20 years ago today – Author’s preface, part 1

Jan 29, 1991: the book fair

I was at a book fair today with Michael. I went to hear an author named Bernie Howegate, who has written a book called “Tales of a Travelling Man” about eight years of traveling around the world on a ten-speed bike, a journey that began in the Magdeleine Islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence ten years ago.

He was interesting and funny. He spoke more about the places he visited than the cycling itself. After the reading we went to meet him and get him to sign a copy of his book for me. I couldn’t hold back from telling him about our plans. I described how we had planned the route we expected to go and our itinerary, including how far we expected to go every day and what we would be bringing. He took in what I told him with a slightly bemused look. When he signed my book he wrote. “To Ken – bike riding is a great experience. It’s the people you meet, not the mileage you cover.”

20 years ago – Introduction, part 2…

Our plans started to go off track about a year later. Saving money was not a skill that Seph savoured. There was a 4-digit number of dollars in our savings but only $20 of it was his. When his restaurant laid him off in the fall, he decided to focus on his acting career, although he had never had a paid role, justifying it by saying that taking another job would interfere with his ability to attend possible future auditions. So I pulled the plug on our joint account arrangement and gave him back his $20. I was committed to the trip and he’d have to save enough to go with me on him own.

But other parts of our relationship were failing too. We had agreed to an open relationship, after he started fooling around with other men, and his wanderlust for sex was overwhelming his wanderlust for travel. At the start of 1990, I told him I wanted a break from our sexual relationship, although we still shared my house and bed, but I became a closer friend. We still cuddled, cycled, took long walks, and ate meals together but that was as far as it went. Several months later I overheard him telling mutual friends that we had broken up. When they asked him when it happened, he said I broke up in February and he broke up in May.

In the last months before departure, when it was clear the Seph would not be joining me, I was able to entice a member of our gay cycling club, Michael Silk, to take his place. That would cut the loneliness factor and accommodation bills, but everything else seemed to go wrong. The Canadian dollar had plummeted against most European currencies (this was before the Euro). Seph had overspent the limit on the charge card I had acted as a guarantor for to establish his credit rating again, and the bank put a hold on $2000 of my funds. At the last moment, David went back on his word and asked that I repay the last of what I owed him in spite of our agreement. He said his job was in jeopardy and that he needed the money as a possible buffer when I was gone, but as soon as I left he spent it on something else anyway,

It wasn’t the most joyful travel launch ever. A temporary assistant had been hired to replace me already so I was out of a job for a year, and David had arranged to rent my furnished room to soon-to-be tenant. I probably couldn’t afford to travel the whole year and that gave me dreadful nightmares of returning to Toronto homeless and penniless to live with my parents in the bleak, icy suburb of Malton all the next winter.

I also had been seeing another fellow since Sept had left, and that wasn’t working out either. On one of our last dates he finally took me to his home to spend the night. He wasn’t the most forthcoming with me. His ex-lover roommate hadn’t broken up with him as long ago as he said, probably even in just the past few weeks, and the scene turned pretty ugly. His other idiosyncrasies kept surfacing and I began to think he might have serious mental health issues. I was still a bit hung up over him when I left, but part of me was also relieved to be rescued by that big silver bird in the sky.

Twenty years ago doesn’t really seem that long ago, but it was. It was the age of technological dinosaurs, and I was one of them. This was before the general public had phone cards, cell phones, international ATMs, no on-line "couch surfing", Internet cafes or even e-mail. I let my friends and family know where I expected to be six weeks ahead of time and they wrote to me c/o “Poste Restante”. Sometimes I got what they sent but I never knew how much of it. It frustrated me to think that some letters weren’t reaching me, but it scared me more to think I was receiving everything when I found nothing waiting for me.


PHOTO: Me (background) and Michael Silk (foreground), Jan '91

20 years ago, in Toronto - Introduction (Part I)

Yesterday I got the idea for an exciting writing project to keep up my blogging and my story-telling skills. I think my best blogs have been stories about my past. I am going to try my most ambitious project ever. It has me totally psyched at the moment, in spite of the hundreds of hours it will require.

