Three tough and tender women:
Terry Platt. Constant Reader knows West Van resident and BC Ferries employee Terry has been mentioned here several times in the last half-dozen years in political items.
But the longtime New Democrat’s brave challenges to Ralph Sultan – frankly doomed in the inhospitable riding of West Vancouver-Capilano, which Liberal Sultan has had a lock on through four elections starting in 2001– are the least of it.
Terry has been treated for cancer for nearly a year. Next chemo appointment on the Ides of March. The course of her illness is an all too familiar narrative of the disease. What elevates it to a beacon in darkest night for all sufferers is her spirit.
Terry is happy. Almost super-humanly happy.
“The chemo room is like a social club! Laughter, chatting, sharing notes, coffee and snacks from the volunteers,” she writes. “Makes the whole thing sort of fun.”
She was a scout leader – and retains the purposeful peppiness of one. “At Christmas the First West Vancouver Scouts even dedicated and decorated a Christmas tree, in Dundarave, in my honour. They called it Scouting Spirit – Terry Platt.” She praises the movers, Jennifer Nemeth and Capilano University professor and 2017 Green Party candidate Michael Markwick and wife Mary.
Recent tests look promising. Of course it’s very unsuave to mention religion these days, but Terry offers: “There are people I have never met praying for me: a congregation in Ojai, California, a group from Christ Church Cathedral Downtown, and a group of elderly ladies.”
It puts one’s everyday bitching and grumbling in perspective. Terry concludes: “Things are good. When the needles hurt I just pretend I am taking the pain for the little kids who have to endure this. Maybe it helps.
“I have no complaints. ... I am well supported by our B.C. and Canadian health care system. If I lived in the U.S. my husband and I would be bankrupt. My mum might even have put a mortgage on her house. I am all she has.
“Every day is a good day. My daffodils are coming up and the birdies still feast at my feeders. I am a fortunate woman!” If you shed tears, don’t be embarrassed. I’m not.
• • •
Tough and tender woman No. 2 is Shirley Stocker, long a resident of both West and North Van now living in New Westminster, and possibly, even probably, Vancouver’s best front-lines radio exec of the age. She was producer of stars Jack Webster and Rafe Mair in CKNW’s glory days. Neither was dealt a shortage of ego, but they took her pointers and respected her judgment – honed young: The eldest of four children, at 16 she was left to care for three rambunctious boys and fought off having them taken away by children’s aid.
Before her 40-year stint with the Top Dog, Shirley worked for the CBC for 17 years, beginning with “reading the hog reports” on the noonday farm broadcast.
She’s been with Variety, the Children’s Charity, founded by theatre people, for 25 years. She’s currently Chief Barker – in usual-speak, president – of Global’s annual telethon, which just raised a record $5.5 million, a lot of it from small-medium and family companies and their staffs long loyal to the show.
Time-whipped, I squeezed in a couple of hours watching the telethon this month. Sharply professional – expected. Brisk direction. Grand dance routines. But above all intensely moving without being maudlin, without the stagey condescension and pity that children with problems and their parents often suffer.
Shirley played an active – exhausting – role in shaping the show. In the circumstances, heroic. Last May she survived triple bypass surgery. Then a stroke. Four implanted stents and a pacemaker. Eight weeks in hospital. Lost 50 pounds – and her precious driver’s licence, due to some sight impairment.
Meeting for lunch last week, I feared she’d show up with a pirate’s black eyepatch and a wooden-leg walk. Wrong. Not even a parrot on her shoulder. She looked splendid, the eyes spring-sky blue, speech and mind clear, a perfect conversationalist, her claimed age surely fraudulent.
I said tough and I said tender, and Shirley is both.
• • •
Edythe Anstey Hanen was a nurse when we met half a century ago in the swing-high Sixties, which un-hip Lord Snow compared to the description of Lord Byron: “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Hippies hung out on a bare Fourth Avenue lot, hurting business for an adjoining honey store. Edye was like a sweet, pretty lost child who had wandered into an unsafe neighbourhood.
Decades passed. In one of those “where are they now?” moments I discovered she’d become a writer of poetry (a heroic calling) and beautiful prize-winning short stories, lyrical, inventively rich in imagery. Incongruously, it seems, for years she was also in rough trade as editor of the Bowen Island newspaper. She’s a Bowen icon.
In Edye’s just-released novel Nine Birds Singing (New Arcadia Publishing) the central character, Maddie, struggles to escape sternly religious parents and a menacing relative, a long labour of self-reconstruction. It recalled to me an English critic’s difficulty in two-speed reading of a certain novel: Eager to rush on with the narrative, held back by the lushness of each page. Recommended? Strongly, and not for old time’s sake.
