LOVERS LOOKOUT: A dad story from the Sunshine Coast

On the corner of Trail Avenue and Dolphin Street in Sechelt, B.C., across from Hackett Park at the newish four-way stop is an atrocious display of sidewalk architecture and a sign that makes the locals snicker but their hearts gleam.

The sidewalk, established in 1987, covered a gutter of delightful tadpoles for one smalltown block and culminates in a jarring two-foot slope of concrete so dangerous that poles and chains were erected to protect the unsuspecting pedestrians from the drop whilst breathing in the spectacular view of the town’s singular traffic light (we now have three) and a burgeoning mountainside gravel pit.

Flabbergasted by this show of civic planning, my father, a man of impeccable taste in design, went to task. In the basement shop of our rented home – one of the town’s oldest – across from the jilted sidewalk, he sawed, whittled, and painted “LOVERS LOOKOUT” SECHELT on a wood sign and, with a few screws, christened the sidewalk a local legend.

This past Father’s Day my brother and I set out to spruce up the sign, faded to a dull brown over its 25-year sojourn. Many will recognize Lovers Lookout but few know the story behind it. Such is life in a quirky smalltown, where highway bus stops are stocked with chairs left by mystery Good Samaritans because there are no bus shelters, where chainsaw-made stump gnomes can be found in the woods, where the free shed at the dump is a trove of treasures and burly men in big trucks scour switchbacks at Christmas for stranded skiers.

My father’s name was Dave Petrescu. He was a carpenter by trade, a photographer by hobby and a shop teacher at Pender Harbour Secondary School for 16 years. He was many other things as well; an incredible father, husband and friend included. Lovers Lookout was just one of his many design triumphs. He and his students built the Madeira Park information sign, he designed a yellow cedar hope chest just for me (though I later discovered most of the Harbour had made their own in shop class), he built our kitchen cabinets with a 500-year-old stump from the Sechelt waterfront, bronze cast his own thumb to replace a gearshift knob on his three-in-a-tree GMC truck and once sculpted a bronze bust of my mother.

My brother and I were just eight and five-years-old when my dad made that sign and it has reminded us of him with embarrassment, pride and sadness in the 25 years since. He died nearly nine years ago from skin cancer. He was at peace, in love with his family, his community and his life. May this story be one example of how we never really lose a loved one; they stay with us in the stories, humour and signs that come after they’re gone. 

THE LABOUR OF LEAVING

I’m laying on a bed watching my newborn nephew squirm and stare like a little shrimp with wide inky eyes, not yet quite part of this world, a tiny fish plucked from the water. We’re in the home I grew up in and helped build, in the room where my father spent his last days just over eight years ago. Today would have been his 60th birthday, so we’re baking a cake – angel food, obviously.
Here I am again, listening intently for another’s breath and heartbeat. This one is so small yet strong. He is his grandfather’s namesake, David, born on his father’s 30th birthday – a breath of life and joy in a family that’s seen too much loss and sorrow in the past 10 years.
I am reminded, bitterly, of the days and weeks spent in this room, slipping in and out of sleep as I watched my father die from cancer. I remember the endless episodes of Law and Order, reading him the Lee Valley tools catalogue, massaging his swollen feet and the ever-present soundtrack of CBC radio.
I remember sitting vigil for days when he first slipped out of consciousness. I dozed off and awoke to find him gone – literally, not there. The bed was empty. Confusion and panic ensued. His slippers were also gone. Could someone barely 100-lbs, on intravenous morphine, who hadn’t spoken or woke for three days just get up and take off? Apparently, yes.
Dad had an abrupt second wind and seeing me asleep took advantage of his chance to escape. It was Saturday, you see, perhaps his last. This meant it might be his last chance ever to hit a garage sale. We found him trucking down our street, coming from the multi-family, cul-de-sac yard sale a block away, with a ‘90s Casio keyboard and various trinkets in tow. I have no idea where he got cash. He was eccentric, defiant and amusing to the end.
I am reminded of the labour of death. The waiting, the pain, the love, the unabashed humour about bodily functions and frailties. The fear and taking over of inevitable physical change. The departure. The arrival. Is the labour of death not so different from the labour of birth?
Change of any kind is laborious, especially when the focus is on the endings – of a life, a love, a career, a path.
Cultural mythologist Joseph Campbell said. “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
He also said, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
This is why change is so hard – it breaks us. When, and if, we’re able to put ourselves together do we become “stronger in our broken places,” as Hemingway suggests?
Leonard Cohen sings: “There is a crack in everything/That’s where the light gets in.”
And if it doesn’t get in do we remain broken, static in our shadowy traumas, surges of fear lashing in our bellies like live wires?
This is the journey, the individual adventure.
The decision to take a one-year sabbatical from my job as a newspaper reporter stemmed equally from opportunity and physical exhaustion. I’ve sometimes compared Island life to Calypso’s Isle in Ulysses, a sensual womb of comforts and support at its best and a stagnating time warp at its worst. As hard as it is to leave, even for a short while, it can only be best.
This year is as much for professional development as it is personal. Courses, conferences and fellowships are being considered. But a more experiential form of learning calls first. This stems from an interest in how people receive and share information that matters most and what new forms of storytelling emerge.
After only a week back in my hometown Sechelt, I’m reminded of the intriguing travel of news in small communities. Stories break with “Did you hear?” at the mall, the hardware store, in grocery parking lots. A few graphs in the local rag or even the big-city dailies can’t compare to the build and unraveling of personal connections, detail and emotional responses to tragedies or hot issues.
It’s good to immerse yourself in new communities every now and then – especially for a journalist. We spend our working lives gathering intimate details about others in short intense exchanges to invite interest, dialogue and change – yet we strive to maintain an emotional distance to be objective, to get the job done.
When the distancing seeps into your personal life is when it’s time to change, to challenge perspective.
Tomorrow, I’ll leave for Amsterdam to meet a dear friend from journalism school. One week later, I’ll leave for India – I’m not sure for how long or what exactly will unfold. I am fortunate to arrive in Mumbai and spend time with a Victoria friend, Kane Ryan, his parents, and the Dirty Wall Project – a charity supporting one of the many slum communities with the mantra “See a need and fill it.” For the past year I’ve followed Kane’s blog, http://dirtywallproject.com/blog/, a frank, earnest and visually stunning portrayal of his work, colleagues and community.
I plan to connect with a certain newspaper night security guard, who works two jobs to support his family in Victoria and a rural school in Northern India, as well as a high school friend of my father’s who left Canada to become a Hari Krishna in the ‘70s and work with inner city kids in Bangalore.
One of the most-difficult items to leave will be my laptop, which I’m trading for a moleskine notebook – where poems and drawings will replace tweets and third-person status updates…. Until an internet café calls – which I’m sure it will often.


