Category Archives: Stories of a Life

Stories of a Life | 1975 | Happy 44th Birthday, My Sweetheart!

May 18, 2019fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, Thought for the Day, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

In the spring of 1974, Cathy and I traveled to Europe for a three-month vacation across the vast expanse of the European continent, something Cathy had insisted on — and when Cathy wanted something, she got it.

Within 48 hours of our arrival at Heathrow Airport, and after snuggling down in a small hotel, Cathy — who was two months pregnant at the time, her pregnancy not in any way proving a deterrent to her desire for a summer European sojourn — fell “ill”. Cathy and I took a taxi to the hospital, where she ended up staying a week, miscarrying our child.

In the two months prior to our departure, Cathy and I had talked about whether we should follow through on our summer plans, given that when we had traveled to San Francisco to visit her mother’s cousins, she had miscarried. But Cathy’s mind was set, and the doctor signed off, so …

After leaving the hospital, Cathy needed rest, so we traveled down to and vacationed on the Isle of Wight for a week, before continuing our vacation on the continent, taking a luxury cruise ship from Southampton to Lisbon.
The vacation was everything and more that we both thought it might be, and by the end of our vacation in the latter part of August, upon returning home (landing in Edmonton, where her mother and sister lived), we were both thrilled to discover that Cathy was pregnant once again!
Over the course of the nine months Cathy was pregnant this time, Cathy took every precaution to preserve her pregnancy: changing her diet to organic foods, plant-based proteins, and upon the advice of the doulas who worked with us during the pregnancy, a great many foods with Vitamin E, including almonds, sunflower seeds, spinach and broccoli, wheat germ and safflower oil, in order that Cathy’s uterus might become more supple.

On Friday, May 16th, 1975, just two days before Jude’s date of birth, Cathy and I took in a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, with Eric Andersen opening, and Phoebe Snow as the headliner. As it happened, our doctors — Roy, our primary physician, and his wife Dr. Patricia Blackshaw, who also saw Cathy during her pregnancy — were sitting in the row right behind us.
When Eric Andersen took the stage, Cathy went into labour, no Braxton Hicks contractions this time. We spoke with Roy and Patricia during the intermission — Patricia examining Cathy in a private room — with both advising us that it would be fine for the two of us to remain at the concert.
We called our doulas to inform them that Cathy was in labour, and that we’d be home around 11:30pm. Our son to be was on his way, and about to announce himself to the world!

16343 96th Avenue, in the Tynehead area of Surrey. In the early 1970s, a decision had been taken by the GVRD to acquire all the land from 160th to 176th streets, and from 96th Avenue to Highway #1, in order that the regional district might create a large regional zoo. While discussions were ongoing, the GVRD acquired all of the land, renting it out to any who applied — which Cathy and I did early in 1973, living on the farm until August 1975, after which we traveled into the Interior for me to begin a teaching job.

At the time Cathy and I were living on a five-acre farm in the Tynehead area of Surrey, renting our farm home (pictured above) from the Greater Vancouver Regional District, for $125 a month. Between boarding horses and selling hay (and the eggs from our chickens out back), we ended up living rent free on the property for more than two years.
Upon arriving home, our doulas were waiting for us, taking Cathy up to our bedroom to examine her. Cathy was only 1cm dilated, and birth didn’t seem imminent. We had prepared for a home birth and kept up our communication with Dr. Roy Blackshaw (who visited the next day), as Cathy’s labour continued throughout the Saturday, and into the evening.
Cathy’s mother called on Saturday morning, the phone answered by a friend of ours (who we had instructed not to tell her of the pending birth — Myrtle was opposed to the home birth, despite our precautions, and we felt sure that were she present, she’d harass us into going to the hospital).
Myrtle knew that something was afoot. When she hung the phone up at 10am, she almost immediately had friends take her to the Edmonton airport. By 2pm, she was bursting through the front door of our house, all but screaming, “Where’s my daughter? Where’s Cathy? I want to see her now,” yelling this in a packed front room of 20 of our closest friends.

