Author: Lorne Mallin

On a clear day, you can see forever. That’s true of the view from my place in Kerrisdale. But as for living in Vancouver Cohousing, I can’t see that far ahead. So I’m hedging my bets by looking to sublet my apartment for six to 12 months from March 1 while I give cohousing my best shot.

I love my cohousing community. We’ve been meeting monthly – making all our decisions by 100% consensus – working in committees and hanging out at social events for almost four years. I feel close to many of our members. But we haven’t lived together yet. Will it meet my needs for a balance of privacy and community? Will all the benefits of living in community outweigh the serenity of my current home?

If you know anyone who might be interested in my place, please let them know. I’m leaving it furnished because very little of my furniture will fit my new home. Here are some of the details:

Spacious 800+ sq. ft, light-filled, eighth-floor apartment with sweeping southwest ocean views from the large balcony and every window in the suite. Perfect for one person or a couple.Features:
• Kitchen: Stove, fridge and microwave. Dishes, pots and utensils
• Bedroom: Bed, dresser, desk and chair. Pillows, sheets and down duvet
• Living room: Leather sofa, coffee table, easy chair, bookcase, bookshelf stereo
• Dining room: table and four chairs
• Bathroom: Tub/shower combo

• Very quiet concrete building on a quiet, leafy street
• Underground parking for one vehicle
• $1,490 a month, $745 security deposit required. Hydro, heat & hot water included
• No TV. Wifi not included – arrange your own service
• No pets
• No smoking
• One block to buses

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I am not God’s gift to photography, but all my working life I’ve used my camera to supplement my writing. Today was a great chance to use those basic shooting skills. As part of the communications committee at Or Shalom, my Jewish spiritual community, I’m helping develop a series of promotional posters we’re calling “Jewish With Feeling.”

This afternoon, I photographed our Rabbi Hannah Dresner, in the foreground of the photo above, leading several members of the congregation in singing a niggun, a wordless melody. The idea was to capture the joyful spirit of our Shabbat prayer services where almost everything is sung.

I remember reading a primer on Judaism that said in North America very few Jews know the meaning of the Hebrew words they’re singing but find spiritual connection simply by singing them in community.

What helps make Or Shalom services compelling for me is that they are largely led by the members. I love that spirit of participation and the variety it brings to Shabbat mornings. The next time I’m leading will be Feb. 13.

This coming Saturday will be a mini-Shabbaton with Or Shalom’s co-founders Rabbis Daniel and Hanna Tiferet Siegel. They’re both teaching the next day at Limmud Vancouver, and Hanna Tiferet will join us that evening to sing at Chanting & Chocolate.

Also this afternoon, I photographed our Bnei Mitzvah class who are young students preparing for their Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Today’s theme was the environment. While I was there, the students were learning about bees and looked very engaged in the topic.

• • • • • •

A moving experience

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about my new sofa, I’d like to suggest MCP Services for your moving needs. Amir and Murad did a great job for a minimal cost. They also do cleaning and painting. Contact Amir through their Craigslist ad.

 

 

I whined in an earlier post about how little natural light I will have in my new home at Vancouver Cohousing. I’ve been particularly unhappy with the prospect of always needing to use electric lighting to be able to read in my living room.

Then a week ago I was inspired by Anna, who has the same layout as my apartment across the courtyard. She’s going to use the bedroom – the brightest room – as her living room. But Anna’s plan to use the tiny storage room for her bed did not appeal to me.

I want to use my bedroom as both a bedroom and living room and last weekend started researching wall beds and sofa beds. My space doesn’t work for a wall bed. I found two manufacturers of high-end sofa beds and zeroed in on American Leather Comfort Sleepers.

Last Sunday, I went to Industrial Revolution on Granville Street and tried one of their floor models of a Comfort Sleeper. It’s very comfortable and designed to be a bed that can be used every night. Instead of saggy springs, there’s a sturdy hardwood platform, and instead of a mattress with coils it’s high-density foam.

The price for a fabric sofa was $4,000, and for leather well above $5,000. I wanted leather, looking ahead to visits from grandchildren with sticky fingers and spilled foods. But it was way out of my price range.

Later that day, I searched Craigslist for “American Leather sofa” and was surprised to see a gorgeous, new-looking Comfort Sleeper in off-white leather for $1,400. It had just been posted that day. Turns out it’s a 2010 model that had hardly been used by the owner, who has been transferred to San Francisco and needed to sell his stuff.

