Dear Poppy,

I watched a TV show this morning that reminded me of you, and how much I miss you.

The show that my wife and I watch on weekend mornings while we eat breakfast is called “Family Affair”. It’s about a single man raising his dead brother’s children, but it’s really about a new family being formed out of the wreckage of other family breakups; of bringing together broken parts to create a new whole.

It’s over fifty years old now, quite dated in a lot of ways, but has core themes of family devotion, understanding, and love which resonate with me today. You probably watched it with us back when we lived with you on Cook Street in Victoria, in the ’70s.

Anyway, the episode we saw was where the children’s grandfather comes to visit them at their home in New York. The kids are too young to remember his last visit five years earlier, so even though he remembers them fondly and sincerely wants to rebuild a family connection, they don’t remember him and it takes a while before they warm up to him. All the gifts and treats he gives them are received with gratitude, but without feelings of connection or affection.

The grandpa’s daughter had been the grandchildren’s mother, and when she and her husband both died, the children were orphaned toddlers, split up and sent to live with different relatives. By adopting them both, their Uncle had reformed part of their family and started his own journey as a parent. In the years since adoption, their Uncle has become a real father to them.

Grandpa had worked all over the country and in his older years was starting to feel the need to settle down and be closer to his family. By the time he’s visited with his grand-kids for a couple of weeks, they’d begun to bond while sharing memories of the woman they’d both lost. Sitting with his granddaughter, answering her earnest questions about her late mother reminded the grandfather of how his own daughter had once been. Grandfather and granddaughter were now feeling connected by having lost the same person. For each, the other person was a reminder and a living connection and a way to fill in a missing piece in their hearts. As dated as a 1960s family sitcom could be, this show seems well-informed and capable of exploring sensitive topics like death and loss in a delicate way. It also treats the emotions of its children with respect.

Poppy, I still remember being 8 or 9 and having a chat on your knee about your youthful migration to Canada, when you were about 13 or 14. You were reluctant to say much to a curious little boy at the time. I didn’t want you to be sad. Fifty years later, I can still smell your cologne, and feel the cool crispness of your suit jacket and your firm hand around my waist, holding me up on your knee. I can still see your pained face and distant eyes, lost in mysterious old moments.

I think you left a lot of family behind when you left England in 1913 to start your life anew in Canada. You gave up a lot to remake yourself as a Canadian, to meet your future wife, and to raise your daughter Angela. I wish you could have told me about your childhood circumstances. Evidence I’ve found in my adulthood hints that you must have been a British Home Child, sent to Canada by The Salvation Army.

Other than that one lap-top sharing, I didn’t learn any more about your early life during the two years we lived with you. Since I’ve grown up, I’ve been able to find records of some of your highlights among your old papers and photographs, as well as in Canadian government records, which describe your enrolment in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War 1, and your career in the RCMP.

As a curious kid living with you briefly, I explored your house, finding evidence of your artistic abilities in the oil paintings and art books in your basement, and through the photographs and home movies you showed us in your dining room. Oil paint and film were your media, and you became a skilled painter and photographer. Your creative, artistic side was passed to your daughter in so many ways, and in her, it blossomed into theatre, music, and singing.

Angela was the angel in your heart, and thinking of what she meant to you and all that you meant to me helps to fill in the gaps left in my own heart. You lost your daughter when she married and moved away, and then lost more of her again as her alcoholism, mental illness became less managed, and her memory loss more pronounced. We lost her to those things completely.

For my part, I want to cast you as the hero in your Hero’s Journey, and a man I’m proud to be connected to and named after. You always carried yourself with quiet dignity, dressed in a shirt, suspenders, and leather wingtips, even to the breakfast table. I never once saw you lose your temper.

Once when I was about five, I was aware of my two names, Ernest and John. I stood on your fireplace’s raised hearth and proclaimed that from now on, I wanted to be called John, not Ernest. Unfortunately at that moment, you were sitting on the living-room couch, right in front of me! I’ve often wondered if my little proclamation ever actually hurt your feelings. If it did, you didn’t let on. I’ve been proud to bear your name for many years now.

