In the kitchen of their PoCo home a day after he completes a 17-mile run, he tells her his plan to run across Canada — a marathon a day on one good leg and a prosthesis to raise money for cancer research.

Betty reacts like a mom. We don’t know the precise words but they approximate “Are you nuts?”

She tells him it’s a stupid idea and he’s smarter than that. She tells him no able-bodied person has ever run from Newfoundland to B.C. She fights, a mom trying to protect her child from himself.

To no avail. Tough mom, determined kid.

The rest of the story need not be repeated; it has become a hero’s legend in Canada, complete with requisite tragic ending.

But that’s just the beginning of Betty Fox’s story, a heroine’s tale in its own right.

Where you or I might have retreated in our grief, Betty and the Fox family stepped forward.

Where most would have held close their personal memories and moments, Betty went public.

Where many might allow the Marathon of Hope to fade into history as something too painful to think about day after day, Betty embraced it, embraced her son’s cause and made it her own, embraced it and worked in spite of the pain, because of the pain.

Could your mom do that? Sacrifice herself for something bigger?

All moms are different but they all know sacrifice. They eat the crusts. They scrimp and save. They do without so their kids don’t have to. They are strong when their children aren’t. That’s a mom, right?

That’s Betty.

That’s Betty, continuing her late son’s cancer-fighting crusade, making it her full-time job for the last 30 years.

That’s Betty, hugging school kids coast to coast and telling them Terry’s story.

That’s Betty, preserving Terry’s grassroots ideals, eschewing the potential quick money of corporate sponsorship because of the potential costs.

That’s Betty, standing up on stage at the Terry Fox Hometown Run in PoCo year after year, flanked by her husband, Rolly, and the mayor and a rock band and even Rick Hansen, and holding every ear with her words of encouragement, every eye with that white hair, that broad smile and that gaze that so recalled Terry’s.

She talked a great deal about what Terry did, what Terry wanted, considerably less about what he meant to Canada.

In fact, she admitted to a reporter just last year that it wasn’t until a few years ago she “finally, truly understood what Terry meant to people,” a realization that came to her after watching impoverished children in Bangladesh running in his name.

And if she never before truly understood Terry’s meaning to our nation, and most acutely to residents of his hometown, it’s unlikely she gave a moment to consider her own place in Canada’s pantheon of heroes and heroines.

Just like a mom, she preferred the spotlight from the outside looking in, stepping into it only when there was no other choice. Even when she earned the honour of carrying the Olympic flag into BC Place stadium at the Vancouver 2010 opening ceremonies, she deflected attention, saying, “Terry was utmost in my mind. I was very proud to be a part of the Olympic ceremony but it was all for Terry. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have been there.”

She’s right. Of course, she’s right.

Terry lit the fire and she tended it for three decades.

It was a tough job but somebody had to do it.

A note: I was greatly honoured when Darrell Fox, Betty’s youngest son and Terry’s brother, asked permission to read portions of this piece as part of his eulogy at his mother’s funeral. — rdm

When your team wins gold without you

By Richard Dal Monte

Every four years, billions of us tune into the Olympics and marvel at the heights of human athletic achievement while accepting, without a second thought, the capricious nature of sport.

We grip our TV remotes and blithely acknowledge that the margin between a spot on the podium and a seat in the stands can be a hundredth of a second in a race or a hundredth of a point in gymnastics competition, that gold and glory can be captured by a last-ditch lunge at the finish line that requires a photo finish to confirm the victor.

But there are other close finishes—and heartbreaks—that happen away from the TV lights and international media cameras.

Read the whole story.

The world is Daun Yorke's classroom

By Richard Dal Monte

Daun Yorke has travelled east and travelled west but her preferred direction is forward.

In a 30-year career as an educator she has never stayed in one place, school or job for long, moving from the Tri-Cities to Vietnam and making a handful of stops between.

This is a story about Yorke’s journey, which is not the same as travels or trips, but involves both.

This is a story about a wandering spirit, a desire to learn and share what she’s learned. It’s about someone who, as a young woman, never wanted to teach but has now spent more than half her life in the classroom.

To read the rest of the story, go to the original…

Stories, memories, truth and lacrosse

By Richard Dal Monte

A man hits 50 and he presses pause, looks back over his life. Friends, family and colleagues. Kids, jobs and vacations. Loves and losses.

Stories.

Sometimes, the stories he tells himself are altered by time, by the inexact nature of memory. Often, the moments he reconstructs most precisely — Man, I remember it like it was yesterday — are, when compared to the record, if such a thing exists, not quite . . . true.

Read the whole story.

Turning negatives into a positive

By Richard Dal Monte

© The Tri-City News

The dress is snow white with long, flowing sleeves gathered at the wrists, and is made with chiffon, so it is lightweight in the warmth of spring. A wedding dress, it has been modified for its new purpose, the train excised so the girl can dance away her prom night unfettered, a row of flowers woven into her hair.

A proud member of the PoCo High class of ’81 — Go, Ravens! — looks at the image and feels not what-was-I-thinking? regret about her fashion choices or hairstyle but a satisfying warmth.

“The styles have changed,” says Traci Alexander, “but I still remember the feelings I had when I picked the dress and that night.”

Photographs have a way of doing that, which is why Alexander reached back 30 years to buy the negatives.

Remember negatives?

SIGN OF THE TIMES

The building could pass for a house except it’s not situated on a quiet residential street but off the end of a strip mall at one of Port Coquitlam’s busiest intersections. In fact, before the Safeway and Canadian Tire and giant billboards were erected across the street, before the skate park started drawing crowds of kids and long before PoCo’s first highrise began its ascension about a hundred metres away, the home of Arthur Edwardson Photography used to be a Texaco station.

