Category Archives: Jude and Megan

#VanPoli Civic Politics | The Death of Cynicism | Part 4 of 4

May 9, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Canada, Jude and Megan, News, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Vancouver City Hall

From a diehard VanRamblings reader (and friend and associate, who holds VanRamblings to account), a former Park Board Commissioner, longtime politico, keen observer of Vancouver’s civic political scene, a well-respected local architect and designer, a city-builder, world traveler, husband and father, and sometimes, just sometimes, a bit of a curmudgeon…

“Not sure why you think these Councillors are doing such a great job!

In addition to being overly swayed by staff, these novice Councillors continue to sit back and leave the Vision Vancouver agenda intact, an agenda which got Vision un-elected, decimated, and an agenda that has resulted in so much damage to our City. As well, in each of your examples in your series this week on our City Councillors, the initiatives you think are so wonderful are contradicted by other decisions they have made.

In particular, Councillor Boyle’s energy shift sounds great if it is meant only to be read. But, think about how each of these ideas can be realized. She wants all neighbourhoods to be walk / bike / transit-friendly, and to use wood frame construction, and yet she voted to support the Skytrain SUBway, and it’s greenhouse gas-spewing green glass concrete towers, unfriendly to neighbourhoods, our seniors’ population and young families.

If Councillor Christine Boyle was really as good a listener as you suggest she is, as a first term Councillor she could have taken advice from knowledgeable people (think: Patrick Condon) that the two approaches are not compatible. Only Councillors Colleen Hardwick and Jean Swanson seem to have their heads screwed on straight on the transit file.

I am surprised (and disappointed), as well, to learn that Councillor Adriane Carr continues to support bonus density policies that have long proven to be and are destructive to neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, her Green seatmate on Council, Pete Fry, is trying to get everybody to drive no faster than 30kph when the most energy efficient speed is 38-40kph. While that gets him media coverage, is that sensible Green policy?

Perhaps a better sum up of Council’s performance to date is a ‘hmmm‘”.

- Bill McCreery, architect, VanRamblings reader, politico, keen city observer.

Much of what Bill McCreery writes in indisputable; he, like many across our city, is frustrated at the slow pace of change at City Hall and the cumbersome nature of decision-making, not to mention an unbecoming naïveté and acquiescence to staff, masked as the defining, seemingly newfound ethos at City Hall, now guided by “being respectful of others.”
There’s a lot of that going on at Vancouver School Board, as well - which not only makes for dull politics, it makes for unproductive, unfocused politics, politics too often in the sway of an entrenched bureaucracy, with the decision-making that takes place not for the people, but rather at the expense of the interests of the very people who elected our city officials into office, responding to a campaign of hope for better, when all we’re getting now is the same ol’ same ol, an utterly unacceptable status quo.
The lack of action thus far in civic governance is frustrating, maddening.
Swept into office on a wave of optimism and the belief that change, change for us, for parents & for children, for seniors & for renters, for the disenfranchised, for the struggling single mother and all the struggling families across our city was possible, and as assiduously as our electeds apply themselves to their work at City Hall, day-by-day, and week after frustrating week, the hope the electorate felt emboldened by last October fades into the miasma of an “I’m alright, Jack” ethos that has set our well-heeled civic officials apart from the “hoi polloi” who thrust them into office.

Sadhu Aufochs Johnston, the City Manager of Vancouver, British Columbia, the CEO.

