Back Door Man * Chapter XVIII * Kits

A memoir of the years 1944-2008. This chapter covers the years 1987 to 1999 during which I slowly give up house cleaning and become a full time caregiver at the end. AIDS becomes ever more heinous.

XVIII  KITS

The apartment faced North West but around the west and south perimeter, tall laurels blocked my view. To the northwest, the views were excellent though not panoramic like they were upstairs. From there you looked out on the same things but saw more sky and felt removed from the activities in the park. At ground level, my views were entertaining and felt as close to the action as one could be and still be invisible. Its openness to hundreds of passersby every day would have disconcerted anyone unreasonably anxious over issues of privacy.

Through three windows, I looked out on Kits Beach and the surrounding grassy fields, at delirious dogs chasing Frisbees, children on the slide or in the sand box, and young people tossing footballs and volleyballs in the sun. This was not a park for tourists, like Stanley Park, but a large park for Vancouverites of all stripes, for families, for that famous commodity, the beautiful young people of Kits, for local residents on Kits Point, for dog walkers, for joggers, for sportsmen, for sunbathers, for swimmers in the heated salt water open air Olympic size pool. The weather in the summer of ’87 was dry and sunny, people thronged the park every day, and whenever I looked out my window, I felt Fortune had smiled on me again.

I had lived on Kits Point in the ‘Seventies with Kenny, Carol, Dan and the others for a year but we were too dazed to notice how blest we were. We didn’t live with a view of the park and oftentimes didn’t leave the house -we might as well have been living somewhere else for all the good it did us to be in that rarefied place. Then I was descending into the darkness the effects of which I was still dealing with. I’m unsure that it was fitting that both struggles happened in the same place, but they did. We are seldom aware of developmental changes taking place and in ’87, I only knew I didn’t want to go backwards and hoped I was going towards the light.

Mr. and Mrs. D had lived in exotic places and led active lives. They had parted reluctantly with their home in Sydney and moved here to be closer to their daughters because of Mr. D’s worsening illness and Mrs. D’s difficulty coping with it alone. They had lived in many foreign countries while he was employed as a trouble-shooting bank manager with one of the big five Canadian banks. They would send him, for several years at a time, to manage branches in financial messes and bring their books back into the black. Then he’d go somewhere else to work his magic at another branch.

They had lived and traveled together en famille in England, Jamaica, and Hong Kong, among other places while he served in this capacity over several decades. Lynn and Buffy had attended schools abroad. During WW II Mr. D served as a high-ranking Canadian Officer in England and Mrs. D inspected engines in a Boeing factory. (I have a newspaper photo of her as a young woman in overalls standing on the wing of a bomber, her hair gathered in a scarf, holding a heavy wrench.)

In September of ‘87, three months after I moved in, an article appeared in the Vancouver Sun, “Funding Cut Called Peril to seniors’ Aid Group”. It announced the demise of Vancouver Homesharers, rumors of which had been circulating since I first met with them. Above the story telling of our match-up as one instance of Homesharers’ record of 174 successes was a photo of me serving them dinner. Homesharers closed before the end of the year. They were only asking for $20,000 but the Ministry of Health, citing a “lack of proof” that it worked, refused to continue funding the program designed to keep seniors in their homes. I have a color photocopy; I still look sleek and young; the Dudleys appear pleased with themselves and our arrangement. Mr. D was eighty, Mrs. was seventy-seven, and I was forty-three.

Richard and Dave had tested the durability of their relationship over three years and found it serviceable. In’86, they invested in a co-op on the fringe of Kits Point - missing out on the distinction of living on the Point itself because the building was on the other side of the southern boundary, congested and narrow Cornwall Street. It was one floor up, with no view and no patio but was valuable like all Vancouver real estate only with less potential to increase in market value as quickly as a condo. They bought it for its spaciousness, a relatively low price, and the fabulous location. As their first step on the Vancouver property ladder it was a smart move, being affordable. Owning property in the city was part of David’s genetic makeup and it had been one of Richard’s goals for years. The place soon became too small but grand pianos take up space and everyone wants more - it’s only natural to outgrow a place.

It was David’s piano. He has always made his living as a tutor. After thirty years, it has become a grind. The disappointment of tutoring is facing students’ lack of commitment to the instrument. The majority of them study the piano only because their parents believe the discipline will be of benefit. Working with such unpromising material quickly gets boring turning both parties into clock-watchers, waiting for the hands to set them free. How frustrating it must be for a tutor with untalented, hormonally distracted students; how he must long to find a budding Van Cliburn to mentor until his protégé leaves for Julliard. One genius would compensate for the drudgery. But will you ever meet one? Watching the years slip by, trying not to grow bitter at his noble task of transmitting the art of musicianship to tomorrow’s spoilt young oligarchs, the melancholy tutor learns how rare genius and natural ability are.

Now, in many ways, I was doing well: my work paid well; it was easy, and it kept me physically active without overtaxing me. And the Dudleys were considerate, generous, and undemanding. Had I gone to heaven? No, I definitely had not. All my personal demons were front and center wasting my time, money, and energy. But more significantly, the year before, in 1986 the grotesque new reality of AIDS became a looming presence in all our lives. I reeled to bulletins from Richard, Pieter, Kenny, Tom, Paul, Jeff, and Page that they all had picked it up. Their diagnoses did not come simultaneously but in a cluster within the year. Over the following years, first we lost Kenny in San Francisco, then Richard died here in his home with all of us present, then Page was followed by Jeff a few months after him in Victoria, then Paul died of an accidental (?) overdose while living pretty rough in the Downtown East Side. Seventeen years later Tom died in St Paul’s. Pieter went last after clinging to life for two more years. The doctors attributed the last two deaths to causes other than AIDS but they both struggled against it for decades before succumbing to something else.

We who survived this plague - and the survivors of all the other plagues of our and every other century - were just luckier than the others were, that’s all. I had unprotected sex with strangers, too, and not as often as I would have liked; I, too, used syringes to take drugs and lived with dysfunctional freaks in dirty places. How did my friends react to their diagnosis? They must have felt afraid, ashamed at first, angry, and confused. They thought, “Will my friends blame me? What did I do wrong? Why me? Can anything be done?”

At the beginning when I discovered it was terminal and there was almost nothing to slow it or relieve the agonizing symptoms on its unpredictable course, I was speechless. My words of commiseration all sounded " and felt - hollow. I looked inside. Emptiness. Was it possible to feel nothing at the prospect of losing nearly everyone in such a horrible way? What was blocking my emotion? Was it a personality flaw, a phobia? Over the gloomy weeks and months, I observed that I responded to the constant stream of discouraging news in a formulaic language of sympathy that conveyed no genuine feeling but merely that I understood while I did not. I looked backwards. How far back in time did my detachment go? When had it begun? Did one event in particular trigger it or had I always been aloof? I had never considered such questions but the answer in a word seemed to be, yes, as far back as I could recall I had always been this way. I had not hesitated to describe myself as a selfish being. I had thought it better to admit it, believing it must be obvious to anyone who knew me.

But I had mixed up the two. I was selfish. But not only that, I was detached from life around me. I cared not a whit for politics, or about race issues, economic issues, gay issues, immigration issues: I didn’t seem to care about anything. I could no longer remember when pot and booze had not been my escape from matters I didn’t want to deal with. Now I integrated more drinking and smoking with the habit of work and the new additional routines of looking after the Dudleys to fill the largest part of every day. I became gradually more absorbed in collecting to keep my mind off what was going on around me. If this detachment from the life around you is sanity, being self-absorbed kept me sane during this prelude to a long string of losses that were beginning.

My routine was to eat breakfast and then toke. Then I’d wash my hands and face, and visit the Dudleys to see if they needed anything and what they might have in mind for me for the evening. Maintaining their independence was of the utmost importance. Mrs. D prided herself on not adding to the routine we established at the beginning. After five minutes of chitchat, I would return to my apartment and, if the first tokes were already wearing off, I’d duck back into the bathroom, turn on the ceiling vent, and toke again before setting off on my house cleaning rounds.

The hours of each working day varied considerably. It depended on who was in town; some days could be as long as eight hours or as short as no hours. But there was always money and I lived well, at the limit of my means, saving nothing. I could calendar my schedule and plan my time with the Dudleys well ahead. This allowed me to say, for example, to Mrs. D “I’m totally free on Tuesday afternoon, would you like me to spend it with Mr. D and give you a break?” Or “Should we all go somewhere?” Or “Where would you like me to take you?” Or “Would you like me to take you shopping?” We could plan accordingly.

Seniors coming down with Alzheimer’s are prone to become frightened when they no longer recognize family and friends, and are paranoid when strangers tell them what to do. But because of his special closeness with his wife, as the disease gradually overwhelmed him, Mr. D was an exception to this, becoming more and more angelic, glad to have his wife tell him what to do, and never challenging. We went on walks together, for drives, and occasionally played miniature golf in Stanley Park. I always found him good company and, while I never would let him out of my sight while we were alone together, I trusted that he would do as I asked if I had to.

In the daytime Buffy would take her mother grocery shopping or Mr. D would driver her to the store in their VW Rabbit, and they would plan the menu for the nights I cooked enough to leave leftovers for a night or two. Using the microwave, they managed to their own satisfaction and invites for pleasant dinners at Buffy’s and Lynn’s (their elder daughter in West Vancouver spiced up their routine. Both Lynn and Buffy, who at this point tended to be rivals, were attentive to them, and fine cooks.)

After work, I would pop into the bathroom and start toking again, beginning a long series of uninterrupted indulgence that continued until I crashed. Also after work, I cracked the first of many beers. I functioned well enough this way and was always careful never to smoke pot anywhere but in the bathroom with the fan on. I still knew my limit while I was performing upstairs and was careful not to overdo it. But I was not circumspect enough to change my clothes and while Buffy always insisted that she had no sense of smell I had no way of knowing if the reticent Dudleys recognized the smell. In any event, they never said a word.

