Dawson Street Revisited

A little stroll down memory lane...

My friends in Dartmouth used to tease me that every time I went to Gampo Abbey I brought home a new boyfriend, and that was true. The first time I went there in 1991 I met Stephen Hill. He was the cook, and we hit it off quickly and intensely on an idyllic day-long hike to Pollett's Cove.

Stephen called himself a writer. He wrote prose and poetry. Now understand, I am no literary critic, but it was obvious to me that when Stephen was writing for himself, like in his journal or during some kind of spontaneous, often alcohol-induced, visionary flood of creativity, his writing was, like him, real, intense, raw, edgy and more than slightly insane. But when he was writing to impress someone else, he would try to write in some "style", and it came across stiff and dead and oh so pretentious.

In any event, Stephen came to stay with me for a while. At the time I was living in a small but charming apartment in the funky north end of Dartmouth, on Dawson Street, near the bridge, not what proper folk would consider a nice neighbourhood. But I knew what my neighbours looked like, and they at least knew my dog's name if they couldn't remember mine. It was a neighbourhood where people walked, probably cause not everybody could afford cars, and people sat on their front steps so we saw each other and talked to each other. I lived there for 12 years. So Stephen came to live with me there. We spent many many nights in the company of Jack Daniels or Wild Turkey or some other consciousness-altering substance, smoking cigarettes, writing poetry together, cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them on colored paper, writing poems around them and adding scraps of this and that, creating this strange and disturbing but somehow beautiful collection of artwork that eventually all but filled the kitchen walls and it was all very wonderful and bizarre.

S. wrote, "...and Marilyn missed work, I felt like a bum, cause we stayed up so late and made pictures and poems all night that were on the wall for our waking-up eyes next morning, and by that evening and the tall drinks the pictures came easy on our minds - and more nights reading poems to one another, making photographs and telling the stories, dreaming privately together into human connections all around the city right out the door, right from her kitchen table with candle where it was warm and private, dreaming over the city, privately and openly..."

We would wander around the neighbourhood at night, talking to the winos and wierdos we met on the street, drinking under the bridge and down by the train tracks, hanging out with the 4 am folk at Tim Horton's (a whole other world) - three months of an alternate universe. I finally had to ask him to leave because my life was becoming a Bukowski movie and that's not really where I wanted it to go, and I desperately needed some sleep and to have at least one day without a headache/hangover.

In case you're not familiar with Charles Bukowski, he was a writer/poet. Remember the movie "Barfly" - that was a Bukowski movie, biographical. Mickey Rourke played the male lead and Faye Dunaway the female lead, and Bukowski himself made a cameo appearance. One scene I remember, was when the two meet in a bar and Jane (Dunaway) asks Henry (Rourke), "What do you do?", and he replies, "I drink". A classic line or what? Well, she liked it anyway.

Here's a Bukowski poem from a book I have of his poetry (Mockingbird, Wish Me Luck):

reality

my little famous bleeding elbows
my knotty knees (especially) and
even my balls
hairy and wasted.
these blue evenings of walking past buildings
where Jews pray beautifully about seasons I
know nothing of
and would leave me alone
with the roaches and ants climbing my dying body
in some place
too real to touch

So on Dawson Street, back in 1991, there was a picture on my dresser, an old black and white of me and my dad. My dad had died in 1974 at the age of 58. Stephen had obviously never met my dad, but something about that picture inspired him to write this poem:

on the dresser, under the mirror
there you stand

shy, somewhere between

14 and 16 years of age

that embarrassing age

eyes shy, downcast

and against side of your father

leaning into his love, because

black and white photographs never lie

he was a good man in the old sense

he had handsome simple features

and went about his business in the world

a personal face that understands

without close words

in a close world

and he's lonely as such men are

so personal

but by the same flip as distant

because there's really nothing worth sharing

besides a smile

and the arm around his daughter

is perhaps for him the best part...

fine men come and go into the grave

that last embrace

and there's nothing you can say
about the sadness they leave behind

Have you ever had someone just casually say something, maybe not even directly to you, but whatever it was just stays in your mind and pops up sometimes, like the words of a favorite song that have some special meaning for you? I have known, and still do, a few people who seem to have the knack of quietly saying stuff that flips my mind/heart/life around, all of them men, and I don't think they know they're doing it.

In any event, what made me think of all of the above was that something Stephen said a long time ago popped into my head today. As I said, he was/is an aspiring writer, and what he said was, "We should treat people as if they already are who they want to be."

Could we do that, I wonder? Maybe if we could just allow that thought to be in our heart/mind, that would be a really good start. And you know, maybe we could even treat ourselves that way.

Just a thought.

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