When Mayor Gregor Robertson and his majority Vision Vancouver Council assumed office at City Hall in December 2008, the first order of business for the fledgling party was to appoint a new City Manager to carry out the programme the party had announced, run on and committed itself to during the course of their thirty-day (and night) winning campaign for office.
From 1999 until 2008, when she was unceremoniously turfed from City Hall, Judy Rogers was the city manager for the City of Vancouver, our city’s first female city manager. At the time of her dismissal by the new Council, Ms. Rogers had worked for the city of Vancouver for 25 years, spending 10 years in the role of city manager, after having become assistant city manager in 1994, and deputy city manager in 1996. She started her new employment as Vancouver City Manager on New Year’s Day in 1999.
In 2008, within one week of Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson taking office, Rogers was fired by Robertson to be replaced by Dr. Penny Ballem — who had only recently voluntarily left her role as Deputy Minister in the province’s Ministry of Health — as the new head of Vancouver’s civic administration, to provide a “fresh start” for Robertson’s and Vision Vancouver’s agenda. Ms. Rogers received $572,000 severance pay.
The catchphrase around Vancouver City Hall from late 2008 until September 15, 2015, when Mayor Robertson announced that Dr. Ballem’s service had “concluded” and Sadhu Aufochs Johnston would be her replacement was “get ‘er done.”
Dr. Ballem well understood her role: fulfill Vision Vancouver’s agenda, don’t second guess the decision-making of the new Vision Vancouver Councillors and Mayor, pave the way for substantive change and remove any impediments to change, and under no circumstance, ever, ever, ever use the word “no” when addressing Vision Vancouver Councillors, and the Mayor, during Council meetings, or when Council was in session at City Hall.
Finally, though, the people of Vancouver (and the Vision Vancouver Council) had had enough of Dr. Ballem’s strong-armed tactics, as the years went by her loyalty to her “masters” proving increasingly counterproductive to the carrying out of the Vision Vancouver agenda. Mayor Gregor Robertson all but promised the electorate during his 2014 campaign for office that he’d get rid of the cantankerous, and to many off-putting, Dr. Ballem — and after a 10-month delay, on Sept. 15, 2015 he proved true to his word.
Dr. Ballem received $556,595 in a severance package when she left Vancouver City Hall.
On September 1st, 2009 Dr. Penny Ballem announced that Sadhu Johnston would be hired as Deputy City Manager to lead the city’s environmental efforts. Note should be made that Mr. Johnston’s hiring was not that of Dr. Ballem, but of Mayor Gregor Robertson and the Vision Vancouver braintrust, who had come to know and like Sadhu Aufochs Johnston through their mutual association at Cortes Island’s Hollyhock “Lifelong Learning Centre”, which a few reporters have inferred is a “cult”, as Georgia Straight reporter Shannon Rupp wrote in an article published in The Straight on March 28th, 1996, with Rupp writing that the …

“… artificial feeling of love & acceptance is what people are paying for, but I have to admit I find these get-togethers oppressive. Perhaps the most annoying aspect of Hollyhock is its culture of conformity — Goddess forbid anyone should question anything. After five days here, I’ve found Hollyhock is really two places: the site itself is delightful, but the half-baked spiritual and psychological concepts it peddles make me uneasy.”

Over the course of the past six months as the new Mayor and eight novice Councillors have settled into their term of office and their newfound responsibilities at City Hall, as VanRamblings has attended or watched City Council and committee meetings, we have observed city manager Sadhu Johnston consistently, egregiously and unremittingly turning into “Dr. No.”
When Vision Vancouver were in power, telling the Mayor and Vision Vancouver Councillors that they couldn’t do something they had their minds set on, or even implying that there was a “no” in his address to Vision Vancouver electeds would have been tantamount to a tendering of his resignation — Sadhu Johnston was kept on at City Hall after the dismissal of Dr. Penny Ballem, to carry out Vision’s agenda, which he does these days every time he speaks at Council, and every time he scolds a Councillor with a near denunciation of their naïveté, that his is “the way things are done.”

Malcolm Bromley, General Manager of Vancouver Park Board since July 2010

The time is nearing for our current City Council to put their stamp on civic governance in the city of Vancouver.
More than one Councillor — and dozens of VanRamblings’ readers — has expressed a concern about how, as Bill McCreery puts it at the outset of today’s post, that some Councillors have been “overly swayed by staff” and that a change of city staff will be required in order that our new Council might fulfill their campaign commitments to the people of Vancouver.