There was never ever any question about us loving each other in any case. To me, you were always just “Poppy”, and unlike my mother and father, you never once hurt me or scared me. Ernest Huntley Clarke is always beloved by Ernest John Love.

Old and New, Sun through and through.
Granville Market, Blue Parrot coffee,
A view of the harbour,
with gulls wheeling softly.

I used to come here sketching,
and dream of a future
where I’d live a good life,
dignified – even mature.

Strolling that island,
so gently today,
and holding her hand,
and hearing her say:

“I’m so grateful for you,
so glad that we met here.
Almost forty years later and
not near done yet, dear.”

The former art college,
framed our first connections.
First dating, then living
to our spirit’s directions.

That clump of pilings and rocks
dredged up out of False Creek
became Nova Terra Firma
for the bold and the meek.

We met there by chance,
my best, beautiful friend.
Let’s have another forty.
Walk with me again!

The other night, as I entered the Main Street Skytrain station, I saw a small old man hunkered down just outside the fare gates.

“Spare some money for a bed tonight?” He had a trimmed white beard and a ball cap.

I stepped up to him and reached into my back pocket for my streetfolk money.

“How are you doin’ sir?”

“Okay, I guess.” He sounded tired, and his expression was worried.

I noticed something in his lap swaddled in a blanket. A little head peeked out between his clasped hands. At first I thought it was a stuffed toy, but it was a cat. Two little white ears angled amidst white, brown, and black patches. The little thing was hunkered down too.

“What’s your cat’s name?”

“Cameron O’Malley. Lotsa shelters won’t take cats.”

Cameron O’Malley sat there, bundled up like a precious cargo, the man’s little baby.

“Aw, he looks lovely.” I dug into my other pocket to give them a few more bucks. I had no idea what a shelter bed cost anymore.

“Aw, well I hope you and Cameron find a good place tonight.”

It’s impossible to know who provided the other more comfort, the small homeless calico cat who needed security on a cold city night, or the homeless man who held warm, furry unconditional love in his cold hands.

We moved a lot when I was a kid. By the time I was eleven, we had moved that many times. Sometimes it was just a few doors up the lane and other times it was to a new town hours away.

It’s amazing how permanent or transient life can feel, and how you can adapt to changes in living conditions. As a kid, you follow your parents; you cross each new threshold in their footsteps. I’ve lived in a number of different kinds of homes, in my grandfather’s fifty year-old house in the middle of a city, in a brand new mobile home in the middle of 77 acres of brush and cow pastures, in three different motels along busy trucking routes, and in rental row housing where your neighbours are just a few inches away on the other side of a wall.

Wherever we lived, we didn’t own our home, we rented it. Each residency could last for months or years. I usually watched life unfold on the ground floor, at the lower-end of the middle-class. I had my own room for the first time at the age of eight, but a couple of years later, we were living in a motel and I had to share a bedroom. I wouldn’t have my own bedroom again till a few years later.

When you can’t have private personal space, you end up cultivating the space you need in your mind. When I was ten, I shared a bed with my Dad, and while he was sleeping, I’d listen to 14CFUN on my transistor radio with a little plastic earphone. My private late night AM radio took me into a wider world where KISS sung a ballad to Beth and Boston power-chorded their way through more than a feeling. Escapism helped to bring my kid-brain some much-needed psychological privacy and personal space. I don’t know how much I really liked my parents or my life back in those days, but I’m pretty sure I resented all chaos and uncertainty. Any chance to escape was refreshing.

I have wondered if impermanence or mobility had been kind of baked into my parents, carried over from their own upbringings. For me and my sister, our relatively transitory housing was driven by the kinds of circumstances that my parents were in. Our mother’s mental illness and father’s alcoholism must have made it difficult for them to save money or create permanence and stablility, but maybe there were older patterns at play too. Maybe ownership wasn’t even a consideration for them. Although Grandpa Love, my Dad’s dad, had built the Love family house in Prince Rupert back in 1918, my Dad never seemed followed in his father’s steps into home ownership.

