Part Two
Why do women usually outlive men? I can't say for sure. But biology tells us that the female of any species outlives the male.
In the world of us humans, women in the western world do take better care of themselves than men. They exercise more as any visit to a local aerobics class shows. These classes are jam packed with women. Yet fewer men show up to jump, sweat and strain. Women also watch their weight more than men.
That doesn't mean that all women are hauling anorectic looking bodies around. Women pile up the kilograms as they age just like men. Yet overall women do try to control their weight more than men do. "My wife's keeping me well fed," a chunky 40's something male told me as he slapped his big stomach. Yet this man's wife was quite thin. She was following a far healthier path than her spouse. For keeping thin does extend your life.
Women also lead less reckless lives than men. They don't endanger themselves as many men do. "Women don't climb Mount Everest," a male mountain climber told me way back in the 1970's.
This isn't true to-day. The second wave of feminism came along in the late 1960's and allowed women to do many things like mountain climbing that only men used to do.
Still even to-day women take less risks than men.A drunken car driver is far more likely to be a man, and usually a young man than a woman. And therefore that male is far more likely to die. Every year more than 2,000 Canadians die in car crashes and here far more men than women end up dead, especially if alcohol's involved.
Women are also far more likely to end up as criminals especially if the crime is violent. Over 600 Canadians are killed every year by someone else. And the person who's stabbing, shooting or strangling someone else to death is eight times more likely to be a man than a woman."If only women committed crime," one female prison guard told me, "we could close nine out of ten prisons."
Men far more often than women rob banks, fight in streets or playgrounds, become illegal drug addicts, steal from stores and commit fraud. Surprisingly men are also more likely to become prostitutes than women. Crime by the way is a young man's game and a very dangerous one too. If you want to die young, become a criminal.
Another plus for women is that when illness strikes them, they're much more likely to go to a doctor than men."I'm not going to run off to see a doctor every time I get a little pain,"my father used to say. He tried to stay away from medical offices. Yet woman aren't like this. They go doctors when they're in pain or feel their body temperatures rise. So here's another reason why women outlive us males.
Then there's the choices that men and women make as they go through life. We'll look at this in the next part/.
Wednesday, 5 October 2016
Tuesday, 4 October 2016
Death and How To Avoid It - by Dave Jaffe -Part One
Part One
Canadians don't like to discuss death even though about 250,000 Canadians die every year.
People laugh when I tell them what I sometimes do. I go into cinema complexes and restaurants. ""Hi my name's Dave," I tell the cashier or food server. "I'm an old man. Do you have any discounts for seniors.?"
Yet sometimes I foretell my future. "Hi," I say again to someone I just met. "My name's Dave. I'm an old man. I'll be dead in less than ten years and maybe long before that." I don't get many laughs if any from people who hear this.
Death is after all a serious business. You pass away, you vanish and you become extinct when you die. 50 million people die worldwide every year. Some people want to die. Every year close to 4,000 Canadians kill themselves and some of them are quite young. Yet that number is less than 2 per cent who die annually. Most of us want to stay alive.
People jog or do other forms of exercise every day to stay alive or live longer. Of course few people roll out of bed every day to exercise and tell themselves, "I'm going to do my daily exercise
to live longer." Yet that in part is what exercise is all about. And if you exercise regularly chances are you will live longer than someone who doesn't.
Of course there's other ways to live a long life.
First off, be born a woman and not a man. Women everywhere in the western world live longer than men. In Canada in the year 2000 men had a life expectancy of 77 years. Yet women's life expectancy stood at 82 years or five years longer than a man's. Some women now live into their early 90's. Most men are not so lucky.
A friend of mine was walking in a park in Victoria in the early 1970's. The second wave of feminism was just getting underway at this time. My friend met a young woman on his stroll through the park. This woman was a strong feminist. "Women are second class citizens in this world," the woman said in effect after she'd started to chat with my friend. "We are paid less than men, face more discrimination, and are treated more violently than men."
"All these things are wrong," my friend replied. "They should be changed. But I'll tell you one thing: You woman will bury all us men." My friend's reply was spot on. Go to a long term place anywhere in Canada. These places for the aged are chock full of old women. And usually there's no more than half a dozen aging men around. The male husbands of most of these woman died off long ago.
In the next part of this story we'll look at some of the reasons why women outlive men.
Canadians don't like to discuss death even though about 250,000 Canadians die every year.