“There are those of us who’d like to see a change at the top,” various Councillors have told VanRamblings, “but having to pay more than $550,000 in severance pay to the city manager, or the $1.2 million Vision Vancouver paid out in severance money to 11 employees in 2016 is just not palatable, to Councillors or the public.”

VanRamblings is not suggesting that Sadhu Johnston be fired or dismissed, rather that the accomplished Mr. Johnston be transitioned into another position of authority at City Hall, while maintaining his current salary.
Vancouver’s Mayor and Council need a leader at the top of the City Hall bureaucracy who will carry out their agenda, and not the defeated Vision Vancouver agenda. Who would that person be to replace Sadhu Johnston?
Take a look at the photo above — that is Malcolm Bromley, the current General Manager of the Vancouver Park Board, who is one of the most passionate persons with whom VanRamblings is acquainted about city-building. Most of the members of Council are familiar with the many accomplishments of Mr. Bromley, his commitment to democratic engagement, and finding a path that will enable the electeds to carry out their commitment to the citizens who elected them to office.
Councillors Melissa De Genova, Sarah Kirby-Yung and Michael Wiebe sat on Park Board when Mr. Bromley was GM. In 2014-15, when Sarah Kirby-Yung was Park Board Chairperson, Malcolm Bromley was instrumental in helping Ms. Kirby-Yung fulfill her commitment (and it was her commitment to the people of Vancouver, and not to her Non-Partisan Association party) to ban cetaceans (whales and dolphins) in captivity in Stanley Park.
VanRamblings has written previously that UBC’s Patrick Condon, Park Board’s Malcolm Bromley, and the Green Party of Vancouver City Councillor Pete Fry are the finest minds in our city on the topic of city-building, the three seasoned urban geographers familiar and admiring of the work of each member of the triumvirate VanRamblings has identified above.
Fiscal responsibility is always a concern in governance. Transitioning Malcolm Bromley from Park Board General Manager to the role of city manager, while maintaining his current salary (although he’s due for a raise), perhaps transitioning Sadhu Johnston into the role of GM of Environmental Innovation, while maintaining his salary, downsizing City Hall’s bloated communications department, would mean savings in staffing costs — and a better run city, with a bureaucratic governance in place that will facilitate the agenda of Mayor & Council, rather than appear to impede.
As we say above, “the time is nearing for our City Council to put their stamp on civic governance in the city of Vancouver,” to let the public know that they’re in charge and ready to get to work on the people’s business.

“The Death of Cynicism,” the name VanRamblings has assigned to this week’s series?
As VanRamblings has suggested throughout the week, the electorate of Vancouver displayed their unerring wisdom on Oct. 20 2018 in electing the finest group of change makers ever to sit around our city’s Council table.
Last year, when writing about the incoming Council, we wrote that it would take a year and half for our new Councillors to “find the bathrooms,” a metaphor for how long it would take new Councillors to begin to implement their agenda. And so it is, and is proving to be. Only by shaking up the bureaucracy at Vancouver City Hall, putting their own senior staff in place to carry out the new Council’s agenda, will this Vancouver City Council achieve their goal of creating a healthier, fairer and more just city for all.
VanRamblings remains confident that our new Council will usher in generational change, and that by 2022 the vast majority of the electorate will come to view governance in our city differently, knowing that the Mayor and all 10 Councillors are on their side, working for them, while achieving and putting into practice the change that will serve us all, each and every one of us, on the road to the death of political cynicism and the renewal of hope in our city, in every neighbourhood, across every diverse community.

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Music Sundays | Gorgeous Dream Pop Canadian Music | Yeah!

May 5, 2019A & E, Canada, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Music, Pop Culture, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Oshawa Ontario-based dream pop group, Dizzy, winner of the 2019 Juno award for Best Alternative Album, Baby Teeth. Dizzy was also up for the Best Alternative Group Juno.

