Care of, p.5
Care Of, page 5
Love always,
Ivan
6.
KIDS THESE DAYS
JANUARY 2, 2020
Hi Ivan,
I run into you every now and then at readings, so I think I know you, but don’t really expect you to remember me since there isn’t even a picture attached to this message. Anyway, reading your book Rebent Sinner (great title BTW), and crying at the appropriate places and probably not appropriate places too since my BFF of 50 years just passed and I am bereft lots of the time. But I have a good life and am really happy most of the time, so I will use her passing as commentary on what constitutes elders and where they/we have gone.
I was quite struck with your words about our LBGT++++ elders. With the departure from this world of my friend Sandy, who was a real live Native elder and the best friend anybody could ever have, I wondered too where our elders are. She was mine, and sometimes I was hers. She came out to me in 1971, when we were still illegal and still crazy. It was a huge risk, except that I was already contemplating my lesbianism at the ripe old age of 18. So she is gone. And I know that I have to become my own elder.
We are also losing Judy today—cancer. Sunshine Coast, cute as a button, fabulous politics—and as you opined, moved into pipelines, and NDP/Green and salmon. Queer politics gets you trashed. Been plenty trashed over the years. Frankly, given up. Playing music these days. Much better place to be. Except for the rampant sexism. But that’s another story.
What I wanted to let you know really, is that we have become invisible. We’re still here. And I would happily talk to the young ones. But they don’t give a shit. I no longer get smiles or nods on the street when the cutest young couple walks by hand in hand. In choir, a young gal is wearing a Maui Pride shirt. Not a sign to me of acknowledgement. Not a fricking thing. And it’s not like you have to guess. I look like a butch dyke. Maybe with a nicer haircut than I used to have. Is this left over from the patriarchy, where a woman over a certain age is no longer attractive so it’s okay to ignore her? I don’t know. But it drives me crazy.
Keep writing. I love that in Canada you, just as you are, can make a living telling your stories. I can laugh, I can cry, I can disagree with you. You are always interesting and you always make me think.
Still alive and kicking in Courtenay,
Syd Lapan
JULY 2, 2020
Dear Syd:
Let me begin with my condolences over the loss of your friend Sandy. I’m only 50, so I’m too young still to begin to be able to comprehend what the loss of a friendship you have had for 50 years must feel like. What secrets and memories and losses and triumphs and learning you must have witnessed and held for each other over those many decades. My tender heart to yours in your time of loss and grief.
I’m so sorry it has taken me this long to sit down and craft this letter to you. One of the biggest lessons that has revealed itself to me over the last four months since the pandemic arrived in our lives is how much human connection I was missing out on as a result of the relentless movement and touring and road that my life consisted of pre-pandemic. I was barely able to keep up with the constant stream of vital emails and booking and planning and quick correspondence: deep and thoughtful letters like yours would be starred or flagged, and filed away with every good intention of answering them when I had more than a minute to land, and rest, and catch up, and think. But those more than a minute moments were rare, and often I chose to go fishing or swimming or work on my cabin in the woods up north.
But here I am, at my girlfriend’s place in London, Ontario, with our dog asleep against my left thigh, and my laptop actually resting in my lap, typing away while stretched out on top of the duvet, while the fan in the corner valiantly tries to move this humid air around the guest bedroom.
Like most of us during this lockdown, my life has slowed and grown much smaller. I had time to plunge my fingers into the cold black earth in the garden beds in our backyard back in early April, and to watch in reverence as tiny green tendrils surfaced and reached for the thin sun, and then grew inches overnight as that sunlight and its shadows stretched longer all through May. I have watched the peony stems swell into buds, and become round, and burst, and blossom, and then become brown and wilt and give themselves back to the ground. The spirea is thriving, and I am waiting for the lilies to make their first week of July debut, maybe tomorrow morning, or the next. I am learning the names and shapes of the birds here.
And I am answering all of those special letters.
Where to start? I looked up the word elder just now. The first definition is “a person of greater age than someone specified,” or “a person of advanced age,” or “a leader or senior figure in a tribe or other group.”
