Episode Seventy-Nine: The Interview-Cooper Lee

In this longer episode Cooper and I discuss the miracle of being there for others. This talented author tells the story of coming upon a car accident and how the magic of strangers coming together can change lives.

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of Bite Sized Blessings.

I'm driving across the United States this week and so right now I'm in Missouri.

I'm doing this episode from my hotel room so you're gonna have to forgive the background noise.

Sounds of kids playing,

Sounds of the hotel air conditioner because it's hot.

This week is so very exciting.

I get to interview a really groovy author,

Cooper Lee Bombardier.

What a name.

Or in French,

Bombardier.

You,

Dear listener,

Can choose the pronunciation you like.

I'm interviewing Cooper for many reasons.

One,

He has written this incredible memoir,

Pass with Care.

It was the finalist for the 2021 Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction.

And Cooper has received so many accolades for this book,

So many,

Including from Berkeley Fiction Review,

Book Riot,

Lambda Literary Review,

And The Rumpus.

The Rumpus said,

A gorgeously rendered response to what one might call the now what question.

After an experience as metamorphic and all-consuming as a gender transition,

What happens next?

Who do we become after that becoming?

Where do we locate meaning?

So the Rumpus asked that question,

Where do we locate meaning?

In this interview,

We get to that,

Or at least one of the places you can locate meaning or create meaning in this world.

It was a really fun interview.

Cooper is so enchanting and funny and intelligent and dynamic.

I really urge everyone to go out and buy Pass with Care.

So now,

The episode,

Episode 79 of Bite-Sized Blessings.

I think once you listen to the episode,

You'll understand just why I'm so in awe of this author.

And I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed the conversation.

And I was living in Portland,

Oregon,

And my partner,

Now wife,

Was living in Vancouver,

BC.

And we were long distance back and forth up the I-5 corridor a bunch,

Seeing each other every few weeks.

And one time I was coming back to the city,

To Portland,

Driving back with just my dog.

And I came upon a pretty nasty car accident on the I-5.

And I saw it was like really torrentially raining.

And there was like one of the section of highway where there was like nothing,

But there were like street lamps.

So I saw these cars kind of pulled under the street lamp and a car flipped over on the median.

I used to work at the Santa Fe Mountain Center.

And one of the activities we would do with clients,

With groups of youth primarily,

But even groups of adults,

Was we'd have people lined up face to face with somebody and just keep asking,

Who are you?

Who are you?

Who are you?

It's like so nerve wracking.

But after a few passes of it,

People start to kind of peel away the superficial,

Right?

And get into things that make them tick or like their core values or something transformational about that has happened in their lives.

So knowing that,

Still feel stumped by the question,

Even though I read your questions over and I was thinking about it.

My first pass at Who Am I?

My name is Cooper.

I am a writer and an artist.

I'm trans.

I'm shockingly middle-aged,

Shocking to myself of just like,

When did that happen?

And I never imagined getting here.

And it's cool.

And also a trip because I really never expected to make it through my twenties for a variety of reasons.

My life has been defined in some way by always feeling in between.

And so that's a piece that I've only come to reckon with maybe in recent years.

And I think part of that is being a trans person.

Part of that is being a queer person.

Part of that is my class background and growing up with working class parents who were literally becoming middle class during my teen years.

And also I've moved around a lot,

Which I think is for me has a lot to do with being a queer person where I grew up in a small town,

Just south of Boston,

But I couldn't wait to get to San Francisco.

I just had this sense of like,

That's where I would find my people.

And I lived in Santa Fe for eight years and I lived in the Northwest and now I'm in Halifax.

So I've bounced around from location to location,

All very beautiful places,

All places where there's a lot of space for queer people to exist,

Where arts are crucial to those places.

Yeah,

I think that's my first pass.

Who am I?

I was going to ask is Bombardier.

I love that name.

Were you born with that name?

That is groovy.

Oh my God.

So it's a family name.

And how did,

Do you know how your family came to acquire it?

Is it,

You know,

I'm just so curious.

Yeah.

On my father's side of the family,

I'm French Canadian.

My great grandma was Acadian.

She was from Nova Scotia.

And there's a farm here where my ancestors go back for like 400 years with a little digression during the expulsion of the Acadians,

Where some of them ended up in Fort Louisburg prison,

Some gaped off the PEI,

Prince Edward Island.

But that farm still exists and I have relatives that live there.

And then my paternal,

The Bombardier name was a French Canadian person from Quebec.

So my father thinks the ancestor from France was from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France and came here and was conscripted or somehow entered the military.

And that likely the early on the name was like,

It's a literal,

Like somebody who blows bombs out of cannons or like drops them out of airplanes.

