John Thomas Pisarczyk 1952-2018

This gathering is now. I sent this message to be read by my younger sister on my behalf:

When I think of John, all of those things that you have heard so far — and will no doubt hear more of — come to mind. He was always someone who didn’t do things halfway and seemed to be able to teach himself how to do new things — and do them well — all the time.

What I will remember the most, though, is that other thing he did well: loving his family. You could see that in the way he played tirelessly with his grandchildren, down on the floor with the young ones, challenging the older ones to excel as he always did at sports almost too numerous to mention.

You could see it in the way he and Terry raised their own children, helping them when they needed it, encouraging them to be their best at whatever they wanted to do. How many trips for various sporting events? How many practices, how many family ski outings and curling bonspiels? They were endless and neither Terry nor John would have had it any other way.

You could see it in his interactions with all of us in-laws: brothers and sisters, son and daughter. He could always find common points of interest, he could tease, and he could compete, and always with a level of calm and thoughtfulness that made us all feel welcome, feel at home.

And the most important thing for me to see was John loving my sister Terry. They were together 47 years and built a life of love and stability for their family — for all of their family — that none of us will ever forget.

Thank you John.

The family's obituary for John can be read here.

Melvin Edward Monteith 1931-2018

Melvin Edward Monteith died on 23 October 2018 after a long illness. He was predeceased by his wife of 56 years, Enid Norah (Lucas) Monteith.

He is survived by his sister Doreen (Roy Baillargeon) of Kamloops, his children Mike (Linda), Brandy (Brenton Wilkie), Terry (John Pisarczyk), Ken, Syd (Tracy Baird), 8 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.

Mel grew up in Kamloops, graduating from the Senior Matriculation programme at Kamloops Senior Secondary School in 1952. In his final school years, he worked summers for the BC Forest Service and landed his first full-time position in Wells Grey Park in 1952. Before his retirement in 1994 he had attained the positions of Ranger and District Manager, and was well-liked by those he worked with, especially those who worked for him. His own superiors may have been less impressed by the application of his motto: it is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.

Mel was a devoted husband and father. From his proposal to Enid at the time of his first post in Wells Grey Park to their marriage in 1953, through many job postings around the interior of BC, to his loving attention as Enid’s health declined after their retirement and he became her primary caregiver, theirs was a story of devotion and attention.

His children all remember the countless ways he showed his love of the family — the summer camping trips, the winter skating rinks, tobogganing, skiing, a swing and a climbing rope at every home they lived in, the attendance at countless sporting events and much, much more. Mel and Enid built and maintained a family that sticks together, despite geographical distance and differences of opinion. A loving home and support for the hopes and dreams of all are the legacy Mel and Enid leave behind as parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.

Mel was hard-working, intelligent, practical and caring. He was fair and open-minded, a ravenous reader of science-fiction and overall a very likeable man, right to the end. His children were endlessly amazed by his capacity to complete complex mathematical calculations in his head faster than they could do the same with their calculators.

One of Mel’s great accomplishments was the building of the family’s log home. He worked hard on weekends and holidays to accomplish this work, largely by hand, from felling the trees, to peeling the logs and winching them atop the structure to carrying rocks and mortar up ladders to build an immense central fireplace. The result was a beautiful home fitting for the loving family he had created.

Mel will be remembered in a private family gathering. There will be no service by request.

In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Kamloops Hospice Association, Marjorie Willoughby Snowden Hospice Home, 72 Whiteshield Crescent South, Kamloops, BC V2E 2S9. Their web site here.

You have all our love and appreciation for being the best father a family could have, Dad. We miss you terribly.

Abby Lippman

I have lost a friend this week, and many others have lost a seemingly tireless ally in a number of struggles for rights and recognition. I know that I will not do justice to Abby Lippman’s contributions to academia or to a number of the social movements where she made her mark, so allow me to concentrate on those areas where our lives happily intersected.

