Yes, it's all about me

Introduction to the life of Slarty

I am inspired to write this book by a friend who believes it may be useful to people. This is Slarty’s biography, (That’s not his real name) but I will only be recounting the parts of his life that pertain to his quest for enlightenment up to the age of 25, and the start of his life with his wife and children. It is not that his quest ended there. But after that period he had enough information and experience to start building a framework of existence.

Those first twenty five years gave him enough material to think on for the rest of his days, and that’s what he has done. I am not naming names as the people involved in the story are mostly all still alive and Slarty does not wish to invade their privacy. I will not be telling about Slarty’s adolescent sex life, in deference to and out of respect for his wife, though in his imagination that could fill a book by itself, which he tells me he has all but forgotten most of.

But I will be telling you about the 1960s and 70s and the drug culture and hippy culture that made some of us, like Slarty, into a modern day shaman.

I want to add that though there is a lot of discussion about drugs neither I nor Slarty advocates abusing drugs for recreation. What he did was dangerous and could have ended badly for him. For some it did. He lost many friends back then to drugs. But in the life of the shaman drugs are a tool to be used to gain insight and open doors. As Slarty said to me once, they only allow you to look inside. You can’t go in.

So drugs are not an end in and of themselves. They are just tools for those select few who have the will not to fall to them, and the wisdom to know when to stop. They are medicine to be used only when needed, and some drugs should be avoided at all costs. But more on this at the end of the story.

I am going to tell this story in Slarty’s own words as he dictated them to me. So let’s begin.

Yes. It’s all about me.

I was born in Antwerp Belgium in 1955. I don’t remember much about my birth expect for having the feeling of: Oh no. Not this again. When I say I remember that feeling, what I mean is that somewhere along the line in my life that became a memory. Did I dream it? Did I actually experience it? Probably not. I think I started seeing it appear masquerading as a memory when I was well in to my teens. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

The next memory I have is of telling my mother that she was the best mother in the world, because my previous mother had fed me nothing but spiders and flies. I can corroborate this story because my mother has been telling it to me ever since I can remember. I was around two years old.

The picture I have in my head which is associated with that memory is of looking down from the ceiling into a room completely made of pine. The walls and floors were pine, and so was the kitchen table and chairs. I think that image started appearing around the same time my first memory started to appear.

I had a charmed life as a small child. I always felt safe and warm and loved. I had no idea what the dynamics of my parents relationship was till much later. They didn’t drink and if they did take a drink at special occasions they did not get drunk. They didn’t do any drugs and never had violent arguments. If they had an argument at all it was more of a disagreement. My mother soon smoothed things over. She could smooth anything over. I soon started using that trait in her to my advantage.

I do have many snippets of early memories like being in my mother’s arms and being given a banana only to have it taken from me. Not sure what that was about and neither is my mother. But we tracked the incident down to a conversation my mother had with her sister in law. It was just after finding out she was leaving my uncle because she had discovered she was bisexual and wanted a female lover. Why she wouldn’t let me have the banana is still a mystery.

My point being, of course, my early childhood was quite mundane.

My mother was all love. I could do no wrong in her eyes and she always protected me. She truly was and still is the best mother in the world. I hope many other people can say exactly the same about theirs. I know many can’t.

My father on the other hand was just: the guy who lived with us, until I was around 5 years old. I knew I called him papa but what that really meant didn’t dawn on me till then. He was friendly with me at times and made attempts to connect with me in his own way but his other side always made me wary of him and a bit afraid. He yelled at me often. He spanked me now and then but it was a mock spanking. I felt no pain from it, and it was usually after I had done something like throwing a brush at the TV after having been warned several times not to. He scared the hell out of me but I still pushed the limits when I felt up to it.

But I never really got hit by him in my early years. In fact there was only once in my life that he hit me and that I really knew it. He asked me why I didn’t have home work. He made a remark about the quality of education the school was giving me. I said the one thing that he didn’t want to hear. How would you know? You only had a grade 6 education. I deserved that slap in the face and I knew it. I wasn’t even sorry he did it.

What I did not know as a small child was that my mother had decided that I was hers. My father had rights, of course, but he was forbidden to discipline me beyond a certain point. If he threatened me she stepped in and he backed off. I didn’t get the strap in school because my mother had given me instructions to advise the teacher or vice principal to contact her before laying a finger on me. I only had to use that get out of jail free card twice. It worked flawlessly both times.

We weren’t rich by any means. My grandfather on my mother’s side had owned a small castle and most of the land belonging to a small city in Belgium before the war. Unfortunately he lost some of it during the war and the rest in the aftermath. That’s a book all on its own so I won’t necessarily go farther into it here. My grandfather was a bit of an idol when I was growing up because he was a well educated man and of high intelligence even without a lot of formal scholastic education. His family had been patrons of the church for generations and he was a religious man.

My grandmother on the other hand came from a family of socialists and atheists. She converted to Catholicism when she married my grandfather. She was a stoic woman in her youth, in the real sense of the word. I didn’t know her very well as she didn’t take a great interest in her grandchildren. She had done her bit and it was very nice they were there. She loved us all. But from a distance. From the time she was 70 years old she started to pray all day long. Her mouth was always moving in silent prayer. But when my mother asked her if she now believed so completely in god, knowing that though they were all brought up stanch Catholics that her mother had never professed a great belief, my grandmother’s reply was: No. I don’t know.

My grandfather on my father’s side died when my father was 12. He died of TB in a gutter with his dog. A place they both spent many nights together, my grandfather too drunk either to get home or too drunk to want to go home. He had learned his lesson after he was greeted at the door by a frying pan on the back of the head.

After his father died my father’s mother sent him to an orphanage because he was too unruly and she couldn’t handle him. He was mistreated there, beaten and underfed. He felt abandoned. I only met my grandmother once when my father paid to have her fly to Canada. She laughed when she told us that for years after he left the orphanage he would hide a potato under his pillow.

She finally did get him out of the orphanage when he was 15 and promptly took him around to different trades so he could start an apprenticeship. He wanted to be a welder but none of the master welders in town were taking on new boys. So he became a plumber. That’s just the way it was done in those days. He gave his pay to his mother every week and was given a small allowance.

I didn’t like my grandmother much. She was a rough person much like my father; quick to change moods and easy to cross. She is the one who put me off soup. When she came to visit, my mother got ill for the first time. I wouldn’t find out why till much later. But my grandmother made soup that was supposed to last a week. It was in a very large pot that was always on the stove and reheated every night for supper. It was easier than cooking different meals every night I suppose. My father made a good living so there was no financial reason for it. It had a full inch and a half of fat on the top, which would disappear when it was heated. I did not eat soup after that experience until I was in my later teens. It is still never the first thing on my mind when I think of food, but at least the thought of it doesn’t make me sick anymore.

My grandmother ran a cafe and tavern in Belgium with my father’s sister till the day she died. I never saw her again after that first visit.

When I was 18 months old my parents immigrated to Canada. My father had wanted to go to South Africa but changed his mind when he heard there was a call in Europe for plumbers to come to Canada. They struggled for the first few years they were here. But even when they were eating nothing but bread and jam, I was always well fed.

After my father learned English and got through the union idiosyncrasies of the day, he started doing well for himself. The strangest idiosyncrasy of all being that you can’t get a job unless you are in the union, and you can’t get in the union unless you have a job.

We were middle class so to speak. We always lived in a home my parents bought; and we always lived in nice neighbourhoods. So what was my problem? Well I didn’t have one until I was around 6 years old.

Like I said, my mother was raised Catholic so she thought I should be raised Catholic as well. My father stayed in the car