Now, you can see a picture of Cathy above in the week before Jude’s birth — Cathy gained massive weight, going from 110 pounds to 185 pounds. By the time her labour pains started, she was more than ready to give birth — but truth be told, both a little uncertain and a little scared at the prospect.
We had made the decision for a home birth in large measure because: Cathy wanted me present and in the room for the birth, which at the time no hospital would allow, and because we didn’t want drops placed into our child’s eyes, and his care taking place in an antiseptic hospital setting.
From the time Myrtle arrived on Saturday til noon on Sunday, she was like a broken record: “Get Cathy to the hospital now. What are you trying to do, kill my daughter?” Myrtle threatened to sue the doulas, and have me charged if any harm came to her daughter. To be fair, had I the opportunity to do it all over again, I would opt for a hospital birth, despite the attendant “problems” that a hospital birth would have conferred on us, and our baby.
Finally, at noon on Sunday, after speaking with the doulas and on the advice of Roy Blackshaw, we made the decision to have the birth at Surrey Memorial Hospital, who were ready for us upon our arrival, placing Cathy in a wheelchair and whisking her to the maternity ward, and into a surgical room where Roy and three nurses were waiting for us.
The room was brightly lit (not what we wanted), the nurses overly officious and insisting that everything be “done by the book”, ordering me out surgical room with Cathy screaming, “No, no, no! He stays!”
Roy took charge, and ordered the nurses out of the delivery room, telling me to stay, and asking that I dim the lights. By 1pm, Jude was ready to announce himself to the world, with Cathy’s screams of pain piercing the room, with me not knowing what the heck was going on, and Roy keeping the both of us calm, and focused.
At 1:42pm, on a warm, sunny and wondrous Sunday, May 18, 1975 afternoon, Jude Nathan Tomlin was born — the single most transformative and most joyous moment of my life (and Cathy’s, too, as within seconds of Jude’s birth, Cathy looked at me to say, “I want another baby right away!”).
Roy recommended keeping Cathy in the hospital overnight, with Cathy and I discussing a middle name for our new baby boy. Earlier, we had decided on the name Jude — one sunny afternoon while visiting friends a couple of months prior to our son’s birth, as we were conversing around the dinner table about what we would name our child, something miraculous occurred: at the very same moment, the song Hey Jude came on the radio, the recently drafted Montréal Canadiens centre Jude Drouin, scored a goal (the hockey game was playing on the TV, which could just be heard in the background), and at the very same moment, Cathy and I simultaneously spotted a copy of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure on a side table. Almost in unison, Cathy and I screamed out, “Jude, we’ll name our child Jude!”
And so we did.
In her hospital room early on Monday, with me by her side, Cathy and I discussed what name we would choose for Jude’s middle name. At the time, Cathy was reading Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, West’s widely regarded masterpiece, the book on the table by her bed (Cathy had asked me to bring the paperback to the hospital later on the Sunday afternoon of Jude’s birth). I suggested to Cathy, “How about Nathaniel as the middle name?” Cathy considered my suggestion for a moment before saying, “Nathan, let’s choose Nathan, instead, for his middle name.” And so we did.
By 2pm on Monday afternoon, just 24 hours after Jude’s birth, Cathy and I left the hospital to return to our home (Myrtle traveling in a taxi, right behind our car). Once home, Cathy rested, and I assumed Jude’s care, along with his maternal grandmother, who was now calmer, and … elated!

Cathy’s mom stayed only through Tuesday afternoon (Cathy insisted she leave — Cathy wanted the experience to be ours, sans her mother). On Wednesday, we left our farm house to go shopping at the Woodward’s food floor at the nearby Guildford Shopping Centre, Jude’s first foray into his bright new world — from the time we got out of the car, until we reached the entrance to the food floor, at least a dozen people stopped us to look at our newborn son, with Cathy & I beaming like the proud parents we were!

Jude Nathan Tomlin, the boy now man, in the winter of 2017, snow boarding up on Grouse Mountain. Happy 44th birthday, my most beloved, precious and much-loved son.