Although I knew the deaths of many friends were on my horizon, the first bell toll was unforeseen and shocked me. Early one morning in the fall of ’88 before I was ready to go up, Buffy phoned to say her father had passed away in the night. It had been quiet as usual upstairs, with no hint of anything amiss. He’d shown no signs of trouble at dinner the night before. Later, I learned Mr. D had actually had a number of strokes in his sleep over the last few years and each time Mrs. D had called 911 for him and the medics had brought him around. Mr. D always asked later, “Darling, why do you keep doing this? Why don’t you let me go?” When it happened this time, she found the wherewithal to listen to his wishes and did nothing.

Long hot baths were once an indulgence she rarely found time for recently. When she was certain her husband of more than fifty years was truly gone, in the wee hours she drew a deep bath, luxuriated long and doubtless had a good, self indulgent cry - one of loss and of relief - muffled by an exhaust fan and a closed door to not disturb me. But that morning, learning of the dear old gent’s demise, I felt disgusted with myself at having slept soundly through the departure of a magnificent soul as it transpired in the room above.

I took a deep breath. Could I feel anything now? Any sense of personal loss? Of grief? Of anger? Concern for Mrs. D? For myself or the security of my living arrangement? Anything? No. By searching for something as soulful and insubstantial as emotion, had I caused it to take flight, like a birdwatcher accidently snapping a twig?

Buffy told me to rest easy; our living arrangement wouldn’t change. She asked me to let the family grieve privately until I heard from her in a few days. A general, vague uneasiness followed and pervaded everything over the following days until I saw Mrs. D again. The root of my discomfiture lay in my emptiness and having to devise a way to disguise it while commiserating and expressing grief I believed I ought to feel but didn’t. When the time came, wishing to be elsewhere, I tried to express a sense of having lost someone important to us both. But Mrs. D knew genuine sentiment was absent. She accepted my words graciously.

Again, as I gave my spiel to Mrs. D, I flashed back to my early childhood, standing rigid, expressionless, and silent, beside my mom looking at some embalmed stranger, a friend of hers in an open coffin. I wondered why I was there. Mother told me, again, the doctrine of the soul and the afterlife that follows death in terms she thought I would understand. I found it all incomprehensible and wondered if it could possibly be. Faith would come, I hoped.

I never believed my mother was infallible. But I respected her and her faith; in my youth, I had tried to understand and believe, too. She didn’t say we must be sad and miserable when someone we know dies, only that we must pray for the person. I never saw her cry at the loss of a friend or a relative. Usually the one who died was old and had been sick a long time; death had become preferable to life without a miracle, for which we prayed until they died. Then she prayed fervently for the departed, immortal souls of those whose wakes we attended.

She was always praying - for the living, for the dying, for the departed and for miracles. Wake going and praying for the repose of the souls of the departed was an act of charity that made you a better person, more eligible for a free pass to heaven when it was your turn to knock. The only ones that I saw grieve at wakes and requiems, if anyone did, were family members and the closest friends. Now, an emotionally blocked adult and without Faith, when someone close to me departed I could not grieve from the heart or ritualistically. It did not bother me that I had no Faith but growing awareness of my detachment was a most disturbing thing to me.

In the aftermath of Mr. D’s death, Buffy and Lynn became more actively present and tried to fill the emptiness he left by seeing to it that Mrs. D was not alone, unless she wanted to be. Mrs. D liked to be alone sometimes; she needed time to herself " an essential the girls shared with her and respected. Mrs. D was grateful to them and welcomed having them with her more. She and I had always related well as long as I deferred to the unwritten and unspoken boundaries that originated in her conservative, privileged upbringing. But after his death when I tried to be closer to her, with much the same intention as Buffy - to see to it that she wasn’t too lonely - she rebuffed me in a way that made it clear that the boundaries were still firmly in place and we would never be close friends.

My position in her house never changed: it remained functional, not familial. It was not in her to befriend a person like me " we were too far apart generationally and in background. There were aspects of my personality she definitely would never warm to " offensive ways I was unaware of that irked her, and to which she never referred. I was too much the brash American - unfocused, unpredictable, and casual. And I found her too much the reserved Edwardian Canadian prairie Lady, too straight laced.

It was a comfort to us both, and a stabilizing influence on our relationship, having her solicitous daughter two doors away. Buffy thought I was great; she championed me and the service I provided just by living with her mother. She knew her mother’s quality of life was higher with me than it would have been without me. Her intelligent help and intuitive understanding allowed us to live together despite our differences without mishaps until she passed away eleven years later.

After Mr. D was gone, Mrs. D gradually lost her will to continue. She had more discomfort with her foot while her health overall remained well. Mrs. D was an educated lady and a thinker; it was no small matter to be old, healthy, and with no end in sight, yet in some physical pain and losing momentum. She didn’t know or trust me enough yet to broach her personal distress and anxieties with me. But she and Buffy had trust in each other in spades and could discuss any subject. Buffy had been the daughter who most needed her parents when she was young, which made her more precious, and warmer and more empathetic now. Mrs. D was an emotional woman but she had been raised to not to show them. Only as she became older did she let it show. I saw her frustrated at times, not at me but at third parties like her brother or certain friends for behaving in ways, she thought undignified or inappropriate.

In the spring after her father’s death, Buffy and Mrs. decided that she might regain some enthusiasm if she had a puppy. They chose a male Silky, which is a crossbreed of Yorkie and Australian terrier. Mrs. D never took any responsibility lightly (although she had left much to Mr., who was a rock). Her puppy would receive every attention and the best of care " he was one lucky pup, arriving at the Point with a silver marrowbone in his mouth. Cute as the dickens, lively, and healthy " they knew dogs and chose well.

But when he arrived, she immediately began having second thoughts, reconsidering how much pet ownership entails - what with exercising and house training, for starters. She knew she could not manage it all herself. Apparently, she hadn’t given much thought to these responsibilities, as previously Mr. D would have taken care of it. Buffy hadn’t brought it up either, assuming I would step in.

I offered to take on all the responsibility for the dog. I could see that she was relieved and that her relief was mixed with guilt because in handing the job over to me she was delegating some of her responsibility as his master " a dog divided, etcetera. But she was a practical woman first and knew her limits. In the end, she was more relieved to have my help than remorseful over taking on a puppy, and in a few days, we settled into a routine that worked for the three of us. I would walk him and he would eat, sleep, and spend his days with missy. The puppy and I formed an instant bond. We named him Derby, at my suggestion.

I had never been a responsible dog owner. My failure with Opie still smarted and I was relieved that Derby was not mine and my responsibility ended at walking him. That’s how it began. Though he was a tiny pup, walking Derby was no simple matter. It required more patience than I thought it would and, since I was new to it, there was much to learn even a seemingly simple thing like walking him. Puppies, I discovered, wander with no pattern and follow a myriad of scents, all of which are at first new and evidently exciting and none of which appeal to humans. If you let them, puppies especially will linger in one place forever, regardless of heat or cold, wet or dry weather, and oblivious to whether or not their alpha master is drenched or shivering. I had to accustom myself to it and it took a while before I learned to assert dominance in the correct manner for Derby to understand what I expected of him.

And then there is the first time your dog finds some obscenely obnoxious substance that is irresistible. You watch as he seemingly closes his eyes and rolls on his back again and again until he’s sated, apparently in canine ecstasy. At first, you think to yourself, what a delightful, unselfconscious show of pleasure. By then it’s way too late. You don’t smell it until you’re back inside and then, if you’re not swift, it’s been transferred to carpets and furniture before you can begin to countermeasure by tossing the little rascal into the tub for a thorough going over. If you have a big dog such events are much more calamitous before you learn to be prepared to cope with them. If Derby had done that to Mrs. D while they were alone, she couldn’t have dealt with it. Finding herself with such frustration, as happened in other ways occasionally, reduced her to petulant tears.

At first, I had scant patience for his indiscrete dalliances over urinous bouquets but wishing to be fair and not impose my personal human timeline upon him, I allowed him time to be a dog before hurrying him along from pause to pause. Thus, we progressed along our route and became acquainted with each other’s peculiarities as well as with other dog walkers and their pets in the neighborhood. Being a haven for dog walking, Kits Point was drenched with scent left by the animals. As a newbie, Derby paused constantly, at which, a few times, I grew impatient and yanked his leash strenuously, causing his tiny, undeveloped body to take flight across several feet and land haphazardly in painful positions, causing him pain and myself recrimination.

In the park, once he knew his way around and after he identified me as his alpha, I began to let him off his lead. This allowed us to roam with one eye on each other; our walks became more pleasant and more of an exercise for him. Walking the seawall that skirts the beach, and raises high above it in some places, he pranced along the arched top edge of the parapet. While Yorkie pups are prone to delusions of grandeur, they are not sure-footed dogs and a few times Derby mis-stepped and fell on the sand as much as twelve feet below " a soft landing that never hurt him. (Had the tide been high he would have landed in the water " also a soft landing " and he would have had to swim to the beach, which could have been quite a distance. But for some reason when the tide was up he never fell on that side of the wall.) At other times, he fell onto the asphalt pavement - the pedestrian walkway, a much shorter fall but a tough one " that was much more harmful to his fragile bones.

On one such hard fall on his head, he went into a seizure. I was beside myself, with no idea what to do. But before we reached the house, the seizure stopped and I decided to say nothing to her unless it recurred. I thought it best not to upset her without reason. It happened once or twice again but only when we were alone. The seizures were brief and seemed of no consequence; again, I said nothing.

But one day, while he was upstairs and I downstairs, she called for me loudly and I ran up. I knew I’d find him in a seizure on the floor and there he lay, in spasm. I did what I had always done " I picked him up, and hugged him closely, petted him and soothed him with words until it subsided. In this instance, it went on longer than any of the previous episodes did. Afterwards I told her everything; that it had been happening for a while, how it began, and why I hadn’t spoken up sooner. We took Derby to a vet who prescribed medication and told us he might have seizures on and off for the rest of his life. He would need to stay on the meds. After a few years, he seemed to outgrow the seizures and they stopped.

