Chapter Four, Part Three.
My father was a true eccentric as well as being an Orthodox Jew. He didn't wear sideburns like the truly Orthodox. Still, he believed in just about every word in the Old Testament. I stayed with my father for about eight years off and on, after my mother and sister passed away. During this time my father threw himself into the affairs of the Orthodox synagogue, the Schara Tzedeck. Here my father caused all sorts of problems while doing some good things too.
He tried to get rid of non-Jewish people who were members of the Jewish Community Centre at 41st Avenue and Oak street. If he had succeeded, the community centre would have gone bankrupt. He demanded that all Jewish restaurants serve only kosher food. "You're father is impossible to work with," one woman told me. "He's crazy about kosher food."
I should have left my father's high rise long before I eventually did. Finally I moved into a tiny one bedroom place on the west side of Kitsilano. But I was a mess. "That man is still fighting his father," one woman, who I worked with at one time, said about me. She was right.
In fact I became the opposite of my dad. He was an Orthodox Jew. I became a liberal Christian. He was a married man. I never married. He ran after the rich and the well-to-do. I became at one time a hard core socialist and worked with the truly poor. He could never save any money. "Your father is a cash addict," another woman I knew told me. I became a real cheapskate who could save a money even at times when I lived on welfare.
There were other opposites in our lives. My father worked from the age of 13 to the day he retired at 78. I worked a total of about 11 years. Last, my father was a good athlete who played a good game of soccer and won many medals on the track in the 100 and 200 yard races. He was a star at what was called 'the county level' in the U.K., which was like our provincial level in Canada. I, on the other hand was hopeless in sports. I couldn't catch a baseball or throw a football.
Yet I could swim which I was still doing in my early 70's. My father never learned that skill. And there must have been other ways that I differed sharply from my father. I can't think of them now, but they surely existed. Yet up until the age of 35 or so, in my character I was very like my father. Like him, I was brash and abusive, and caused problems, whatever organization I joined.
Once I ended up in this tiny suite in Kitsilano I continued my disruptive path. Now at times massive rages overcame me and then sadness settled in my brain. I wanted to cry but couldn't. I kept on taking valium and abusing women. Then in late 1974, I contracted chomdromalacia, or a roughening of the kneecaps. My knees swelled up and I could only walk now with the help of crutches.
What would I do, I wondered. How would I survive? Then suddenly a rescuer came into view.
Yet before he showed up, I had detoured into weight training that made me need him even more.
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