20 years ago today I was beginning my final two weeks of preparation for the biggest trip of my lifetime, year-long cycling trip through Europe and Asia. When the anniversary of the start day arrives on March 5, I will begin a "20 years ago today" day-by-day account of that 49-week trip. I have the diary I kept during the first half of the trip, and a notebook on distances I traveled each day and people I met along the way.

The rest of the details are in my memory banks, which have been stored in the incubator of my imagination for the past twenty years, where they have slowly crystallized into fiction. Memory, after all, is just a broken series of flashes, glimpses of what truly happened. It takes fiction to connect the dots and make sense of it all, even if the result is distorted and filtered. But this is what I do know.....

The trip was two and a half years in the making. It had not been my idea at first. It was the brainchild of my boyfriend at the time, Joseph. We had met in the Gay Pride parade in June of 88, the year that I marched with Toronto’s gay outdoors club, Out & Out. More accurately, I rode my bicycle beside those who marched because I was part of the cycling group. It was my cycling shorts that attracted Seph – as I used to call him. He was wearing a pair too, and he told me he was looking for someone to ride with. With that twinkle in his eye, I thought he was just giving me a line but it turned out to be true.

But he had competition. Another young lad named Ron had met me earlier at a pre-parade breakfast, and he was determined to sink his teeth in me before the day was out. He was skinnier and not as cute as Seph, but he definitely horny. But I wasn’t really interested in either of them. They were both more than ten years younger than me, and I was focused on a pre-arranged rendezvous in the beer garden with a mesmerizingly handsome man named Paul, who I had also met earlier that day.

The beer garden was in Cawthra Park, at the end point of the parade route. By the time we got there the whole park was filled with celebrants and the line up for the beer garden was half way around the block. I joined the line pointlessly, in the hopes that I could still find Paul somewhere in the crowd. But Seph and Ron grew restless and hornier and began pulling on my opposite arms as though I was a wishbone. Frustrated and disappointed over Paul and not wanting to start a fight by choosing one of the boys, I decided to leave.

Later I met up with Seph because he lived two blocks from my house. Things went better than I expected and I ended up sleeping at his place. That’s how it started. We fell into being lovers with surprising ease. We began doing almost everything together, but more than anything it was the cycling that kept us together.

Seph had had a dream to do a year-long cycling trip through Europe for a while. I had already cycled in Greece, France, the US and the Canadian Rockies in previous years so I encouraged him to do the trip. I taught him what I knew – how to plan a route and how to save and budget. To help him stay on track, I encouraged him to find extra evening work. He didn’t want to spend time apart from me so we both took jobs as waiters at the Pantages Theatre, that was showing “The Phantom of the Opera” extravaganza at the time. (Remember Garth Drabinsky?). We also both became door-to-door canvassers for the United Nations Association, though the commissions weren’t rewarding.

At first, I didn’t think about joining him on his trip, even though he begged me to. I had a full-time, permanent position in the planning department of the City of Toronto that I would not be able to regain if I left, and I also co-owned a house with a business partner, David. He had lent me he front money to purchase my half of our house and I had agreed to make monthly repayments to him. These were walls preventing me from joining him, but he was free of such obligations.

But to my delight, my walls proved to be mirages. My employer was willing to hire temporary staff to replace me for a year and David said he was fine with me not making repayments for the year if he could charge me a year’s interest to the monies I still owed him. I was definitely enlisted on the trip. Seph and I opened a joint bank account with the agreement that we would do our best to add to it without keeping track. Everything was full steam ahead and for the first few months it seemed to be on track.


PHOTO: Me (left) and Seph (right), July '89

Gay Sierrans - a brief history

I saw an article on the Sierra Club today, and it brought back memories of 1986 when I was more of a gay activist than I am now. The Sierra Club, usually gilded with an untarnishable glow from helping save the world from corporate greed and government mismanagement of the planet, hasn’t always had a perfectly golden record.