When we began giving him pills twice a day, the matter of diet became an issue because of the difficulty of getting him to swallow the pills. Initially Mrs. D bought him dried dog food, which he ate readily enough. I cannot recall with certainty just how it happened that I began preparing Derby’s food myself but I was never a fan of the dried food regimen and less of the canned. I’m sure I proposed preparing it myself and began cooking ground meat with rice and barley in large quantity. This was simple to do while I prepared our dinner. After it cooled I grated raw root vegetable into it " carrot, turnip, parsnip, all things Derby loved - stirred it together to distribute it evenly, and portioned it into two and four cup plastic containers that I dated and froze. We would mix his pills with portions of that when we fed him and he scarfed it all up in seconds and thus always had his meds. He stayed on this diet for fifteen years. He always adored raw carrot chunks and all bones " it was almost frightening how he could make a pork chop rib bone absolutely disappear. He approached the largest bone without fear and never choked.

Derby was easy to house train and after we no longer needed newspaper, when he was a year old Mrs. D enrolled him in a dog obedience training course at the Community Center. I felt put upon at first, never having trained a dog this way, still slightly under the Hippy delusion that dogs should run free, and knowing nothing of this process. But once we started, he responded well and I changed my attitude. I took him to these classes twice a week and soon began to enjoy it. Derby proved to be a good student, attentive and up to expectations, making us proud. On graduation day Mrs. D saw her seven-pound Silky outperform several of his larger classmates, fifty and sixty pound dogs of all shapes and colors. Training is always a good thing for urban animals. Derby and I benefited and I had confidence in his reactions afterwards.

He slept upstairs with missy and she fed him in her kitchen, but despite that my training and walking him bonded him more closely to me than the other things united him to her. This naturally rankled because, after all, Derby was hers but he preferred me. It was some time before she accepted it and for a while, we kept him upstairs with a baby gate across the top of the stairs. There he stationed himself for hours, while I was at work and at home. At such times, he disregarded missy’s glares. If he heard me, he would not be still, constantly whimpering and barking because I was shutting him out. There were many times I felt relief to have him off my hands and displeased that his behavior was coming between his us. I knew it bothered her. I was still a loner, happy not to own a pet and glad Derby was hers. He was fun to be with, cuddly, entertaining; I loved him, no doubt of that " we had bonded. But I could love him more knowing I didn’t have the responsibility. Was that selfishness or emotional void?

During 1988, with all I was doing I still had time on my hands and decided to take a training course to become a volunteer tutor of English as a Second Language (ESL). Besides learning to teach English, I acquired the protocol of going into the home of housebound people, mostly women, who want to learn English but can’t go to formal classes. They call it Homefront and it runs out of Vancouver City College. The training was brief and soon they assigned me my first student.

My original intention was to help impoverished housebound immigrants. When I arrived at the spacious west side home of a middle age, modern Chinese woman with a husband and four grown children I felt surprised and confused. Marie Chan was a lovely person, welcoming, gracious, and kind. We liked each other. She already spoke broken English that allowed us to communicate enough to begin lessons. Three of her children were in university and the fourth was well along in high school. Her husband was a successful businessperson. Her whole family spoke perfect English. I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t taught her or why, alternatively, she couldn’t go to VCC for classes, which the school holds on a daily basis. She had a car, a driver’s license, money, and time. Why wasn’t she doing it? I tried not to show my disappointment, though I did say more than once that her children ought to speak English around her, not Chinese, at least after she began to study it with me. She always greeted me cheerfully and fed me delightful dim sum that I soon looked forward to. She was bright and made progress with English.

The commitment to the tutoring program is six months. After six months with Marie, I dropped out. I felt let down by this assignment to a well off woman. I had wanted to work with a learner more truly in need of free, private tutoring. In March of ‘88, I received a post card postmarked Hong Kong from Marie thanking me for teaching her English. It was well worded and the handwriting legible. At the time, I didn’t give it much thought but I held on to the card. I doubt she was competent enough to write it herself. One of her children wrote it for her I’m sure. It was good face for the postcard to be hand written and signed with her name.

Eventually I recognized that her family didn’t want her to become more independent, preferring she remain bound to them and the home, a servant, unable to communicate with the English speaking world. Now I realize her generation of immigrant women all had that willingness to remain under the collective family thumb indefinitely if necessary, as incomprehensible as that seems to westerners. They were raised to believe they had to do it for their families’ sake. It’s only when they’re older and family has flown that a few might ask why they did it. The new generation of young immigrant women is less ignorant and not easily cowed. The old hogwash doesn’t convince them and many learn English as soon as they arrive.

A few months after Derby arrived, an old friend of Mrs. D’s, Madeleine Marsland moved back to Vancouver from Florida. They were both born around 1915, and while she was a girl of six Madeleine developed stomach ulcers. At the time, medicine did not recognize the possibility of ulcers in children causing them to misdiagnose her condition. Over decades many patently incorrect treatments were attempted which exacerbated the symptoms. At one point surgeons removed two thirds of her stomach in one of many foolish attempts to remedy her problem and this left her unable to digest food except in tiny amounts and slowly. Consequently, her digestion was delicate and she became food phobic. As a frequent dinner guest of Mrs. D’s, I cooked for her often over the following decade, and it was always a source of anxiety knowing how unlikely it was that she would enjoy it. It became another culinary challenge for the back door chef, one that forced me to lean on the support of philosophy. Her digestion was the bane and focal point of her existence and it colored everything in her day over her entire life. Aside from that, her health was good; she outlived Mrs. D and almost reached 92. It wouldn’t kill her but many times her stomach and good health made her wish something else would.

The love of Madeleine’s life was her first husband, Leonard Holt. He had a manic-depressive disorder and eventually committed suicide. But she loved him deeply and with no reservations to the end of her life, evidence that he had fine qualities despite his psychological difficulties. (Mrs. D also liked Leonard though I don’t recall her saying much of him, good or bad.) Madeleine never would put their years together or his death into the past. And who could fail to understand that the impressions left by the shotgun suicide of a sweet, beloved partner would never fade?

Her parents conceived her under an accursed star. For instance, Don Marsland, the story goes, who had courted her as a girl, had always been obsessed with her. Though he married someone else when she married Len, he continued to fixate on her. When his wife divorced him sometime after Len’s death, he tried again. Don came back to Canada, wooed Madeleine on the rebound, somehow convinced her to marry him, and carried her back to the swamps and gators. She had never felt anything but lukewarm towards Don and the longer they lived together the less she found to like in the man, the less she cared for Florida and Americans, too.

He had a Napoleon complex without charisma; he was a pushy, possessive, jealous, and paranoid tyrant who wished he’d been born American " another reason for her to disrespect him. She lived there with Don for a decade; in the last five years, he came down with Alzheimer’s. As it took over, his paranoia grew and he became increasingly dependent while his jealous rages kept her more isolated and physically weaker. His adult children lived in Florida and Madeleine decided to leave Don with them and return to live on her own here. She hoped he wouldn’t follow.

Madeleine and Mrs. Dudley met at the University of Saskatchewan and had been close friends ever since. Mrs. D knew all about her life and her difficulties. The arc of their separate lives had been strikingly different. Mrs. D had lived a life of entitlement, married to a handsome, personable, and successful banker with social graces. He had served Canada with distinction as an Officer. They had travelled and lived all over the world. Madeleine’s life had been one of unrelenting physical and emotional distress.

Mrs. D talk to me on the subject of private matters, for which I admired her; she never mentioned Madeleine’s name to me until she was almost here. She had known Madeleine was coming and wanted to resettle. She was concerned her friend would be an added burden on us. There seemed no way around dealing with it and we welcomed her with open arms. She was weary after her travels and troubles. Despite being thrilled to be back again with her closest friends, she was low and dispirited.

We had dinner together with Buffy and I cleaned up and departed, leaving them to themselves. Mrs. D knew Don Marsland well enough to dislike him intensely " she couldn’t stand Canadians who badmouthed Canada. She had always known Madeleine would regret marrying him. She called Don a weasel, strong words from her. It was all she could do to keep mum at the time of the wedding and difficult to remain silent now. It was evident to me already, on her first night back, watching their two faces, that if Madeleine lived close by, her constant neediness would be a pebble in Mrs. D’s orthopedic shoe. Despite that, Madeleine was her closest friend, and she would be a distraction and a comfort over the years.

Another dearly loved irritant was her older brother, Wheatley, a widower whose spouse had been long dead. Extremely handsome, tall, silver haired, and dapper, he lived in a condo in a retirement community in White Rock. Unfortunately, he had nothing to substantiate his princely facade. Also on the negative, he had a weakness for scotch and when he was drunk, it always trumped his sister’s scorn for this character flaw. He drank too much when he visited and Mrs. D suggested politely that he try to restrain himself. But Wheatley was an alcoholic who’d reached the stage at which he functioned well only until the arbitrarily set time of day when decorum ceased. That now was mid-afternoon, when someone " himself - would discretely lift the stopper of the decanter and pour the delectable contents over ice.

I wondered how much of his loud, vulgarity she would tolerate before she would blow her top but I never saw her lose control. She really did love Wheatley though they were opposites. He was her only sibling, her family. She could never dismiss him, no matter how he offended her. But it was transparently clear how she felt during the many moments of exasperation I witnessed.

A year or two after Mr. D’s death, a woman his age named Greta, who also lived in his building in White Rock, decided he was fair game and began to pursue him. She was someone Mrs. D had known slightly for many years and a person she disliked. It soon became obvious that Greta - not dead yet! - was lonely and infatuated by Wheatley’s good looks and his somewhat devil-may-care personality. There was no doubting that Mrs. D. thought the entire business undignified and beneath them.