I’ve wondered over the years if home ownership would have changed our family for the better. As far as I can tell, my Dad had always been a renter and none of his jobs ever laster more than a few years. Maybe he actually liked moving around every so often. Whether that was his nature or not, it wasn’t all on him. Every few years, my Mum would have a nervous breakdown or Dad would lose his job or something, and we’d have to move somewhere new and kind of start all over.

I believe that to my Mum, her real home would always be in her hometown of Victoria, where her father lived, and where she’d spent most of her life. Mum’s dad had been a Mountie and they’d moved a fair bit during her youth as the family followed him from post to post around British Columbia. Maybe in her first eleven years, she changed home as many times as I would. She and her parents settled in Victoria sometime in the mid-forties.

A Nesting Instinct

By the time I was a teen, we were renting a townhouse in East Van. I had my own room again for the first time in a few years and it was like heaven to me. We lived there through my last two years of elementary, and all through high school. By that time, I’d collected a vast collection of books, magazines, and comics, and had my own second-hand TV and a clock radio in my room, so my entertainment was self-contained and assured. I think I was trying to equip my own apartment, to define my own living space, and set up some amount of self-sufficiency. Home didn’t always feel secure or totally safe, but at least my room was mine.

When I turned 29, my wife and I were able to buy a condo in East Van, very near to the neighbourhood where she’d grown up. Ownership was a big step for us. The responsibility scared me,  but we’d gone into it together, talked it all out, and worked hard to save up our down payment.  We bought our condo pre-built, and drove by the site every week to watch the construction progress of our future home.

On move-in day, it felt so amazing to be moving into a brand new place that nobody had ever lived in before. I can still smell the new carpet and paint, and see the bright walls and shiny fixtures. There was no evidence of age anywhere: no dust, no stains, no scratches, no dented corners, no musty, mouldy aromas, no dry-rot, and no old, second-hand furniture that’d been in someone’s family for thirty years. Everything was new, and it felt like a total housing reboot.

However, our dream condo turned sour as it revealed its substandard underbelly to us so many times over the years. Starting just a few months after moving in, we discovered that we lived in a leaky condo, but we stuck it out through leak after leak, levy after levy, and more than a couple of insurance claims, hoping that each repair event would be the last. Now, twenty-eight years later, after a leak into our bedroom caused by old, degraded membrane outside, we finally decided we’d had enough of annual repairs, and should use our home’s value to find a newer condo with better-quality construction.

But even with leaks, plumbing problems, and all the other issues in our original condo, it has still been my home for almost thirty years, and of that relative permanence, I still feel very proud indeed.

After 28 years, it’s amazing what you take for granted, and what you get used to. My wife and I are looking hard at selling our condo and buying a new one. It’s about time to get a new home.

When we bought our current condo back in 1995, we’d been renting since 1987. The financial commitment of ownership was new, and it scared me. My Dad had never owned a house, as far as I knew. All my life, my folks had rented, and for my first eleven years, we moved about eleven times. As an adult myself, I saw that the allure of home ownership was mostly in its permanence. I’d learn later that, over time, it could be less expensive than renting (at least in Vancouver). In those ways, me and my wife were fortunate in buying our new condo, back in 1995.

We were most unfortunate however in that our place was a leaky condo in a poorly-built post-Expo wooden low-rise. It was classic wood frame construction with the kind of California stucco on the outside, built before rainscreen became a requirement.

We had plumbing issues since day one: in our first week, we watched soap suds goosh up into the toilet in our ensuite. It was funny at first, making poltergeist jokes or yukking it up over our “self-cleaning crapper”.

A few months after that, we had our first rainfall leak that soaked the carpet in our master bedroom. On rainy nights, we could hear the little taps of raindrops inside the wall. Over the next 20 years, every exterior wall of our flat had some water ingress, including our sunroom (a cold room that opened onto our patio) which had to be demolished and completely rebuilt due to degradation from past water leaks and some very active carpenter ants.

Oh, and every few years, a copper pipe would break or have a pinhole leak above us (we’re on the first floor). We’ve had overhead leaks or drain line overflows over our kitchen, diningroom, and both bathrooms.