I negotiated the price down to $1,300 and today took delivery of the sofa, which has pride of place in my current living room until I move into cohousing next month. I’m celebrating the beauty of the form and function, and the beauty of the deal.

American Leather photo of a Comfort Sleeper as a bed that can be used every night.

 

(Alert: not for vegetarians) This morning while I was playing tennis at the University of B.C., my crock pot was bubbling away, slowly cooking a favourite winter comfort food: 18-bean soup with organic beef bones.

What’s most comforting is not the beans but the bones – the marrow, to be exact. My mom made soups with beef bones and we all prized the marrow, the fatty, jello-like stuff in the core of the bones that we called “mock”. Just like those days, for my Shabbat dinner tonight I scooped out the marrow, spread it on bread and added salt. Delicious.

Today while preparing this post, I googled bone marrow and was surprised to find there may be health benefits. A University of Michigan-led study shows that the fat tissue in bone marrow is a significant source of the hormone adiponectin, which helps maintain insulin sensitivity, break down fat, and has been linked to decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity-associated cancers.

What a bonus. But that’s not what attracts me to my comfort foods. One other has the same key ingredient as bone marrow – fat. For several years, when a close family member came to the end of a visit and I saw her off at the airport, I went straight to the Yaohan Centre in Richmond for a serving of Chinese barbecued duck. Very soothing. There are Chinese meat shops in my Vancouver Cohousing neighbourhood, so I can see more duck in my future.

Other fowl comfort foods include chicken soup with matza balls, and the very salty roast chickens from Safeway.

As a carboholic, I also find comfort in bread, to the point that I never buy loaves of bread, except when there’s company for Shabbat. Leave me alone with a loaf, and it quickly disappears. Same with poppy seed squares, ice cream and peanut butter by the spoonful.

The Huffington Post lists the 25 best comfort foods. What are your most soothing foods?

 

CLUB 69: Charlotte Rampling is so wrong

I’ve always had a thing for British actor Charlotte Rampling. But the fellow member of Club 69 (born Feb. 5, 1946) lost my admiration today. The Oscar nominee for best actress for “45 Years” said the campaign to boycott this year’s Academy Awards because the nominees are all white is “racist to white people.” She’s stuck in the social attitudes of a very different era. “One can never really know, but perhaps the black actors did not deserve to make the final list,” she said.

 

 

At my dentist’s I was remembering asking him more than four years ago to do a holistic review of my mouth. My idea was to take care of everything that needed work then or within a few years s0 I could pay for it out of my earnings from editing contracts and not wait until I was older and forced to take it out of savings.

Dr. Bill Rosebush examined every tooth. The verdict included four implants. Yikes, that’s about $5,000 a tooth. My gold-plated group dental insurance was chopped the moment I walked out of The Province at the end of 2006. I can honestly say that’s what I miss most about working there.

Bill sent me to an oral surgeon for the implants, which required extractions. Later the surgeon inserted posts and healing abutments. When I discussed with Bill about getting the crowns made, he said my situation was rather complex and arranged for me to get into the Prosthodontic Clinic at the University of B.C., where he teaches.

One advantage of getting into the clinic is that while the lab costs are about the same as private care, the work is done by graduate dentists in a three-year residency for their specialization. They charge general dentistry rates, instead of specialist rates. I saved about $2,000 per implant. Extractions cost me less than $100, compared with $400 at the oral surgeon.

And I did need more extractions because I ended up with eight implants in total and a bridge. The extractions at UBC were not only cheaper but much less painful. The oral surgeon used a short-acting anesthetic and yanked out the teeth while I was briefly out cold. I was in agony after the freezing wore off. At UBC, the residents teased the teeth out of their ligaments. I felt almost no pain after; steroids for a few days helped.

The most painful part of going to the university clinic is the time it has taken. It’s now almost three and a half years since I first went there, and the work is finally over except for a little tweaking. I graduated a couple prosthodontic and periodontic residents during that time. They all took excellent care of me and the clinic will follow up on me for several years.

Four years ago I began paying for extended health coverage, including a limited range of dental work, such as fillings and cleanings. I’m about to cancel the dental coverage because it is so limited and is really prepaid dental care rather than insurance.