For 31 years, the business has occupied a spot between recreation and transportation, boxed in by Lions Park on one side, Lougheed Highway on another. Tens of thousands of drivers roll past the premises each day, most in a rush to get to work or get home. And while they may not notice the building or know that its bathroom still sports the original gas station tile, they’ve likely noticed again and again the miniature billboards outside advertising Edwardson’s services and sporting photos of toothy families, adorable dogs, beaming grooms and glowing brides.

A few weeks ago, a new sign went up. Next to a photo of a cherubic infant, it reads:

“Were you SHOT before 1990? Selling all old negatives.”

The cheeky, eye-catching, all-caps “SHOT,” it should be noted, is rendered in an Old West-style typeface, for the sign and this story are about history.

THE TRI-CITIES BEFORE

Arthur Edwardson had long been a photographer before he made it his full-time business, always juggling it with jobs that provided a regular paycheque. Back in Saskatchewan, he and his wife, Joyce, taught in one-room schoolhouses. Once they moved to B.C. in 1957, he worked other jobs: He was an ironworker on what is now the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, toiled at the old Flavelle Cedar mill on Port Moody’s waterfront and eventually landed a spot at Scott Paper in New Westminster.

He left the Scott Paper job and turned his attention to the camera for good in the mid-1970s, basing his business out of the family home on Grant Avenue in PoCo; the living room was the studio (until the house was raised) and the three Edwardson boys had to clear out of the house when a shoot was happening.

In 1980, the Edwardsons built the current building around the old Texaco, putting in dedicated studio space, a waiting room with a wood-burning fireplace and a back room with what probably felt like plenty of storage.

Rows of handmade wooden drawers line one wall of that space, each holding hundreds of envelopes filed according to Joyce’s system — “A, B, C” — each of these holding dozens or hundreds of negatives.

While they obviously pre-date digital photography, they also pre-date much of what Tri-City residents think of as the Tri-Cities. There are negatives that were processed, dried, clipped and filed before even one shopper had strolled through the doors of Coquitlam Centre mall, negs from shoots that pre-date development of Westwood Plateau, Heritage Mountain and the big-box areas of the Dominion Triangle and United Boulevard — and, perhaps, the coining of the term “big-box store.”

And as thin and fragile as they are, they’re taking up room and they have to go.

SOMEBODY’S HISTORY

“We decided that we would clean out the old stuff first,” says Joyce Edwardson. “[1990] is just an arbitrary number to help me out, give me some space. It still isn’t enough.

“I just can’t do it, I can’t throw them away,” she says. “I’ve spent a lot of time pacing in front of that filing cabinet trying to figure out what to do with them… What are you going to do with them? We didn’t want to throw them away but how do you contact people?”

Thus the sign — an idea of Neil Edwardson, 45, the company photographer since his father died in 2006 — and the offer to sell off the oldest negs.

And while the response to the sign his mother worried was “a little bit tacky” has been steady, if not overwhelming, he knows there may come a time when they have to make a tough decision.

“There’ll come a point when we have to [throw them away], I guess,” Neil says, adding, “That’s somebody’s history. If there’s a fire [in your home], that’s what you reach for.”

Indeed, the images that adorn mantles and bookcases and credenzas are the core of their business, a family business in which Neil as a child would earn 25 cents per print for printing passport photos, in which his brothers, twins Brent and Keith, now 49, worked for years and in which Joyce was the salesperson and bill collector (she still is).

And that business is the stuff of memories for generations of Tri-City families: baby pictures, grad shots, wedding photos.

Examples of the latter sit on the counter at the Edwardson studio. Dating to the 1970s, one set of images shows a bride in a white dress that’s cut above the knee, sleeveless, with a plain, round collar; she holds a bouquet of yellow roses, daisies and baby’s breath; her veil is swept back over her head, behind a row of simple white flowers. The groom wears a grey suit — wide lapels, flap breast pockets, a white carnation — and a beige shirt. A handmade sign on a wood-panelled basement wall proclaims “Congradulations AND Best Wishes.”

For a family, such photos constitute an historical document, artifacts of time and place, mementoes of people and times long gone.

For Neil Edwardson, too. “When these were shot,” he says, “I was six.”

FREEZING TIME

Linda McLean appreciates a business with longevity. Owner of Coquitlam Coiffures in downtown PoCo, where she has worked for 35 years, she’s also a longtime resident of the city along with her husband, Garry McLean.

And when a moment needed to be frozen in time, they went to Arthur Edwardson. He snapped family portraits. He photographed their children Darren and Tania at graduation. He shot Tania’s wedding and would have photographed Darren’s, too, but was ailing at the time.

“He did wonderful work,” Linda said of Arthur. “In a small town like PoCo, we were very fortunate to have him.”

It was Tania who spotted the sign a couple of weeks ago while visiting from Penticton and bought some of the old negatives. Linda plans to pick up more.

Traci Alexander does, too. She has her eye on the last of the three sets of negs that contain pieces of her life. A PoCo native who has lived all but 10 of her 47 years in Mary Hill, she already has in her possession the strips of film capturing herself at grad as well as those showing her in period costume — “sort of a saloon girl” — in preparation for a 1989 party marking the 100th anniversary of a law firm where she worked at the time. She also has her eye on some post-1990 negatives from an Arthur Edwardson studio shoot that show the assortment of outfits she would later wear to a cousin’s posh wedding in England. (The newer photos of her Maltese pooches Muggles and Zipper are digital files.)

No matter what the format, the pictures “preserve a part of my life,” she said.

“Normally, people go [to a photographer] to get weddings, bar mitzvahs, all these landmarks of people’s lives.

“It’s sort of like freezing time.”

Building a business, battling a pandemic

By Richard Dal Monte

What if you started when everything stopped?