With no objections on his part, and Mrs. D too refined to protest, Greta, who pleased him by pretending to keep pace with his alcohol consumption and not scolding like his sister, appropriated Wheatley to herself. She appeared with him everywhere. Whether visiting Mrs. D and Madeleine (who now had her own place), on cruises together, at parties, at family birthday celebrations, at holiday dinners " you name it, there was Greta, front and center, smiling, glass in hand, arm in arm with him head and shoulders above her. He enjoyed her company and attentions. Mrs. D was outraged but, as usual, kept it to herself when either was present. She did make her feelings felt when they were not, speaking up when we were alone. As she advanced into her ‘80’s she fell less constrained on certain topics in front of me.

I enjoyed the novelty of having more money though I still couldn’t save. I commissioned a cabinetmaker to build a large tall U shaped display case in six parts for me. I also bought antique furniture that included a superb Victorian walnut Canterbury and a green Chinoiserie cabinet with glazed doors above a fall front desk. I also began to collect objects in a more focused way than I did in the past. I found a weekend job at a large consignment store on South Granville, the Shaughnessy Antiques Gallery. This job was not of long duration and ended badly because of the petty felons who owned the business and the crooked way they ran it, the details of which I only learned much later.

I was thrilled to be working in an antiques shop. I hoped to learn and meet people who might further my interests or that it would transition into a stable position of some kind in the trade, one I might fall back on when I was no longer connected with Mrs. D. That I didn’t need the pittance they paid me added greatly to my satisfaction and I spent all my earnings on things in the shop. Much later on, I learned that this was the wisest thing to do with those cheques because they were virtually bogus. Thus, by endorsing these worthless slips of paper and taking merchandise, I was the only employee getting anything for his time. The owners were robbing the vendors of a portion of their sales by saying they had been stolen and the staff of some of their pay by issuing rubber cheques. In the end, when some vendors went to the police over disappearing consignments, the owners scapegoated me by accusing me of stealing the missing merchandise and firing me. The police came to my apartment to follow up on the charges. They searched and questioned me but I had nothing for them to find and they exonerated me of suspicion. I was incensed at the audacity " and stupidity " of the owners. But then thieves must be audacious to succeed. I quickly moved on, as it really didn’t matter to me. My first taste of “the trade” was foul.

Meanwhile, a few doors south on Granville, was Hycroft Antiques. This business owned by two older men, Ken and Merv, was slowly winding down as their lease ran out. They had been partners forever and in business together on and off for forty years, here and in Victoria. They’re extremely knowledgeable and unlike most of the local dealers, would make time for, and loved to research unfamiliar things that came along. Moreover, they love objects and formed their own collections of many kinds of things. They have combed the world for objects and learned markets and prices by so doing. They know what to look for, what to expect. They know fakes. They know people. Nothing interests them more than antiques, the market, and the trade does. Having come to know them, I realize they could sell cars to Venetians. At the time I met them their silken tongues gave me confidence to purchase five teapots. They were thrilled to find a new pupil for an ancient, deeply loved interest of their own, ceramics. They had reduced their prices because they were retiring and I became their avid student.

From that point my love of ceramics such a large part of my persona that here in Vancouver, where it is easy to be recognized for small successes, I became known among certain people as a collector of antique ceramics and someone with knowledge of the field, to which encomiums I am not entitled. I bought a few books on porcelain, Meissen and Worcester being my first preferences. I enjoyed reading up on, and discussing these porcelains but only concluded how vast and what a minefield of misinformation pertains to them. They are best embarked on with the energy and optimism of youth, and pursued over a lifetime, with ample funds to travel and buy, and with leisure. It was too late for me to begin, and such bibelots were financially out of reach.

Meissen is a treacherous market, heavily weighted with copies and outright fakes as well as Meissen’s own copies of their perennially popular eighteenth century originals. There are a huge number of restored pieces undetectable to the untrained, inexperienced eye. Moreover, during their three hundred years of existence Meissen’s own record of achievement, while high, has had its lows, too; not all Meissen is of uniformly superlative quality. And since almost all Meissen is marked, ignorant and disreputable dealers will price anything with a crossed swords mark high regardless of its authenticity. Therefore, Meissen rarely slips by unrecognized and is always unaffordable.

First period Worcester, on the other hand, is an academics game. It was rarely marked and this was only done briefly and selectively. A few pieces of under-glaze blue and white ware were marked, with workmen’s marks only. They are an odd assortment of vaguely pseudo-Chinese-characters. The polychrome pieces, with rarest exceptions marked “Wigornia”, were not marked. All of it is exceptionally rare and if you don’t read about it, you won’t recognize it. In twenty five years I have found only two early Worcester pieces, one blue and white egg cup in New York in year 2000 for which I paid $425 and one polychrome unmarked Wigornia-type cream boat in Vancouver for $5 in 1992. In both instances I was at first uncertain which factory made them until I researched them. But I never doubted I had something. I found the eggcup, which had a tiny fleabite chip and a short hairline at the rim, among ten other more damaged pieces of blue and white, 18^th Century English, all priced similarly. I was, at first, appalled by what I took for high prices and only allowed myself the eggcup. I have repeatedly kicked myself for not buying all of it. That was shortsighted; the lot was worth a small fortune. But it was my Father’s money and I didn’t have the right to spend it too freely or know enough to gamble - I was on my own and didn’t know better. By the time I did, it was too late.

I found the flower decorated cream boat, in perfect condition, on a five-dollar table in a downtown shop with overpriced merchandise. Honestly, if the price was $50 I might not have looked twice. But its molded hexagonal rococo design and the deep enamel colors enticed me. For five dollars, I had to have it. At the same time, I also bought a blue and white Chinese bowl for $150 that was a waste of money. I soon lost interest in the latter. That’s how it goes: I was a beginner, feeling my way through the minefield of antique porcelain. If I had had less money, I would have been less of a spendthrift.

As I have said, I managed to narrow the focus of my ceramics collecting somewhat but you can’t restrict yourself in Vancouver because the stuff’s not here and if you do you’ll end up with nothing. My collecting remained highly eclectic while I dreamed of the 18^th Century. I began by wanting to collect English porcelain. But in Vancouver, what was here was pedestrian; what was available at auction in the large world-class rooms cost many thousands.

I discovered that I needed to buy in the same way addicts need to fix. It would come over me in almost predictable waves. And soon my collection was composed of bits of every kind of ceramic from the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries, both English, and Continental. My standards were more flexible than wise. Instead of saving for one or two fabulous things, I bought mediocre bits. I eagerly compromised if I liked a piece enough (or needed a retail fix), compromised on condition if I thought something rare (which it often was not), and I would pay more that I should or could afford for the unworthy. I bought many things, which all too soon lost their magical aura. These I came to call my “mistakes”.

Over my years on the Point, Pieter photographed most of my things for me for an album of record. This catalog of the highlights makes it clear why I was always short of money. I was off and running but there was no finish. I surrounded myself with these luxuries - ceramics, furniture, quirky old paintings, clocks, silver, textiles "everything but ready cash as my spending continued to outpace my income. I shouldn’t be this hard on myself for it; mismanagement of money is the commonest human frailty in the world. What I did not see was that my old friends were dismayed at my enthusiasm and new trade acquaintances were only interested in unloading on me. I lived in a vacuum.

Kenny died in San Francisco that spring while Richard was there. It happened on Richard’s birthday. I had no idea Kenny was near death or I wouldn’t have phoned but I happened to call in the morning. A stranger’s voice answered with hurried, garbled words I didn’t understand. I asked for Richard. When he picked up, I sang Happy Birthday. He gave a sort of ironic muffled laugh in reply and said “Kenny’s dying. I have to go. We’re just taking him to the hospital. We’ll talk later.” We hung up. I felt like a fool. It was a horrid moment I’ll never forget. That day or the next Kenny died.

He had bought his way out of the legal circumstances that drove him here. I’m sure his parents, being wealthy lawyers, had a hand in it but it still took years to pull it off. Money buys everything, you know, and eventually it bought Scarlet a return ticket and he migrated back to the Bay Area and bought a house and property. I never visited but I heard the house was the tiniest cabin at the top of the highest hill on the smallest property with the best views. You had to climb over a hundred steps to reach it from the street. If you knew him, you’d say it sounds typical. The stranger’s voice on the phone had been his Father’s and the words were indecipherable because at that moment he was running down those hundred winding steps to the ambulance with the paramedics and his son on a stretcher. Breathlessness and anguish had made his words indecipherable.

Upon moving back to California, Kenny really had no choice, if he was to support himself in his preferred manner, but to continue to peddle drugs. I am not in a position to say how widely he cast his net or whether he sold drugs to other lower echelon dealers in the US. But he did sell quantities of MDA, PCP, and cocaine to Pieter who retailed it here. It’s possible that Kenny had actually learned to be careful and wasn’t involved directly in dealing down there again - but he did feel more alive around danger. At any rate, he never found himself in trouble with the police again. Pieter would go down to San Francisco and bring the drugs back up in various ways. No one ever caught him. They made a fine living this way until Kenny passed. Then Peter’s drug dealing days gradually wound down.

Pieter had now lived in Vancouver for more than a decade. His closest friends were Richard and Kenny. He had more in common with them than he had with me as they were more inclined to enjoy risky behaviors. They had more money and could afford to travel. Peter was not deep in any sense. He was brassy and loud. Peter’s Broadway went no further than Ethel Merman, and a good book was the latest best seller. He had no taste in clothes or interior decoration and he could be ridiculously short sighted when it came to money, refusing at times to spend even on his own creature comforts, especially as he grew prematurely old. It often upset me, as I never understood these absurd choices: I sometimes thought he made them arbitrarily, just to annoy me. After both of them died, we became close; until then we were not.

In May of ‘89, my parents celebrated their Fiftieth wedding anniversary. I went to New Jersey to help with the arrangements and last minute details that were difficult for my Mother to manage. She was then eighty-four and my Father eighty-one; gravity was slowing them down. (At one time, she said, “I never felt old until I turned eighty.”) They were showing their years now and it was something of a revelation to realize the natural process, which they had held at bay for eight decades, was proceeding. The event started with mass at their parish church, St. Mary of the Lake Church in Lakewood, and followed with a lunch and reception at Winkelmann’s, a popular, German restaurant, that they and everyone they knew liked. The menu was German cuisine and the décor gave a nod to Black Forest but the employees in Teutonic dress all spoke New Jersey.