In 1984, a group of gay members in San Francisco applied to form a social club within the larger organization for gay and lesbian Sierrans. It made sense since there were already social groups for both single and married straight members, but the San Francisco-based Board of Directors disallowed it on the grounds that having such a group might cause them to lose donations and non-gay members, that old familiar defense for practicing discrimination: “We’re-Not-Bigoted-but-Our-Sponsors-Are”.

The gay community fought back hard and the fight, which lasted a year and a half, received lots of media attention. They took it as far as it could go in the courts and at city hall, but in the end they lost and there was nothing they could do. The result was both humiliating and shameful, especially since the gay community in San Francisco was reeling in pain, fear and grief in the jaw of the AIDS holocaust at the time. Many queer members and their friends left the organization in disgust and defeat. That was 1985.

The following year the Sierra Club president, “Ms. P”, arrogantly ran for re-election on her success of defeating the country’s largest and most organized gay community. A public campaign was organized to disgrace her but she easily won re-election with most gay members gone. It was just more salt in the community’s wounds.

Ah, but her shiny Anita Bryant moment in the sun was short-lived, and she didn’t see it coming.

The Sierra Club has chapters in most parts of North America but the executive is based in San Francisco. Executive Board members must live near SF to attend the meetings, so once elected they choose which area they would like to represent, then head off to have the local chapters ratify their status as their representative on the Executive. The president naturally get to choose an area first, and the “natural” choice in most cases is the largest area with the most natural resources – Canada. If Ms. P had known anything about Canada or Canadians at the time she probably would not have chosen it, but she did, and so off she went to Toronto to get ratified by Canada’s only chapter.

At the time, I was serving as secretary for the International Gay/Lesbian Outdoors Organizations (IGLOO) and part of my role was to receive newsletters of gay/lesbian outdoors organizations from member clubs from other cities and promote their larger events to other clubs. Through a local SF newsletter, I had followed the demise of the Committee for Gay/Lesbian Sierrans’ bid with great interest.

I was also activities coordinator for Out & Out, a large gay outdoor recreation club based in Toronto. Five of the local Sierra Club chapter executive were members of our club. When I heard Ms. P was headed in our direction I quickly sent letters to the local chapter president and other gay members on their board explaining what had recently transpired in SF and asking them to do the unspeakable, to refuse to ratify her as their representative.

I wasn’t sure if it would work. I only had the acquaintance of one of the local executive but it was worth a try. Generally, any local chapter would be thrilled to have the president as their representative, but there are rare moments in time when going against the establishment accomplishes more than embracing it. This happened to be one of those moments.

I received no response from my letter before Ms. P arrived but I learned two days later that she, in a most-Canadian way, was thanked for her expression of interest but clearly and firmly told that because of her stance against gay Sierrans she would not be either an appropriate or acceptable representative for Canada. For the first time in Sierra Club history, the Executive president was quietly, shamefully sent home without being ratified, knowing that the next nine best areas had already ratified the other Board members as their representatives.

I will never know how that crisis on the Executive resolved itself or exactly how much loss of face Ms. P suffered, but it must have had a strong impact on both her and the Board. Within a couple years, a Gay Sierrans group was established and, as far as I know, it has existed ever since. I wonder too, how the about-face was received by the SF gay community. After losing their loud and public fight, aided by both politicians and media, their crushing defeat was politely reversed with the quietest and most subtle of acts. Perhaps that was one of the first times liberal Americans began to echo that now-familiar chant, “Thank God for Canada”.

PHOTO: Me, on my last hike up to Black Tusk meadows, August 1997

Update on diabetes

I am diabetic and have been since I was 50, six years ago. Once discovered, it took months to stabilize my blood sugar level. The diabetes clinic a St Paul's kept insisting I increase my medication but I couldn't handle the side effects. I take Metformin and Januvia, and at first I was allergic to both, especially Januvia, which used to leave me curled up like an armadillo in pain half the night. It was a nightmare for me until the spring of 2008 when my sister, a holistic allergist, treated me and removed my allergy. Since then, I have been able to take them without consequences.