What if you had the idea and the energy, the passion and the plan? What if you’d saved and sacrificed, tapped into your years of experience and expertise, mortgaged everything you owned, poured every spare moment into starting a business.

And then . . .

And then the pandemic stopped everything just after you opened or while you were negotiating bank loans and navigating government regulations, or as you were preparing to open a new location.

What would you do to survive?

Read the whole story.

A girl, a gown and a future

By Richard Dal Monte

© The Tri-City News

The girl has jewels in her hair and sneakers on her feet. She is wearing a gown of deep royal blue adorned with glittering rhinestones. She tries on two or three jackets, trying to determine which goes best with the dress and will protect her from the chill of the evening to come.

The girl munches a crisp Gala apple, to keep her strength up, careful not to smudge her makeup or damage her airbrushed nails. She limps from the shade of a covered patio, accompanied by her grad date, into the tidy double-wide trailer where she lives with her mom. She fusses with the bodice of her gown where it irritates a scar from an operation.

The girl, not unlike many soon-to-be high school graduates, has a future that’s uncertain, a past that’s uneven and a present that’s a gift to be savoured a moment at a time.

Brenda Goodwin is not just any girl, not just any grad looking to party the night away.

Hers is a story to be told because it contains many elements of a good story — suspense, drama, salvation, among others — and because it is missing one key element: an ending.

• • • •

“Eventually, I will go around and tell my story,” Brenda, 19, says across a desk in a quiet classroom during a conversation about her future. “Every year is a new testimony.”

Still, she admits, “I don’t even know my story yet.”

Her story so far (abridged version) is this: In November 1999, when she was in Grade 11 at Centennial secondary school, Brenda Goodwin was diagnosed with a brain tumour. In January 2000, the tumour having grown, she was given a week to live. On May 18 of this year, she attended her grad dinner and dance at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Vancouver. On June 9, next Sunday, she will walk across the stage at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in cap and gown, and she will graduate.

Looking back on the darkest of days, her sister Julianne, 25, says, “I thought, ‘I’ll never get to see her married. I’ll never get to see her graduate from [high] school.’ But I turned it around and said, ‘I will see those things.’

“You just don’t focus on the alternative.”

The alternative is a dark cloud in the distance on a sunny afternoon as Brenda prepares for her prom, better a year late than never. “It’s a special day for me,” says Julianne, a substitute teacher in Surrey and the closest in age to Brenda of her three siblings. “My older sister got to do grad with me and now it’s my turn to do grad with her.”

“Doing grad” means fussing over Brenda’s hair, exhorting her little sister to have a snack and discussing the best route to the Hyatt — she’s chauffeur for the evening.

Amidst the prom talk — Is it sit-down or a buffet? Do you have enough cash? — Julianne says, “It’s special because she’s worked so hard to get where she is.”

Where she is? Nineteen, on the verge of graduation, alive.

“It’s been a long road,” says Julianne, referring to the tumour, the infections, the harrowing treatments and side effects that followed.

“It’s a long two and a half years,” says her mom, adding, “You can’t think in the future. You have to live one day at a time.”

A lesson learned — one of many — courtesy of the girl and her ordeal.

• • • •

“She’s taught us a lot about strength and courage,” says Daun Yorke, a graphics and photography teacher at Centennial who spearheaded a greeting card drive in 1999 to raise money for Brenda’s medications and oversaw creation of a colourful quilt for her bed.

Visiting Brenda at B.C.’s Children’s Hospital when every goodbye may have been the last, she still came away hopeful. “You learn about illness,” says Yorke. “You learn about ways you can handle this.

“She’s a miracle. She’s amazing,” Yorke says. “She’s just such a spunky and positive person. I can’t wait to watch her cross the floor at grad. She knows she’s been given a gift. She greets every day with this positivity and this incredible smile.”

“Her body was ravaged,” says Ron Roberge, a counselor at Centennial. “I’m surprised she’s still here — but she surprised everyone.

“She’s not isolated as a hero,” he says. “We’re frequently reminded of the strength of the human spirit by others [facing disease].”

But “she just motors on. Her spirit has really taught us…”

“After all this time, she’s still with us,” says Daniel Collett, a tech ed. teacher at Riverside secondary who was Brenda’s Stagecraft teacher at Centennial at the time of her diagnosis. “She wasn’t supposed to be here as far as the doctors were concerned. But she didn’t listen to all that.”

Collett, who remains a close family friend, says he’s struck by Brenda’s “deep faith and her strength and hopefulness that seem to stem from that. She will not give up and give in to this cancer.”

“She just knows and believes. End of story.”

• • • •

The girl is wearing baggy black cargo pants, a zippered hoodie and sneakers. She leans forward over the desk and reveals a necklace a child might wear, with baubles of different colours and shapes. On her right wrist is a Medic Alert bracelet (seizures), on her left-hand ring finger a silver ring engraved with “True Love Waits,” a slogan urging teens to abstain from pre-marital sex (“In the process,” she smiles, “I’ve never even had a boyfriend.”). She also wears a t-shirt in the style of Molson’s “I Am Canadian” beer gear; hers reads: “I.AM.CHRISTIAN.”

“God keeps me going. Just go, go, go,” Brenda says. “I just want to graduate just like everyone else does.

“Everyone thinks [graduating] is all great. Yeah, you get out of school… but what’s next?

“I don’t even know what I’m going to be in the future. I don’t even know if I can get a job.

“Since all of this has gone by, it’s all shut me down for all the stuff I wanted to do as a child and growing up,” she says. “I think God has a plan for me… soon, I hope.”

• • • •

Soon, she’ll climb the Queen E. steps, bad hip and all. Soon, she’ll collect her Dogwood diploma. Soon, she’ll say goodbye to a school that has held and helped her in so many ways.

As Ron Roberge said, there are heroes aplenty.