Yours,


Sarah

Dreams of Jim lead to better thoughts…

I've decided to compile some of my favourite blogs, stories and posts that are only available online here to keep track of them. They cover the time period between my last year at Ryerson University in Toronto to two years later, as I settled into a new job as an arts writer in Victoria...



From MySpace: 15 Oct 06 Sunday

This afternoon I passed out on my green shag rug and awoke two hours later from a very disturbing dream about my first .. and last .. guitar teacher, Jim.
Jim was a forty-something guy with greasy long hair, pockmarked cheeks and cigarette breath who wore everything in the fabric known as jean.
He was a weekend warrior rock star playing the Coast pub circuit in a cover band called Local Traffic. By day he taught kids guitar at the now defunct Strings and Things in Sechelt.
I was given guitar lessons with Jim from my parents for my tenth birthday, inspired by an obsession with the Tracy Chapman Fast Car record and my mom playing House of the Rising Sun very superbly.
I lasted three lessons.
Jim was a total pig. He burped and farted (I'm pretty sure he was farting, but it was hard to hear) and kept going on and on about how girls never make good guitar players, they don't want to cut their nails, how I won't want to cut my nails and probably quit too, how many great female guitars players have YOU heard of and on and on...
So I quit and that's basically when I became a boy-chasing mall rat. Thanks Jim. Stay out of my head please.
I guess this sprung to mind because of all the superkids I've been talking to lately. You know, those kids I always go on about who are four-feet, barely in the double digits, hardly say a word, yet can rip out your heart with a Mozart concerto or play Shostakovich with more emotion than most adults I know and then sit down for some and pop and chips.
How did they get so good? Not with Jims in their lives. Quite the opposite. The amount of support for kids in music here makes me teary sometimes. As much as I'd like to kibitz with cute rock stars all day .. yeah right .. I love the kids.
And I'm starting to listen to music differently, which is kind of weird. Last night during Nosferatu I recall getting this very eerie feeling and then thinking, "Damn. Oboe, you fucking rock!"
(I'm also reading this awesome book right now called This is Your Brain on Music: The science of a human obsession, in which I've learned classical music is the original punk rock having directly rebelled from the Catholic church's banning of polyphony [more than one musical part playing at a time] and the interval of an augmented fourth because it was too evil)
Anyway, I'm not too sure where this boring stuff is all going other than I'm tired, can't sleep and seem to be consumed by the things I never learned and the things I did learn, but have forgotten and probably won't learn again.
The latter thought was compounded by just reading the letter my dad wrote me before he died, in which he swore me to remember and pass on all the important things he taught me to my own children one day like how to chop wood, fish, plant a garden and drive a stick shift. Oops.
In memory of my dad, Dave, who would have been 53-years-old today here is a poem the author/artist Harvey Chometsky wrote about him at the age of 23, when he had reputation around Prince George as an odd-ball tour guide with an arcane knowledge of the area.


In the Prince George dump there's no scavenging allowed.
The reason they give, says Dave, is sanitation.
He says the trick .. believe me he knows ..
is to go there at lunch,
while the workers are eating.
Go to the dump for lunch.
He says he hates it when bags are soft.
There might be dead babies or anything in them,
but he hasn't come across one yet thank Christ.
Well it's true you know. The soft ones are bad.
What you do is keep away from them
like I did
and still find this poem
those picture frames, diaries, notebooks and a compass
that hangs on my door,
that tells me every morning
which direction I'm going.