Stories of a Life | 1988 | The Love of My Life | VCC | Pt. 2

May 11, 2019Broadview Co-op, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

The woman you see pictured above is the love of my life.

In the summer of 1988, Lori and her son Darren, and my two children, 11-year-old Megan and 13-year-old Jude, travelled over to the west coast of Vancouver Island, where we rented a cabin near Tofino, and where we enjoyed the time of our lives, a memory that resides deep in me still.

This will not be the last time I write about Lori — today’s Stories of a Life will focus only on the first four days of our acquaintanceship.

Photo of Megan Tomlin, taken at the cabin near Tofino where we stayed in August 1988

As the children were growing up, given that (for the most part) during the first few years of their lives I was the sole custodial parent, sharing custody with Cathy as the children grew older, my relationship with my children was close. We talked about everything, and as far as was possible I answered every question put by them to me, as honestly and as fully as I could.

While Jude was an energetic boy of the world, making friends with anyone and everyone, full of joy and laughter, out and about in the neighbourhood and across the city (and in the mountains), skateboarding and skiing and as athletic as he could possibly be, Megan was a much quieter child, no more reflective than Jude, just more prone to staying close to me, and wanting always to converse on the broadest range of topics, and anxious to learn as much about the world (and all its complexities) as she could.

Megan was curious about the state and nature of the world, about politics and political structures, about the nature of governmental decision-making, both children attending the peace marches with me each year, as well as meetings of the progressive, left-of-centre Coalition of Progressive Electors Vancouver civic party, and various of the NDP meetings, and otherwise as engaged as she could be as a budding young feminist & community activist.

Megan, as with my mother, was also possessed of a preternatural ability.

Photo, Broadway campus, Vancouver Community College, taken from Chinacreek Park

Over the years, as we shared our lives with one another, both Jude and Megan were always curious about my “work”, what I was up to when I wasn’t with them. Arising from that interest on their part, I always sought to make them a part of my work life, taking them to the places of each of my employments, to my office in SFU’s Faculty of Education when I was working on my Masters, to attend in the elementary school classes where I taught (when they were on a ProD day), at Vancouver Community College, and later in my work at Pacific Press (which paid phenomenally well for very little work, allowing me to continue work as an arts and entertainment editor, and later, Director of Special Projects at Vancouver Magazine).

Early in the 1988 summer semester at Vancouver Community College (which I wrote about last week), Megan attended my first Monday class, sitting quietly near the back, erudite and well-read as always (better read than me, true then, true still), interjecting only occasionally to clarify some bit of information, for me or for one of the students in my English Literature class, unassuming and friendly, but clearly informed.

Midway through the three-hour class, we took a 15-minute break, most of the students leaving the classroom, with Megan standing with me outside my office, opposite the classroom, when the following occurred …

“Daddy,” said Megan, “do you see that woman standing just on the other side of the glass doors, the blonde-haired woman leaning on the railing?” Then a pause & the proffering of a question, “What day of the week is it?”

“Monday,” I replied.

“Hmmm,” she said, looking somewhat quizzical. “Monday, huh?” At which point, she seemed to find herself lost in thought for a moment, then turned to me to say, “By Thursday, the two of you will be living together.”

“Megan,” I protested, “I don’t even know who that woman is. And besides, she seems much younger than me.”

And at that, we dropped the subject, shortly after returning to the classroom, where she set about to correct me on aspects of my teaching presentation style, and information that I had imparted that she felt was not clear enough, and should have been better clarified by me, adding …

“Given who these students are, you seem not to be taking into consideration that they’ve been out of school for awhile. Your use of language, the words you choose could be better chosen to impart your message. And, oh yeah, you were telling the students that they would be expected to write papers during the semester. I want to be present when you’re grading those papers, and I want to read the papers you’re unsure as to what grade you will give. Overall, I trust your judgement — I’m just not sure I feel all that confident that your command of what constitutes good essay writing is as well-developed as it could be.”