In September of 1989, Richard phoned to invite me to join him, Carl, and Pieter on a five-week holiday in Greece in mid-September. Pieter was taking him and he told Richard to invite anyone he wanted. Flush with drug money, Pieter would pay our hotel expenses and air fare. While he could make foolish decisions not to spend, he no longer seemed like such a skinflint. Taking us to Greece was an extremely generous, uncalled-for gift he was really making to Richard, not expressly to us, knowing his friend was dying and wishing to commemorate their friendship by something extraordinary. Taking Carl and me along was less of a gift to us than it was an added one for Richard. Carl, and Richard and I were extremely close. Richard didn’t invite David because he had just returned from a big holiday alone and Dave agreed not to object if he invited me. Richard had a sentimental side after all.

I needed permission to be away that long and I was not sure if the prospect would float, as Mrs. D was still grieving. But she and Buffy agreed that I couldn’t miss such an opportunity. I confirmed that I would go and Pieter made arrangements. We would stop in London on the way to allow Richard to rest a few days before flying on to Athens. From there we would fly to Rhodes where we would stay for three weeks. We would spend our final week on the mainland in Athens and around Delphi and then fly back to London for two more days of rest before coming home.

Richard’s sickness had advanced and watching it was terribly frightening. He had developed Kaposi’s sarcoma, a virus, which manifests on the skin in the form of patches of abnormal dark tissue, painful and embarrassing. They would disappear in one place and reappear elsewhere. He wore makeup to cover the spots but felt so terribly self-conscious  that it showed in his expression. I was surprised that he felt up to such long and strenuous travel and until the last minute, I wondered if he could endure the strain.

We left Canada around the beginning of October. Peter and Richard were much more accustomed to long airplane travel than Carl and I. For Richard the trip to London, with the long lay over while we waited in Toronto, was grueling. But he didn’t complain so Carl and I followed his exemplary lead. We didn’t either, though we felt like whining and we would have, had we been travelling alone.

Peter had booked our three days and two nights’ accommodation at a small gay hotel in the grimy Earl’s Court district of London. I wasn’t keen on the place but it was typical of Pieter to think that because it was gay owned and the employees and clientele were gay this element of gay exclusivity added risqué excitement to staying there. As my first experience of London hotels, it was disappointing. The rooms were cramped, the beds uncomfortable; the view of a moribund garden out the large window caked with Dickensian grime in the room I shared with Carl was dreary. The small neglected yard with its stunted tree, and dusty, wan shrubs seemed to have never seen the sun.

The staff of the hotel was young, self-absorbed, and unresponsive to our needs; it was as though they walked with mirrors attached above their empty heads into which they constantly peeked. I asked for a wake-up call at 4:30 AM on the Saturday in order to go to Bermondsey market when it first opened but no call came. As I was unable to sleep anyway because I was excited and anticipating the call, I was awake and wondering why no one rang. I dressed and went to the lobby only to find the reception desk abandoned. When I advanced my search for help into the drawing room, I found the desk clerk making out with a beautiful black man I’d noticed hanging around the previous day, his pants now gathered at his ankles. I gave the clerk s**t for being irresponsible. He acted pouty and put upon, and only reluctantly condescended to put down the black man’s c**k long enough to call a cab.

Bermondsey turned out to be futile as I was too nervous to risk buying in utter darkness inspecting by flashlight. It seemed to me, with an exchange rate at that time of over $2 to the pound, asking prices were insufferably high. When I returned to the hotel, my friends were still in bed. At breakfast later, I told them of the disappointments of my early morning excursion, starting with the lack of a wakeup call. They acted unsurprised and as though I should have expected nothing less. Their noses may have been a little out-of-joint because I was showing independence and initiative. Peter and Carl on the other hand, spent one or two nights cruising in the gay bar at the hotel and one or two other hot spots around Earl’s Court. This amusement had no interest for me. I don’t recall any of us having success of any kind, sexual or otherwise, in London that time out.

They went sightseeing to the usual tourist destinations while I continued to try to break ground on my own and meet people in places where I hoped to find antiquarians and antiques. Before we left Vancouver, a friend had given me names of shops and dealers to look up in London. I was intent on doing that, not knowing if I’d ever return. I couldn’t be with my friends and go antiquing, too. Having chosen the latter, I felt somewhat guilty over not joining them on all their outings. They missed me and Richard especially was let down. But I just wasn’t interested in seeing Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace and I hoped they’d forget and forgive my striking off on my own, as we would spend the rest of our travels together. It was selfish and foolish to behave as I did; it was my last chance to spend time with Richard and instead I went antiquing with no reward. There would always be another day for London. I’m sure Richard never forgave the slight but he never said a recriminating word.

It was another long flight to Athens with a shorter layover there while we waited for our final flight to Rhodos, where Peter had rented the Villa Tsampika for October. There was also a car waiting. In one album, I affixed invaluable shorthand notes detailing the spots we visited on Rhodos, as well as some of the hotels where we stayed, the beaches, and places we saw in Turkey. I noted the date we flew back to Athens and drove to Delphi for a few days. These notes serve me well now.

Nicknamed Island of Roses, Rhodos has almost as many tiny Byzantine churches, chapels, bell towers, and medieval castles in various stages of decomposition as it does residents. As we were there out of season we had somewhat more comfortable weather, warm but cooler than it was in Mediterranean high summer, and fewer tourists competing for the attention of weary Greeks who toil in their service with such evident unwillingness. There are over two hundred miles of good road on the fertile rock and I’m sure before we left we covered five hundred of them. Tiny chapels are everywhere and monasteries appear as dots at the most challenging heights imaginable, emerging from a background of multicolored ubiquitous rockroses. Most of the domed religious architecture is whitewashed and detailed in sumptuous deep azure.

At first, we felt a bit remote from civilization, which is to say from the nightlife of Rhodes itself. But that wasn’t much and we weren’t looking for nightlife anyway. In one day, we adjusted. Rhodes was close; if we had bothered to take the tour, we would have found much to see there. Our villa had four bedrooms and furnished adequately if not prettily - for my taste - for four rough and ready guys. We weren’t after luxury. The floors and the walls of our villa were all tiled and all the fixtures were in contemporary Greek taste that I found hideous. But the weather was every bit as gorgeous and distracting as it’s said to be and our itinerary kept us outdoors so much of the day that, after the initial shock of the many shades of shiny brown ceramic surfaces in our Villa, I didn’t let it bother me. The villa had large open patios at the front and back and we lived outside almost all day. As restaurant fare was indifferent, sometimes we shopped locally and I cooked. There were always fresh fruits, vegetables, fresh meat, and fowl in the markets. Peter was inclined to fuss over his food but I devised menus to please everyone. Lime trees and fresh basil, which is extremely difficult to cultivate in many parts of BC, grew profusely around the villa; I used them in almost everything but coffee.

We called at a spot called Galatea, seven miles from our villa. The Italians built this largely open-air bathing establishment in the Moorish taste while they occupied Greece in the ‘20’s. In the ‘30’s they abandoned it and since then it has been crumbling. Remembering the loathsome Fascist occupation, the people of Rhodes despised its exceptional Italianate architecture. But for us it had no despicable connotations. We didn’t know the Fascists were responsible for it and found it grand and somewhat mysterious. We asked ourselves why the Rhodians had neglected Galatea while maintaining the much older more decrepit architecture of the island.

We often ate lunch at a taverna called The Panorama at open-air tables surrounded by blue morning glories, rockroses and the omnipresent brilliant whitewashed walls, with 180-degree views. Here the food, which elsewhere on this noble rock had a quality of apathetic sameness, was tasty and prepared with pride and love. We found the sea warm, buoyant and refreshing, the skies above were, precisely as one hears, a distinctive blue found nowhere else, and everything around us so amazingly quaint and photogenic that it was impossible to take a bad photo.

The only pleasure we missed was pot. We were five weeks without and we never, over all that time, accepted its absence. We railed and ranted occasionally, blathering on over how much more perfect it would have been if we could have smoked some pot. But in the end, we managed fine. It would have been a brilliant time to quit but that was far off.

In the middle of our stay, we ferried across the Straights of Marmaris to Turkey and visited three cities in four day. The first was Marmaris where the ferry docks; then on to Kushadasi, and then Cesme. Prices in Turkey were lower than they were in Greece. Every place we visited in this part of the country was scrupulously clean. We were overwhelmed by the amazingly intact ruins at Ephesus and Europol. In these outposts of antiquity, one gets impressions of how life was lived millennia ago. In the unfamiliar presence of ruins and sculpture that combine beauty and grandeur with history and purpose visitors can try to imagine themselves living then. There is nothing like this in our world. We went to a bathing establishment in Turkey that looked at first like an architecturally fascinating building with immensely high domed ceilings and marble walls. But on entering we got a snort of the smell of fresh human s**t and that was all we needed. We turned and left. Then we became involved with a dealer in rugs and carpets for a few hours, drinking many tiny cups of tea, before we left him empty handed and sad.

We had to end our love affair with Rhodos at the end of October for a fling on the mainland where we rented another car. Here we drove to the town of Galixidi to visit the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. We roomed at The Pan Hotel and spent three days touring. The breakfast room there was the only one I saw in Greece that was entirely wood paneled. The place was almost empty while we were there. The breakfast was a typical unsatisfying cold Continental buffet - roll or pastry and coffee that left you still waiting for breakfast. But the view across the wide, deep valley behind Galixidi above which stand the ruins of ancient Delphi, “navel of the world”, were worth a million breakfast buffets.