Sometimes, if the drain lines haven’t been maintained in the basement, kitchen waste water would back up into our kitchen sink. This used to be a once-every-two-years event, but became a once-per-month event for three months a year ago. In the laundry drain line, once or twice, hardened detergent or whatever would block a drain line, causing other people’s soapy laundry water to back up through our laundry drain pipe. We got a backflow valve installed to prevent it, but not before our new laminate floor next to the washing machine had gotten ruined.

As the building has aged, we’ve had ants, silverfish, and mice running around the building. (Thank god we had cats.) That situation is well in-hand in the last couple of years, thanks to our didecated strata council and good budgeting.

So, even though this had originally been our kind of “dream home” and our first ownership stake, there have also been multiple water-related issues and problems related to building deficiencies which have soured the home-owner experience fairly bitterly.

As the years went on, other residents became affected too, but things did gradually get better: In 2018, the roof was redone and the entire building envelope was rebuilt (rainscreen, thank god). We can honestly say that the wood structure and waterproofing of our exterior walls and ground-level membrane have all be rebuilt or replaced, and are now in excellent condition.

Coming in the next year (we hope), the majority of the building’s old copper piping will be replaced with new flexible Pex piping. So, buh-bye crappy copper, hello 25 years of reliability (and yet another big levy).

With many of the repairs have come levies and insurance claims, not to mention a lot of unwanted frustration, uncertainty, and stress during the repair work. We guess that since buying in 1995, we’ve probably spent over $150k to deal with leak repairs or other water-related damages in our place. That number is a source of both frustration and pride.

In January, a leak through the ground-level membrane outside one of our bedrooms seemed to be the final straw. Months of tenacity from our strata and building management brought a restoration team to our doorstep, and as I write this, we’ve paid our bill and thanked the good tradesmen for making our home waterproof once again. Thank god for helpful volunteer strata board members, and tradespeople who take pride in doing a good job.

But although materially, mechanically, our suite has never been better, that recent leak event was the last straw for us emotionally and financially. The insanity of our various building deficiencies is head-shaking, but only surpassed by the insane rise in housing prices in the Vancouver condo market.

It looks like a good time to downsize into something newer, and to move on to a new chapter. If home is a state of mind, it’s time for us to change ours. Someone else will take our place, and make this rehabilitated condo into their own dream home.

Tonight, I found myself sobbing over the age of my cat.
In calendar years, he’s about 12 or 13,
In human years, maybe almost 60, I think.

Maybe he’ll live another 7 if we take good care of him.
I’ll be 64 and he’ll be gone, just like his sister, Peaches,
whom we lost just a few years ago in 2019.

We’d lost two brother cats in 2011 and 2012
after raising them for 20 years,
from little kittens.

One day, Blue will be gone forever too, I cried in my head,
keeping my little convulsions silent
so I didn’t wake up my wife.

I walked out gingerly in my bare feet
to our enclosed balcony
where I knew Blue would be while we slept.

He was sitting on our table staring out our big window,
just looking at the moon and night sky.
He loves sunlight and moonlight equally.

He was still high off a little catnip that
we’d given him earlier, and he greeted me
with an enthusiastic head-butt.

I talked and he purred, and I stroked him
and he head-butted, and showed his joy
in all the curls and waves that his tail could tell.

His joy in the moment of moonlight sharing
made me forget my future fear and worry,
and just enjoy a beautiful now.

I was glad to meet him where he was
share his moon moment with him,
and have all the moments
that we can have
for now.

I saw Curtis James outside Stadium Skytrain a few days ago. It had been months since I’d last ran into him, and it was a happy mutual recognition as we elbow-bumped and traded compliments on each other’s leather jackets. We talked about how nice the clear blue skies have been, and I asked him if he was still living in the same SRO.
“Yeah, it’s still the same old shit hole”, he laughed.

” Hey,” he continued, “did you know that Vancouver has an underground nu-clear power plant? That’s what those vents are coming out of the ground, across from the church.”

“Bullshit!” I heard myself say. What a character, I thought. “There’s a steam plant a couple blocks away that delivers high-pressure steam to heat buildings all over downtown. Maybe that’s what those vents are…”

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head adamantly, “those are underground cooling towers for a nu-cu-lar power plant! That’s where that steam’s coming from!”