People laugh when I tell them what I sometimes do. I go into cinema complexes and restaurants. ""Hi my name's Dave," I tell the cashier or food server. "I'm an old man. Do you have any discounts for seniors.?"
Yet sometimes I foretell my future. "Hi," I say again to someone I just met. "My name's Dave. I'm an old man. I'll be dead in less than ten years and maybe long before that." I don't get many laughs if any from people who hear this.
Death is after all a serious business. You pass away, you vanish and you become extinct when you die. 50 million people die worldwide every year. Some people want to die. Every year close to 4,000 Canadians kill themselves and some of them are quite young. Yet that number is less than 2 per cent who die annually. Most of us want to stay alive.
People jog or do other forms of exercise every day to stay alive or live longer. Of course few people roll out of bed every day to exercise and tell themselves, "I'm going to do my daily exercise
to live longer." Yet that in part is what exercise is all about. And if you exercise regularly chances are you will live longer than someone who doesn't.
Of course there's other ways to live a long life.
First off, be born a woman and not a man. Women everywhere in the western world live longer than men. In Canada in the year 2000 men had a life expectancy of 77 years. Yet women's life expectancy stood at 82 years or five years longer than a man's. Some women now live into their early 90's. Most men are not so lucky.
A friend of mine was walking in a park in Victoria in the early 1970's. The second wave of feminism was just getting underway at this time. My friend met a young woman on his stroll through the park. This woman was a strong feminist. "Women are second class citizens in this world," the woman said in effect after she'd started to chat with my friend. "We are paid less than men, face more discrimination, and are treated more violently than men."
"All these things are wrong," my friend replied. "They should be changed. But I'll tell you one thing: You woman will bury all us men." My friend's reply was spot on. Go to a long term place anywhere in Canada. These places for the aged are chock full of old women. And usually there's no more than half a dozen aging men around. The male husbands of most of these woman died off long ago.
In the next part of this story we'll look at some of the reasons why women outlive men.
Monday, 26 September 2016
Exits and Entrance - A Journey Through Many Landcapes by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 12 - Part Two.
Chapter 12 - Part Two.
"Stuff happens," Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. Secretary of State said after he and other members of President George W. Bush's government had launched the disastrous invasion of Iraq. You can say the same thing about the human body as it ages: Stuff happens.
As you move into your late 60's, diseases stalk you. A short painful heart attack can end your days on earth really quickly. A massive stroke can shut off blood to your brain and you die. Ever active cancer cells eat away at your bones, your glands like your prostate or your breasts or your colon. At last weakened by the struggle to fend off cancer, your body gives up and you're gone.
Often long before life's end, diseases of old age ravage your body. Have you ever heard of shingles or 'herpes zoster' as biologists call it? This viral disease often attacks aging people who've had chicken pox when they were young. One man who was hit by this disease said after he got it, "I can only sleep for an hour-and-a-half at a time. My chest and back are inflamed and the pain is something else." He died a few years later.
Another man who's in his 70's, can barely speak. He's got Parkinson's disease,a disease that causes his muscles to freeze up and gives off tremours that shake his body from time to time. He can't speak too well and often slurs his speech when he talks. Linda Ronstadt has given up singing," someone told me recently. "She's got Parkinson's." Then there's other diseases like Alzheimers etcetra etcetra. The list of diseases in old age is endless.In a few years I will be gone, but probably not after passing through a painful exit to death.
As my father used to say quoting from the Bible, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." You can see death as the final injustice because you can't avoid it. Or you can see it as the great equalizer because everyone, rich middle class and the poor will all die.
Yet as I reflect on my coming death I look back and realize I've been incredibly lucky. I now believe that luck above all is the key to good fortune. Conside the following. If the British Air Force hadn't repelled the Nazi Air Force in the summer of 1940, my parents would both have died as German troops would have landed in Britain and conquered it. I would never have been born. "Never in the field of human history," intoned British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, "have so many owed so much to so few." The Allies won World War Two. If they'd have lost it, I would have been gassed in a German concentration camp.
Though my parents overspent foolishly from their marriage in 1938 to 1950, my early relatively affluent childhood gave me a head start and even a lead on many of my contemporaries. My mother and father were in many ways responsible parents. Donald Winnicott the British psychiatrist said that the good mother was the greatest gift that civilization had. And my mother was a good mother. She sacrificed herself to her family. Also I spent my youth before the rise of heroin, cocaine and amphetemines. My youth was lived free of drugs.