Brenda’s sewed quilt sections and sold angel cards. They sat at her bedside and beside her in English. They obliged her schedule, designed to accommodate a weakened body driven by a rock-solid spirit.

All so a girl could pick navy blue laces to go in baby blue Vans, decide on a halter top and jeweled bodice, and grow out her hair for style, not to hide the scars.

Led by a child, Herb Spivey clings to life

By Richard Dal Monte

© The Tri-City News

He was used to getting on his bike and riding. He would pull on his leathers, strap the black beany the law called a helmet over his long, tangled hair and kick-start his BSA, or maybe the Harley chopper with the extended forks. He would crank the handgrip and dig the noise, the vibration, the speed.

The only thing that came close was heroin. He was a biker first, junkie second – in priority and chronology.

After his first, longest stint in jail, he and his old lady would sell five-ounce bags of junk to street dealers, moving daily from motel to motel when business was brisk and the risk of arrest highest. Risk is relative when you’re injecting an ounce of heroin into your veins every four days.

The law, the courts, the police – it was all a grown-up game of cops and robbers played with childish abandon.

His two addictions – bikes and junk – were everything. Consequences, responsibilities, haircuts, they were for square johns, as he called them. Herb Spivey wasn’t a square.

He had all the makings – a father who ran his own trucking business, a talent for music, a stint in army cadets – but this peg found its fit in a motorcycle gang and the drug culture. He rode like a madman and peddled junk on downtown streets far from the cul-de-sacs where suburbanites check the locks after the 11 o'clock news and pull back the blinds to peer through double-glazed windows.

Herb, 50 now, with a head full of memories of depravity and debauchery, doesn’t forget those places just because the quiet suburbs are now home.

Can’t forget them. Won’t forget them.

He kicked the addictions – no easy task – because he had a reason.

• • • •

Tyler Spivey is eight and blind, intelligent and emotional and demanding. And the joy of his father’s life.

He’s Herb’s mission and his savior, whether either of them knows it.

They’re all they have, and they both know that.

Tyler’s mom, Herb’s wife Sherry, died a couple of years ago. Also a reforming addict, she overdosed in their Port Coquitlam home, leaving her widower – ex-convict, ex-Satan’s Angel, ex-junkie – alone to care for their child.

“He (Tyler) wanted me to take her out of the coffin, bring her home and do CPR on her,” Herb says, referring to previous efforts to help his OD’d wife. “He said, ‘You always made Mommy well before, why can’t you do it now?’”

Nothing has been easy with Tyler.

He was born prematurely, weighing 710 grams. “He looked like a frog,” says Herb, himself a war baby born in Holland. Tyler was blinded when too much oxygen was pumped into his incubator.

For the first five years of his life, Tyler was always at his mother’s hip. She would do everything with him and explain everything to him, says Herb. “That’s why he’s so inquisitive now.”

Now, it’s just the two of them.

A story: Herb and Tyler play Nintendo, the father by sight, the son by sound. “He can tell when I cheat on him, 'cause he plays better than I do,” says Herb, his bearded, craggy, not-pretty face splitting into a toothless grin.

Another: Herb and Tyler go to downtown Vancouver to visit an old friend. Dealers, junkies approach offering their wares – cocaine, heroin, pills, whatever – and Tyler lashes out with his white cane at the weird voices. He hears their impaired tones, which remind him of his mom on pills, and says, “'Don’t talk to him, Dad, he’s a scumbag,’” Herb relates, adding, “He has a real hate on for drug addicts.

"He really watches me.”

Herb watches Tyler, too, making sure there are always fresh carrots in the fridge, making sure he’s dressed for the weather, making sure he has a cloth in the pocket of his black denim jacket to wipe a nose or a mouth on the way to school.

The two of them are a sight to behold as they walk the kilometre or so to Westwood elementary. There is Tyler, skinny and bouncing in an effective, if not graceful, fashion. There is Herb with his ramshackle gait; a big man, he takes small steps, each leg a piston operating unevenly and independent of the other.

What they lack in grace, they make up in speed. “We pass everybody,” they say, smiling at the shared joke.

Indeed, they manage a ferocious pace, and on an overcast April day, the clean-cut neighbor boy who is tagging along hustles to keep up, gulping breaths along the way.

This day is Tyler’s first back after being sent home the previous week for behavioral problems. As they wait outside the principal’s office, Herb shifts his weight from one black-booted foot to another.

Several hours later, outside Tyler’s classroom, he adopts the same nervous stance, presses his lips together and blinks away a tear as a morning of small successes dissolves when Tyler lashes out at a teacher near the end of class.

In between is the routine, the stuff that’s only now becoming second nature. Shopping, baking muffins, attempting to clean the small, two-bedroom, social housing unit they share.

And, yes, the daily trips to the local drug store to drink his dose of Tang and methadone.

Hardly the biker life.

• • • •

“For the motorcyclists, the horrendous growl of the bike is the magnified sound of human anger, bred of frustration and inadequacy. It is also their reassurance of potency and total freedom to speed away from all the annoyances of life…. They are free. They are angry. They are strong. They are men.” (from Simma Holt’s 1972 book The Devil’s Butler)

“Dirty Herb,” as he was known half a life ago, was part of the Satan’s Angels motorcycle gang. He laughs as he tells stories of their lawless antics, which he describes as misunderstood hijinks. Pressed, he will acknowledge bad acts.

Some are recounted in a book by former Vancouver Sun reporter and MP Simma Holt, who followed the case of a group of Satan’s Angels convicted for grabbing a young hippie off a downtown street and making him their “butler” for an evening. The subject of beatings and other atrocities, he would come back to haunt them, his testimony putting seven men in the B.C. Pen. One of them was Herb, who, according to Holt’s book, was likely the least involved of the bunch, although hardly an innocent bystander. He served a third of an eight-year sentence.