He was sticking to his tall tale adamantly. I wasn’t going to convince him, so decided to play along. “Well, I don’t see any third eye in the middle of your forehead, so I guess you’re still safe, eh?”

“You kidding? Three-eyed fish are the tastiest!”

There’s something deeply satisfying
about exploring the world on foot.

When my years were in single digits,
I explored the city of Victoria.
It was my home, it was my mother’s birthplace,
and it felt big but usually also friendly.
It was the right size for me, perhaps.

Most of my dreams are of personal journeys,
on foot most often, down blocks,
or along endless hallways.
I’m always looking for something
or late for something, and unprepared.
It means that life can be mysterious
and unpredictable, and often lonely.

Just a week ago, I walked a few miles around Victoria,
down the tourist strip, through Beacon Hill Park,
where I’d played as a kid and marvelled at the peacocks,
and walked way up Cook Street, past the sites of both
of my grandfather’s long-demolished homes.

It made me reconsider what the words “home”
and “memory” are really worth
when most of the landmarks from my
neighbourhood had disappeared
after forty years.

But on this little real-world journey, my wife was with me,
and as we walked, we joked some old jokes, bickered in the heat,
and debated our directions, and i was not alone,
and the past was something that happened to
someone else, a long time ago.

Most cities are in some constant state
of reinvention and transformation.
This city and its occupants are no different.
We’re going somewhere – together.

He was my father. As of this year, he’s been gone for 32 years. Next October will be the 100th anniversary of his birth in Prince Rupert. There’s a lot to remember, to rejoice, and to regret with him. Maybe his pulse still can be heard in the waves rhythmically washing the Prince Rupert shoreline.

If I could talk to him, openly, honestly, and gently, I would tell him that I love him, I forgive him, and I would ask him to forgive himself. We were very different people, and he might not have understood me as much as I’d liked, but he did try.

His biggest gifts to me must have been his stories. A lot of them are still tucked away in my memories, waiting to be unfolded again. In his storytelling, he told me who he was. The successes, the failures, and the hopes are all there to be found again. He is infinite and unbounded now, long ago released back into the world.

She was my mother. As of this year, she’s been gone for 25 years. This June was the 90th anniversary of her birth in Victoria. She remains enigmatic to me, but I can imagine her singing voice entwined among the sounds of morning birdsong and ringing church bells in her hometown.

If I could talk to her, openly, honestly, and gently, I would tell her that I love her, I miss her, and I would ask her to let go of any regrets, and to take joy in the happy lives of her descendants. She really never got to know her offspring, but we still feel like we carry resonant pieces of her inside us.

Her biggest gifts to me might have been her laughter and her moments of joy and playfulness. These were rare and precious things. A lot of her is probably tucked away in my cells, waiting to be revealed and reused. In her creativity and beauty, she showed me who she was, and who I might become. All the joy to be found in a free, untethered, and unaddicted spirit is there for me to explore. She is infinite and unbounded now, long ago released back into the world.

Today was a good day to visit Mum and Dad at Mountain View Cemetery. They’re on the Rose Wall of the Vancouver Crematorium, right next to each other, Angela first, then James.

As I write this, I’ve just gone to see Mum and Dad and wipe off their lettering. The roses in the little garden below them look weather-beaten, but their memory is safe up on their wall next to their neighbours.

On the way in, I passed the biggest monument around, belonging to a “Mr. William Dick”. It really stood out. I guess ol’ Willy had something to prove.

I’m now sitting by a little fountain listening to it bubble, and hearing the birds sing and a crow call. It’s actually a nice place to hang out after a brief visit. In spite of being right on the intersection of 41st and Fraser, once you’re a little ways into the grounds, it’s not as noisy. I saw a squirrel prancing and jumping across the grass, scooting over the plaques to get to his next tree, and for the past few minutes I’ve been hearing conversation and laughter from a group down the lane behind me, sharing their good stories.

I guess today’s lesson is that it’s not all just tears and remorse at the cemetery. It’s kind of nice too. But the wind is picking up and I’m sure we’ll have a big dowsing of rain later, so I’d better go home.