Category Archives: inspiration

inspiration, memoirs, stories

Take care, or take your medicine!

As a teen, I’d never have thought that in middle-age I’d be taking prescription meds each day to manage my health. (For all I knew back in my teens, even middle-age was like an impossible dream. Sometimes you fear that where you are is all there is and all you’ll ever have.)

Growing up, I never saw my Dad even take an aspirin. With him, I’m convinced he would never even admit to being sick. I don’t remember him ever taking a sick day.

My Mum should probably have been taking Lithium or something to manage her manic-depression, but she hadn’t gone to see a Doctor since before we’d come to Vancouver in 1975. In the half-dozen years since then, the only substance either of my parents ever medicated themselves with was alcohol – way too much alcohol.

My Dad only paid attention to his Doctor when he was given the ultimatum “If you don’t stop drinking, you’re going to die!”. That dramatic advice impressed my old man. It probably made him feel central to a big drama (his own survival), and gave him yet another great story to tell.

By 1984, Dad had a heart attack, multiple strokes, and would relapse into alcoholism and break his hip in a hospital shower. He had survived with his mind and personality intact and had succeeded with the hard work of stroke rehabilitation, but was broken physically and partially paralysed for the remainder of his life.

In contrast, by 1977 my Mother was too far gone into depression and alcoholism to even leave her bed. She’d completely withdrawn from all of us and the outside world, preferring to stay drunk or to appear to be sleeping all the time. She was unreachable, and we probably stopped trying over the course of the year.

Medical intervention for my Mother came with a last-minute ambulance ride to Burnaby General Hospital. She survived, but alcohol poisoning had given her permanent brain damage. She detoxed after a full blood transfusion, and was not the same person afterwards. She’d wanted to escape her life through alcohol, and had almost died and been “remade” with a slightly different mind and personality. She’d had a painful almost-death and kind of rebirth into a new life as a long-term resident in Riverview Psychiatric Hospital.

So I guess I never had good role models for taking care of myself, or staying healthy. At the age of 46, my mum almost died from alcohol. At the age of 62, my Dad almost died from a heart attack and multiple strokes.

Now, at the age of 59, I’m kind of in the middle of those two ages, and managing diabetes and high blood pressure. I’m taking Metformin and Jardiance for my Type 2 Diabetes, and Ramipiril to manage blood pressure. I do blood tests and talk with my Doc every 3 months, eat way more healthy than my folks ever did, and do 5000 to 10000 steps a day.

I guess the point of recounting all this is to show myself that I’m taking better care of myself, in both physical and mental terms. In fact, I’ve learned how each of those aspects can affect the other.

By 2014, my diabetes had been largely unmanaged for about four years. I was pretty large and overweight by that time – maybe weighing 205 or more. I also would experience some very dark feelings at least one morning each week. Other times, tears would come unexpectedly. I felt like my emotions were actually working against me. In the last ten years since that time, my diabetes has stayed in control through meds and some of my attempts at improving my diet and daily exercise.

Today, I weight about 177 pounds and am on-track to lose a few more and to get my blood pressure solidly inside the normal range. I try to get at least 5-6 hours of sleep each night and often walk more than 8000 steps each day. I feel no anxiety, and those black mornings have become very rare occurrences. I feel more calm, more confident, and more happy.

Better physical health can make it easier to improve mental health, and vice versa. I had to learn that lesson myself, but I also had to take my parents’ health struggles to heart as real warnings.

inspiration, memoirs, relationships, stories

Kindness: A Porttrait in Blue

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On Tuesday, July 15th at around 12:15, we said a final goodbye to our beloved cat Blue.

“Blue-Blue”, as we called him, had been with us for about 9 years. We adopted him and his sister back when they were about five.

In June of this year, my wife noticed that Blue’s breathing had become much deeper and laboured, as if he were taking sharper breaths more frequently. He was also weaker than we’d ever seen him, walking slowly and no longer jumping up onto our couch or chairs.