Why don’t we have dental care covered with our universal health care in Canada? Many European countries do it. In 2014, a blue-ribbon panel released a report called “Improving Access to Oral Health Care for Vulnerable People Living in Canada.” As the Globe & Mail reported, “it said that publicly funded dental care programs need to be broader and more coherent and provide essential care to those most in need, including children in low-income families, seniors living in institutional care, people with disabilities, the homeless, refugees and immigrants, aboriginal peoples, and those on social assistance.”

 

Did you miss me? Tuesday night I took my buddy Roni Rachmani out for dinner to celebrate his recent birthday and we caught a late screening of an excellent movie, “Concussion“. By the time I got home, it was almost 1 a.m. and I didn’t have the energy to blog, which takes me about two hours a day.

The movie stars Will Smith as Dr. Bennett Omalu, a Nigerian pathologist working in Pittsburgh who discovers the sometimes fatal damage caused by concussions in football. It follows his courageous campaign over several years to force the National Football League to finally admit that as many as 28 percent of league players were suffering brain damage.

The movie is all about shining a light in dark places. Which is what we used to say journalism was all about. The principle still exists in some pockets, such as Vancouver’s online The Tyee. But in the daily newspaper world, corporate concentration and desperate cost-cutting are relentlessly silencing voices.

Yesterday’s cutbacks at Postmedia  across Canada were a major topic of conversation as we ate Tuesday night. Roni writes from Vancouver for the major Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, and was a reporter in Tel Aviv on the media before immigrating here. I spent more than 30 years at daily papers, including The Vancouver Sun, The Toronto Star and The Province, where I took early retirement in 2006. I’m glad I got out when I did. The main image in today’s post is from a fabulous fake front page full of inside jokes that colleagues presented to me on my last day.

Roni and I see newspapers dying a slow death everywhere. Many papers are reducing the number of days they produce print editions and flailing in their attempts to make digital news gathering profitable.

When I was at The Province, people in the newsroom were constantly speculating about when the paper would be killed off. Tuesday was a big step in that direction with the Sun and Province newsrooms being merged. I got a hint of that when I contacted the human resources department recently about a pension issue and learned the email address is now @sunprovince.com.

There is still good journalism at the Sun and Province but the papers are pale shadows of their former selves. For my news, I subscribe to the Globe & Mail on Friday and Saturday, The Economist weekly magazine, and for the rest I go online and CBC Radio 1. I also try not to miss my old SFU friend Allen Garr’s solid opinion pieces in the Vancouver Courier.

Where do you get your news? Is there life after newspapers?

As an 18-year-old reporter at The Sun, one of my first assignments was to interview Santa Claus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the way to Dances of Universal Peace last night, I stopped at Spicy House Korean Restaurant on Lonsdale in North Vancouver for dinner. I’d never been there before but when I saw my favourite Korean dish, bibimbab, posted on the menu outside, I had to go in.

At Spicy House, bibimbab is cooked soybean sprouts, carrots, spinach, zucchini, a small slice of beef and a fried egg on a bed of rice served sizzling hot in a stone bowl. In South Korea, I was usually served more mountain vegetables, like fern fiddleheads. As with every Korean meal, mine last night was served with several side dishes – such as potatoes simmered in a savoury sauce, and kimchi, which is spicy, pickled Chinese cabbage.

Kimchi is a Korean staple, eaten with most every meal. For me it is also a not-exactly- kosher, guilty pleasure in restaurants, one that is at odds with my dietary practice. When I shop for kimchi in Asian markets, I make sure to check the ingredients and buy it without the usual tiny salted shrimp. But when I eat out, I can be pretty sure they’re there.

I call my dietary practice Eco Kosher Lite. It’s “eco” because it’s more important that my food be organic or local or both than have an official kosher stamp of approval that its production has been supervised by a kosher authority. It’s “kosher”, because I don’t eat pork or shellfish and I don’t eat meat and dairy in the same meal. That last point comes from a biblical proscription against “boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.” That has come down through the ages to mean no cheeseburgers in today’s world. And it’s “lite” because I don’t go crazy with separate sets of dishes for dairy foods and meat foods, and other strict practices.

I didn’t grow up eating this way. We ate everything in my secular home. My favourite sandwich to take to school was – gross-out alert – bacon and peanut butter. Once when my family went out to eat with my orthodox grandfather, my zaida Abraham Shuer, I ordered a Crab Louis and my mother kicked me under the table.