However, I had grown tired of Nature's constant wagging finger, always having to concern myself with everything I ate and pricking my finger for blood several times a day to check my levels. They were never quite good enough unless I starved myself, which would in turn worsen my muscular dystrophy and increase my risk of falling.

I would do comprehensive blood sugar testing between 3 and six times a day for a couple weeks every 3 or 4 months at first, but the results never changed much. Gradually the spaces between the testing grew farther and farther apart until I stopped testing a year and a half ago.

It was irresponsible, I know, but I was sick of thinking about it. Recently, though, I started worrying about it again, knowing that if the levels got too high I was at risk of losing my eyesight, having heart failure or amputation, etc. My dread of learning the truth kept me from testing again, but this morning I bit the bullet and started testing. To my surprise, my before-breakfast reading, always the highest of the day, which usually ran between 8.7 and 11, came in at 7.1, one of my best readings ever. My pre-lunch and pre-supper readings, typically between 6.7 and 8.0, came in at 5.9 and 6.1 respectively. Those are the levels of a healthy non-diabetic, so I must be doing something right.

What a relief! I'll keep up the testing a bit longer though....

Blue Monday

Article on CBC on-line news - "January 17th is considered to be the year's most depressing day."

Two months ago in mid-November our first cold snap of the new winter (-17C) came hurtling at us a full month before the official start of winter, which seemed to verify long range forecasts and the Farmers' Almanac, that this would possibly be our worst winter on record, even worse than the winter of 2008/09 where we received six major snowfalls between December 13 and the end of the year. Since I am unable to walk on ice and snow without falling, and cannot get back up if I fall, I was quite anxious about it.

That was then. That was the last cold snap below -10 and the last snow we saw until last week. But last week's snow lasted less than a day and since then we have been riding high on balmy temperatures on or near +10 with no return to winter forecast for the coming week. So I am anything but blue today. Light is returning to the sky and I can see where I am going before and after work, and if there is another cold snap it is likely to be short-lived. What a relief! I am filled with optimism for the coming year. Only my skies are blue.

Today, I also submitted my formal expression of interest for a position with the new Employer Contact Centre, which would be my first job change that I have had to apply for in nine years. I hate the complicated and convoluted federal job selection process but, even though I am staying with the same department, they might receive more interest than there are positions available and need something to justify who they have chosen. I am confident that I will be one of them, given that I have been cross-trained for both work with the pensions and Employment Insurance, but even if I am not chosen I would be fine staying where I am. I cannot lose.

PHOTO: Industrial Sex: this photo has nothing to do with my entry, but I couldn't resist....

My new rooster

I have started the year off well. One of my goals I set was to complete three original windows in stained glass, and I finished my first one on Saturday, one I designed over a year ago and have fantasized about making since then. It is a square window of a rooster standing on a post. His image covers most of the window and is a very colourful bird. I used more than 30 types of glass from my scrap bins to make him.

Tonight I was riding home on the #6 Davie bus and chatting to a fellow rider I see almost everyday. She asked me how my weekend was and I told her about my stained glass work. As the bus rolled down Granville St I started telling her about my rooster, how I finished it on Saturday and spent a good part of Sunday polishing it.

Suddenly, we became aware that our bus had missed its turn onto Davie Street. It seems our driver was more focused on our conversation that his prescribed route, as he confessed to me apologetically a few seconds later. The passengers went into a minor panic and he had to pull over and let half of them off. The Davie bus is an electric trolley and so it wasn’t possible to turn around just any block. The driver had to take it right across False Creek over the Burrard St Bridge more than a mile away before he could turn it around and cross back over. By the time he returned to Davie St he was ten minutes behind schedule, as was everyone else.

I suppose I shouldn’t talk about polishing my 35 cm cock in public……

Alice in Government Land, Part V - new horizons

Upper Management with the federal government is always far off in some other part of the country, in a fantastical place that operates under different laws, different logic and different perceptions. No one there knows much about what workers like me do, and nothing they do affects us within many months of them doing it, if ever. Their memos, sent out at least a couple times a week, either seem irrelevant or senseless, as if they were speaking another language. I have learned to delete them without trying to read them.