Mid-week last week, I was listening to Gloria Macarenko’s afternoon CBC show, On the Coast (I will say, I much preferred Stephen Quinn in the afternoon, alas). Ms. Macarenko was speaking with frequent guest, Andrea Warner, who was in the studio to discuss a Canadian music group of some note, all but anonymous to the uninitiated (that’s you and me), but as presented by the erudite Ms. Warner, worthy of your time & consideration.
This past week, Ms. Warner wished to tell all of us how much she loved recent Juno award winners, Oshawa’s dream pop group Dizzy, who recently picked up the Alternative Album of the Year Juno award for their absolutely outstanding début album, Baby Teeth. Dizzy had been up for the Breakthrough Group of the Year Juno at the Halifax-based celebration, but lost to bülow, who VanRamblings also loves and has long been on our iTunes playlist. Quite honestly, the Breakthrough group award oughta have been a tie. Just below, you can hear music from bülow.

Not to confuse you, above is bülow, winners of Breakthrough Group of the Year at this year’s Juno awards ceremony. We’ll get back to writing about Dizzy in just a moment.

Since the release of Dizzy‘s début album, Baby Teeth in 2018, fans in rapture have fallen for Dizzy‘s distinctive vibe (the group has received a great deal of play on CBC Radio 2, as well as on CBC Music).
Dizzy‘s lush and low-key sonic landscape paired with evocative lyrics that run the gamut from confessional, specific and heartfelt to esoteric, universal and wry has captured the imagination of those who became aware of Dizzy‘s distinctive brand of music, and then became fans.
Vocalist / songwriter Katie Munshaw and Charlie Spencer started playing together in high school and were more of an acoustic folk-pop duo than anything fully resembling Dizzy. Over time, the two novice but ambitious musicians sought to stretch their musical chops, the two going on to form a larger, more diverse band that came to include the latter’s three siblings, all one year apart: Charlie, Alex and Mackenzie Spencer.
All the band members grew up in and around the ‘burbs of Oshawa, a city that backs onto Lake Ontario. In an interview with New Music Express last year, Alex told the interviewer that the environment in which he grew up “does have its beauty and its little moments of innocence — it’s very quiet and secluded, and that helps nurture our sound in some way.”

On Baby Teeth, it’s obvious how much creativity the band draws from their sleepy hometown. Bleachers and Pretty Thing are intricate compositions that place as much value on hushed moments as on memorable, prickly guitar parts and swooning choruses. Swim, however, bucks the trend with imaginative lines that see the band plead for some escapism: “You are the athlete / I am the astronaut, for thousands of miles I float / Still, you carry me home” | New Music Express, 2018.

So now I imagine, you want to hear what Dizzy sounds like. Here goes …

Stories of a Life | 1988 | Teaching English and Writing at VCC

May 4, 2019Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

In the winter of 1988, I was hired to teach English literature and writing at the Broadway campus of Vancouver Community College, located on the eastside of the city, about a block west of Clark Drive.
The head of the College Foundations Programme in which I would be employed was a gregarious, erudite fellow in his mid-50s. I went in for the interview in early February of that year, and what started out as your run-of-the-mill confab, turned into a 3-hour gabest, where the two of us spoke about our lives and the various experiences of our lives over the years.
While I was a flaming, long-haired radical, the button-downed department head was a staunch Conservative party member. Now, in those days that meant Progressive Conservative party, with the emphasis on progressive. Turns out we had much in common, agreed on many issues (particularly human rights), felt the same way about the English language (always, always use the English spelling, never the bawdlerized American spelling).
During the course of our three hour discussion, he informed me of a number of issues for my consideration respecting my pending job …