In sentencing the seven, Mr. Justice Dohm said, “In my opinion, rehabilitation is a very doubtful matter for any of these people.”

Herb did his best to live up to the judge’s words.

“It’s a fast lifestyle. You live 10 days in one,” Herb says of his drug-dealing and using days. He figures his arms are worth a couple of solid-gold Cadillacs.

But now he says he’s been off heroin since Tyler was born, with the exception of a slip that left him feeling ashamed and reminded him what he would lose if he ever lost his son.

Tyler is the wall between Herb and the self-destructive choices that have defined his adult life.

Before him there was Ronnie.

• • • •

Ronnie Stephens is Herb’s 31-year-old son from a previous relationship. When called upon, Herb left his needles and heroin in Vancouver and moved to Quesnel to be closer to his then teenage offspring.

Herb remembers it as six years. Ronnie, now a skipper of a prawn boat out of Gibsons, says he lived with his dad for about a year when he was 15, and spent a great deal of time with him for several years.

What they’re both clear on is: Herb was clean during their time together.

“He’s never, ever seen me high. Never,” says Herb. “He’s never seen a needle in my house.

"I wanted Ronnie to be able to bring his friends home and not be embarrassed.”

“He was trying hard that whole time,” Ronnie says late one night on the radio phone from his boat, moored at Powell River. “He kept me away from all that.

"He showed me right from wrong. He taught me if you work hard, you get respect,” he says, his voice betraying annoyance at talking about his father.

“He taught me to work, work ’til you drop. And that’s all I’ve been doing ever since.”

The two haven’t had much contact since Ronnie moved away at 18. Within a week of his departure, Herb took a trip of his own. Back to Vancouver and heroin – a familiar journey.

He is asked to explain it.

“With me, I really need that goal,” Herb says. “It was like, I didn’t have any goals anymore, no purpose in life. It was really weird.

"But now that I’ve got Tyler, I don’t have too many fears. He’s going to be with me the next 12, 15 years. By then, I’ll be out of drugs. I’ll be into something a lot better by then.”

What that will be, Herb doesn’t know.

What he does know is he’ll do whatever he can for his son. If that means taking a few more years to wean off methadone, so be it. If that means cutting his hair and trimming his beard and dressing more like a father and less like a biker, no problem.

After all, he gave up his number one addiction, motorcycles, out of fear that if the two of them are in an accident and he’s incapacitated, his blind child could wander into traffic.

“I want to feel good about myself. Right now, I feel good about myself. It’s a nice feeling. It feels better than when I’m on drugs.”

Asked to compare the pleasures of the needle with those of fatherhood, Herb replies, “It feels way better when (Tyler) does something good. I get tears in my eyes. You know, I wouldn’t cry over heroin.”

Still, the job of a single parent carries a world of struggles. He would rather be working than on welfare – he held straight jobs previously, including one as an asbestos removal estimator – and he’s having trouble finding any sort of social life.

But when he has had a rare evening free, “I didn’t know what to do with myself, I was so lonely without Tyler here.”

Their dependence on each other is a symbiosis in which Herb is Tyler’s eyes and a guiding hand, and Tyler is his father’s conscience.

They’re an odd couple, father and son. One can see only a little light out of his right eye, yet is scared of the dark. The other is simply scared of the darkness of his son’s absence.

“Tyler means too much to me to screw around,” says Herb, answering a question about his commitment to staying off heroin. “If something happened to me… it’s like if something happened to him. I know where my life would be: my life would go straight downhill. I wouldn’t want to be alive if something happened to him.

"He’s my life. And I’m pretty sure that’s the way it is with him. We are pretty tight.”

This article won two first-place honours in the 1996 B.C. Newspaper Awards: Best Feature [community newspapers/daily newspapers under 70,000 circulation]; and the Stuart Keate Memorial Award for Writing Excellence, a category open to print journalists from daily and community publications.

Ba ba ba ba

By Richard Dal Monte

© The Tri-City News

For a singer, the voice starts in the gut, or just above it. The diaphragm, a muscle between the chest and abdomen, forces air stored in the lungs up and out – through the bronchial tubes and then the larynx, past the vocal chords, through the glottis and past the epiglottis, and, finally, out through the mouth in a rush of sound.

For Donna Otto, the voice starts in the heart, and hers threatened to break when her voice was taken away.

Fifty years singing and leading singers, 30 years as a teacher, a dozen as artistic director of Coastal Sound Music Academy… and then there was silence. Or, at least, a raspy remnant of a voice that had exhorted thousands of children to do more and better with theirs.

Irony? As deep as a basso profondo and as layered as a four-part harmony.

Otto appreciates the irony now, in hindsight. But had you asked her last fall, all she would have seen was the tragedy of how her passion caused her pain.

This is what happened:

For the last four or five years, Otto, a music teacher and choral and band director at Kwayhquitlum middle school in Port Coquitlam, has struggled with her voice. Starting school in September, she would be been fine but, by October, problems would arise.

“When you teach music and you do band, and you’re speaking over a full band…” said the Port Moody resident, “my throat was getting tired after rehearsal.

“In rehearsal,” she pointed out, “you’re not just using your hands, you’re using your voice.

“Teaching middle school kids is very vocally stressful,” Otto said. “It’s not that they’re difficult – they’re not – but because they’re very energetic.”

The days of teaching and afternoons of rehearsing, both with her students and members of Coastal Sound Music Academy, took their toll, especially approaching the traditional big Remembrance Day assembly.

“By November, I would often lose my voice. By Friday, I would have this husky, kind of tired sound. My voice wasn’t getting any rest at all.”

Stressing her vocal chords, ignoring her own vocal coach’s recommendations to build down-time into her schedule, she lost her voice.