But since Wanda, our wonderful manager, announced her retirement in November, two of the senior managers above her, Bob and Ann, have come to our call centre twice to discuss their vision for the future. Their first visit was timely because things seemed to be going off course for some time. Two years ago we had over 50 employees in the pension side of the call centre where I work and now there are only about 30. We assumed this had mostly to do with the ruling Conservatives' austerity measures, given that they have imposed a hiring freeze. In their eyes, the only good civil servant is one willing to die for them, i.e. in the Dept of National Defense.

But in November, the Bob & Ann show swung by to clarify that our attrition was something more personal than that. There are 4 call centres for the pensions in western Canada and territories region, about 60% of the country by area and 30% by population, and the powers that be have decided that smallest call centre in Regina (about 20 employees) and ours (formerly the largest) will close.

The reason given was that neither of them are connected to processing centres. They say they want us to be cross-trained for processing work so that we have more variety and so they don't need to lay people off in the slow periods. But that makes no sense since our slow period in late fall is so short that no pension call centre staff are laid off anyway. I brushed off their presentation as a guise to hide the fact that the ruling Conservatives want jobs shifted to areas where they are popular, and Vancouver has never elected a single of their candidates to office. Not to worry, they assured us, because no one will be let go. They said they would wait 10 more years or more if necessary until only a handful of us remain before closing it completely. I will likely be retired in five years so I decided not to trouble my head over it. Besides, the Conservatives are unlikely to stay in office much longer and any decisions they have made will be wiped away by the next ruling party.

But Bob & Ann were back today to give a second presentation. They have been given the green light by Ottawa to open an Employer Call Centre (ECC), a one-stop shopping site for employers, something that has been badly needed for many years. They have not been given any monies for it so they are hoping to steal employees from both the pension and employment insurance call centres to staff the new centre and accelerate the demise of other two. What services the new ECC will provide is quite uncertain at this point, but that doesn't stop Upper Management from wanting to begin training next month, even without prepared training modules.

I like serving seniors and the disabled, as I have been doing for the past 9.5 years, except for a brief 9 months that I was seconded to help EI, but sometimes it seems too stressful and repetitive, especially in the January to May period when there is never a break between the calls. It will only get worse as the number of employees shrink.

The new call centre is a wild card. The job description will be changing monthly for the first couple years as services are added. No doubt it will be frustrating and confusing at first, but the first staff getting in at the ground level will be listened too and will be given the chance to shape what the call centre does, which is certainly not happening at the pension call centre. There will also be chances for advancement and choosing preferred specialties. I need some fresh air, a reason to look forward to going to work, to shake my head and laugh with incredulity--more than I do now, that is. If it all goes sour, I could still return to the pensions.

As soon as I left the Bob & Ann show, I sent an e-mail to my Team Leader to express an interest in being involved in the first training. I have been grinning ever since.

new goals for 2011

I have a pattern of feeling adrift after someone close leaves who has been sharing my place for a while, whether their stay was a few days or a couple weeks. My place suddenly feels too empty and my life too purposeless. Martijn stayed 22 days and I would have kept him a couple more weeks if he would have stayed, but he was anxious to visit a family he knows and Kelowna and then move on to start his new life in the Yukon. Martijn grew closer to me than most couch surfers, not only because of his longer than average stay, but also because he did so much with me. He also has a generous heart, an easy disposition and playful nature. He made as much effort to look after me as I did for him.

I knew I would need to occupy my time as much as possible as soon as he left, especially for the first couple days, to shut out those instinctive feelings of emptiness. For that reason, I began a new stained glass window the night before he left. The pattern is one of a colourful rooster perched on a post. I am keeping the background translucent and the rooster more opalescent (denser glass) to enhance the feeling of depth. The pattern is almost square, 44 cm wide by 45 cm tall, and has 170 pieces. I have already cut, ground, foiled and soldered together 57 pieces and it is coming together beautifully.

