Chapter 12 - Part One
After I'd had a semi-mystical experience on the Gorge road in Victoria, I felt that I'd been given a lift I sorely needed. For I was now an old man. I w-as after all, 66 years old in 2008.
"You're a spring chicken," Galia Chud a woman in her 80's told me when I said I was old. Still I felt worn out at times. My long time friend Dick Prinsep died in 2008 from stomach cancer. An allergy racked my body. and caused me to sweat and cough. I was now completely bald. Creases and lined dug themselves into my face.
A mole on my right forehead turned into a basal cell carcinoma. And tiredness stalked my body and ended my day in the late afternoon. "The cracks of old age," writes biographer Hilary Spurling, "are infirmities, ailments, setbacks, loneliness, despondency and fear." I felt all these emotions in the spring of 2008.
Yet I'd also found ways to escape from old age's downsides. When I painted landscapes, the pains of old age vanished. Watching movies that I enjoyed enabled me to forget my declining health. I travelled long and short distances to many of Vancouver's lovely parks and felt incredibly happy in these green oases. I continued to read art histories, popular biographies and sometimes novels. This lifelong pursuit lifted me out of the depression that sometimes hit me.
Still, the death of Dick Prinsep and my exit from the Unitarian Church still hovered over me. An hour or so of sitting on the Gorge Road and looking at the waters shift to and fro,seemed to wipe out for a while all the problems of the past and present. "Now I can go on," I told myself. Or as I told some of my friends, "I've had a born again experience."
I travelled back to the motel nearby that I was staying in. I fell asleep and as I drifted into never never land I felt truly happy. When I awoke the next morning a new day dawned that felt to me like a new age.
Yet this feeling unfortunately didn't last forever.
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