Right.

But the name has been around longer than airplanes have existed.

Yeah.

It's quite a name.

I think about it a lot in terms of how,

You know,

I mean,

It was something I got teased about a lot as a child,

But I also grew up with tons of relatives around me.

So there were a lot of us around,

You know,

I wasn't like the only Bombardier.

I grew up in Massachusetts and they said Bombardier.

And so here in Canada,

People are like Bombardier and I'm like,

Sure.

I was going to say,

I completely mispronounced it.

It sounds very,

Very sophisticated when you say Bombardier.

I was going by Bombardier for most of my life,

But since I've been in Canada,

I'm like,

People want to say Bombardier.

They seem to know what they're saying.

Yeah.

Do you feel like you're kind of like living into the family name by dropping truth bombs with your writing?

Oh,

That's an interesting question.

I mean,

They're definitely bombs with the writing,

Right?

Because the culture that I grew up in is so centered around silence.

And if you spent time around like my extended family or people where I grew up,

It's like people are always talking,

Very talkative,

Very gregarious,

But like also there's all these things that are kept silent that are not addressed,

That are not faced.

And that is challenging,

Right?

And so I think even if I was to talk only about the most glowing,

Beautiful moments of life,

It still really kind of goes against the culture I grew up in to talk about your business with strangers.

And so kind of having a memoirist in the family is a little bit of a cringy nightmare for me.

So I was raised Catholic.

My dad's the oldest of nine children.

My great grandmother who grew up here in Margaree Forks,

She came to the States as a teen with her sister to clean houses for wealthy families.

And her brother stayed on the farm and had 16 children and adopted a 17th.

So like,

You know,

You need hands on the farm.

So I come from pretty big families on both sides.

Well,

My mother was Protestant.

And I know that she dealt with a lot of grief from her parents for wanting to marry my father.

I wouldn't say like disowned or whatever,

But they kind of disavowed her around at first around marrying my father because he was Catholic.

And so my experience of religion,

I remember going to St.

Brigid's Church where I received the first few sacraments.

Up until about the age of 12,

I would go and feel kind of swept up in the sense of like God,

Right?

The sense of something outside of myself that was bigger.

And then I remember one day,

Clear as day,

Just like sitting in the pew and having this feeling of like,

I'm being lied to.

I don't belong here.

I'm not welcome here.

And it was super intense.

It was really just like this one day of like,

Nope.

I think for a lot of my life since then,

I thought that that meant conflated this sense of religion with spirituality or the sense of not feeling welcome in one space meant that other spaces of spirituality were foreclosed to me.

I grew up seeing religion sort of wielded against people in my family as a weapon,

As a crowbar,

Right?

As something that seemed other than the purpose of what on the face values of like Catholicism or Christianity are espoused.

I think that contributed a little bit to my feeling of,

I feel lied to.

When you read my book,

You'll see that I talk about spirituality in there somewhat,

But I'm hesitant to put labels on my spirituality,

But it is a little bit of hodgepodge,

Right?

Especially,

I lived in Santa Fe,

You know,

I'd have like my Guadalupe statue and some,

Yoruba botanica candles burning and,

You know,

A feather somebody gave me or that I found while hiking and this sort of sense of like these things all communicate a sense of spirit or a way to contemplate or to communicate.

But the dogmatic part of it all wasn't for me.

So it wasn't very long after the election of Trump and I was living in Portland,

Oregon,

And my partner,

Now wife,

Was living in Vancouver,

BC,

And we were long distance back and forth up the I-5 corridor a bunch,

Seeing each other every few weeks.

And one time I was coming back to the city to Portland,

Driving back with just my dog.

And I came upon a pretty nasty car accident on the I-5.

And I saw it was like really torrentially raining.

And there was like one of the section of highway where there was like nothing,

But there were like street lamps.

So I saw these cars kind of pulled under the street lamp and a car flipped over on the median,

Like basically on the Jersey barrier,

Dividing the two sides completely upside down.

And I just pulled over and ran across the highway and was like banging on the door,

Trying to get the doors open.

But what happened in this moment was that this guy ran over and he and I were like pounding on the doors,

Trying to get it open.

The airbags were blown up inside the car.

So it was like completely upside down.

We couldn't see anybody.

We couldn't hear anybody.

And through this whole experience,

You know,

The other people who were pulled over by the side of the road,

This one guy came over,

White dude,

The orange construction best.

And I was like,

You call 911.

He called 911.

And meanwhile,

This guy who was like this burly Puerto Rican dude,

He came up to about here on me.

He and I were like running around the car trying to get the doors open.

And then he went around the other side and I heard glass smashing and he smashed the passenger front window open with his fist,

With his bare hand.