At the same time so-called 'miracle drugs' like streptomycin, the polio vaccine and penicillin, that came onstream in my childhood and youth, spared from the scourges of many diseases like polio and tubercolosis.
Meanwhile during the 1950's to the 1990's, governments all across Canada created many social programs that saved my life. Private companies invested heavily and the Gross National Product often grew massively at a rate of 3 to 4 per cent a year. Jobs were plentiful. To-day the Canadian G.N.P. limps along at barely one per cent annually.
I now realize that adjusted for inflation I have probably cost the Canadian taxpayers over $900,000. "Anatomy is destiny," Sigmund Freud said. Yet this isn't true. "Geography is destiny. If I'd have been born and lived in any of the poor countries around the world, I'd have passed away years ago.
My life will soon end. The first part of my life was dogged by poverty, deaths and disability. The second half of my life, that is the last 37 years, have on the whole been very good. So ends the story of my life.
"Stuff happens," Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. Secretary of State said after he and other members of President George W. Bush's government had launched the disastrous invasion of Iraq. You can say the same thing about the human body as it ages: Stuff happens.
As you move into your late 60's, diseases stalk you. A short painful heart attack can end your days on earth really quickly. A massive stroke can shut off blood to your brain and you die. Ever active cancer cells eat away at your bones, your glands like your prostate or your breasts or your colon. At last weakened by the struggle to fend off cancer, your body gives up and you're gone.
Often long before life's end, diseases of old age ravage your body. Have you ever heard of shingles or 'herpes zoster' as biologists call it? This viral disease often attacks aging people who've had chicken pox when they were young. One man who was hit by this disease said after he got it, "I can only sleep for an hour-and-a-half at a time. My chest and back are inflamed and the pain is something else." He died a few years later.
Another man who's in his 70's, can barely speak. He's got Parkinson's disease,a disease that causes his muscles to freeze up and gives off tremours that shake his body from time to time. He can't speak too well and often slurs his speech when he talks. Linda Ronstadt has given up singing," someone told me recently. "She's got Parkinson's." Then there's other diseases like Alzheimers etcetra etcetra. The list of diseases in old age is endless.In a few years I will be gone, but probably not after passing through a painful exit to death.
As my father used to say quoting from the Bible, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." You can see death as the final injustice because you can't avoid it. Or you can see it as the great equalizer because everyone, rich middle class and the poor will all die.
Yet as I reflect on my coming death I look back and realize I've been incredibly lucky. I now believe that luck above all is the key to good fortune. Conside the following. If the British Air Force hadn't repelled the Nazi Air Force in the summer of 1940, my parents would both have died as German troops would have landed in Britain and conquered it. I would never have been born. "Never in the field of human history," intoned British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, "have so many owed so much to so few." The Allies won World War Two. If they'd have lost it, I would have been gassed in a German concentration camp.
Though my parents overspent foolishly from their marriage in 1938 to 1950, my early relatively affluent childhood gave me a head start and even a lead on many of my contemporaries. My mother and father were in many ways responsible parents. Donald Winnicott the British psychiatrist said that the good mother was the greatest gift that civilization had. And my mother was a good mother. She sacrificed herself to her family. Also I spent my youth before the rise of heroin, cocaine and amphetemines. My youth was lived free of drugs.
At the same time so-called 'miracle drugs' like streptomycin, the polio vaccine and penicillin, that came onstream in my childhood and youth, spared from the scourges of many diseases like polio and tubercolosis.
Meanwhile during the 1950's to the 1990's, governments all across Canada created many social programs that saved my life. Private companies invested heavily and the Gross National Product often grew massively at a rate of 3 to 4 per cent a year. Jobs were plentiful. To-day the Canadian G.N.P. limps along at barely one per cent annually.
I now realize that adjusted for inflation I have probably cost the Canadian taxpayers over $900,000. "Anatomy is destiny," Sigmund Freud said. Yet this isn't true. "Geography is destiny. If I'd have been born and lived in any of the poor countries around the world, I'd have passed away years ago.
My life will soon end. The first part of my life was dogged by poverty, deaths and disability. The second half of my life, that is the last 37 years, have on the whole been very good. So ends the story of my life.
Friday, 23 September 2016
Exits and Entrances - Chapter 12 - Part One by Dave Jaffe
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.
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.
Thursday, 22 September 2016
Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 11, Part Five.
Chapter 11 - Part Five.
