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FEATURES: SEPTEMBER 2007

1967: The Unlikely Revolutionary — Page 2

By early 1968, my more adventurous girlfriends and I, lacking access to the usual ’60s drugs but looking to participate in the exciting new trends, would get ourselves high by inhaling nail-polish remover. By spring, I discovered that my very sophisticated cousin from West Van smoked pot and that my best friend, who would soon dump me for cooler girlfriends, had taken LSD. I mean, dropped acid. We were soon bombarded with school and church talks about the evils of drugs. After one of those cautionary talks, I noted in my journal that many of the “hippie boys” in attendance were very cute.

It wasn’t the only time I would refer to the new tribe of hippies in the city. They were there, as I scrupulously recorded, when I went to a “swingin’” concert in Richmond and on the beach by Stanley Park. And, of course, everyone knew they lived on Fourth Avenue. One day, my uncle decided that our family drive should include a tour to the nesting grounds of this weird new species. We drove slowly past and gawked out the window at them sitting on the grassy slope near Arbutus, “living like chickens” as my uncle observed in disgust.

There were other parts of the 1967-plus revolution besides drugs and hippies. At the end of the school year, our student-council president gave a fiery speech about the evils of American domination in Canada. Suddenly nationalism, fuelled by Expo 67 in Montreal, was all the rage. I would bemoan the fact that I missed seeing Trudeau on his election-campaign swing through Vancouver, although I did manage to score one of his buttons. In spite of being so deeply apolitical that I couldn’t have told you the name of another elected person in the country, I marked ELECTION!!! in my journal that June 25 when the country went crazy for him.

My mother never really went back to the church, something that had been an intimate part of her life for 50 years.

By the fall, I had gone to an anti-Vietnam War rally downtown, not that I knew anything about the war (except for the school gossip that the good-looking Montague boys could get drafted after they graduated because they were Americans.) Instead, I went in support of my best friend, an unfailingly prim girl with an unlikely crush on the one student activist in our school. So there was I, a protester twice removed, chanting slogans as we walked, trying to fit in.

Oddly, it was my mother who was the more thoughtful, committed revolutionary in those days. Until 1967, she had never missed Sunday mass once. But in the post-’67 years, catching the spirit of the times, she and some of her friends broke away from the church.Like the medieval Cathars of France, they tried to create a Catholicism that seemed to them more genuine, spiritual and organic. They held services in each others’ living rooms and occasionally Jim Roberts, the radical priest of the Lower Mainland, would come out to help perform the service. The response from the church was pretty much the same as it had been to the Cathars 1,000 years earlier, minus the burning people alive bit. The archbishop deeply disapproved and let it be known publicly.

My mother never really went back to the church, something that had been an intimate part of her life for 50 years. Even after the dissident group drifted apart, she had no further use for the Catholicism that had been drummed into her from birth.

Like me, she had been oblivious to the summer of love. She never wore beads, let her hair grow, or travelled to San Francisco. Not for her Jimi Hendrix, Buffalo Springfield, or Country Joe and the Fish. She would not be counted as part of that year of revolutionary change. Yet 1967 marked a dividing point for her, as it did for so many people. She left her old life behind just as decisively as any flower child.