It began to seem like Greece was closing down to recuperate from the millions of foreigners who had made chaos of it over the past season, straining the resources and hospitality of these people. They were grateful for the life giving transfusion of our tourist dollars on which most depend but they had had more than enough of tourists, and our shrill enthusiasm for what they looked at every day. After Delphi, we spent two nights in Athens, which seemed like an afterthought, hardly worthy of notice after all the other places we’d seen. It was merely a small, dirty city with a few ruins on the hills around it, which I didn’t visit. We stayed at the Hotel Candia near the train station and I would not remember it if I hadn’t taken photos and put the name in my album. The only thing I recall" again, only with the aid of photos - is the deserted roof garden with a small empty swimming pool. Of all the places we visited in Greece, I’d least care to see Athens again.

The Greek people had sour expressions on their faces, the women especially. The men were handsome and virile. Both genders bore a long-suffering demeanor; the unsmiling women, however, were repulsive, short, wide and dumpy, shuffling in the dust in their eternal black veils. Many had dark moles on their faces and bore as much expression as prickly pickles. I saw no affection between the sexes and I understood. If the much written up homosexual preferences of Greek men is factual, after looking at their short, stumpy, sour faced women no one could blame them. The sexual policy of the Hellenes might be heterosexuality is necessary for the practical procreative purpose; homosexuality is necessary for pleasure. I saw no effeminacy among Greek men though had we looked I’m sure we would have found it. The Greeks all seemed troubled, short-tempered, and without humor. Knowing what Greece faces in 2012, I suspect the Greeks we met - shopkeepers, hoteliers, restaurateurs " already saw something awful coming. In 1989, these people already foresaw their country sliding towards the economic debacle they face today. I would have worried, too.

On November 5, we flew to London for a two nights of rest before returning to Canada. I have almost no memory of what we did there. It couldn’t have amounted to much. Richard needed to gather his strength for the next long trans-Atlantic leg of our journey home.

Back here each of us went to his separate abode to readjust to the roles we had left. They had missed me though Buffy had looked after Mrs. D well in my absence. Derby was beside himself when he saw me again and demanded my full attention. I felt glad to be back tough it was that worst time of year, November, and after all that Mediterranean sunshine nothing could refloat my spirits It was a pleasure to taste my pot pipe again.

Sometime in the spring, a large group of Kenny’s friends gathered in Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver to disperse his ashes. Carl, Richard, Tom, Pieter, Tony, David, Sophia, Jorey, me, and five American friends I didn’t know, including three I hadn’t met from San Francisco. It was of course a sad, ominous occasion - we knew more memorials were brewing. Afterwards Pieter took a photo of all of us standing under the trees in the parking lot; he is the only one missing. It was inadvertent but his absence from the group almost gave the impression that he was dead, too - not the case by a long shot. I love the photo despite the sad occasion. Richard stands there in a waist length green rain parker, hands in his pockets, smiling at the camera. He is off to one side and Carl, Dave, and I are together on the other. Everyone has a smile, but Richards’ is the most mysterious as he knew that, barring some unforeseen calamity to someone else, he would probably be next. If knowing this frightened him, he didn’t show it.

Life went on as usual. Richard’s life ebbed in ways that upset us as various symptoms manifest in repulsive and painful ways. He gradually sought the solace of the poppy. Eventually he contacted the Right to Die Society (RTDS), which sent several women to visit and talk over how he wished to exit. They were a tremendous boon. Soon he had a legal will and arranged most of the details. He found satisfaction in knowing how it would end. All that remained was to choose the time; he did that, too.

In late spring, eight of us gathered for the event. Richard did not have a religious or a spiritual bone in him. But, at the suggestion of one of the women from the RTDS, he with their help, or they with his, had put together a formal observance of sorts that he was leaving us. When the final moments came, Richard was alone in his room with Dave and the woman facilitator. Meanwhile in the living room the rest of us formed a circle on the floor, holding hands and meditating until someone informed us Richard’s suffering had ended. He had taken a self-administered overdose of Reds in yogurt and quickly stopped breathing. David and the woman from RTDS had been with him for support and assistance. It was a dignified death and a proper leave taking. He had made it his right to terminate the course of the wasting viral disease that would only have continued to a revolting and painful end. Instead, he chose the time, the means, the place, and the company he wanted.

Moments before his passing as I sat beside him on his bed, I promised him I would always think of him every day when he was gone. Not a day passes that I don’t, that something doesn’t bring him to mind. I see people we both knew. His partner Dave is in my life - his phone number is the number Richard had before he met Dave, 734-2571. Whenever I dial it, I remember. When I look around me downtown, I think to myself, “If Richard could just see what a fucked up mess they’ve made of this corner, he would have lots to say” When I go to the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library, built precisely over our cold-water flats at Homer, of course I remember him and our carefree youth. When I pass the cell phone store at the corner of Robson and Seymour where Faces used to be in the Orillia Block, the very place we met, I see my longhaired, young, flirty friend.

On August 12, 1990, David held a memorial service at their apartment and I read the following poem by our mutual friend, Gerry Hawke. She wrote it in memory of a friend who died in 1979. I thought it perfectly appropriate for Richard.

 

We are the pinpoints of light

Moving back and forth

Up and down

In the dance of life

For some forms, the briefest span

Hours, by our reckoning of time

Take part, and then drop away.

Others, trees rooted in the earth

Mother to us all

Sway for hundreds of years

Then drop and are transformed

To nourish new life.

The time we have with one another

Seems often times too short

To gain the understanding

Of what the dance is all about.

Sometimes a special person

Flickers with a quiet light

That warms and touches with compassion

All those on whom it glows.

Though that light too soon goes out

It leaves its warmth

Burning in the hearts of those who felt his love.

 

The post-Richard decade was filled with incidents as well as routine that, had I lived anywhere but in my suite with a view in that charming small house in that grand location, would otherwise have been more difficult to shoulder. I continued to make a good living at housework; Derby shone his light on both me and Mrs. D; Madeleine found a place just around the corner where Don joined her; and I lost two more friends, Page and then Jeff, in Victoria. Then I learned through the grapevine that my erstwhile dear friend, sweet gentle Cecil, who was busted with me after my party for Hopper in ‘74, had overdosed in San Francisco. And later I heard Paul Daigle suffered a similar fate in Gastown.

I continued collecting. Here in Vancouver I met Richard Morris an English Jew who had travelled widely and learned a great deal on the nature of things. On his travels, he picked up wide experience with antiques, especially ceramics, which was his great sanguinary passion. He was here with his family in part because he had married a Vancouverite, Dolores Clayman, the daughter of a man who had been a wealthy haberdasher in the Twenties. She was a musical virtuoso and got to go to Julliard where she excelled. Her exposure to the big city made her a woman of the world, too urbane, broad minded and worldly to live here again.

Richard was himself the proverbial wandering Jew, unable to nest. Dolores loved to travel, too, and between the two of them, flitting about - from city to city, country to country - became the family affliction. It was an illness, debilitating like other illness; I could see it in their eyes, the conflict between longing to settle somewhere and the inability to find a place that could hold them. Richard had wanderlust worse than Dolores; his was incurable. They divorced when Dolores had finally had enough and delivered an ultimatum: buy a home and settle in London or divorce. At the end, Richard lived alone in Spain, his favorite country, while Dolores and Michael, who were similarly afflicted, lived in London in a townhouse where I visited them for the last time in 2003.

We met at an antiques show in ‘88. I had a table there, trying to raise money with a few of my ceramics and other smalls, all too fine for such a venue in a backwater like Vancouver. But, though I already knew this, I tried for no other reason than that hope springs eternal. I had priced my items at approximately what I paid or slightly higher to allow dickering room. Richard, Dolores, and Michael strolled along in the thick of all the dour, poker-faced early birds one always sees at these so-called events. They were strangers to me and I had no expectations.

Michael and Dolores were well dressed, far better than the rest were. As I have noticed seems to be common with me, I remember how he was dressed but I do not remember what she wore. He had put on a well-tailored overcoat, a debonair hat, a suit, tie, and polished shoes, and he carried a tightly rolled brolly, marking himself as a well-heeled out-of-towner and every inch a Beau Brummell. They whispered knowingly while motioning discreetly at several continental pieces with quick finger, head, and eye movements. When they stood there longer than most people do, I knew something was up and began to hope.

He was the only person who could name the factories that had manufactured the porcelain on my table, Wallendorf and Limbach, two minor 18^th Century German studios. Ken and Merv sold the pieces to me - no other local shop would have knowledgeably dealt in such mysterious ware. Richard dickered with me over prices and then actually bought them. Nothing cements relations between a vendor and a buyer faster than a sale does and when you make a transaction with a knowledgeable buyer, nothing is sweeter. I saw immediately that he knew more than I did; I wanted to know him better. That interest was mutual. He told me that he had owned my pots before Ken and Merv and that he had just opened a shop. “Drop by. Lots to see”, he said. As a dealer, he would welcome any knowledgeable and keen young-ish collector like me. He referred to me as a collector to flatter me, not as a buyer or a customer, which might have frightened me off.

I did visit and was not disappointed. Richard had stocked his shop with superlative things gathered on his travels with an astute eye for beauty and taken great pains over authenticity and provenance. Dolores and Michael were present when I called and dodged in and out on various mysterious errands while I visited. None of them could stay put more than thirty minutes. We liked each other; none of us was pretentious or stuffy and in short order we abandoned any social barriers. It is difficult, however, to make conversation with someone who you keep expecting to get up and leave.

They had often been to Vancouver through the years and knew all the dealers and their foibles, as well as the market here and in the West. Richard had money from some source though apparently insufficient to live the way they would have liked without supplementing it. Now he was pinning his hopes on the antiques trade and, surprise, surprise, it wasn’t looking too promising. But he was a player and a good enough bull shitter to feel right at home punting with the others.

The face of his wife and son showed anxiety, fear, and weariness; they looked as though they had been following the Patriarch, Richard, a long time, as he involved them in one scrape after another. I gathered they now had some doubt that as he grew older and the pull of gravity stronger he could still keep all the balls in the air without one breaking on the ground. They seemed to know that Richard didn’t tell them everything, that he always had something brewing in the wings, something upsetting to know, and that it was no different now.