By 2001 or so, the Unitarian Church of Vancouver no longer filled my needs. I tired of the services, except for Harold Brown's playing of the piano, the choir's music and some of the sermons. The endless quarrels in the church also turned me off. People came and went from the church, as if they were moving through a revolving door. "The church is a half way house," now retired scientist Merva Cottle said. "People come here to solve their problems. Once they solve them or if they can't solve them, they leave."
"What's the largest congregation in Vancouver?" one jokester told me. "The congregation that went to the Unitarian Church and then left it."
In 1999, the church's main minister Sydney Morris resigned her job. Members forced her out and this small, lively but sometimes disruptive woman returned to the American Midwest. Five years later inn 2004, Anne Buckmaster, a tall minister from Seattle, resigned her job. She too had been told to leave after some disagreements. By then we had a new minister. Steven Epperson was a bearded intellectual person from Salt Lake City. He gave the church the stability it had once had under Philip Hewett.
In the midst of these problems I started problems in the church. My fetishism which I've mentioned before, started to fade. Yet as this occurred I started to stare obsessively at well-dressed women. This was something I'd done during most of my adult life. Yet as I aged, this obsession became much stronger.
Any dark or brown haired woman who was well-dressed turned me on and I would start to stare at her continuously. Amanda came to the church in about 2000. She was a thirty something woman who sang in the choir. All I wanted to do was look at her. (Amanda is not her real name). I used to walk near her house long before she moved into her west side home. Yet I kept doing this after she moved in to the area. One day she saw me as I walked past her house. She saw me in the street and then a few months later left the church and her house.
"She left this area and the church because she was scared of you," a church member told me later. "And she thinks you're a creep. You just look at her and never talk to her."
I wrote a letter of apology to Amanda, but this caused more problems in the church as one woman got very angry at me for doing this. Finally I left the church in 2005 after not giving a sermon I was supposed to give. I was glad to leave but I realized that I needed to go into therapy to cure my problem. I found one therapist and then started to do self therapy after I left her.
Amanda returned to the church after I left and told people what I'd done. When I wanted to return to the church just once to hear one of Steven Epperson's sermons, my friend Jennifer Wade told me, "Dave this wouldn't be a good idea." By then I had written an honest account of my journey in and out of the Unitarian Church, and mailed out over two dozen copies. The book was as one man said, was full of "too much information." It was without doubt one of the worst things I'd ever written.
Yet my experience with Amanda didn't end there. After I left the church, she started to walk past my co-op but wouldn't talk to me. She was giving me the same treatment I'd given her. This tall elegant art curator was no fool. She must have walked near my home about seven or eight times and then vanished from my life. I realized that once again I had caused a woman problems and vowed not to hurt women again. I hope I kept this resolution. Time which I'm running out of, will tell.
By 2001 or so, the Unitarian Church of Vancouver no longer filled my needs. I tired of the services, except for Harold Brown's playing of the piano, the choir's music and some of the sermons. The endless quarrels in the church also turned me off. People came and went from the church, as if they were moving through a revolving door. "The church is a half way house," now retired scientist Merva Cottle said. "People come here to solve their problems. Once they solve them or if they can't solve them, they leave."
"What's the largest congregation in Vancouver?" one jokester told me. "The congregation that went to the Unitarian Church and then left it."
In 1999, the church's main minister Sydney Morris resigned her job. Members forced her out and this small, lively but sometimes disruptive woman returned to the American Midwest. Five years later inn 2004, Anne Buckmaster, a tall minister from Seattle, resigned her job. She too had been told to leave after some disagreements. By then we had a new minister. Steven Epperson was a bearded intellectual person from Salt Lake City. He gave the church the stability it had once had under Philip Hewett.
In the midst of these problems I started problems in the church. My fetishism which I've mentioned before, started to fade. Yet as this occurred I started to stare obsessively at well-dressed women. This was something I'd done during most of my adult life. Yet as I aged, this obsession became much stronger.
Any dark or brown haired woman who was well-dressed turned me on and I would start to stare at her continuously. Amanda came to the church in about 2000. She was a thirty something woman who sang in the choir. All I wanted to do was look at her. (Amanda is not her real name). I used to walk near her house long before she moved into her west side home. Yet I kept doing this after she moved in to the area. One day she saw me as I walked past her house. She saw me in the street and then a few months later left the church and her house.
"She left this area and the church because she was scared of you," a church member told me later. "And she thinks you're a creep. You just look at her and never talk to her."
I wrote a letter of apology to Amanda, but this caused more problems in the church as one woman got very angry at me for doing this. Finally I left the church in 2005 after not giving a sermon I was supposed to give. I was glad to leave but I realized that I needed to go into therapy to cure my problem. I found one therapist and then started to do self therapy after I left her.