Vancouver Community College’s College Foundations Programme was a provincially funded high school completion programme for adults who wished to go on to a post-secondary education;
The student drop-out rate for College Foundations classes was 75% by the end of the term, as had long been the case, with a full 50% of the students generally withdrawing from classes in the first 3 or 4 weeks;
Arising from the high drop-out rate, class sizes were set at 30. Of the 30 students enrolled in each class, all were working class with troubled backgrounds, a full third (sometimes more) of the class were sex trade workers still active in the profession, while the remaining two-thirds worked at minimum wage jobs, if they could find employment at all;
The mid-19th century novel I was to teach for the summer semester (to begin in May), was Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I told the department head that under no circumstance could I teach the anti-feminist Tess, all the moreso because of the makeup of the class I was to teach. The creation of Tess was entirely a male construct, I argued, the lead character passive and accepting of a guilt that was not her own, hardly an inspiring figure for the women students enrolled in my class.
Instead, I told him I would wish to teach my favourite novel, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, the protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, the strongest feminist heroine in 19th century literature, as passionate and bright, as obstinate and loving, as imaginative and sympathetic, and intoxicatingly beautiful a woman — for her mind, and the world of ideas in which she lived, with a sensuousness that charmed all in her world — as one could hope to find in the novel. Not to mention which, George Eliot was just a pen name, the working class author’s true name, Mary Ann Evans, presenting her characters as social outsiders subject to small-minded persecution, with Maggie triumphing throughout the book.

My argument carried, with permission granted to teach Eliot’s fine novel.

When classes started in early May, my first impressions of the members of the class was that, as a whole, here were a group of mostly young people in their early to mid-twenties who had been beaten down by life, who had been subject to much abuse, and an utter lack of love and support.
As we got to know one another, I learned of the dreams that my students held for themselves: one wanted to be a police officer, another an airplane mechanic, yet another a day care supervisor, another a social worker, and yet another a university professor. I also learned that the friends and families of the students did not offer their support to my students in their “trying to better themselves,” rather their friends and families experienced the ambitions of my students as their being “too big for their britches”, as a disloyalty to their working class roots, as a pulling away, a desertion.
I also learned that a feature of my students’ lives was a propensity to have their friends argue with them, which inevitably — in many cases — often meant coming to blows, a decidedly unsatisfactory end to a dispute.
I decided to begin each of the two three-hour evening classes each week by teaching the students a new word. The first word I taught was specious …

The definition of specious: superficially plausible, but actually misleading and wrong.

After discussing the word specious with my students, its connotative and denotative meaning, I suggested to my students that the next time they found themselves in an argument with a friend, rather than appear to disagree with their antagonist, instead say something — with a big, almost revelatory smile on their faces — along the lines of, “Thank you. What a wonderfully specious thing to say,” that all the time their friend was thinking you were saying something kind, thoughtful and seemingly agreeable, in actuality you were calling him or her a fool — but only my students would know that, as it was unlikely that their friends knew the meaning of specious, and the implications of employing that word.
Unsurprisingly, several of my students did exactly as I prescribed above, returning to class a few days later with shit eating grins on their faces, saying, “I tried it out. It worked perfectly! I didn’t have to get into an argument with my friend, and what was even better, I felt that I’d won the argument, defended myself, allowing us to enjoy our evening and to have a good time out drinking at a bar, with the both of us feeling just great!”
Ah, the power of language — it’s just a wonderful thing, don’t you think?

Now on to teaching The Mill on the Floss. Early on my students could not make hide nor hare of Eliot’s novel, they protested that they didn’t understand the flowery British language of 1860, and that as far as they were concerned, the novel I’d chosen was a no go — they couldn’t and they wouldn’t read it, and that was all there was to it. The students were adamant (another word I taught them the meaning of, and gratefully so).
Little wonder, I thought to myself, that students long out of school would experience some difficulty with deriving meaning from mid-19th century British literature. I asked my students how many of them had been read to when they were young children. Not one had had a parent, an aunt or a teacher read to them at any point in their lives. I decided to change that.

“Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by,” is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth long since past; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of her childhood, not merely with a memory of what she did and what happened to her, of what she liked and disliked when she was in a pinafore but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what she felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another; what she felt when her school chums had shut her out of their game because she would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when she didn’t know how to amuse herself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when her mother absolutely refused to let her have a tailed cape that “half,” although every other girl of her age had the cape she so desired? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.”

When we were to begin the teaching of The Mill on the Floss, I asked the students to read Book One, Chapter One, for the next class.
At the beginning of that class, I turned down the lights, and from the lectern at the front of the class, I proceeded to read cogent passages from Chapter One, injecting meaning and emotion into the words. When I was done, the lights were turned up, and I could see that there was hardly a dry eye among the students in the class, who’d found the passages I’d read moving beyond anything they’d experienced in their school years to date, as many of the students exclaimed to me. We went on to discuss what occurred in Chapter One, the meaning that could be derived from the chapter, and why I had chosen the passages that I did to read to the class.
As the Wednesday evening class was drawing to a close, I assigned one of the students (who I had consulted with in advance, in my office, and during the mid-class break) to read passages from, and present Chapter Two to her fellow students at the next class, and to do as I had done, reflect on the meaning of Eliot’s words, why they were moving, what we learned about Maggie, her brother Tom, her parents and aunts and uncles and cousins, about where she lived, and what she and they thought of her parents and who, perhaps, was the more loving and supportive parent.
After the mid-class break at the next class, the student I had assigned to read passages from Chapter 2 did just that, coming up to the lectern, the lights now dimmed. Again, reading for meaning, when the lights were undimmed, there was not a dry eye among the students. All of the students came to love George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver (as for me, both Cathy and I called Megan “Maggie” all the time she was growing up, and still do).
We read through the thirteen chapters of Book One of The Mill on the Floss, just as we had for chapters one and two.
In the third week of May 1988, the head of the College Foundations Programme — the man who had hired me — took a leave. Three weeks later he was dead, the first person I’d been close to who had died of AIDS.
A new department head was put into place, a feminist woman and left wing activist of some note, who proved to be very much the authoritarian (rather than a humanist, as her antecedent had been) and proved, as well, to be much less open than had been her predecessor to my approach to teaching. She scolded me for teaching The Mill on the Floss rather than the assigned 19th century novel I was teach for the summer semester, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, also frowning on the dimmed lights for the reading of passages of the first Book of Eliot’s 1860 novel; neither was she particularly enamoured of the easygoing camaraderie that had developed between the exhilarated members of the class and myself.
“Unprofessional,” she harrumphed, telling all of her administrative colleagues at VCC of what a terrible teacher I was, how I had demeaned my students both by reading to them, and allowing them to read to one another, which imprecations by her, and more, carried over into my involvement with members of the civic party of which I was a member, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, prominent members of whom taught at Vancouver Community College, and who made no bones about the fact that they knew me to be a terrible teacher, a teacher who demeaned his students, treated them improperly and with unconscionable disrespect.
Sometimes, youse just gotta love the authoritarian, holier-than-thou left.
Thing is, though, while students dropped out in droves from the classes taught by my colleagues in the department — as the now deceased head of the department had said had been a common circumstance for years — not one of my students withdrew from my class before semester’s end.

Over the years, I have run across more than a dozen students from the class the students and I shared at VCC in the summer of 1988.
During that summer semester of 1988, and beyond, I provided out of class assistance to the student who wished to be a police officer, which he is today, having gone on to a baccalaureate degree in criminology, and then a Masters degree, both from Simon Fraser University. The student who wished to become an airplane mechanic? Ran into him at a Dollar Store on Commercial Drive — he told me he had taken specialized training, and now travels the globe providing service that only he and very few others are able to provide. The woman who wished to attain a degree in Early Childhood Education did just that, only recently retiring from her work at the child care centre where she was a supervisor for a near quarter century.
The young woman who wished to be a university professor?
Well, she has long worked as a consultant in the federal corrections system, directly with offenders, and on the way to attaining her PhD in Psychology was hired first as an instructor at a British Columbia university and then as a professor, all the while raising her family and running a successful private therapeutic practice, for which work she has received much recognition.
Teaching? I loved teaching.
But as anyone who knows me soon realizes, I can be obstinate, and when I believe myself to be in the right, no one and nothing will direct me away from the path that I have chosen, a path always in the service of others.

