Bart Campbell - The Door is Open: Memoir of a Soup Kitchen Volunteer

THE DOOR IS OPEN

MEMOIR OF A SOUP KITCHEN VOLUNTEER

Bart Campbell

THE DOOR IS OPEN

Copyright 2001 by Bart Campbell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages in reviews. Any request for photocopying or other reprographic copying of any part of this book must be directed in writing to the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (CANCOPY) One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.

Printed and bound in Canada
Cover design: Rayola Graphic Design
Interior photos & cover image: Marina Dodis
2nd Printing: August 2004

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Campbell, Bart.
The door is open
ISBN 1-895636-36-1
1. Campbell, Bart. 2. Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver, B.C.)Biography. 3.
Homeless personsServices forBritish ColumbiaVancouver. 4. Poverty
British ColumbiaVancouver. I. Title
HV4510.V35C34 2001 362.50971133 C00-911580-3

Represented in Canada by the Literary Press Group
Distributed by General Distribution Services

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the B.C. Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for their support of our publishing program.

Anvil Press
278 East First Avenue,
Vancouver, B.C. V5T 1A6 CANADA
www.anvilpress.com

for Pina, Cary, Aaron, and Neil

Writing a book is hard, because you are giving yourself away. But if you love, you want to give yourself. You write as you are impelled to write, about man and his problems, his relation to God and his fellows. You write about yourself because in the big run all mans problems are the same, his human needs of sustenance and love.

Dorothy Day
(from her autobiography, The Long Loneliness)

SELECTED FACTS:

The downtown eastside of Vancouver makes up most of the V6A forward sortation area, which has the lowest median income of all 7000 of Canadas postal prefixes.

Because of their poor financial demography, downtown eastside residents receive almost no junkmail, except for flyers from high-interest money lending companies and cheque cashing stores.

The downtown eastside houses less than 3% of the citys population but was responsible for 17% of all Fire Department responses and 22% of all police calls in 1999.

Half of the unattached elderly in Canada are poor.

Over 70,000 Canadians visit food banks every month.

1 in 5 Canadian children are poor.

Canadian volunteers serve more than one billion hours annually. Their unpaid services are estimated to be worth $13 billion, or about 8% of our nations GDP.

WHEN MY wife and I separated I sought comfort and solace in the usual ways of divorcing menwrapped in the arms of a different woman, and by drinking too much and too oftenbut my depression just got steadily worse. I was waking up in the middle of the night screaming, ringing in my ears, weeping in the hallways, rapid weight loss and night sweats, depressed. My life had become a very scary thing for me and Ive worked around enough busy Hospital Emergency Rooms as a Medical Laboratory Technologist to know that kind of deep depression can be fatal.

And then one afternoon on my way home from work I pulled my bicycle up to the curb at the front of a long bread line I had indifferently commuted by hundreds of times before, and asked a stocky man with a broom if he needed any help. It was as casual as that. It just sort of happened without a plan or a reason, like this book just kind of happenedwhile I was sitting on the steps of a skid row drop-in centre, smoking cigarettes, talking, listening, watching, and writing down what I remembered when I got home.

Writing down my feelings and immediate impressions is a habit I developed during my dizzy childhood to cope with my family making seventeen cross-country moves before I was fourteen years old. Recording my feelings onto paper made them last longer and helped impart context to the whirligig of my childhood which lacked any other sort of geographical or personal connections. The confused, messy scrawlings on scraps of paper stuffed into shoeboxes on the top shelf of my bedroom closet were the word maps that I used to try and understand my life. And Ive never lost that childhood habit of writing something down everyday about the world I am currently living inbecause I know very well that things wont stay the same forever, and if I dont get it all down right away, I might not be able to believe myself later.

The counsellor I sometimes saw during the early, painful days of our separation once asked me why I had chosen that particularly chaotic time in my life to begin volunteering at a skid row charity. I had absolutely no idea how to reply. That unanswerable question irritated me, and I began delving into the notes I had written after my shifts at The Door Is Open, looking for the real reason why I went back there every Monday and Wednesday evening.

But after reading through all the disjointed, out of sequence notes in one sitting, I still hadnt learned why I hung out so often at the drop-in centre. Seemingly, I started every new shift at the drop-in centre expecting something to happen, but then nothing ever did. But I did recognize that in the beginning I kept going back because I was trying to seek peace beyond my loud, angry divorce proceedingsliving the forgiveness of my debt and debtors in a place where I could perform acts of quiet kindness without expectations of gratitude. And that was the best part of it. No one knew me down there, so my good deeds became less complicated, and more than just the atonements I was making to ease my guilty conscience for being such a failure as a husband.

I also saw that I had found more friendship than I had ever known before in that blustery community of alcoholics and homeless people, and that the personal lessons I learned from them have resonated throughout my life and permanently changed me.

To tell a long, complicated story briefly: My wife and I reconciled after seventeen months of legal separation. That was six years (and two more kids) ago, and we still have tender spotsold wounds whose scabs rip off occasionally and bleed a little into our livesbut we find creative new ways to work them out.

Once I overheard my wife describe our surprising reconciliation to a friend by saying: It was like in this recurring dream I have where my family is driving down a bumpy road and we get into a car accident and we are flipping end over end over a cliff in slow-motion and then I blink and suddenly we are all ok and our car has landed right side up on a smooth highway and we just keep rolling happily along. The kids are ok, and everybodys singing Baby-Beluga-in-the-Deep-Blue-Sea at the top of their lungs.

But she was only ducking a difficult question and I know about all the hard things we both went through before we reconciled, and that it probably never would have happened if I hadnt started hanging out at The Door Is Open and let the experience change some of my entrenched outlooks on life, and teach me some thingslike that often the best way to help yourself, is by helping others, and that the more you give of yourself, the more you forget yourself in work or in love, to that extent you will become happy.