Our vet checked him out, and X-rays showed a lot of fluid in his chest cavity and around his heart, which are all signs of advanced heart disease where blood is leaking out of the arteries and settling into the vestibular areas around the heart and lungs. That accumulation of fluid creates pressure on the lungs, causing them to decrease in size. His heart was weaker on one side too, and more fluid had built-up in the sack that surrounded his heart, causing pressure there too. Basically, his heart was struggling and breathing had become difficult. In typical cat fashion, he made no noise to show his discomfort. A cat’s instinct is to hide weakness and illness from others in order to not be seen as easy prey for predators. They also tend to isolate themselves if they are feeling very unwell.

The Animal ER hospital put him on oxygen and removed over 200 milliliters from his chest, and more from the pleural lining around his heart. After a scary few days in hospital, he came back home and started taking diuretics and blood thinners to help manage his condition. After that first day or two at home with the pressure relieved and the sedation worn off, his spirits bounced back and his smile returned. He looked more like himself again. If we could keep him on his regime of meds (4 pills, every 8-12 hours), we could manage his illness and keep him living a happier life. Unfortunately, Blue discovered the bitter pills that we’d been hiding in his soft treats, and he got wise that we were grinding other meds into his wet food. He refused any food that smelled of his medicine. The prospect of forcing pills down his throat against his will felt like elder abuse to me. If he saw me coming after him with a pill popper, he’d just learn to run under the bed and avoid us. We didn’t want him to fear us or have any anxiety about us, so we made the hard choice to let him eat whatever he wanted and to avoid the meds altogether. It meant that we were in more of a palliative mode with him now, accepting that his life would soon come to an end, one way or another. At best, the fluid extraction and meds had bought him 2 more weeks, but he wouldn’t accept any more meds.

The fluid extractions were done by inserting a big syringe into his chest on each side. We didn’t want to submit Blue to any more invasive procedures, scary separation, or sedation. We just decided it was best for him to live as long as he could in his peaceful, familiar home.

Blue’s decline over the next week was steady and noticeable: he got slower and seemed uncomfortable, appearing somehow both restless and tired. He would lay in our bedroom closet for an hour, and then come out to the main area to lay on the carpet. We tried to feed, brush, and talk or sing to him whenever he was up and about. In spite of his regular mild activity, we worried that he might not last very much longer. His cardiologist confirmed our fear, telling us that he might only have days left. We knew what we needed to do next, and we scheduled an in-home euthanasia from a local vet. It was so difficult to have Blue take his last-ever breath while laying in my arms, but letting him nod-off peacefully was a dignity that our gentle old boy richly deserved. I felt like we had taken on the crying and the suffering so that he wouldn’t have to. Today, Blue’s remains are in a blue urn on our mantle, along with his paw prints. He sits up there next to his sister Peaches in her little pearl-coloured urn.

Every time I looked into Blue’s face, I saw the face of a smiling little friend. In fact, he didn’t seem so little to me at all. His importance in our lives made him a major figure in our home. He made a huge impact.

Blue’s affection was always sincere and unreserved, ever since our very first introduction in 2016. With Blue, the act of being itself seemed like a form of communication. Every pose or move he made told us something about him. Over the nine years he was with us, he taught us to understand him and he watched us closely to learn how we behaved too.

Blue was a good communicator. His eyes, whiskers, and ears told us everything that the word “meow” could not. He used his whole body to communicate, pointing his eyes, his face, or even his entire frame towards whatever thing that he wanted us to pay attention to. His tail was a living punctuation mark, a barometer of his moods, pointing up when he was happy and excited, down when he felt sad or scared, or twisted into any manner of loops or shepherding crooks when he felt intrigued and delighted. I’ve never really paid enough attention to human body language, but I have learned to read “cat” quite fluently.

If I had to sum up Blue’s personality in a word, “kind” is probably the best one I could use. He watched over his sister Peaches in the months when they were stuck in the animal shelter system. Peaches had a lot of fear and anxiety at first, and really relied on her brother to feel safe. They were all each other had. By the time we met them at the SPCA, they were five years old, and had been in the animal shelter system for months. Thankfully, they’d always been together.