Kal and Kurt took me out for breakfast this morning. We sat on the patio of Joe's because the rest of the restaurant was full. It was brilliantly sunny and freezing cold as it has been the past three days, but the heater were on full-force above us so at least my hair was warm, and our waitress kept the hot coffee flowing.
To keep me focused on the positive, I also set several goals for 2011--not resolutions. They include completing 3 new stained glass windows, doing 10 new exciting things I have never done before, walking more than 1 km at least 100 times, doing morning abdominals 100 times (these last 2 are essential if I wish to maintain my ability to walk any sizable distances), finishing the first draught of my novel, paying a lump sum down against my remaining mortgage, getting 2 new dental implants, making my will, completing 90 pendants for the BC Faerie Camp and doing at least 10 entries per month on this blog. If I do all of these 2011 will be an excellent year.

I have completed 60 pendants for the BC Faerie Camp so far. Watching the Polar Bear Swim is my first of 10 new things, and the rooster window the first of my 3 windows. I have had one long walk and have done my morning abdominals once--not bad so far.

In the news, there is massive flooding "of Biblical proportions" over half of Queensland, Australia, and a 7.1 quake hit Chile this morning. So much for a smooth start to the decade in those places.

PHOTO: Kurt, Kal and I on Joe's Restaurant patio

New Year's Day Polar Bear Swim

It was -1C, brilliantly sunny and the first day of the new decade. It was also the last day Martijn, my Dutch couch surfer who has been staying with me since Dec 10, would be with me. He has been an excellent guest, one who left me wondering why every day can't be so fine, and we wanted to do something special for his send-off. We decided that would be the Polar Bear Swim in mid-afternoon.

My back was giving me a lot of grief and my legs were shaky, but we walked the length of Davie to get to English Beach to meet my long time friend Yves. The city, the water and the mountains were incredibly beautiful. The pushing of the crowds and the uneven ground were a challenge for me but I managed well enough. There were at least a couple thousand spectators and participants packed in around the bay. Since I cannot walk on sand it was impossible to see any of the swimmers in action. Martijn and Yves disappeared into the crowd in their Speedos and re-emerged a couple minutes later, wet and shaking. They had to force their way through the crowd to get to the water's edge.

Afterwards they stayed with me as I struggled half a block up Davie Street to catch the bus. They left me there and climbed the hill to my place. The traffic was horrendous. The bus took almost half an hour to go the first kilometre. I got off at the top of Davie, two blocks early, just to be free of the packed bus. I met the boys waiting for me at Davie and Burrard, a few metres from my building, where they have been waiting for 15 minutes.

Our friend Holly came by and the four of us spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out at my place. They were reluctant to leave. I wanted to cook a special meal for Martijn's last supper with me, poached salmon with dill, rice and Hollandaise sauce (appropriately Dutch). I didn't have enough food for Yves and Holly for the meal I had planned, but I invited them to stay anyway. I split my salmon portion with Yves, and added a stir-fry of mixed veggies and nuts in an eggplant/tomato sauce and boiled yams for Holly, who is a vegan, but I made extra for everyone. It was a great meal, although not enough for Martijn. He had been fasting for 29 hours and was ravenously hungry. He cooked and ate two pork chops while the rest of us relaxed and chatted.Yves and Holly left separately over the next couple hours. I occupied myself with the dishes, conscious of a growing anxiety inside of me. Martijn's companionship had made my typically most dreary month of the year, December, into the best year of 2010 and though I knew it was time, I didn't want him to leave. But of course he left as planned and I went to bed, refusing to let myself feel despondent.This morning I found his salty Speedo hanging on my bathroom towel rack, and a few items of dirty clothing he had intended to wash before leaving tucked away beside the futon sofa in the living room. I suppose I will be sending a care package to Whitehorse, his next home, as soon as he sends me his new address.

PHOTO 1: Martijn and Yves
PHOTO 2: Martijn