Amanda returned to the church after I left and told people what I'd done. When I wanted to return to the church just once to hear one of Steven Epperson's sermons, my friend Jennifer Wade told me, "Dave this wouldn't be a good idea." By then I had written an honest account of my journey in and out of the Unitarian Church, and mailed out over two dozen copies. The book was as one man said, was full of "too much information." It was without doubt one of the worst things I'd ever written.
Yet my experience with Amanda didn't end there. After I left the church, she started to walk past my co-op but wouldn't talk to me. She was giving me the same treatment I'd given her. This tall elegant art curator was no fool. She must have walked near my home about seven or eight times and then vanished from my life. I realized that once again I had caused a woman problems and vowed not to hurt women again. I hope I kept this resolution. Time which I'm running out of, will tell.
Tuesday, 20 September 2016
Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe Chapter 11, Part Four.
Chapter 11 - Part Four.
After the renovation of Eight Oaks Housing Co-op were finished, a mega project loomed just outside our building. Liberal premier Gordon Campbell brushed the dust off the plans of his friend, former Social credit premier Bill Van Der Zalm. 'The Zalm' as this conservative premier was called, announced in the late 1980's, that a new Sky Train line would barrel along Cambie Street to Richmond, Vancouver's southern neighbour.
Many citizens along Cambie Street and near it, opposed this project. The N.D.P. governments of the 1990's buried it. Yet the new premier resurrected this plan. Despite a sizeable opposition to this new project, the Canada Line project went ahead in 2005. When the Vancouver city council approved the new line, it called for the tunnel along Cambie Street to be bored underground. Yet this didn't happen. Instaed the builders of the line went for what was called "'Cut and Cover'.
The surface covering of Cambie Street was ripped up, and deep trenches were dug to where the building of the tunnels took place. Now huge Komatsus, cranes, and John Deere caterpillars swarmed along Cambie Street. Massive trucks lumbered around the neighbourhood. Noise, filth , potholes and traffic diversions turned Cambie street into a nightmare.
For me, burdened with walking with a crutch, life became very difficult. Bus stops just vanished overnight. "Can you tell me where the closest bus stop is to my address?" I must have asked the project office's information officer at least three or four times on the phone. 35 stores fled Cambie Street as their customers vanished.
Dangers lurked around me and others. One day a huge truck lurched into a pothole outside the co-op and drenched me from head to foot. "I've had that happen to me at least twice," a neighbour across the street told me when she heard my story. One Sunday which fell on an April Fool's Day, a security guard on the project refused to move his car, even though I asked him politely to do so. I tried to move around his car and fell on one of my knees. My left knee started to swell up. I rushed to the emergency ward of the Vancouver General Hospital which had been hard hit by Liberal cutbacks.
Yet luckily my kneecap wasn't broken.
Still, this new project didn't match or disrupt my life, the way the building renovations at Eight Oaks had. "This building of the Canada Line is a big nuisance," one of my neighbours named Dylan said. "But it's nothing compared to the problems that the renovations caused me and my family."
At the same time as the building of the Canada Line went ahead, there came upheavals at the Unitarian Church. These too caused me problems.
After the renovation of Eight Oaks Housing Co-op were finished, a mega project loomed just outside our building. Liberal premier Gordon Campbell brushed the dust off the plans of his friend, former Social credit premier Bill Van Der Zalm. 'The Zalm' as this conservative premier was called, announced in the late 1980's, that a new Sky Train line would barrel along Cambie Street to Richmond, Vancouver's southern neighbour.
Many citizens along Cambie Street and near it, opposed this project. The N.D.P. governments of the 1990's buried it. Yet the new premier resurrected this plan. Despite a sizeable opposition to this new project, the Canada Line project went ahead in 2005. When the Vancouver city council approved the new line, it called for the tunnel along Cambie Street to be bored underground. Yet this didn't happen. Instaed the builders of the line went for what was called "'Cut and Cover'.
The surface covering of Cambie Street was ripped up, and deep trenches were dug to where the building of the tunnels took place. Now huge Komatsus, cranes, and John Deere caterpillars swarmed along Cambie Street. Massive trucks lumbered around the neighbourhood. Noise, filth , potholes and traffic diversions turned Cambie street into a nightmare.