I think the meaning of the word elder as we are both using it for the purposes of this discussion is to be found somewhere in between these definitions. Merriam-Webster is a little more nuanced maybe?
1) Of earlier birth or greater age 2) of or relating to a more advanced time of life or 3) superior in rank, office or validity
As I read and ponder all of these definitions, I am sure only of a few things. I may be older, but I’m not ready to be anyone’s elder, just yet, and I for sure do not have enough elders of any definition in my life at the moment.
Both of my grandmothers are gone now, Florence in 2009 and Patricia in 2017. I think my seventy-year-old mother would cuff the back of my head if I called her an elder. I know she was simultaneously horrified and titillated a couple of years ago when a younger woman stood aside and let my mom and her partner Chuck cut to the front of the line at the annual Rendezvous Winter Festival pancake breakfast at the rec centre because they were “senior citizens now.”
Queer elders, as we both know, are a different beast altogether. Maybe our queerness disappears a little as we age? Is that what happens? Maybe we slowly trade in our zippered black leather jackets and big motorcycle boots and blend in with the civilians once we have retired our uniforms? Maybe when we wear OUR Maui Pride shirts the kids just see an old woman who likes rainbows and comfortable shoes?
Sarah and I took the dog out walking along the Thames River a few months ago, when the goslings were still giant and clumsy melon-sized balls of yellow and grey fuzz. The buds were out on the trees but spring had yet to fully arrive still and I was grateful I had brought my warm jacket.
We passed by two older women sitting side by side on a bench that overlooked the water. One was knitting. Both were wearing purple shirts under their open jackets. One had a trace of a moustache and the other had a silver labrys pendant on a chain around her neck. I recognized them as family immediately, before either of them spoke to us. I almost always do. Sarah did not, and we talked a bit about this, and the two old lesbians in the car on the way home.
How do you know for sure they were lesbians? she asked me.
Are you kidding? I said. The purple shirts? The labrys necklace?
What’s a labrys? She raised one manicured eyebrow at me.
Sarah is 40 and I am 50. She grew up in Sweden, and never really had to “come out” in the same way I had to back in the 80s. It was more commonplace in her circle of friends to be bi or queer in the much more liberal Sweden of her teens and twenties. The world had The L Word by then.
She mostly hangs out with other musicians of all sorts, and has spent very little time in the official queer community. She cannot clock an older lesbian quite as fast as I am able to, and frankly, older lesbians very rarely spot her.
I just re-read your letter. Imagined you and Sandy back in 1971, like you wrote, when you were 18 years old and still illegal and still crazy. The writer in me conjures up round-cornered Technicolor photographs of the two of you, in faded bell bottoms and plaid shirts, squinting into the camera, leaned up against a beat-up yellow VW Bug or a brown four-door Toyota Corolla. I was two years old, so that makes you…67 years old now? Give or take. Still too young to lose your best friend. I’m going to take a guess and blame cancer. You say you have to become your own elder now, and just typing those words out, and contemplating what this means, brings me to tears.
You say that queer politics gets you trashed, and I find it hard to argue this point with you with much conviction, even though I so wish that this were not true. You say that you have given up on them, and I can’t say I blame you too much. I have my moments of feeling like giving up myself, but my writing and my work keeps me tethered still, even when I want to escape. Hence the cabin I’m building up north, I guess.
My partner Sarah is a musician, too, so I often witness the sexism in the music industry that you mentioned. How when we walk into the theatre side by side to sound check for the show we wrote and tour together, the sound guy always defaults to talking to me, as the closest thing to a man that he can relate to. Sarah is actually the technical genius in the family, and the guitar and equipment wizard, and the composer, and the musical director, and the one who leads the six-piece band we tour with, but try telling Steve or Rick or Darryl the sound guy that he should be talking to the soft-spoken pretty one in the room, not the butch storyteller. They assume that I speak music bro more fluently than she can, even though music is Sarah’s first language, and she can usually out-play, out-program, and out-delay pedal most of them on most days. So I often act as translator, by necessity. This sometimes makes me feel like a traitor, like I need to confess, or somehow cleanse myself of these masculine sins-by-association, but I am never sure where to go, or to whom to turn to in order to do this.
