I am an ordinary person in an extraordinary
life, as many of us are.
I am promoting myself more openly lately,
not because I am vain, egocentric, or even self-interested: I am back in Hong Kong, starting a small press, and reading books on Branding, Niche Marketing, etc.!
I began with this travel site in Mainland China.
And of course, though I am forever indebted to many wonderful people in that beautiful land of China, it was not really the
best place to do Major Internetting.
My childhood in Canada was both secure and eventful.
My grand-parents came from Dublin, Manchester, Edinburgh,
and Catford, Kent, and I am British Isles by racial ancestry. Three of them were Protestants, my grandmother from Dublin was
an excommunicated Roman Catholic.
The family story goes that upon hearing the local
priest was hitting schoolboys, including my Dad, with a ruler, she raced right down to the schoolyard and gave the violent
man a hit with his own ruler.
My father entered Air Canada at the age of eighteen,
and gave himself his own university education by attending night school. My mom too did not have money for higher education,
and worked as a secretary in Montreal before she married Dad.
Those were boom times in America and Canada, and
Dad rose fast; we travelled extensively on our Free Air Canada tickets.
Those wonderful perks came four for each family
member, every January, a belated Christmas gift.
I was a good middle-class girl, and cleaned, babysat,
shopped for food, cooked breakfast for Dad on Saturday, and even enjoyed all these adult activities. Except for the
cleaning!
Ice skating and hockey in the winter, summers at
Lake Sturgeon in Ontario swimming and walking along the CNR train tracks to the Bobcaygeon penny candy store.
Christmas trees and Easter egg hunts and Girl Guides,
and ballet lessons, and the Tooth Fairy.
In my early teens, disaster truck. My father
left my mother for another woman, and my parents entered into 20 years of litigation.
To those astute enough to quickly ask: was there
money? I can only answer this: Yes, there
was money. But divorce lawyers make a huge dent in family savings.
Since this is only a Faux Tell All, as only trusting
people write out every last droplet of daily life, I will cut to the next major life cycle.
World Travels For Free
Oh, yes, all those free Air Canada passes!
"My last girlfriend was a stewardess," confided a local business
friend, "She was the second airlines staff I went out with - and they are the most flaky people in the world - Just hop on
a plane and go off somewhere!"
I felt admonished for a moment, then recognized this flightiness
in my father, and perhaps others in my family - !
We knew the planes to London and Paris left at
the crack of dawn, and you arrived tired, full of food, and full of airplane non-air. We had to get up at five in the
morning to get to the airport in time, and it was another five hours to reach the UK.
Where did I go?
I went mostly to Europe, the Caribbean, and quite a bit around
Canada and the USA. If you played your card
right when travelling on free airlines employee tickets, you could also get "bumped" into First Class, easier than winning
than the lottery, with that same rush of feeling irrationally blessed by life.
You would proceed graciously before all the hard working, full
paying customers, mindful not to tell them your dad was a federal government employee, and trying not to scream with joy.
The meals in First Class could take up almost all
of the five or six hours from Eastern North America to Europe.
Barbados
Bermuda
Antigua
San Francisco
Vienna
Edinburgh
Paris
Zurich
Arosa
Athens
Belgrade
London
Cardiff
Liverpool
Manchester
Hong Kong
New Delhi
Kathmandu
I just remembered a fortune teller, a good one, who said you
will be travelling aroundtheworld your entire life, so I may be lucky again, as I have seem to have
got stuck in East Asia.
Youthful Adventures
I left home at 17, a family full
of friction residual from the divorce, and other men and women who entered my parents' lives, to travel. Needless to
say, my brother and sister too had trouble with the new stepmother. As well as my mother's new boyfriend, an American
military type whose style differed from our dad's easygoing ways.
With free airline tickets, travel came
easily.
I moved to London where I showed paintings and drawings on New Bond Street, and made many friends. Full of every crazy thought wave
coming down the ideological turnpike,
I believed that young people banding together
could change the world.