For me, burdened with walking with a crutch, life became very difficult. Bus stops just vanished overnight. "Can you tell me where the closest bus stop is to my address?" I must have asked the project office's information officer at least three or four times on the phone. 35 stores fled Cambie Street as their customers vanished.
Dangers lurked around me and others. One day a huge truck lurched into a pothole outside the co-op and drenched me from head to foot. "I've had that happen to me at least twice," a neighbour across the street told me when she heard my story. One Sunday which fell on an April Fool's Day, a security guard on the project refused to move his car, even though I asked him politely to do so. I tried to move around his car and fell on one of my knees. My left knee started to swell up. I rushed to the emergency ward of the Vancouver General Hospital which had been hard hit by Liberal cutbacks.
Yet luckily my kneecap wasn't broken.
Still, this new project didn't match or disrupt my life, the way the building renovations at Eight Oaks had. "This building of the Canada Line is a big nuisance," one of my neighbours named Dylan said. "But it's nothing compared to the problems that the renovations caused me and my family."
At the same time as the building of the Canada Line went ahead, there came upheavals at the Unitarian Church. These too caused me problems.
Saturday, 17 September 2016
Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 11 - Part Three.
Chapter 11 - Part Three.
In the 21st century, problems started to loom head at Eight Oaks Co-operative too.
I had now lived in this place since its opening in August 1982. It was starting to run down just like me. Built at a time when many co-ops were going up, it had like many other co-ops been poorly built. Although not officially classed as so-called "leaky co-op" as many other co-ops were,the building's outside was starting to rot away. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation that ran the housing co-op program, insisted that Eight Oaks be renovated.
A struggle broke out in the co-op as some board and rank-and-file members rebelled against CMHC's orders. Other members sought a compromise. A veteran now of past struggles in the co-op, I stayed out of this conflict. Still, I was saddened to see some members of the board of directors leave the co-op. "Democracy can sometimes be a messy business," one political scientist told me years ago. As some board members and others moved out, I realized the truth of her statement. In the end the repairs went ahead. CMHC won the day.
The repairs started in September 2005 and ended in the spring of 2006. Huge metal pipes soon encased our building. Green sheets covered the building's grey walls. Burly construction workers hammered, drilled and carved on the co-op site from dawn to dusk five days a week. The noise flooded our ears every day.
"It was too much for me this morning," Cindy Weeds, a 20 something member of our co-op said in the fall of 2005. "Two construction workers showed up on my balcony at seven o'clock in the morning and just started drilling." Cindy's experience happened to others in our co-op. We also had a tense meeting one night with the head of the construction team who told us that they couldn't fix some of the new problems they'd discovered while fixing up the other problems they knew about.
At last in May of 2006 the renovations were finished. Yet now a new building project reared its noisy head and right close to the co-op. It was another mega project from premier Gordon Campbell's Liberal government. And it too disrupted my life and other people's lives too.
In the 21st century, problems started to loom head at Eight Oaks Co-operative too.
I had now lived in this place since its opening in August 1982. It was starting to run down just like me. Built at a time when many co-ops were going up, it had like many other co-ops been poorly built. Although not officially classed as so-called "leaky co-op" as many other co-ops were,the building's outside was starting to rot away. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation that ran the housing co-op program, insisted that Eight Oaks be renovated.
A struggle broke out in the co-op as some board and rank-and-file members rebelled against CMHC's orders. Other members sought a compromise. A veteran now of past struggles in the co-op, I stayed out of this conflict. Still, I was saddened to see some members of the board of directors leave the co-op. "Democracy can sometimes be a messy business," one political scientist told me years ago. As some board members and others moved out, I realized the truth of her statement. In the end the repairs went ahead. CMHC won the day.
The repairs started in September 2005 and ended in the spring of 2006. Huge metal pipes soon encased our building. Green sheets covered the building's grey walls. Burly construction workers hammered, drilled and carved on the co-op site from dawn to dusk five days a week. The noise flooded our ears every day.
"It was too much for me this morning," Cindy Weeds, a 20 something member of our co-op said in the fall of 2005. "Two construction workers showed up on my balcony at seven o'clock in the morning and just started drilling." Cindy's experience happened to others in our co-op. We also had a tense meeting one night with the head of the construction team who told us that they couldn't fix some of the new problems they'd discovered while fixing up the other problems they knew about.
At last in May of 2006 the renovations were finished. Yet now a new building project reared its noisy head and right close to the co-op. It was another mega project from premier Gordon Campbell's Liberal government. And it too disrupted my life and other people's lives too.
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