Blue had originally been named Epo. He and Peaches had come to the Chilliwack shelter from an owner in Langley. Their owner was moving and couldn’t take them to the new home, so had put them up for adoption. They were about five years old when they entered the SPCA in Chilliwack, then the “Catfe”  cat cafe in downtown Vancouver, before going to the shelter in East Van where we met them. We all got along pretty well from the start, but they were a bit overweight and had noticeable fear and anxiety. They needed a quiet, loving home with lots of room and sunshine where they could feel secure and safe. After being cat-less for four years, we were more than ready to welcome a pair of bonded kitties into our life again.

I’m sure it was was difficult for Blue when his sister Peaches died a few years later. She’d developed a huge tumorous mass all around her heart and lungs, and it was basically inoperable. Poor little Peaches had no future ahead of her. We had to have her euthanized. Blue seemed to understand what had happened when we’d taken her to the Animal Hospital but had come back later empty-handed. We cried as we vainly tried to explain her passing to him. His pupils just went huge and he started shadow-boxing like mad on our glass patio door, “bump bump bump bump!” with his front paws.

The easiest consolation we found from losing Peaches was that we could still pour the excess Peaches portion of our love and care right back into her big brother. Over the next nine years, Blue bounced back, prospering emotionally, returning that extra love back to us ten times over.

https://ejohnlovebooks.com/true-life/tree-house/biographies/i-am-child-free-my-children-are-different/

inspiration, memoirs, psychology, relationships

Sixty years on, the scales of guilt and anger may have balanced

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As I approach sixty (in my sixtieth year now), I admit to feeling almost no remaining guilt, anger, or regret whenever I think about my parents. There are just a few whispers, but my attachments to them are long gone.

As a kid, living with them had been both exciting and scary. As an adult, I found that their deaths made me feel real closure and relief.

My Dad

When my dad died, I was 23. It was a painful, rending loss of a person whom I’d once admired, loved, feared, and finally pitied. A year or so after he died, I learned about the full extent of his abuses in my family and I grew to bitterly despise him, his hypocrisy, and his total lack of accountability. He’d raised me with words like respect and responsibility, but his nature contradicted that: He tended to want to sweep his failings under the carpet rather than face them and try to fix them. His narcissistic and authoritarian character ultimately destroyed any fatherly image he’d tried to own.

I took many lessons of his life into my heart. Whenever I need to bring out a strong, authoritative voice, it’s his voice that emerges. He could be sweet, caring, and gentle, but his good moments are forever in risk of being eclisped by his bad ones. That scale is inherently biased: violence, whether psychological/or physical has a denser molecular structure than peace and love. One nasty, violent act, if unredeemed, can overshadow fifty acts of kindness.

I really had to hate the man to truly let him go. When he died, I grieved, but I also felt calmer in the realization that my obligation to him was finished.

My Mum

When my mum died, I was 29.  I felt such a mix of regret and relief. She’d been remote, like a stranger to me, for as long as I could remember. She’d been an enigma, hard to know, and even harder to reach. Her depression and alcoholism were terrible barriers for her to hide behind, but that was her passive, withdrawn way. As a family, we did nothing to intervene. The elephant in the room was illustrated blatantly in a TV commercial I saw as a kid, and that simple phrase and image has stayed with me all my life. We never acknowledged our elephants. Nothing was to be spoken about it.

Over eighteen years of awkward visits in whatever hospital my Mum was living in, I could never really know if she recognized or saw me, even when I was standing right in front of her. She’d left her family to be mired in her own dead end existence, without physically going anywhere. It was no life for her.

I decided to try to preserve her best qualities within my own values and actions and to never punish her for her lack of mothering. Being a mother was never in her nature. She needed mothering and support herself. She was a victim of forces that I couldn’t understand.

Some break-ups just take a long time. Forty years on, I’m still learning from my parents’ examples.

inspiration, memoirs, relationships, stories

The Good Father

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In my childhood, two men personified fatherhood for me: my father James Evan Love, and my grandfather Ernest Huntley Clarke.

I believe that people are neither inherently good nor evil, while absolutely being capable of the whole spectrum of good and bad behaviour. It’s on that spectrum that I try to place my father and grandfather.