It felt like the Morrises were in the shop because they had nothing else to do and they would have preferred being almost anywhere else. The larger, more puzzling question was why these citizens of the world ever returned to Vancouver. Their unaccountable presence here reminded me of my original doubts over why the Bentons had moved to Coal Harbor. To me, their two situations made as much or as little sense. Their focus darted from one thing to another, never settling long on anything. I found this restlessness loathsome, weird. Watching them made me uncomfortable. Was it because I was present that they said almost nothing, or was it, for them, normal? How was it that they had nothing to do?

I continued to drop by Richard’s shop both to keep up with new arrivals, and to stay in touch with him and Dolores, whom I soon came to like greatly. Eventually I invited them for dinner at my apartment. They seemed please to be asked, and arrived dressed for the occasion. From their demeanor it was obvious that it was a treat for them to step out, something I imagined them often doing on the great social stages of the world. They had few opportunities for that here. I discussed antiques with Richard, and when I asked Dolores about herself, she told me something of her years in New York.

I was enthralled. She is not only a pianist but also a composer of a ballet and musical theater, reviews for London’s West End in the ‘Fifties, and more. In London, she met Richard who thereafter wrote lyrics for her subsequent work, including over 3000 jingles. She earned money by composing jingles and had written the theme music and lyrics for Hockey night in Canada. (At the time, she was being denied royalty rights for this and was in a decade’s long legal process of seeking recognition and financial compensation for it. Eventually she won her court case.) For dinner, I served Mrs. D favorite watercress and orange salad, followed by Boeuf Bourguignon and a fruit tart. We had an aperitif and shared one or two bottles of wine over dinner.

I was so impressed with their travels and Dolores’ stories of her youth in Manhattan that after dinner I felt it was safe to risk playing a Mabel Mercer recording, certain they could and hoping they would appreciate her if they hadn’t already heard of her. Within a minute, Dolores called to Richard as he emerged from the bathroom, “Richard, listen: it’s Mabel, darling”. And with that, she began to recall the days when she first met Miss Mercer. For a year or more, she was her accompanist and a friend, gadding about Gotham. They had actually hobnobbed together with Café Society in the Fifties, while Dolores was studying at Julliard. I couldn’t have been more thrilled to be in Mabel’s dressing room. It was better because I didn’t have to feel self-conscious meeting her. What a wonderful evening that turned out to be, more surprising than I ever could have hoped for. To think something like that could occur in this tiny insular city " it left me bubbly for days. Mabel returned to the top of my must play list and stayed there a long time while Dolores and I became closer.

But Vancouver could not hold the Morrises’ interest for long, business notwithstanding. (The shop had only been a hobby.) Before they left, without prompting Richard did me a favor. One day, he asked me if I knew a Harry Beasley. I said I didn’t and should I. He began to glow warmly over this Beasley. He described him as one of the city’s most devoted and eccentric bachelor collectors of the old school. He said he would try to talk the old curmudgeon into allowing me to meet him at his apartment, which he was too frail to leave. Beasley, as I came to call him, lived in a large apartment in an old stone character building at the corner of Granville and 14^th Street, one I’d noticed and long been curious to enter.

Richard arranged everything before they left. I went to Beasley’s’ building as planned with him on the phone and he buzzed me in. He’d left the front door to his apartment ajar to allow me to walk in. As I closed it he greeted me with, “I hope you’re not a dealer” from his ample drawing room that overlooked that ever changing commercial corner. I was somewhat taken aback to find an elderly, short, wispy haired, arthritic hunchback with one or two widely spaced brown front teeth. His stained, ragged clothing barely clung to his sagging flesh and his grey eyes, which could barely see me, oozed a sticky opaque film around the rims. In his physical condition, grooming was pretty much out of the question, neither a possibility nor, apparently, a habit. Consequently he hadn’t washed or been washed in a long while and he smelled. My impression was of standing before a life size, living Derby Mansion House dwarf.

His apartment was also filthy and malodorous and with every step he took, I thought I’d have to rush to break his fall. But I learned not to concern myself; he’d evidently been like that a long time. Without teeth, he lisped and that made him difficult to understand at the beginning. None of these small points concerned him in the least. All that mattered to Beasley was antiques - what was in the shops, what were they asking, what did I collect, what did I own, who did I know, how had I met them.

We became friends and liked each other greatly. Despite these first impressions of decay, he was a fascinating eccentric. He longed to communicate with the outside world, which had moved on without him, and he immediately decided I would be his liaison. I visited four or five times a week and we phoned at least once a day.

This continued for two years until he could no longer look after himself, something that, to those who knew him as well as I did, was inevitable. At some point " a plumbing or electrical issue conceivably " when his landlord had occasion to look inside his place and saw the mess, he received a written notice of eviction. The shock of this tragedy swept over him like a tidal wave " a long fearful silence, a distant growing thunder, an unstoppable surging tower of water. It took with it his most precious possession, his independence. Only then, now it was threatened, did he grasp what he had always heretofore taken for granted - as all of us do. He was unsuited to live with other people, and not ready for provincial warehousing.

His loyal loving sister, Marguerite, had visited him and brought him food for years. She lived on Robson and found him an apartment in her building. With a lot of help, we moved him there. He stayed for a year and I visited as often as I could. But Beasley never recovered from the shock and the move; he never adjusted.

He began to show signs of the onset of a gentle dementia that made it impossible for him to continue to stay there and once again, had to move - this time into a care home for poor people with disabilities, like himself, close to VGH on Twelfth Avenue. There he had a small private room with none of the things that had been his life. With full blindness and dementia, he went into a shell and stopped talking, stopped eating and passed away in 1993.

I came upon a photo of him that was irresistibly charming and had to have a copy. The love of his life and lifetime companion, a Scot named Lachlan, snapped the photo when Beasley was sixteen. He posed looking slightly exasperated, with his head against his raised right hand in an armchair before an open window, with sunshine streaming and conifers waving through it, at Lachlan’s Aunt’s home on Point Grey Road and Trafalgar. He’s a bored, skinny teenager in a fashionable striped polo shirt. From the collar up, his smooth, youthful face and Brilliantined black hair, dark eyes under bold brows and heavy lashes, a sensuous, unsmiling mouth and strong chin are reminiscent of Proust’s dapper 1890’s carte de visit. He was devilishly handsome, as he never was while I knew him.

A disorderly man, used to being looked after by women, he had lost the negative. When I asked for a copy, he refused. With a strong sentimental attachment to Lachlan and the photo, he was anxious that it not leave the apartment, though he could barely make it out. Without his knowing, I took it to a photo studio and had a negative and several photos in different sizes made. Then I returned the original. I had to have a good photo of him and this was the only way. (I collect photos of friends taken in their youth and this is a gem.) It’s all I have of him now. We never did much, if any, buying or trading between ourselves. I just enjoyed being with him, such an eccentric and a trove of knowledge of the history of early Vancouver and the early days of the trade. I often pass the places he lived and I remember Harry.

Long before Beasley died, the Morrises had left Vancouver for other parts of the world, continuing their nomadic wandering. I saw Ken and Merv on Granville Street from time to time because, though out of it, the trade was in their blood and, while they could have lived anywhere, they made Vancouver their home. When they closed their business, they had a tremendous load of stock left, which held them hostage. They dithered long over what to do with it and never really decided. They refused to consider the auction because they would have lost money that way. So not without trepidation and anxiety, but with no other option, they became consignees at the Shaughnessy Antiques Gallery, which had changed hands after the debacle into which the first owners had tried to drag me.

The new owners, it turned out, were shady, too, and only slightly more genteel. The Boys discovered the new management was like the old, and not reimbursing for all their sales. The owners and employees pilfered some of their merchandise and blamed customers. They pulled out in disgust and found the shop around the corner was happy to have their consignments. A young, pretentious, gay man ran it. Formerly a teacher, he had no knowledge or experience at the trade but came to it emboldened by the facile notion, born out of stupidity and overexposure to interior design magazines, that selling antiques was prestigious, and an easy racket.

He did well for them for a time, they had the right things for the market, Ken and Merv priced them low, and they found ready buyers. But taste and the market are fickle " when a generation of old collectors disappears, their taste may go with them. Eventually their sales fell off when the owner became distracted as his head inflated with premature confidence that waylaid him into costly commercial foolishness. Before this young gay fool’s business bottomed, The Boys lost patience and pulled out. To this day, they still have most of the old stock in self-storage lockers.

Authenticity and beauty in the antiques trade resides in the objects alone - the experience of the trade taints everyone in it, though traders are solely to blame for it. It is foolish to expect ethics in business. Things are never what they appear or as we imagine. Like someone we meet as a gentle, genderless child and meet again, when he is a Man of the World " sharp, pragmatic, a tad despotic " we find that disillusionment follows prolonged exposure to the tides of life. Likewise, few objects keep their luster or charm under the nitpicking eye of the jaded connoisseur, collector, and dealer. They must “good, better, best” everything.

Richard’s partner, David, was happier having a partner than he was living alone. A few months after Richard died, he began to look around, and over the following year, he tried living with two different guys who didn’t work out. Then he met Jim Tracy and they had enough physical and emotional attraction, and enough other commonalities to establish a relationship that still flourishes. In the beginning, Jim had problems with drugs and out of control urges to often childish, impulsive behavior but David learned to cope and over time, Jim has outgrown most of them. They are now living a much more relaxed lifestyle that includes a great deal of travel and family time. Jim is a wonderful man and we have become close. He is a master decorative painter and works on projects with me all the time.

Don Marsland turned out to be a loathsome piece of work - demanding, jealous, loud, and suspicious. Madeleine had my sympathy for all she put up with from him for in Florida and again here. His paranoia worsened and reached the point at which she had to institutionalize him. She found a place for him in West Vancouver and arranged everything without his knowing. She asked me to drive him there under some pretext.