I met Abby at Head & Hands, a youth organization in the NDG neighbourhood of Montréal where I worked as Coordinator of Legal Services and then as Executive Director, all in the 1990s. Abby was a member of the Board of Directors and President of that Board for a number of years. Not your usual President, but one who came with extensive knowledge and history in the women’s health movement, and one who demonstrated her commitment to the cause with every act. I remember that we had an annual fundraising mailing to our members at the beginning of December, and Abby personally signed each of those letters, often adding a personal note to the member/donor. There weren’t dozens of these letters, there were hundreds of them. Every one of them got a signature that could be smudged to demonstrate its authenticity, putting some real meaning into the strength of a small charity: that it can be close to and personal with its donors.

When I left Head & Hands, I was very happy to be able to pursue my relationship with Abby, now more as a friend than as a colleague. Oh, we talked about health issues and didn’t always agree about everything (I’m thinking of the funding from pharmaceutical companies that I felt my organization could accept without impact on the content of the programming it served to support or the issue of HPV vaccination). Even when we didn’t agree, Abby always gave me a reason to reflect on my opinions and to see them through other eyes.

We are both big fans of the arts — my taste in films was often much more pedestrian than hers — and we had occasions to go to the movies or to a student production of an opera at McGill. I have two favourite memories of Abby at the cinema. First, when we participated in the time-honoured tradition of going to see a film (or two) on Christmas Day. Abby was determined to sneak into the second film without paying, while straight-laced Ken insisted on going out and paying as we should…I paid for both of us in my slavish following of the rules.

The second movie memory was when I encouraged Abby to sign up for the cinema’s loyalty program in order to be able to accumulate points for free movies. She painstakingly did her sign-up at the automated kiosk and got her temporary number…whereupon I learned that her concern for privacy had led her to use a pseudonym and give a false address and invented postal code! How, I asked, are you going to get your card, which they send through the mail? I don’t know if she ever went back to deal with that one, but it left me giggling.

The most moving thing Abby did for me was to include me in her family, inviting me to participate in the family meals for all of the Jewish holidays. Her Seder evolved over the years, with multiple texts to choose from (traditional, feminist, humanist, and a Dr Seuss-like version called Uncle Eli’s Haggadah) and some extra items on the Seder plate — an orange for the place of women and Palestinian olives to remind us of the occupation and the injustice in that situation. The year (one of the years?) when Israeli forces invaded Gaza, all texts were set aside, and Abby read a letter she had written denouncing that action. The meal was always permeated with the political significance that it deserved, even if the metaphorical connections to current social justice issues might have been more pronounced around her table than around many others.

Abby wrote editorials, marched, picketed stores, participated in an ongoing vigil of Jewish and Palestinian women outside the Israeli consulate… Like I said at the beginning, it would be impossible for me to list every cause and every action without unjustly leaving several out. She exuded boundless energy for social justice and little tolerance for its absence. She was opinionated and loving, loud and giving, quirky and intelligent. Most of all, she was someone I was glad to be able to count as a friend.

I will miss you, Abby Lippman.

*****

Article in The Gazette here.

In lieu of flowers, Abby's family requests that dontations be made to The Native Women's Shelter of Montreal.

The Old Man and the T…V

How about a little anecdote from my recent visit with my family over the holidays? Well, if you insist…

Let's start by stating right out there that I very much enjoy visiting my family, and will never understand those who don't get along with their siblings and parents. But that would be my apparently bizarrely idyllic childhood speaking. The only regrets from this year were that my oldest sister couldn't join us and that my brother and sister-in-law couldn't stay for the whole time the others were there. I did, however, get the chance to know my niece-in-law a bit better, which I am very glad to have done! We accomplished this over a very cutthroat game of Pictionary (boys versus girls) and even managed to defuse our most competitive moments before anyone's evening got ruined!

So what's with the Old Man?

My father has been fighting a long battle with squirrels. These are not the imported-from-Europe type that overrun city parks in the east where I live. They are the little red ones that naturally inhabit the forests of the west…and also naturally raid the various bird feeders that Dad stocks with seeds to draw an amazing variety of rather impressive birds (like the Stellar's Jay pictured here in a photo stolen from the internet).