As a kid, I’m sure I had a simplified view of morality, of good versus bad, and perhaps I even excessively idolized my grandfather. I didn’t know about moral relativism or any of the conflicts or ambiguities that adults actually faced. My early values were probably rendered in the black and white and primary colours of the sunday newspaper funnies that I loved to read. Adult lives and motivations remained mysterious, and it would be years before I’d start to understand the contradictions that a dispassionate universe would impose upon grown-ups. The universe didn’t seem to care about right or wrong; it was up to each person to know the difference.

One thing I learned early-on as a defining characteristic of a good adult was how they dealt with responsibility, obligation, and consequences. Good grown-ups took their responsibilities seriously and were reliable in fulfilling them. Good grown-ups owned their mistakes. Bad grown-ups, on the other hand, were unreliable and inconsistent. I had seen that some bad ones even tried to avoid consequences altogether. Some adults could not be trusted.

So, that’s the lens through which I look at my grandfather Ernest and my father James. Ernest had seemed to me always reliable and responsible. He’d always held a quiet dignity, kept a regular schedule in his activities, taken good care of his health, and managed his affairs with care.

When we lived with him for two years in his house in Victoria, I observed how my parents seemed secondary to him. It was more than the respect that a guest gives to their host. It was like a deference that my unemployed parents granted. Ernest became their de facto landlord while we lived there; they paid him rent. Looking back, I’ve wondered if this grated on my father’s strong sense of self determination. Dad had always been a proud and headstrong man, but it was proper that under Ernest’s roof, James was not the boss of the house.

Ernest Huntley Clarke came to Canada from England at around twelve years old, as part of a group of Salvation Army Home Children. As he grew into his teens, he worked his way west from Quebec through Ontario, to Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. At eighteen, he enlisted in the Northwest Mounted Police, which a few years later would become the RCMP. He was a Mountie for thirty years, and was honourably discharged in Esquimalt, BC in 1948. After that, he held a variety of occupations in his later years, and in his early seventies was the manager of the Yates Hotel in Victoria, still working full-time, when we came to live with him.

“Mister Clarke” (as the hotel’s elderly residents called him) was a well-liked and respected man. I never saw him drunk, and never once did he seem to really lose his temper or lose control of his emotions. He led by example, stood with quiet dignity, and I admired him like nobody else.

In contrast to Ernest’s humility, my Dad seemed to have an active ego, and a need to prove what he knew in front of others. I think Dad needed to be seen as the smartest guy in the room, and to be seen to be in the right. I never saw him assert his intellectual dominance around Ernest though: I suppose that my Dad genuinely respected his father-in-law.

The trouble with a person who needs to be in the right is that often they cannot admit when they’ve done wrong. That was my Dad all the way through: admitting fault or (heaven forbid) apologizing for a wrong were things I never ever saw him do. All he did when confronted with a past bad action was get defensive and angry. I never once saw him apologize for anything.

My Dad did lots of good things for me and my sister though: he raised us alone after our mother had almost died and gone to hospital, he stayed employed and made sure that we always had food, clothes, and a roof over our head. He brought us new bikes for Christmas. Occasionally, he took us out for McDonalds or KFC, or drove us out to the airport to watch the planes land at YVR.

Dad did try to impart values of self-reliance to me and my sister Kim, but even his attempts at constructive lessons were framed by his bitter memories of childhood betrayals or grisly experiences in the army or as a firefighter. To him, the world was challenging, unfair, and absolute: you had to know how to fight to make your way through your group’s “the pecking order”. Dad taught each of us how to throw a punch, but not how to discuss or compromise.

My Dad was not in control of his demons, his addictions, or his temper either. He could be volatile and frightening when drunk. He could be violent, and we learned early that it only takes one violent and unrepentant adult to break your trust and undermine your belief in heroes. That’s why my grandfather Ernest remains so important to me: he seemed to balance the scales in life and remain in the light, even when my Dad was at his darkest.

art, design, inspiration, learning, literacy, psychology, teaching, visual

Inspired by Teachers, Symbolic or Real

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What Makes a Teacher Special?

Who are (or have been) the most important teachers in your life?