”I use a phrase all the time with the kids: You have to listen harder than you sing.”

Otto, 55, had to listen to her laryngologist, the doctors who found small nodules on her vocal chords, the specialists at Vancouver General Hospital’s voice clinic. All agreed that she needed to be quiet for longer than a weekend.

Thus, she went on medical leave, signing up for an eight-week vocal therapy class and combining rest with education about “reprogramming [her] speech apparatus.”

It kept her from surgery and saved her voice – and much more.

• • • •

“Singing is such a personal thing,” Otto said while sipping an herbal tea in the kitchen of the exquisitely restored heritage home she shares with her husband, David Spence. “Nobody has a voice like anybody else. It is totally an individual thing. When you lose that personal voice, you have lost a special part of yourself.”

Learning that special part of herself was in jeopardy shook Otto.

“I came home and I felt like, what am I going to do? Because the thing I love to do the most is teach children music and I could no longer do that.

“I just felt like I was finished and I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“It was hard for her to let go of her teaching,” said Spence, minister at St. Andrews United church in Port Moody. “She felt badly about it.

“She was hard on herself because this was the centre of her identity, to be able to use her voice in teaching others how to use their voices.

“I think it meant a lot of reassessing what her identity was,” he said. “It didn’t come easy.”

And it prompted a difficult decision. Forced to rest her voice and look at her future, she decided to retire at the end of this school year after 30 years as a teacher (before Kwayhquitlum, she taught at Viscount elementary for 19 years and Rochester for five). She’ll focus her efforts and her voice – now aided by amplification – on her Coastal Sound charges, meaning she’ll be doing some of the same beloved work, but less.

That’s something she learned in what she now calls “an amazing, forced teachable moment.”

• • • •

“Ba, ba, ba, ba.”

“Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm, hmmm.”

“Oooh-oooh-oooh-oooh.”

Otto demonstrates some of the vocal exercises she has been prescribed. The first, the baby-like babble, is designed to loosen her jaw and facial muscles. The second starts in the abdominal muscles to produce “coordinated vocal onset.” The third modulates like a siren to bring the voice volume up safely.

There are more, things she says might draw stares should she do them in her car in traffic: Isolation exercises involving flexing her eyebrows and cheeks up and down. Posture alignment. Tongue exercises.

Whatever it takes.

Now, Otto has a new challenge: “How can I communicate this to children?”

For a teacher, the information is no good unless you can share it, impart it to young charges who can do better with it.

Thus, the teacher who was forced to become a student of her own voice, her own body will tell choir members to never take their voices for granted, to warm up as a runner would to prepare for a race and to sing from the gut.

And she will continue to practise what she teaches.

Joe's house

By Richard Dal Monte

In June 2009, my father, Giuseppe Dal Monte, died at the age of 83 due to complications from heart surgery. In April of this year (2010), my brother and I sold the family home in East Vancouver. Last week, the new owners took possession.

To the new owners,

Let me start with an apology, or at least a warning: You live in Joe’s house.

Yes, you own it now. The names on the title and mortgage are yours. But to some of your new neighbours, that little white house with a lovely view of the North Shore mountains and situated within sniffing distance of PNE fried onions will always be Joe’s house.

It’s not just Joe’s house because it’s the only house he ever owned or because he lived there for 53 years, the last 28 as a widower. (Before it was Joe’s house, it was Irene and Joe’s house.)

It’s Joe’s house because he made it that way.

The neat one-car garage used to be a carport but he took that down in the mid-1980s and built this one. (Note the extensive use of recycled wood, much of it from the carport, because he never threw away wood.) Although during construction I mainly handed him things, held things, carried things, maybe swung the odd hammer, he used to say we had built it. “Remember when we did that roof?” he would say.

He built the forms, mixed and poured the cement — hey, we’re Italian — for the patio that takes up half the backyard. Summer evenings, we would set a dinner table there, in the shade of the garage, eat barbecued chicken with pasta and bread and salad from his garden, drink his red wine.

He tilled and planted and weeded that garden, and harvested tomatoes, radicchio, onions, zucchini and countless other treats from the manure-enriched soil.

He built the back porch where, as children, my brother, Paul, and I would often sleep on hot summer nights in sleeping bags laid on top of air mattresses. He later enclosed the porch, turning it into another room, though I’ve always thought it was better open so the breezes could flow through.

He also enclosed the space under the porch so he could store his gardening implements, lawnmower, assorted hardware and other tools, though not the 13 tape measures we found in a cabinet in the basement.

He built the little bar downstairs but, really, most pouring and drinking in Joe’s house was done in the kitchen.

And many decades ago, he built the wine cellar.

Stand in that wine cellar and breathe in. There is an entire history in there.

The shelves where our mom stored her canned peaches and cherries and pickles and jams are made from old kitchen cupboard doors.

The small ladder used to lead to the coveted upper deck of my brother’s and my bunk-beds.

The inside wall is the original outside wall of the house, a greenish stucco with the texture of peanut brittle.

The stained concrete floor has undoubtedly absorbed drips of the red wine he made every year and may still hold the residue of a failed attempt more than four decades ago to make champagne (the story goes that my parents were alerted to a problem by the pop-pop-pop of exploding bottles).

And then there’s the foundation.

Last week, before the papers had been signed and the money had been transferred and the keys handed over, I took one last walk through Joe’s house. I wandered from room to room, turned around and around, taking in every angle and committing it all to memory.

And in the wine cellar — my god, that smell — I looked at the concrete foundation that forms the outside wall and something occurred to me. I stepped up into the basement and strode out to the shed, where we’d left some old tools. I grabbed a level and walked back to the cellar, where I held it up against one wall, then the other.

And damn if they weren’t straight and true.