The class was over at 9pm, I met with a handful of my students, some in the classroom, others in the hallway, and a couple in my office (with Megan waiting outside in the hallway, engaging with some of my students).

When the class had come to an end, I reminded the students Tuesday’s class would take place downtown, at a venue where a play I’d be teaching was currently being performed; student attendance was mandatory.

Megan and I left the campus around 9:30pm, stopping off at Mike and Edith’s (friends of ours) Cheesecake, Etc. on Granville Street, near the south end of the Granville Street bridge, where Megan enjoyed a piece of cheesecake topped with fresh, organic strawberries, and I had my usual fresh-baked, and toasted, baguette with butter and jam.

Both VCC Broadway campus English Literature classes attended the performance of the play, which took place upstairs from what is now part of the Vancouver Film School. My class sat close by me, while students who were taking my colleague Peter’s English Lit class sat nearby him, except …

When the lights went down, and the play began, I felt a warm hand move over my right hand, and looked over to see an absolutely radiant, beautiful young blonde woman, with her arm rubbing up against mine. I thought to myself, as I am wont to do in similar situations (which always come as a surprise me, having occurred quite frequently throughout my life) …

“Raymond, it’s a figment of your imagination. There’s no one sitting next to you, and most certainly, no one has their hand on top of yours.”

I didn’t give it another thought, returning my attention to the play.
On the Wednesday, I taught my Writing class (grammar! … I am the last person you would want to have teach you grammar … I am capable of doing it … grammar just seems so restrictive to me … but I suppose you need to know the rules, before you can break them).

Thursday I returned to teach my English Literature class.

After classes were over, and after meeting with a few of my students, a blonde-haired woman walked up to me — who I may, or may not, have been made aware of earlier in the week — saying to me …

“I’m working on a paper on apartheid, and have been told you might be of assistance in helping point me in the right direction to research the paper, and provide me as well with how I might best formulate my argument.

I’ve heard that you like to walk, particularly along the stretch of beach over by Spanish Banks. I was wondering if we might walk and talk, which would afford you an opportunity for some fresh air after three hours in a stuffy classroom? It is, after all, a lovely full moon night, don’t you think?”

I thought the idea of the walk was a good idea, and (as anyone who knows me soon realizes, I am more than voluble about conversing on issues of interest to me). I grabbed my coat out of my instructor’s office, and the two of us headed off in the direction of my car.

But I was famished.

I asked her if we might stop in for a brief moment at Cheesecake, Etc. on the way to the beach — we could discuss her paper over a bite to eat. When we arrived at Cheesecake, Etc., after consulting with her, when Mike came up to take our order, I requested two orders of the toasted baguette with jam. “Oh, you mean the usual,” said Mike. Both Mike and Edith flitted around this woman and I for the half hour of so we were in the restaurant, with Mike taking a break to begin singing at his piano, his songs seemingly directed at this young woman and I.

Just before 10pm, this young woman and I left the restaurant, climbed back into my car, and headed towards the beach, traveling down West Broadway, during which glide along the street, she turned to me to say, “You live near here, don’t you? I noticed it’s getting kind of chilly. I was wondering if you might have a sweater I could wear?” Within a couple of minutes, I pulled up in front of my housing co-op, turning to her saying, “I’ll grab you a sweater and be right down,” with her responding, “I’ll come up with you, if that’s alright, to find the sweater best to my liking.”

Upon entering my apartment, while she stood in my living room, I entered my bedroom to look on the shelving where I kept my two dozen sweaters (what can I say, I’m a sweater person). Upon returning to the living room, holding up a warm sweater I thought she would like, standing opposite her she approached me, and standing on her tippy-toes, she kissed me.

Once again, I thought to myself, “Raymond, she didn’t kiss you. That’s just a false projection. You just better give her the sweater, and head off to the beach.”

While I was having this inner dialogue with myself, she once again stood on her tippy toes, pulling my face closer to hers, and kissed me again, a long, luxurious kiss, a kiss unlike any other I’d ever experienced.

Lori and I moved into together that night.

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.