Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe; Chapter Eight - Part Four.

    Chapter Eight - Part Four.


    The 1980's was a good decade for me but it didn't scatter only good times along its way.
     In 1983 my father collapsed in the early morning. At the hospital when I came to see him he was raving about something. The doctors who examined him found that he needed pills for his blood pressure. Later doctors carved a tumour out of his prostate, probed his 78 year-old body for other ailments and kept him in hospital in 1985 for other operations.
   When he recovered from all this surgery he was basically isolated at the top floor of a three story apartment building in the west end. The building had no elevator and this made it very hard for him to get out of the place. This apartment building was just around the corner from the 15 story building  where he and my mother lived when they first came to Vancouver in 1966. Now my father cajoled a friend of his, a middle aged man to stay with him.
     By now I had forgiven my dad for the many mistakes he'd made in life. I now recognized that I'd made many mistakes too and had caused him many problems also. As the 20th century U.S. movie star Mae West used to say, "I'm no angel." Now in my mid-40's that was my motto too.
    Yet his friend was soon overwhelmed by the many tasks that it took to keep an aging man alive. "Dave, your dad is really hard to take care of," he told me. "And he doesn't know how to stay within a budget."  I smiled and said that my father's money problems had been a constant part of his life. He was a someone said about people with money problems, "They are cash addicts." That was my father.
    In reaction to his way with money I became a real thrifty person who often spent only tiny amounts of money every day. "Jaffe, you are so cheap it's disgusting," one woman told me when I was in my early 30's. Another kinder woman told me that though she had met many cheapskate males, she had never met a man so cheap as me.
    Each time I went to see may father in the west end apartment, he continue to grow worse. At last he passed away in early 1988 at the age of 82. For a while I mourned my dad's passage from this world. For years after he died I would trek into the west end mourning his death and my sister's and mother's. Amazingly a few days after he was gone, my financial aid worker from the welfare office phoned me up.
    "Dave," she told me, "You now have handicapped status." I was now back on welfare, subsisting on a $450 monthly welfare cheque. I had forgotten that when I went back to the welfare office a few months before, I'd applied for handicapped status.  "You mean I didn't get it?" I replied."
     "No," she replied. "You got it. You are now officially disabled.Come into the office to get your new benefits." I had now taken a big step up in the benefits ladder. My life changed again for the better.In the 1980's Canada was still a welfare state and I certainly benefitted from this.