In 1997, at a Jewish spiritual retreat, I decided to get more serious about my Judaism and adopted my current dietary practice. It makes me more conscious of what I’m putting in my body, and I feel I’m connecting across the generations with my zaida.

Club 69 update

Today I’m welcoming my friend Jack Resels to Club 69, show here with his lifemate Soorya, married since 1969. (Hey, that’s another 69.) They live in Belterra, the new cohousing community on Bowen Island.

And I’m lamenting the passing of English actor Alan Rickman, who played so many great character roles, including Prof. Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies. He was born on Feb. 21, 1946, and died on Jan. 14 reportedly of pancreatic cancer, after only being diagnosed a few months ago.

Fergus kept a steady beat on the drum as Jutta strummed her guitar and a dozen of us sang and whirled around the room. Sometimes we held hands moving in a circle, sometimes we circled around a partner offering blessings, and we chanted in Arabic, Sanskrit, Hebrew and English.

It’s an interspiritual practice called Dances of Universal Peace, introduced in the 1960s in California by Jewish-born Samuel L. Lewis  (1896-1971), who was recognized as both a Zen master and a Sufi master teacher. The Dances have since spread around the world.

Last night, the Dances were held in the former-church-now-studio next to Presentation House Theatre in North Vancouver, led by Jutta, Allaudin and Steve. The music, movements and high ceilings elevated our spirits.

Dance has been a thin thread in my life, occasionally woven into some of the decades. As a nerdy teen I danced in a Viennese waltz team at junior high, was part of a square dance team, and was known as “Spider” during the height of the Twist for the crazy way I moved my legs.

At 19 as a reporter for The Vancouver Sun, I sweated through a 27-hour dance marathon, from 9 p.m. on a Friday night until midnight Saturday. We were allowed five-minute bathroom breaks each hour, which I often used to phone in updates to my story to the newsroom.

A year later I met and fell in love with an American named Betsy on a kibbutz in Israel. While she studied contemporary dance at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, I took a few of the classes. Men were scarce but I was no gift to the dance world. This past summer, Betsy and I had a sweet reunion in New York, where she is still a dancer, after not seeing each other for 40 years.

Over the years, I did some spiritual dancing called zhikr with a mystical school, the Arica Institute, and danced at parties and social events. More recently I have performed at sacred dance festivals with Ofira Roll in Vancouver and Courtenay, B.C. I enjoy going to Unity Dances at the Quaker Hall in Vancouver led by Amir O’Loughlin, a local Sufi teacher.

This afternoon, at the end of a Vancouver Cohousing community meeting digesting the latest construction delays, we danced and sang to the classic R&B/soul tune, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” a hit for Marvin Gaye.

Oh baby, there ain’t no mountain high enough,
Ain’t no valley low enough,
Ain’t no river wide enough
To keep me from getting to you babe

That’s me, Vancouver Sun reporter Lorne Mallin, a little worse for wear after a 27-hour dance marathon in 1966.

Performing with Ofira Roll at the 2011 Vancouver Interspiritual Dance Festival.

This morning at Or Shalom, Vancouver’s East Side synagogue, was the Bar Mitzvah of a young man named Devon. As usual during this rite of passage, he helped lead part of the Shabbat morning service and chanted from the Torah in Hebrew. The 14-year-old took on the additional challenge of chanting the Haftorah, in this case a reading from the prophet Jeremiah.

Then Devon delivered his Dvar Torah – his thoughts on the Torah portion of the week – and held the congregation spellbound with the quality of his mind and his command of language. Here I am 69, without half the critical thinking skills of this remarkable kid who is barely a teenager.

This part of the Torah tells the story of the last three of the 10 plagues that befell the Egyptian people and their Pharaoh, who refused to let the Israelite slaves go free. Here are short excerpts from Devon’s presentation:

This week’s Torah portion discusses the final stages of the plagues of Egypt in a way that causes me to question the judgment or teaching of God. In this portion God says, “I have hardened the mind of Pharaoh.” I wonder what the point is of painting one who is already evil as even more exaggeratedly flawed, and what the point is of sacrificing firstborn children and animals all across Egypt just to teach that one guy a lesson.

On first reading, this stupefied me.