Stories of a Life | Raymond’s Ongoing Battle of the Bulge

April 27, 2019Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Joy, one of Cathy’s University of Alberta roommates & Raymond. Photo taken April 1970.

For much of my life, I have a fought an unsuccessful campaign with my weight, with the exception of the period from 1969 to 1975, where early on I was preparing “meals” for myself (and hardly eating), and in the period after marrying Cathy in 1970, when my weight hovered around 135 pounds, as you can see in the picture above, taken by Cathy at a house she shared with fellow University of Alberta students, just off the campus on Edmonton’s southside. A happy go lucky person without a care in the world.
Following graduation from SFU in 1975, after settling into jobs in the Interior, with Cathy taking on a job as a Financial Aid worker cum social worker, and me at the beginning of my teaching career, Cathy and I settled down to life as working nine to five citizens, a quick and hardly nutritious breakfast in the morning, a bagged lunch, and at the end of the work day — given that by 1975 Cathy had developed into a gourmet cook (a story for another day), a sumptuous meal and homemade dessert. Mmmm, good.
Although Cathy and I jogged, went cross-country skiing in the winter, with me taking judo classes while Cathy attended Okanagan College two evenings a week, somehow during my teaching tenure in the Interior in the mid-to-late 1970s, the pounds started to pile on for me. Cathy — an athlete always, throughout her life has run 5 miles each day seven days a week, plays volleyball & basketball in the evening, and tends to walk everywhere, while Cathy stayed fit and trim, alas such was not the case with me.
I have never been profoundly obese (the most I’ve ever weighed was 225, while 195 – 200 is my usual weight). In middle age, through my forties, fifties and early sixties, if I thought about it, worked out and was careful about what I ate, I often managed for a year or two to settle in at a weight of 175 pounds. A comfy and healthy weight for me, I think.
Weight has always ceased to be an issue when I’m head-over-heels in love, which fortunately has occurred relatively frequently over the years: with Cathy 2 (the woman I lived with when working on my Master’s, when it became clear that Cathy, my wife, and I were finis), in the late 1980s and early 90s when I was head-over-heels in love with Lori (who I consider to be the love of my life, although I am given — despite the ugliness of many of the post years of my marriage to Cathy — to thinking that Cathy, too, is one of the great loves of my life), with Anne in the mid-90s, and with Janaya in the late 90s. Oh there were a great many other women in my life over the years, but I would say that Cathy, Cathy 2, Lori, Anne and Janaya stand out as the women who, when I was in love (and I would have to say, too, lust) with them, the pounds just melted away, as during my entire time with each of them, my weight always hovered around 145 – 150 pounds.
While raising my children, I often continued the battle with my weight, in the periods between significant relationships with women I loved.
As I have written before, my relationship with my children growing up was honest and forthright. Jude was a happy-go-lucky kid, while Megan tended to the more pensive, take charge and opinionated (as she is to this day).
One late spring weekend, around 1986, when I had decided that it was time for me to once again begin a workout regimen to help me lose the pounds, the kids and I walked on over to the spiffy new Sportif on West 4th Avenue, where I proceeded to try on a variety of shirts and shorts.

Megan Jessica Tomlin, age 9, spring of 1986. Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver.

One particular outfit consisted of a mesh acrylic top, and matching billowy blue shorts (which were exactly that). Upon exiting the dressing room and presenting myself to Jude (who really couldn’t have cared less) and Megan, my loving daughter looked at me with a wary eye, from head to toe, at the outfit I’d chosen, and with a serious expression on her face said to me …
“Dad, you look like a beached whale,” then burst into a fit of giggles.