In 2021, I re-encountered the legendary Ira Zbarsky, now in his late 70s. His wiry, 5’6” form remained more physically fit than that of most men a third his age. His un-dyed hair remained mostly black; aside from larger crows’ feet, his face had essentially no wrinkles since our first meeting in 1988; and he continued to do hard agricultural labour most of the year and pick up a little extra coin doing heavy lifting warehouse work; he had the same twinkle in his dark eyes and was still locating himself at the edge of the global crises of his day.
My experience of him, as usual, entailed feeding him a bunch of my food, listening to stories of his recent adventures, organizing a public lecture by him and then being treated to an endless series of communications failures and missed appointments, culminating in his sudden and complete disappearance in the middle of organizing a project together.
If David Lewis a giant, Ira Zbarsky is an elf: seemingly ageless, wise yet flighty, improbably lucky, with a strange affinity to growing things. Like David, Ira saw me as a person with great potential and, after meeting me at the Green Party office in 1988, invited me to come up and stay at his place at Branchflower Co-op, perched on a hill on the outskirts of Sorrento, BC, a community in the Shuswap region of BC.