And then there was like suddenly these feet and we pulled this woman out of the vehicle and bare feet,

It's like December,

Bare feet.

We pull her out and then we pull out her husband.

And they were two Chinese people,

Somewhat limited English,

Both barefoot.

I was like,

These people were chill.

Like they were just chilling,

Driving their car along,

You know,

Not expecting this.

And they were like without a scratch.

They were totally shaken up.

And then the construction guy was like,

We got to get these people out of the middle of the road.

I scooped the guy up.

I just was like,

Woo,

Because he was barefoot and there's glass and shit all over the highway.

So I like ran across the highway with him.

And then construction guy who scooped up the woman ran across the highway with her.

And then the other people who had pulled over were like,

Do you want to,

You know,

Like blankets and do you want to come sit in my car and get warm?

And they were so upset about their car.

They were so,

I mean,

Understandably,

Right?

Any one of us,

Like total a car,

It's super stressful,

Super shocking.

The dude who had smashed the window open with his fist was like,

That's just stuff.

That's just stuff.

Don't worry about that.

And then I went to my truck and pulled out a flashlight and all these like semis were driving by like super slow.

Everybody just,

It was like everything kind of came to this slow movement.

And my flashlight was almost dead.

I thought it would be like flagging,

You know,

To get people to go by slowly or whatever.

And the guy walks up to me and he says,

He puts his hands on my shoulders and he's like,

God was talking to you tonight.

And I was like,

I don't know.

I don't know.

And he's like,

No,

God was talking to you tonight and you listened.

And then he held up his hand and that,

And I saw his knuckles were bloody.

And that's when I realized he had smashed the window to get the people out of the car.

And it was just like,

So it was such a beautiful moment,

Right?

Where it was this kind of sense of,

I live in Portland,

A place where,

You know,

It's not big on God necessarily.

And I have these mixed feelings about the notion of God or this idea of God as I was raised with,

Or with which I was raised,

But it did,

When he said that,

Felt true in this way,

This really core way of feeling like I just didn't even think about stopping.

I didn't even think about pulling over.

I just was like,

Boom,

Side of the road,

Across the highway,

Trying to help.

And that sort of sense of,

I think,

Feeling like part of something bigger than yourself is like that sense of God.

For me,

That's what I felt.

That's what he was talking about.

And then he gave me this big hug and I gave him a big hug.

And then we were like crying on the side of the highway and like,

Everybody was totally fine.

Everybody was totally fine.

But it was this moment where I felt that to me was this core goodness of people,

Just all these random folks.

We just kind of came together and acted to help.

The sort of divisiveness that I had been feeling around the election,

Around leading up to the election and since the election,

I think didn't feel relevant in that moment.

You know,

I'm listening to your story.

And one of the things I'm thinking of is I know I-5 and it is a crazy pants highway.

It is crazy.

So the entire time you're telling your story,

I'm thinking,

Oh my God,

You're like running across I-5.

I'm thinking,

Oh my God,

Because people drive insane on that highway.

So I'm so glad you included that the,

And plus it's torrentially raining,

Which already reduces visibility.

So then I'm thinking about you running across the highway and I'm like,

It's a miracle you survived just running across that highway.

But I think also,

I mean,

Thank goodness,

The traffic slowed down,

But it's interesting,

Right?

It's like a group of strangers had this appointment to help these people and they all showed up.

And in those moments of crisis when things are,

Everything's really acute and you couldn't see in the car.

You didn't know what was going on because of the airbags and stuff.

Everyone did what they had to,

To resolve the situation and make sure people were safe.

And it's too bad.

You're right.

Acts of kindness.

Yes.

It's too bad that it takes a crisis or something catastrophic happening to bring people together,

Kind of wash away some of the judgment and hatred so that people can be there for each other.

But I think it also proves that we can be there for each other when need be and that all of the,

All of the political or religious,

Or,

I mean,

Who knows all the judgments that we live in every day,

Judging other people,

Those things kind of get washed away.

I guess,

I don't know.

I feel like I'm being very dark.

I'm being very dark.

I tend to kind of skew that way.

I mean,

Despite the,

Despite the quadruple dose of Prozac in recent years.

You know,

One thing I'll talk about is in the mid to late 1990s,

I worked at an AIDS hospice as a cook in San Francisco.

For me,

I think there was part of being there.

My friend Carrie,

We were working on this indie film together and I was like an actor slash doing the titles for the film.

Carrie Campbell was the caterer slash sound guy.

Everybody,

It was like that kind of scene where everybody had like three jobs and we made each other's projects happen.