Whenever we walk into a venue and there are women technicians, I always make a mental note to make sure to come back, I can tell you that.
But back to your letter. I’m sorry you are invisible. At first I typed “I’m sorry that you feel invisible,” but then I went back and deleted the word feel. If you say you are invisible, then I believe you that you are. So I will type it here again: I am so sorry that you are invisible.
I used to get called sir or be read as a man most of the time, but not so much the last couple of years, and hardly at all since the pandemic hit. I’m not sure exactly why this is. Is it a factor of the many weeks that have passed since my last trip to the barber shop? Is it these 51-year-old hips? The silver in my hair? Is it that I always without fail wear a mask when I go grocery shopping? Is it that I don’t bother with a button-down shirt and tie, or my fancy show shoes while sheltering at home? I truly do not know.
What I can tell you is that being called a lady or ma’am still makes my teeth hurt and the inside corners of my mouth pinch like sucking on a really sour candy does. As strange as it sounds, being seen as a woman makes me feel like the opposite of invisible. It makes me feel intensely, mercilessly seen, or maybe mistaken for. I am not butch or trans or non-binary me. I am one of those women. I am the dyke next door. I am the not-pretty one of the two girls who moved into unit 705.
This is the little corner of the straight world I currently find myself in, anyway. I don’t know how the cool young queer kids see me anymore, as it has been four months since I have seen any of them. I will report back once my online classes start up in September.
I miss the road, and doing shows, and faded and grimy green rooms and dusty black staircases threading through cluttered backstage mazes, and crowds of sweaty overdressed loud-talking queer people, more than I ever thought possible. Another thing the pandemic has taught me is how much I took all that road for granted, which, should all that road ever stretch out in front of my wheels in our currently unforeseeable future, I sincerely promise to never do again.
If I ever make it back to Vancouver Island, and if I ever see your face in person, I know in my butch heart that I will recognize you as my elder sister, and I swear to you that I will turn around and find the closest baby queer in the room and I will bring them over to where you are standing and I will say, Here, I want you to introduce you to Syd, she’s a friend of mine, and I think you need to know her.
I hope I get to hear you play music one day, too.
Much love and solidarity,
Ivan
7.
SOLDIERS WITHOUT COUNTRY
FACEBOOK MESSAGE
DECEMBER 3, 2018
Ivan. I have been following your travels via social media and I just can’t believe the miles and countries you present in. It’s all wonderful to think upon, but, yes, knowing the road from the inside out, I feel for you. I have often wondered if others feel that insane toppling, like falling from the Eiffel Tower when you first get back home from everywhere and feel yourself naked, undressed of commitments and timed events. I would so often feel like a billing envelope dropped in the alley, a grey rainy northwest alley. Everyone was so happy for me and I would confuse the hell out of them by weeping at their kitchen tables feeling like I had bullet wounds all through me. We didn’t know back then about ptsd or the nature of trauma with all its myriad ways of presenting. I would feel so hollow, so empty, I was inconsolable. Over the years I learned to show a cool remove but even to think of that chaos now, brings tears brimming to my eyes. Ani DiFranco was betrayed by her audience and the passing of time and I have wept for her as well. So we truly are “soldiers without country” to quote an old Ferron song, capable of showing up in the trenches and disappearing on stage.
I have dreamt of doing a workshop with you at some point, somewhere. It’s true what they say though in that there’s a huge drop in physical endurance and things that once seemed easy peasy often stand just a little out of reach. But I think this spring I’m going to learn to stretch and grab. Here is my cell phone number. I suggest that we try to have a connection but I bet that you hear that from all the girls.
x, F
Dear Ferron:
It’s Friday night on July 3, 2020. I’m at Sarah’s place in London working in my little office here, catching up on letters and correspondence. I was searching through the last several years of Facebook messages for a note I got a few months ago from an older butch on Vancouver Island, and I came across this beautiful message from you.
