. Those of us who knew him in both places go back and forth between his two names. Gaetano was his grandfather's name and he loved it. In his low bore masculine way, he enforced the name change when he moved here a few months after me in 1981. Its funny how his two names are so iconic and yet each points to this singular man as if they are one and the same name.

Gary was sarcastic, dry, solid, humane, intelligent, sensual. As he grew older, he found solace only in nature, and came, I suspect, to avoid the company of those he did not know, and even those he did. He was never immune to finding quiet joy in solitude and whiskey. When we were lovers, from time to time he would suggest that I spend the day elsewhere, and he would turn up the music, embrace a bottle of Jack Daniels, and spend the day dancing and hanging with himself. I love a man who enjoys the pleasure of his own company.

He used to call me "da Baptist". This was a reference to the Baptist affiliations of three of of my four grandparents. I think lots of folks in our company were puzzled by our union ... I was this wiry pushy "sectarian" (as IM would have it) hyper-political activist with a fast mouth and a sharp tongue, and Gaetano was this natural man, movements like a cat, skin like suede, muscles that grew simply when he thought about them. Maybe a little bit of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to us. An odd pairing; never seemed odd to us, even after we moved on to other lovers.

Curious conjunction: both my father and Gary's father were born in Timmins, Ontario, a mining town in the Canadian Shield 500 miles north of Toronto. Gary's father, Leo, was born of Italian immigrants, my father born of economic refugees from Nova Scotia.


I moved to San Francisco first, and he followed eight months later. The photo above, by our friend IM, is me at the wheel and GGB riding shotgun in the Ryder rental truck that transported every last dust bunny that we owned from our palace in Vancouver to our new fortress in San Francisco. I think our great days were in Vancouver. San Francisco was where we were destined to go and grow, but it was not the soil that had generated our being together. It was a slow drawing apart, and we even continued living together for a year after we parted as lovers. After a few years of living separately, we ended up as house neighbours, him upstairs and me downstairs in IM's house here in the Castro. I'm still here ... and gawd noze, I wish Gaetano were still here.

So many memories. That he is gone, fourteen years now, is still unfathomable. So unfair. I mourn him every day.

Click on the image below of the altar his friends created for him in San Francisco, for a little photo essay I mounted a decade ago about my sweet Gary.


Some photos by Gary Gaetano Bandiera here.

Three Deaths in Vancouver

Had a chat with CS, a friend at work, yesterday in which she revealed that she had found an article I wrote in 1993, Three Deaths in Vancouver. So click on the link if you want to read it. I re-read it just now, and still endorse its persective. CS told me she liked it, better than anything she has read here.

The article was an early part of Bad Subjects which has continued and changed. I haven't read it much in the last decade or so, but it is inspiring just in that it has soldiered on.

Played semi-hookey today ... that is I worked at home this morning and then went with four work colleagues to a Giants game. We sat in the baking sun, a rarity in San Francisco, and watched a lifeless Giants 8-0 loss to the Colorado Rockies' Jeff Francis, a Canadian. Had a great time, including chat, relaxing, and a Stella Artois beer ... I prefer ales, but they ran out of the ale for which I had queued just as I reached the head of the line. Stella Artois is light and perhaps a better choice for a boiling midday game. TF bought me a Ghirardelli chocolate sundae ... we hadn't even thought of one till RL bought one ... we couldn't resist.

How to sew this together ... the best part of being human is the casual warmth of hanging out with people you like and love. The worst part of the epidemic is that we are denied all that casual warmth. Not to forget the striving and creativity and lost time. But just chilling with friends ... nothing beats it.

Photo by Arod.

Laurine and me

This is a pic of Laurine Harrison, whose untimely and sudden death I wrote about two days ago, and me at Christmas at the apartment of my friend whom I nicknamed Dodge. The year is probably 1978, perhaps 1979. I opened a box looking for something else, and there it was.

Photo, I suspect, by my friend GK, ca 1978.