Twenty-Nine Years Ago

Hi Rod,

So Rev. David Harding has died, and you are going to put together some kind of testimonial? Really? Why? How well did you know him?

But first: You ask if I think your email to our late friend Cec’s wife will get to her now that she has moved.

Well, I guess if your email to her hasn’t bounced, Tessa will get it. I’m told she has moved into a small apartment at Frank Davis Place (on North Spruce Road—Cec got her on the waiting list about the same time he learned he had cancer), but I can’t imagine Tessa not being on-line. She is the type to keep active. Did she keep up membership in Three Pines after Cec left off ministering there? Do you know? I wasn’t following that kind of thing back then. I know she never liked being a minister’s wife. In fact, she more or less refused to play that role, didn’t she? But she did like some of the people at Three Pines. Whether that included the two ministers that replaced her husband I do not know.

I left Three Pines a few months after the team of Dave Harding and Henry Quirley arrived. When Rose and my marriage broke down, the tacit agreement was that Rose would get the church. I got the sofa. It was a good sofa and lasted another 15 years. Still, I had led her to that congregation and felt fate had cheated me out of it. I didn’t quite forgive her.

A few months before the split, I did call in Rev Harding during a crisis in Rose’s mental health. You were still working here as a community minister. You may remember.

After going with me to see a kind of black farce on mental illness at the town playhouse, Rose started disassociating. Actually she started disassociating right in the middle of the first act. While I thought the play was aimed at the insensitivity of the normal community, who are oblivious to the attempts at suicide a woman is making literally beneath their noses, Rose was sure it was a big Bedlam haw haw at desperate people. Thirty years later, I’m ready to consider her opinion, but at the time I just wanted to sit and take in the play to the end. But she got really angry at me and walked out of the theatre. I stayed a few minutes longer but then went looking for her. It took me about ten minutes to find her on a side street, crumbled in a snow bank. This was in March, 1980, but during her disassociation my wife thought it was still 1977, that is, before her miscarriage, and before other stresses on the marriage arose. She did not remember those events or even having seen the Attenborough play.

Rose’s psychiatrist, Patterson, was out of town. And, the afternoon after the play, I had some kind of exam on my schedule at Faculty. A student that year, returning to university at the late age of thirty-five, I was busy becoming a school teacher.

I dared not leave Rose alone, but I was desperate to find someone who would spell me off so that I could get to the exam. In the late morning, I phoned Dave at Augustine. He came over directly. We were living in an old but solid block on Henley, paid $165 a month, had hard wood floors.

I got to my exam and, while Dave was with Rose, the past returned to her.

Oh, well! Rose was going to leave our marriage anyway! Her second marriage seems still going. She lives in Atlanta, her “new” husband’s town. You can search on-line under her married name—Rose Mordman--and find some of her photographs and thoughts on art, especially on “negative space.”

But you can’t expect me to think well of Dave Harding. It wouldn’t be human.

Later I became friends with 2 other women who (along with Rose) also considered themselves his victims. One said she lodged a complaint with Quirley, but he wasn’t interested in pursuing it. I remember Dave calling his fellow team member, Rev. Quirley, “an innocent puppy, ready to please everybody, his tail wagging for one and all, not my style at all.”

Later, Cec asked me why I didn’t pursue the bum on behalf of the 3 women.

But I was too far from the system by the time I got my information (it was 1985 already) and ... I forget my other excuses...

Not my church, I guess.

And 2 of the 3 women had been asking for it, which made it their business, right?

(The third said she got a real yucky feeling from Dave’s advances & left the church.)

I didn’t feel on high moral ground. Apparently Dave thought sex was a legitimate part of counseling. What do I know?

To me he seems to have been a greasy pig of a person, but that’s an impression based on seeing him maybe three times, when my own life wasn’t in such great shape. He did respond to our call for help quickly enough. That’s true.

You never did give me your responses to A Month of Sundays. It was you that led me to the book, and it is about your profession, Reverend, not mine.

Our new minister, Linda Harcourt, is planning to arrive in late July and start work on August 1.

John