People like Don, with advanced dementia, are commonly transferred under false pretenses to institutions like the one that I took him to. I did it and left without Don knowing what had happened, just as planned. When I told Madeleine I had accomplished my mission, she was extremely relieved and remorseful because with one stroke she had taken away his personal freedom and restored her own. It was necessary to remind her she had done what was best because there were many long days and sleepless nights over the coming weeks during which she needed understanding. Gradually she adjusted. Don passed away of natural causes in less than a year. Then her healing hastened and in no time, his name rarely ever came up.

My parents were not getting any younger. In 1997, my Father was eighty-eight and my Mother was ninety-three. They were feeling it. They had given up their trailer home in St. Petersburg years before and soon after they stopped traveling altogether because it was too much effort. They were sleeping a lot more and eating less. Their neighbors, good close friends, were looking in on them often, being attentive to their needs, for which Joe and I were grateful. Mother, my dear devoted Madame de Sevigne, had almost stopped writing; when she did write, her letters were brief. Her eyes had always been a source of strain and the condition worsened in the last decades. She’d had cataract surgery and other problems like macular degeneration. There were endless visits to eye specialists, prescriptions for new lenses, and medications with awful side effects.

It was her way always to accept God’s will unprotesting and she did not flinch. The ardor of her faith and her devotion to insuring my own salvation never wavered. Her belief in the efficacy of my prayers on her behalf increased in direct proportion as her letters ebbed in number with her strength. My Mother declared herself more openly as her life wavered. At this final stage of her life, she cared less about my reaction to her staccato barrage of requests for what I couldn’t give, which was my repentance and a return to the one true faith. Fervent prayer for my parents would provide proof of this and give her a peaceful death.

Mrs. D turned eighty-nine in 1999. For at least two years prior to that, she had shown weariness of everything. She no longer enjoyed things she previously loved. A while back, for a year I had rented videos of Hollywood musicals and a few Studio classics that she, Madeleine, and I watched one night a week, Movie Night. That had been fun for a while but eventually it lost its interest, too. For a few years, she and Madeleine had taken to watching Golden Girls every day. Her TV was in her bedroom and Mrs. D would have a scotch and water while laying in bed, her friend beside her. (Madeleine was always more comfortable reclining " like most things, it had something to do with her digestion.) I never heard the two of them laugh as hard as they did watching this show. But it wore thin, too.

By then Buffy had married for the third time. Her new husband was a wonderful Dane with a large number of grown and married children, a widower who, with his wife, Buffy had known well for many years. Buffy had helped care for his wife during her protracted final illness and she had asked Buffy to marry Anker when she died in order for him not to be lonely " not that she married him for that reason (though it didn’t hurt!)

“Third time lucky,” Mrs. D said at the time, terribly happy Buffy and Anker had seen fit to throw the dice. Also by then, Buffy had put down the old Rottweiler she lived with when I moved in and after two failed attempts to adopt another dog, had found a personable, affectionate Standard Poodle, Madeleine. She turned out to be truly perfect for Buffy and a dog we all grew to love. She won Derby over, too, and made him adore her " he was no pushover, being highly resistant at the beginning. All the improvements to Buffy’s life brightened Mrs. D’s outlook for a time. But that, after a while, also ran its course and eventually Buffy’s life with Anker became predictable with ups and downs like everyone else’s.

She began to talk over ending her own life with Buffy but did not broach it with me, being too private and concerned that I might disapprove. When Buffy was sure her Mother was serious and not toying with the notion or jockeying for attention, which would have been out of character, she broached the subject of assisted suicide with me. I told her I accept peoples’ right to end their life and wanted to see it legalized and socially accepted one day. As time went on we discussed it more and eventually we both joined The Right to Die Society of Canada. Affiliated with that organization, which is still operating, we found the names of people who had ended their own lives and of others seeking legal access to assistance and the means to end their own lives with dignity.

We could not act quickly enough to satisfy Mrs. D who would have ended her life immediately if she had had no one else’s feelings to consider. It took time before Buffy felt completely convinced that it was the right thing.

 Lynn also had to agree to it. And at the beginning, the idea came as a shock to her. She was unprepared for it; believing suicide was unethical and immoral and no one could convince her otherwise. Although she has no religious affiliation, she is conservative, a botanical watercolor artist with respect for all forms of life. She recoiled from her mother’s wish.

Lynn loved her Mother as much as Buffy though they had different impressions of her and different expectations, just as Joe and I did of ours. At first, she threatened to stop Buffy from proceeding with any such plan. This was not unexpected; Mrs. D would never have proceeded as long as Lynn resisted; and she would never allow her actions to embroil Buffy in legal proceedings. Her mother’s simple request to grant her last wish and allow her to end her life was what finally persuaded Lynn. Faced with her mother’s unflinching determination, Lynn reluctantly agreed not to interfere or create trouble for anyone afterwards.

During all this, my name didn’t come up. The three of them excluded me for my protection, not that it would have done much good if someone had laid charges. A coroner’s report would have shown that Mrs. D died of a drug overdose and real questioning would have followed. Then it all would have unraveled and none of us would have been spared.

Early in ‘99, Buffy and Anker went to Mexico and returned with Barbs. In June, with everything arranged, Mrs. D said her goodbyes. We never spoke again. Lynn was extremely emotionally upset and fearful. She did not appear for several days prior to it or after. Up to and including the final moment Mrs. D was most anxious to finish what she had set in motion; she never hesitated. I was not there when she took the dose, mixed with yogurt as Richard’s had been. I may have taken Derby for a walk as it transpired, as with Mr. D, in the room above mine. All I heard from there was silence.

There was no communication until the following day when Buffy told me her Mother was in a coma. They waited three days before she stopped breathing, fulfilling her last wish. While everything was out of our hands, we lived in anxiety, dreading each possible scenario that could occur. What if someone walked in? It’s not difficult to imagine what Buffy went through while her mother lay in a coma. What if she woke up? It was harrowing for us all but especially for Buffy and Anker. They took turns sitting by her and sleeping on the sofa in the living room with spells walking Madeleine in the park and grabbing a snack. It was a tremendous relief when she ceased to breathe. The three of us met and decided what to tell the neighbors. The doctor needed to sign a death certificate, and everyone would have to learn of her death.

The doctor had no suspicions and Mrs. D’s body was cremated a few days later. Buffy showed tremendous strength of the long period while this event germinated and ripened. We had all given our support but the most difficult hurdle had been Lynn and the possibility that she might renege. But Lynn, too, is a Dudley and, whatever might have been going through her mind during this process, she was true to her word. I’m sure both the Dudleys were as proud of their mother in death as they were of her in life.

Afterwards Buffy asked me to stay on in my suite until she sold the house and to take Derby for my own, to both of which requests I most readily agreed. Despite misgivings concerning the responsibilities of dog ownership, we had long since bonded too closely and I now couldn’t have given him up. Had she not given me Derby I would have been heartbroken. Then she gave me Mrs. D’s Dodge Caravan and said she would continue to pay the salary I had been getting for the last months ($600 a week). She also said I would be getting $25,000 in cash as a gift from Mrs. D’s estate and that she would give it to me over the next few weeks. Her generosity overwhelmed me. I had hoped there would be something for me at the end of this process but I had not expected nearly that much. It was my first windfall, amounting to $50,000.

I’m not proud to say that I recall nothing I did with the money and have nothing to show for it. I suppose I paid off my credit card balances and I’m sure I bought antiques. At some point soon after that, I sold the Caravan for $15,000 because it was such a huge beast and a gas-guzzler, beyond what I needed. Then for $2000 I bought a Rabbit with low mileage that the original owners had kept in a garage its entire life, thinking it a steal, and drove it until it bit the dust in 2006.

She sold her mother’s house for around $700,000 a month later and then asked if I would be willing to move into her basement suite and live there on terms similar to those I had with her parents, except that she would ask me to pay a nominal rent. Again, I didn’t hesitate because there were many reasons to say yes: the neighborhood, familiar to Derby; living with people I knew and cared for, and who felt the same about me; low rent; and a bigger and brighter apartment in a garden with lawn all around it. It seemed perfect.

Meanwhile my phone calls home were not what they had been a year earlier. I talked mostly with my Dad because Mom slept most of the time and her responses, when she took the phone, sometimes seemed confused. She drifted in and out of consciousness. Dad whispered in order not to waken her though it was probably unnecessary. When I talked with their neighbor, Jane, she told me they both needed more home care than they allowed themselves. I offered several times to go back and live with them but Mother wouldn’t hear of it, saying there wasn’t room, they did nothing all day but rest, had no appetite anymore, and would be poor company. This response stymied me. I couldn’t disregard her emphatic wishes and act unilaterally. It was too far to travel only to find rejection at the other end, although I’m sure that wouldn’t have happened once I appeared at the door.

Instead, my plan was to continue to houseclean, knowing that Mother’s end could not be far off. I had given up many clients a few months before because Buffy had requested that I be around the house for her Mother’s needs, although she rarely asked me for anything. At the back of my mind, I was thinking I’d have to find new clients. They had always come along effortlessly and they probably would again. At the same time, my wee small voice was murmuring, “isn’t there something else you’d rather do?”

But before anything happened, after I had moved to Buffy’s, Joe called to say Mother was in a coma in hospital. He told me not to panic and rush home, and that there was nothing I could do. He said to wait here in readiness for further news. Two days later, she passed away of complications from old age. She was ninety-five.

She slipped into a coma and she might have died at home if either my Father or my brother had had the presence of mind. They did nothing for her in hospital but keep her comfortable. All that’s just hindsight and I don’t know if I’d have done anything different, had it been my decision. But I would have discussed the matter with her while she was still able to understand and tried to keep her home. She was just old.

It was time to go back. I told Buffy the news and said I didn’t think my Father could live alone. I stopped short of guessing how long I might be gone but told her I didn’t know. I asked her to keep the apartment for me until I knew more. She understood and said to stay as long as necessary, only asking that I keep in touch. I knew I might be making an extended visit and tried to prepare mentally for an indefinite stay in a retirement community. That would surely be novel. In October of ‘99, Derby and I flew to New Jersey for another funeral.