My Life In Two Or Three Parts- PartThree

                Deliverance


     It must have been March 1965.
     I had graduated from McGill University the year before with a useless degree in English Literature. My parents were shoehorned into a tiny apartment in Montreal's north end. I was jobless, and hopping from one friend's place to another, a man on the move just following in my parent's foot steps and mimicking their endless moving.
      As the snow melted in the streets of Montreal, my father ran into a man he knew.. "Monty," he said," you can get a job selling cablevision to homeowners and apartment dwellers."   My father went around to the address he was given and was instantly hired.
     Then he went out and started selling cablevision.. In the first week he made more than he'd made in the previous six months.
      Bingo he was no longer poor.
      We moved again downtown into a small apartment and I tagged along with my parents. In the next year I dropped out of teacher's college for a second time and then hitchhiked and bused out to Vancouver. I loved this city on the Georgia Straight with its neasrby mountains and mild weather.
    As soon as I came back I told my dad, "we should all move out west to the Pacific. It's great out there." My dad told me that he'd already told his company that he wanted to move to Vancouver and that's where and my mother were planning to go to.  In late 1966 my family pulled up roots again and took another journey. I followed my parents out west  and left Montreal with my sister Valerie in the middle of a December snow storm.
     When we arrived in Vancouver in the middle of night it was raining. "This is the fortieth day in a row that it's raining out here," the cab driver who picked us up told me. "God bless the rain," I used to say years later.It sure beats the snow." But I didn't say something like that in the first years that I lived in Vancouver.
    A few months later in the spring of 1967 I was feeling good. I was preparing to try for the thired time to be a teacher. Yet then tragedy struck
       In late April Valerie the sister I was closest to, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. In September my mother Lillian Jaffe passed away from cancer. In December one of my cousins died in a hospital in London England. I was devastated.
     In the history books, the summer of 1967 is called 'The Summer of Love'. That year as U.S. armed forces fought killed and died in Vietnam, the Beatles's 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' played in millions of North American homes. Thousands of young people left their parents's place for a while to live in places like Kitsilano in Vancouver, Toronto's Yorkville and above all The Haight Ashberry district in San Francisco.
    The young people called themselve'hippies'. They grew their hair long, dressed in casual clothing, smoked marijuana and made love sometimes in old houses. "I'm for love and peace," they said. I could not join this great outpouring of energy. In my history book the summer of 1967 I called "the Summer of death'.