Any category, any reason. Think about it.

Growing Up Years

Growing up through to my teens, my heroes were the adults I admired, and the school teachers from whom I took my lessons, both directly and indirectly.

My Dad

My Dad taught me about fairness, courage, cowardice, respect, and how to work hard for a living.

Dad was both a positive and a negative role model, and I’ve already written about him at length in numerous articles. By his living example, Dad taught me a lot about regret, fear, and the dangers of not dealing with your demons. Dad was suspicious of religions. His faith rested in science, many of the values of the modern world, and his simple series of edicts: Respect the rights of others. Do it right or don’t do it at all. Stand up to bullies.

Maybe nobody else holds a more central position in my psyche than my Dad. Young lessons at his side were set early, and some of them took a long time to reverse. Fathers raise you right in the fray of life. Their hands tend to get dirty.

Directly and indirectly, my Dad taught me how to survive.

My Grandfather

The next role model/teacher would have to be my Mother’s father. We called him Poppy. He led by example, was a gentleman, and he bore his losses and burdens with dignity and grace. I still hold my head up high thinking of Poppy.

Poppy also painted landscapes in oil (taught himself, I think), and I found it interesting to look through his Walter Foster art books and see how perspective worked or how to model a form with cross hatching.

Grandparents tend to have more distance from the centre of your life, giving them a wider perspective and often, a wiser view.

My Art Teachers

Tom Hudson

Dr. Tom Hudson was an internationally-recognized Master Art Educator, and a key proponent of the revolution of the Basic Design programs in the UK in the 1960s. Tom and his colleagues adapted modernist values from Herbert Read and from the practical patterns and programs of the Bauhaus, trying to transform and update art and design teaching across the UK. [View the VADS UK Basic Design online collection.]

As Dean of Education at Emily Carr College of Art + Design (ECCAD), Tom was directly responsible for the structure and evolution of the Foundation (1st year) program that I waded into in 1985. I was so inspired by his passionate lectures on Colour, Drawing, and Modern Art that I soon volunteered for his summer, out-of-class art projects. I remained a student and assistant of his at ECCAD until 1991.

Tom Hudson has been described as pursuing his goals with “missionary zeal”. That was very true of him. He remains the central figure in my training as a visual designer. I still hear his voice when I’m hacking away at some creative challenge, and I continue to find inspiration from his early lessons.  Through his art and design tutelage, Tom taught me how to see and understand the big, revolutionary changes in art and design history, how to relate them to current movements and ideas, and how to pursue my own explorations.

Neil Prinsen

Mr. Prinsen was my art class and home room teacher throughout high school in East Vancouver.

He was a practical, direct man with a friendly face and a confident yet sympathetic nature. He had some idea of the challenges my sister and I faced in our difficult home life, and he let me know that he cared.

He was a talented painter who gave me my first lectures in painting and art history. Art was always my favourite subject in school, and in Mr. Prinsen’s class, I learned about the Impressionists, I fell in love with Claude Monet, and I frantically tried to emulate Seraut using felt pens.

In our senior year, Mr. Prinsen gave me and a few of my classmates art books describing the artists and genres that we each had responded to the most. He gave me a book about the Impressionists, and I devoured it and studied it over and over.

Mr. Prinsen was passionate about art – he loved it and he truly understood it. He was a great high-school teacher and a nice man.

My Grown-up Years

My CEOs and Bosses

For years after leaving the art college, I worked for a succession of small private high-tech companies. Most often, I was the resident graphic designer, documentation writer, and creative dog’s body.

Running a small company and taking responsibility for your employees is stressful, and I don’t think I could do it. From my best bosses and coworkers, I’ve seen warmth, humane behavior, responsiveness, compassionate support, and well-reasoned decision making. All bosses ought to exhibit those values.

Unfortunately, on the other side of the scale I’ve also witnessed yelling, nepotism, loud profanity, lying, massive egos, laziness, weaselly sucking up, manic eyes with little flecks of foam at the mouth, and straight-up dumbfuckery of all sorts.