Dad also gets pileated woodpeckers, which are scarily huge birds!

But I digress. The squirrels had another bad habit that my father is — er — helping them with. They managed to bypass various security measures to take up residence inside his roof, which is intolerable, so he was helping them to move to more appropriate quarters for rodents…the landfill!

Living in the country and away from such amenities as cell phone coverage, the internet and cable TV, Dad does what others in his situation do: he has a satellite dish to capture TV signals that offer him way more choices than I get on my basic cable plus service at home.

As we gleefully watched reruns of everything during the holiday season, something annoying started to happen. The satellite was blinking off, robbing us of our sedentary pleasures! Sometimes the blinking was so extreme that we couldn't even get through a 30-second commercial without as many as four or five blinks off. And we do love our commercials, so that was extremely annoying.

The theories abounded. Dad opined that there seemed to be a particular temperature range where there were more problems with the TV: above or below, things worked just fine. My brother's theory was much more entertaining (getting back to the squirrels). He painted a picture of a lonely squirrel sitting in the satellite dish, holding two ends of the TV cable and cursing down the hill. "You've killed my whole family! How do you like this TV reception, Old Man?!"

While that got us laughing through the blue screen times, it wasn't until my little sister (she's only 49, after all) found a loose connection and tightened it that we got back to watching such important works as Jerry Springer's "Baggage" on the tube.

Still can't keep myself from chuckling as I think about what the evil combat squirrel might do next to make Dad's life a living hell!

You Can Do It That Way If You Want

A classic story from my family.

My sister, visiting from Australia, decided to go into the card store to buy some postcards of the local scenery to send to her friends and family back home. The postcard display announced that they were 25 cents or 5 for a dollar, tax included. She selected 15 postcards she liked and presented them at the cash.

The cashier counted them carefully and announced that it would be $3.75. My sister said "But they're five for a dollar" and got the reply "But you have 15."

Frustrated, my sister pursued her line of argument. "You mean I could buy 5 for a dollar, go outside, come back in and buy the next 5 for a dollar, repeat once more and get the 15 for $3?"

"You can do it that way if you want" was the clever clerk's reply.

You can believe that this has become a catch phrase in my family: since each of us is always right in whatever we do, the sibling doing it differently is inevitably greeted by a chorus of "You can do it that way if you want" followed by peals of laughter.

Getting Excited About Sports

This one is not about my own motivations in consuming sports, usually centred more on the players, sometimes on the action and rarely on the results. No, this is my chance to recount a couple of my funnier memories from my childhood involving sports. Not participating in them of course — nothing funny about my level of athleticism, at least not for me — but seeing how excited some people can get watching them.

When we used to go visit my grandparents when I was young, Grandpa would often be watching two televisions: one with the hockey game and one with professional wrestling (not the delightful Olympic-style wrestling pictured above). He got very involved in the two of them, twitching and calling out for each good play and each throw and pin. My Mum told us stories about visits when we were younger, and Grandma would have to remind him that he was holding the baby so he wouldn’t get too carried away.

My brother had another weakness: football. We used to try to get him to yell less loudly at the touchdowns, even making him run outside onto the front porch to do his yelling on occasion. The funny part is that he did it! I have that mix of annoyance at the yelling with the amusement of his containing his excitement for several seconds as he ran for the door to the place where he could shout his exuberance to the whole neighbourhood. Oh, let’s face it — our town was not that big, so I’m sure everyone heard him.

I still find that those memories bring me a smile, not for the amusement, but for how endearing I found the extreme emotion related to something over which they had no control or influence.

I’m finding the same mix of annoyed, amused and endeared with the guy who does the sports recaps on the CBC News Network. The sports recaps are delivered like live clips from the moment of the excitement, right down to the tone of voice and the pace of the delivery. I started out thinking ‘Who is this guy and why is he yelling about a game that’s over?’ but I have ended up having that little smile as a flood of memories of those endearing moments from my youth come flooding back.

In the end, it’s nice to bear witness to someone doing a job with such gusto and such engagement.