But I have come to realize that as sacred myth the Torah is using Pharaoh as a symbol of immorality. And that what is described as consuming all of Egypt, including its crops and animals, symbolizes and makes viscerally real the fallout of slavery.

• • • • • •

Perhaps the disasters expressed by nature in the plagues demonstrate the pervasiveness of consequence.

Maybe the learning is that we cannot contain the evil we unleash. Another teaching is that the presence of good does not, necessarily, offset evil or save us from the consequence of evil action.

On a personal scale, as soon as we accept another human being as a lesser individual we close our minds from learning, we’ve “hardened” our minds as Pharaoh did. As soon as we accept that there is such a thing as ‘human’ and ‘subhuman’ we are falling into the steps of Pharaoh and leading ourselves to peril and who knows how exaggerated the real repercussions will be.

• • • • • •

As I become more and more aware of myself, I slow down, and as I slow down, I have begun to notice the grandeur of nature.

After a while, you start to become more and more amazed by how beautiful our world really is. And I realize that, in those moments when the patterns in the clouds swirl and the distant trees are swayed by a wind we cannot feel, I am, perhaps, as close to God, to our world, as I will ever be.

In such moments, we get a glimpse of the sheer joy of life, and that is almost too much to ever understand. That is what happens when we slow down and appreciate things; life gains newfound meaning. And would we not agree that to appreciate God’s Creation, or whatever caused this universe, is truly a holy thing?

Update on Joel Wambi’s angels

Three angels answered the call to help with the expenses for Joel Wambi, an orphan in Uganda’s Abayudaya Jewish community whose Bar Mitzvah is next weekend. Thank you! I wired the money to Uganda tonight.

Update on daily practice

I let Friday slip by without my daily spiritual practice of chanting, meditation and yoga. But I got back on the horse today. Fifteen out of 16 days ain’t bad for a New Year’s resolution.

If patience is a virtue, then my Vancouver Cohousing community of 45 adults and 16 children is approaching sainthood. The completion date for our 31-unit project has been continually delayed since September and we learned today that we’re pushing into late February instead of the end of this month. Since we broke ground in July 2014 in a tight construction market, it’s been challenging to get good crews for many of the trades.

As a director of our development company, this afternoon I joined two other directors in a conference call with our development manager. He told us issues with completing the siding and landscaping are the main reasons for the latest delay. We moved quickly to communicate by email and phone tree with our members. We’ll learn more at our monthly community meeting on Sunday.

As the email writer, I was hoping people wouldn’t shoot the messenger. So far, the response has been very understanding and typical of this amazing group of people. Since the very beginning in early 2012, we’ve made all of our decisions by 100 percent consensus, which means everyone agrees. We realize that in cohousing what is best for the community takes priority over personal concerns. Our process committee gracefully facilitates our meetings and has helped us navigate some very tough decisions, such as how to handle budget overruns.

After signing up as an associate member of Vancouver Cohousing in June 2012, I attended my first community meeting. Two of the members who stood up to speak that afternoon casually adopted the yoga tree pose – standing on one leg with the other foot pressed against the standing thigh. It takes balance, which for me was symbolic of the goal of a balance of privacy and community in my life. Later, I told members that “You had me at tree pose.”

I jumped right in, getting involved with the marketing and membership committees. I created posters for public meetings and other marketing materials, and came up with the idea for a successful Cohousing Fair that featured keynote speaker Charles Durrett from California, our original architect and the guru of cohousing in North America.

In the membership committee, I hosted many public information sessions at my home where a team of us made presentations to people interested in cohousing. Once any of them signed on as associate members, there was a three- to four-month process where they attended community meetings and social events, worked with a committee, had a financial interview and received an overview of our progress to date. At the end of that process, if they figured Vancouver Cohousing was for them, they asked for full membership. We asked the community for consensus to accept them, and they joined us.

This way we have become a self-selected group of like-minded individuals and families who work together beautifully and want to live a more collaborative and neighbourly lifestyle. We just have to wait a little longer to live together.

A new siding crew takes measurements Thursday at the front of the project where siding isn’t finished. The siding details are quite complicated and time-consuming, typical of many aspects of our project. 

Pouring cement Thursday for curbs at the front entrance, part of the “hard landscape” work still ongoing.

Still no plants in the courtyard planters on Wednesday, part of the “soft landscaping”. (Cam Dore photo)