A boy alone

By Richard Dal Monte

Jessica Chan Peng liked beautiful things. She liked a pretty dress for dinners and parties and church. She liked bright-coloured flowers and trees in bloom. In photograph after photograph in family albums — images from Hong Kong and Taiwan, Whistler, White Rock and the Oregon coast — branches laden with pink cherry blossoms and beds of yellow tulips and blue, blue ocean horizons were the backdrops as she posed, smiling only when her son was in the picture.

Jean Norman remembers that smile. She didn’t see it much in the year and a half she cared for Jessica but one occasion stands out: Jean took a German Shepherd puppy to Jessica’s home for a visit. When it was time to leave, Jean looked down to see the dog had dozed off at Jessica’s feet. “No go, Jean,” a smiling Jessica told her nurse. “Puppy sleep.”

It was a beautiful smile, Jean recalls. A peaceful smile through the stabbing pain. A smile like the ones they shared over Gilbert, Jessica’s teenage son.

Although communicating was a challenge — Jessica spoke Cantonese and Mandarin — they managed with a few words and hand gestures. Jean, a single mother of two teenage boys, could tell when Jessica was getting on her son’s case, and would join in to gently chide Gilbert about his school work, his room, his chores.

Gilbert’s school work wasn’t any different from that of any number of classmates at Coquitlam’s Gleneagle secondary. His small, cluttered bedroom, with the computer desk next to the mattress and boxspring stacked on the floor, was likely neither much more messy nor much neater than theirs, even though his mom liked to keep a tidy home.

His duties around the house were another story.

Each day for much of Grade 11 and most of Grade 12, Gilbert Chan would attend classes for the first three blocks of the day, then head home. There, he would help the community health workers, talk with Jean (a homecare nurse with Fraser Health Authority), pick up prescriptions, perhaps help his mother bathe, mindful of the tubes that delivered powerful chemotherapy drugs into her veins. He would also make doctors’ appointments for Jessica and for his father, Lim Chan.

He had great responsibilities. He had no choice.

Both his parents had cancer. Both were dying.

• • • •

Lim Chan was born in China and lived in Hong Kong, where he was a partner in a metalware business — cups, plates, platters. Jessica Peng was an accountant born in Taipei, Taiwan. They met while he was on a business trip, married in 1985 and lived in Hong Kong. On July 8, 1986, Gilbert was born.

The family immigrated to Canada in 1997 to give Gilbert access to better education. In 2000, Jessica and Gilbert became Canadian citizens, a year before Lim.

That same year, Jessica Peng was diagnosed with colon cancer. She had surgery in the summer, then underwent radiation and chemotherapy treatment in the winter, and appeared to recover. In 2002, however, the year the three moved to a subsidized housing complex in Coquitlam, doctors discovered cancer near her spine that caused her tremendous pain. In January 2003, she was told her disease was terminal just as her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumour, which would also be pronounced terminal eight months later.

In October 2003, Jessica Peng died. She was 50.

In March of this year, Lim Chan died. He was 65.

Gilbert Chan was 17 and alone.

• • • •

“It feels like they’re away, like they’re just taking a long vacation somewhere else and not able to return in time.”

Gilbert sits on a black leather couch in the living room of the two-bedroom apartment he used to share with his parents. It’s an overcast afternoon and his classes are finished for the day. In a few weeks, they’ll be finished for good.

The fluorescent light on the wall behind him is off. The TV is off. The stereo in his room is on – it’s always on – tuned to 99.3 The Fox, a steady, round-the-clock stream of music and voices.

He’s wearing black shorts and his favourite adidas t-shirt, and he kicks his bare feet in and out of his slippers.

He is small and skinny. His hair is black and a little unruly. His face is as if carved from stone, and he speaks slowly and quietly.

“My dad’s passing wasn’t as dramatic, I guess, as my mother’s,” he says. “I guess we were prepared for it. With my mother, we thought she might have weeks or months to live.”

The night his mother died, he recalls, he and his father returned home from Crossroads Hospice at one minute past midnight. “I remember going into my room and sleeping and being really scared.

“That hit me really hard, that she’s really not going to be here and I’m on my own with my dad.”

It wasn’t that he and his dad didn’t get along; they just weren’t very close. Not like Gilbert and his mom — they had always been inseparable. In Hong Kong, they lived on the predominantly Cantonese-speaking Kowloon Peninsula and the Mandarin-speaking Jessica often had only her young son with whom to talk while her husband was away on business, sometimes for months at a time. As Gilbert grew and learned both Chinese dialects, so did his mother.

After they came to Canada, he learned English and would act as translator for both parents; he was the go-between who dealt with doctors and nurses and pharmacists, although the health authority would supply Cantonese-speaking community health workers who cooked and cleaned, and taught Gilbert to cook a bit for himself.

“I’m comfortable with my fried rice,” he says, smiling, even laughing a bit.

Still, now that he’s on his own, he admits he prefers cooking off-the-shelf foods: frozen pizza, noodles and the like. A case of canned New England clam chowder sits on his kitchen table, a case of canned corn on the counter.

There are other, home-cooked, meals, though. Women from Canaan Church, a Christian evangelical church in Coquitlam and Vancouver that his family attended, occasionally bring him food. Other friends of his parents also help him out.

Then there’s Jean.

• • • •

“When his dad went to the hospice,” Jean Norman says, “my [professional] role was over. Then I stepped in as a member of the community.”

As a member of the community, the 23-year registered nurse who has been doing home care for the last five years took Gilbert under her wing. She introduced him to her sons, who are 16 and 18. She had him to her Port Coquitlam home for dinner.

And on the day his father died, she was with him at Crossroads Hospice, awaiting the final moments, when “he’d had enough… he just had to leave.” After being assured by a hospice worker that she would stay with his father to the end, Gilbert went with Jean to her mother’s house for a bowl of what Jean calls “TLC soup,” and to wait for the phone call.

