Over the past few years, and ever since Jim Green lost his bid for mayor of Vancouver, I have been in regular if not frequent touch with him. It has ceased to surprise me as to where he would be when he picked up his cell phone: He was just as likely to be on Haida Gwaii working on a First Nation development project as he would be shooting pool at the Yale.
What I never expected was to find Jim Green, the man with his signature pork pie hat and his inexplicable habit of wearing both a belt and suspenders to hold up his pants, in the subject line of an email that crossed my screen last week: Jim Green is dying.
The grim but simple message from the mayors office read: As you may have heard Jim has been quietly battling cancer over the past while. The cancer is spreading and Jim is spending all of his time with his family and working on various exciting projects. Coun. Geoff Meggs would be the liaison for information about Green.
We may indeed be the only species on the planet aware of our own mortality, but we generally remain in denial of the fact.
Jim Green has lived large ever since he first appeared on the public landscape here several decades ago. He was one of many American draft dodgers fleeing north to avoid serving in the Vietnam War. He threw himself into the causes that define the Downtown Eastside with all the passion he possessed.
He inherited the mantle of an earlier generation of warriors in that cause: Bruce Eriksen, Libby Davies and Jean Swanson, the founders of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association (DERA).
Somewhere along the line he developed an academic interest in anthropology, his skills as a development consultant around the issue of affordable and social housing and his passion for opera, which he introduced to the Downtown Eastside by way of performances in Blood Alley.
Most people, even those only vaguely familiar with Green, will be able to list his great victories including his third and finally successful attempt at getting his mitts on the abandoned Woodwards building. Its now a complex in the heart of the Downtown Eastside where market and social housing, and a venue for the arts and education have been woven into an exquisite and engaging tapestry.
Prior to his Woodwards success, he was also able to pursue his goals, as Eriksen and Davies did before him, by successfully running for council. And here he made history, too, as part of the first COPE administration the city had ever seen.
But his defeats were certainly as great and as well known as his victories. There were his two unsuccessful runs as mayor, one against Gordon Campbell and the second against Sam Sullivan; a fight he lost by a razor-thin edge caused at least in part by confusion over a candidate on the ballot named James Green.
His attempt at building a community bank, the Four Corners Bank at Hastings and Main, designed to serve the needs of that neighbourhood would fail. DERA without Green would collapse for lack of leadership only to be replaced by an even more dynamic organization that Green had a hand in creating while still at DERA: The Portland Hotel Society. That organization now runs Pigeon Park Savings, a more modest version of Greens banking project.
Lesser folks would have stood down and sought a more placid, private life when facing any one of the disappointments Green has encountered. But he carried on, a romantic with a definite pragmatic streak. When he managed to leverage the prospects of a Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Winter Olympics into a number of benefits for Downtown Eastside residents he said, I would walk hand in hand to the bridge with the devil if it gets what we need done.
It was the poet Robert Browning who wrote: A mans reach should exceed his grasp or what is a heaven for.
It is in that heaven where we should expect to find Jim Green.