I’m convinced that some of the people who exhibited the worst of these behaviours were really borderline sociopaths. Often they were in Sales. Others were just bullies and made the Worst. Bosses. Ever.

Overall, the best and worst of my bosses taught me to trust my own judgment and to stand firm in my sense of integrity.

Favourite Teachers Whom I’ll Never Meet

These are writers, Philosophers, and searchers whose work I’ve really enjoyed, and whose voices have really gotten under my skin. Their expertise cuts across a vast range of subjects, but in each case, their voices resonated with me very strongly.

The Dalai Lama

His Holiness became an inspiration to me years ago, when I began reading his books. Two of his best books, IMHO, are “The Art of Happiness” and “The Universe in a Single Atom”.

My wife and I saw The Dalai Lama speak at GM Place, when he came to our hometown of Vancouver. The crowds were massive, but very joyful.

The international importance of this man’s living example of loving kindness and compassion simply cannot be overstated.

Albert Einstein

After reading Stephen Hawking’s book, “A Brief History of Time”,  I decided that I needed more background in physics, so I bought a small book called “Relativity: The Special and General Theory“, written by Albert Einstein.

It turns out that Albert Einstein is an excellent explainer of his own theories. I followed his detailed yet easy to comprehend discourse from his initial “man on a train/observer on an embankment” examples, straight through to the Lorenz Transformation. I even limped through the calculus far enough to see the final derivation of his famous equation e=MC2. I had to read this book twice, but it was all there, relatively well-said.

I grew so fond of hearing his voice in my head as I progressed through that book, that I began to warmly regard Albert Einstein as “Uncle Albert”. Even more than 50 years after his death, I believe that he still has a vast multitude of adoring adopted nephews and nieces who feel the same as me.

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong’s book “History of God” did more to help me consolidate my thoughts and feelings about religion and spirituality than almost any other author, with one exception (above).

Her little book on the life of the Buddha was a thing of beauty, at once both humanizing and elevating the character of Siddharta Gautama for me.

In “History of God”, her description of “The Axial Age”, covering the major personalities and eras around which all three monotheistic religions rotated, stuck with me very strongly.

Groucho Marx

Another adopted Uncle – a Great Uncle, I think. He’s a complex and contradictory figure: bitter yet sweet, biting yet gentle. I picture an older Groucho, way past his prime, skewering some rich upper crust fat cat at a dinner party, and then going home to strum his guitar and bang out an angry letter to the editor about how his own money is subject to too much income tax.

I love watching videos of Groucho on the Dick Cavett show, showing his intelligence and his quieter, more serious side. Stefen Kanfer wrote an amazing biography of Groucho, but best of all, I love dear old Groucho’s own private little autobiography of sorts, called “Memoirs Of A Mangy Lover“. Let him tell his own story in his own surprisingly self-deprecating style, I say. I can read between the lines, hearing his sad regrets, while he seems to be trying to make me laugh at him, as well as with him.

Other Artists, Philosophers, and Thinkers

Here are other significant people whose ideas and values have resonated with me through their writings:

  • Emily Carr: In her autobiographical books (like “The House of All Sorts”), Carr described her challenges as an artist and a woman in 19th and 20th century Victoria, BC, her deep friendships and painful resentments, and her lifelong love of her many pets. She struck me as a strong, determined woman who had to grow a very tough hide to protect her sensitive heart.
  • Jack Shadbolt: In 1985, BC painter Jack Shadbolt presented a lecture to my first-year art program, and in class, I studied his creative process through a video showing him working in his studio. A recent book about him (“In His Words”) is revealing more to me about his upbringing in Victoria,  BC, and his inner world of experimental symbolism as an abstractionist. The lines he’s drawn seem woven from ancient archetypes, threading their way through generations of his art students.
  • Stephen Hawking: To me, as a layman, Hawking is a better popularizer of physics principles and theories than Einstein, but culturally, he’s the important connective tissue between Newtonian classiciasm, Relativity, and the Quantum era.
  • Wilhelm Worringer: His book “Abstraction and Empathy” brought forth a historical connection between ancient and modern kinds of symbolism, and connecting abstract visual communication to human culture and psychology.
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