Already doing too much, in too many directions,
with writing poetry and stories as well, I was drawn into a third interest: astrology, and began studying with a famous astrologer,
Jeff Mayo.
The great love of my life, a life both
happy and tragic at times, then entered my world when I returned to Vancouver, Canada.
His name was Chard Chenier and he was
older than me, and from a huge and friendly French Canadian who still lived in the French village of St. Boniface, Winnipeg,
Manitoba.
He was as calm and tranquil as my family
was turbulent.
He was a talented artist and musician
with many arts shows to his credit, and worked with great discipline and devotion to the arts in Canada.
We were not competitive with one another,
contrary to myths about artists, and shared all our money, problems, challenges, and small triumphs.
A week before he entered my life, a Tarot card reader
of great skill and reknown sat at the house in Burnaby I shared with my Cousin Barbara, and told me
I see a fair haired man,
The Page of Cups,
this will be a long love for you both
My life intertwined with Chard Chenier, French artist
and musician: a romance predicted to me by my best Tarot Card reader only a month before I met him.
Will it be long, I asked Evelyn.
Oh yes, she said, very long.
We were naive, idealistic, ambitious artists,
and vastly social. More than half of the nights of the week, we were out movies, art gallery openings, piano lounges,
or jazz clubs.
This did not take a lot of cash. The films
were at universities, the gallery openings were our friends, and Chard played music at clubs so I got in free.
One of our first joint projects was to make video
films of our lives as artists for local cablevision television. Chard pushed us towards this, as he fixated on psychic
readings that dictated his future in art videos.
His psychics were less able than my own, as almost
all of the predictions for my own life have come true, and scarcely any of his.
Apart from our television films, he worked on a
super-8 full-length movie that told a story about an actress called Zoey that he himself wrote.
We respected one another and I consider this partnership
one of the more happier ones in my life. Our
lives were peaceful, as we rarely argued.
Into paradise again came some trouble.
I was falling ill, iller and iller from my earlier
car accident on the Lion's Gate Bridge. Soft tissue injuries to my jaw and neck activiated a painful problem called
TMJ, notoriously difficult to solve.
In Chard's childhood, his sister Paulette suffered
from a rare and nearly fatal childhood illlness, shaping the whole family, requiring a freely given patience and tenderness
from Chard as a brother.
He was the right person for me to be with, yet I
wish our live's harder lessons could be learned more quickly, as the illness went on and on.
The name of my illness: TMJ, or temporomandibular
joint dysfunction. It is excruciatingly painful. It was to last for 76 months to the precise month.
TMJ: Major Illness
Major physical illness is one of the formative
aspects of what I was and who I became, after the other major chapters:
Happy Childhood
Family Break-up
World Travels
Art World: London
Partnership With Chard
Major Illness
The illness became like a sort of prison. No matter what
you do you cannot escape the time that it runs. I tried everything, and read hundreds of DIY books on health from the
library and local health food stores.
Megavitamin therapy, juice fasting, copper necklaces to alleviate
the pain, aspirin, prescription drugs I soon ditched as they almost caused me to have a second car accident when I backed
out of a parking lot in a tranquillized state.
I think I will close this section with a small or large miracle.
Chard phoned me late one Saturday night from a birthday party down the road from where we lived. On his way home from
playing blues at the Yellow Door with some friends, they stopped in at our neighbour Ellen's to have chocolate cake.
I got dressed, liking shocolate cake, and walked down the street
to the party. There I told my friends how ghastly my health was, and they referred me to a Miracle Therapist.
When I went to see Marilyn hee home was full of exotic birds,
which her boyfriend collected. I lay down on the therapy table, and at the moment she delivered a healing snap to my
body, a bird flew through the air, and sat exactly on my heart.
Only days before, life told me life isn't worth living,
and now, it changed its mind, and told me, yes, it is.