I remember the morning I received it very clearly. I had just returned from an incredible but very gruelling tour of eleven cities in ten countries in Southeast Asia. I had been home for six days, and I was still jet-lagged, and physically suffering from an intestinal situation that I will spare you the details of, but suffice it to say I will never drink a fresh pineapple juice full of delicious yet suspicious crushed ice while petting rescued street dogs in a pen in Malaysia ever again. I only had to learn that lesson the one time.
I remember how my eyes filled up with tears and how I could suddenly hear my own heartbeat thrum past my eardrums as I read your words. I remember how my hands shook just a little as I reached for my cell phone and dialed your number, and how miraculous it was to hear you answer, hearing that deep and molasses-coloured and oh-so-familiar voice right there, live and in person, in my ear.
I think I tried to keep the fawning to a bare minimum, but I still do want you to know just how much a part of my life, my writing life, my road life, my inner and intimate and emotional creative life your music has been, for the last 32 years now, by my math.
The first girl I ever kissed was a jazz singer. Neither of us really knew any other queer people, not who were women, anyway, but her roommate’s mom was a lesbian, and she had a partner and a cabin on Vancouver Island so the roommate called her mom the lesbian and set it all up and the jazz singer and I jump-started my Volkswagen van and went on a road trip to meet our people. Sheila and Jo. They fed us lentil stew and let us sleep in the octagon-shaped studio cabin and showed us lesbian books and lesbian poetry and three days later when we left Shelia gave me two cassette tapes: Joan Armatrading’s self-titled album, and Ferron’s Shadows on a Dime.
I listened to that tape until it wore thin and my tape player chewed it up and swallowed it, and so I bought it again. Then I bought it on CD, and I even found the LP in a thrift store on Commercial Drive and I bought that, too, even though it was 1995 by this time and I didn’t own a record player. I eventually bought most of your other albums too, but Shadows on a Dime was my first and best love. I saw you live in Juneau, Alaska in 1992, and again at the WISE Hall in Vancouver. Your music, and your lyrics especially, are so much a part of my own writing practice now, your voice has accompanied the tap tap of my computer keyboard for all 12 of the books I have written. I learned to play many of your songs on guitar, and copied the lyrics into journals and learned them by heart. I fell in love all over again in a new way with Sarah a couple of summers ago when we learned to harmonize on the chorus of your song “Girl On A Road.” I listened to Shadows on A Dime the first day home from every long stretch of touring, dog-tired and heartsore and the milk in the fridge all gone sour, crying on my couch from the grand toppling of it all while my laundry dried. Your music was a familiar place, an inherited quilt on the bed, a worn and favourite coin I kept in my pocket that my fingers knew all the edges and the weight of.
Those few months in early 2019 when we talked often on the phone were such a blessing to me, really, I don’t know if I can shape the words right enough to explain it to you, but I will try.
I don’t know very many butches who I connect with creatively. Most of my heroes that I resemble in any way are dead. I know butch carpenters and mechanics and chefs, and butch academics and filmmakers and parents and social workers, and I am truly grateful to have them in my life, but I didn’t really have a personal connection to another living butch or trans or non-binary writer who was older and wiser than me until you sent me your cell phone number that December morning.
In early April of that same year, I experienced a bout of the worst online harassment I have ever lived through. I’ve had three serious, real-life stalkers, and I get my fair share of weird hate mail, but the spring of 2019 was next level. It was organized, and it was tech-savvy, and it was beyond mean. It was scary. A U.S.-based, ultra-right-wing Instagram account came after me online, and whoever was behind it had many minions. They created multiple accounts in my name and posted pictures of Hitler memes, and fathers feeding their trans babies bottles full of bleach and tagged my actual account in them, stuff like that. They tracked down the actual street address and suite number of the building I live in, and posted the information publicly, along with an invitation for their followers to go out and find me and, (and I quote) “visit this freak in person and tell it how you feel about it indoctrinating your children in public school to its vile trans lifestyle.”