“When we came back, there was this 17-year-old boy making his father’s funeral arrangements by himself.

“How could you not reach out to somebody like that?” she says.

She had previously reached out, in her professional capacity, to try to smooth Gilbert’s path. When Gilbert was in Grade 11, with the consent of his mother, Jean Norman called Caryl Nelson, the boy’s counsellor at Gleneagle, to apprise the school of his situation. As the parents’ illnesses progressed, and as Jessica allowed Jean to share more information with the school, she updated the counsellor.

“I don’t think it really hit home until this [school] year,” says Nelson, “when Gilbert’s mom was hospitalized and we realized the dad’s cancer was progressing. Then we realized, oh my god, what’s going to happen here?

“I guess, in the back of your mind, you think, or I thought, there is extended family in Hong Kong and they’re going to help.”

Discovering that wasn’t the case and that Gilbert would be living on his own (as a ward of the provincial government), Nelson acted. At a staff meeting earlier this semester, she told colleagues Gilbert’s story without identifying him.

“I wasn’t asking for anything,” she says, “I just wanted them to know one of the members of our community was going through this.

“The staff were just completely blown away. A number of them said, ‘Well, we’ve got an extra room in our house…’”

Many teachers handed over cash or wrote cheques. Two did something else.

• • • •

On March 4 of this year, two days before Lim Chan died, Debbie Bouska and Cindy Quach’s Humanities 9 Enriched class went on a field trip to view The Jade Book and an accompanying presentation called The Stone of Hope.

True to its title, the 151-pound book is made entirely out of B.C. jade, or nephrite. It was carved from a boulder by Coquitlam’s Cosimo Geracitano, who spent thousands of hours on the project between 2000 and 2002. The book’s pages are carved with likenesses of and quotations from Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa. The Stone of Hope lecture, according to Geracitano’s website, carries the message that “as sure as people can transform nephrite, they can also transform themselves and those around them into more compassionate and charitable individuals.”

The lecture fresh in their minds, Bouska and Quach’s class was told Gilbert’s story, though not his name. “Oh my gosh, they just flew with it,” said Quach. “It was just this primal reaction that there’s this child alone.”

“This was… an opportunity to do some good for someone needing it,” said Grade 9 student Beth Cowin. “So many people pass that up, we wanted to grasp it while we could.”

Within a week, class members hosted a pre-Easter breakfast for staff with food provided by parents. They raised $1,000 in half an hour.

They then held a raffle for assorted donated goodies, including the right to park in principal Dave Matheson’s spot for the remainder of the school year.

Between that, a donation from the school and the first thousand, the total now sits at approximately $2,000 plus the $1,700 raised when Gleneagle staff hosted the School District 43 softball tournament June 4.

The money is going to establish the Stone of Hope Scholarship, which this year will go to Gilbert to help pay for his post-secondary education (he was accepted to SFU for September) and in future years to other students in need.

• • • •

Need. Gilbert has enough for a lifetime. Sure, he will have a bit of money to pay for next year’s schooling, and family back in Taiwan may pitch in so he can fulfill his parents’ dream of him earning a university diploma. And granted, he chose to live on his own rather than try to insert himself into another family.

Ask him and he’ll say he’s doing fine. The government, his guardian, pays the rent and gives him a small allowance (until he turns 19), just enough to get by. The church ladies bring food and knock on his door if he doesn’t show up for Sunday services.

And Jean, well, Gilbert plays Xbox with her boys, gets bossed around by her niece like he’s a blood cousin and simply sits there, letting the boisterous Sunday dinner political talk wash over him, just like he belongs.

And that, Jessica Chan Peng would see, is a beautiful thing.

This article won first place in the 2004 Suburban Newspapers of America [North America-wide] awards competition for Best Feature Story.

The reason, the Run and mom

By Richard Dal Monte

It all begins and ends with this: On May 10, 1981, in the early evening, after the supper dishes had been washed but before daylight gave way to dusk, my mom, Irene, died of cancer.

I was 17 and a month from high school graduation.

And it was Mother’s Day.

While reading these facts may prompt tears from some, typing them out these many years later merely makes me shake my head — the timing so horrific, so tragic that it is not to be believed.

I am numb to it by now. And not.

I have dealt with it by now. But not really.

Dealt such a blow at such an age, you don’t ever recover.

You are like a car that has been smashed and twisted in an accident, then rebuilt to gleaming perfection: The new paint may be flawless, the frame may be straight enough and that beauty may run reliably for years, but underneath, there is damage.

Sometimes you have to exorcise the damage, rub at the scar tissue.

For me, that has meant, in my work, telling the stories of many survivors — those who have lived and those who have been left behind.

It has also meant attending virtually every Terry Fox Hometown Run for the last 15 or so Septembers.

I listen to the speeches and I remember.

I hear that song, “Never Give up on a Dream,” and my throat constricts.

I read the slips of paper on which people write the names of those for whom they’re running — so many lives, so many losses — and eventually, I have to stop and walk away.

And each year, I listen to Betty Fox speak to the crowd.

Each year, her words seem new and fresh and painful. Each year, children who have been taught her son’s story flock to her and she hugs them, smiling broadly.

Each year, I can see the damage behind the smile.

I remember the look of worry on her face and the agony in Terry’s voice on that day in September 1980 when he announced he had to stop the Run.

And I remember the day he died, seven Sundays after my mom. I had a lacrosse game that night and the coach talked about Terry in the dressing room. It felt as if a fog was flowing through my head, and my legs, never swift, were heavy under the burden of two large weights.

Next Sunday at the Hometown Run, I’ll shake off those weights, that damage and walk for Terry, for my mom. Or maybe this year, I’ll run.