Through Carrie,

I got this job cooking at Maitri AIDS Hospice,

Which at the time was part of the Harford Street Zen Center in the Castro.

And it was created by a person named Isam Dorsey,

Who was a drag queen,

Was homeless on and off,

Who started this hospice for primarily to give end of life care to people dying of AIDS on the streets.

I loved cooking at this place and I worked as a cook in restaurants for 10 years or something.

I loved cooking at the hospice.

Part of me taking the job,

I think,

Felt like an act of penance in a way.

I had a girlfriend who died of AIDS at the age of 25.

I was 24 and we weren't together at the end.

Things had disintegrated between us a couple years into her illness and we weren't able to stay a couple and it was really hard.

I was also a 21-year-old when she was diagnosed and this was in 1990 when that diagnosis was a death sentence.

It's still hard for me to not think of AIDS that way and I know treatment and prevention and living with AIDS has completely changed in the decades since that time.

But for me,

It's still like that carries that specter of having a positive diagnosis meant a pretty painful and intense death for most people I knew at that time.

I always had this huge sense of remorse and guilt and shame for not being with her up until the very end and feeling that sense of despite how difficult things had gotten between us that I should have been able to transcend that and take care of her till the very end.

I remember there was a resident who was a poet and he started losing his eyesight and over the months that he was losing his eyesight,

He started drawing these self-portraits and so he had them all hanging in his little room.

They were so beautiful and strange and you could see them becoming more abstract as his vision continued to deteriorate.

One day I showed up for work and the volunteer said,

Oh have you gone in to see Peter yet?

Something about the way he said it was like,

What do you mean?

He's like,

Oh you didn't know,

He passed the other day.

Nobody thought to give me a call and be like,

This guy that you talk to every day at work is dead?

I was so frustrated and freaked out.

He was like,

Do you want to go see him?

I was like,

Wait,

He's here?

He's like,

Yeah,

He's in his room.

They've laid him out in Buddhist tradition.

He'll be there,

They've made this body,

He'll be there for three days.

I was just like,

I've never seen a dead body outside of a funeral home or outside of a coffin,

Except one time in the lower heat in my neighborhood.

Cops standing around this dead person on the street and laughing like they were at a donut shop.

I felt terrified,

But then I said,

Okay.

This volunteer was super reassuring.

He was like,

I'll go with you,

I'll be with you.

So we walked into Peter's room and he was just lying there.

They covered him in a white sheet and he had his hands folded over his chest and some flowers in his hands.

The window was open and the window was ruffling the sheet.

He just looked so peaceful.

It was this beautiful moment of just,

I felt like being able to accept that this is where we all end up.

This is the thing that we all have in common,

That we all die.

So much of the Western culture is about trying to avoid that fact.

To just be there and stand there and be quiet and put my hand on him and just say what I had to say.

Such a gift.

I don't know if I have a big flourish to the end of this story,

But working there,

Cooking there and making life a little bit more pleasurable for the people who were there to basically end their lives was a gift.

It felt like such an honor to bring little moments of nourishment and joy and comfort by serving them food,

Making them home-cooked meals and listening to their stories.

Sometimes on holidays,

Taking somebody out for,

Let's get out of here and go to the park and take the wheelchair and let's go.

To just have those moments of sitting with a slow and stigmatized demise.

I think having this sort of normalized sense of death is sad and it's hard and it's unfortunate and absolutely the lives lost to AIDS at that time especially was unnecessary.

But the grace which the hospice showed up with for those deaths was remarkable and beautiful and loving.

That feels pretty miraculous to me.

Well,

And I think dying is such a lonely process,

Right?

Because only you yourself can do it if you're dying.

Some people get up and don't realize that that day they're going to die because they're going to get in a car crash or they're going to get mugged.

But the AIDS patients,

They could see it coming.

I mean,

As you said,

It was a death sentence.

And so imagine just being in that lonely place for so long.

But then you have someone who comes in and is nourishing you,

Whether it's with food or it's with conversation or it's with an appreciation for that person's art or their creations.

I think that's just being present and being willing to walk towards the suffering of this person is astonishing.

But I also think as astonishing as death is such an abstract concept.

People like to talk about it,

But we really have no concept of what that reality looks like.

And for me,

What's fascinating about your story is that Peter was drawing these self-portraits and over the months they were getting more and more abstract.

And it's almost as if he was witnessing the dissolution of self as he was going to cross this threshold that's so mysterious.

And so for me,

That's fascinating and prescient on his part.

The running theme for me is just how people can be there for each other when they're needed.

Both the gentleman who was like the Hulk and broke the window of that car and you as well,

But then also you in that cooking food and just being present and having conversation.

That's the theme for me.

And that's it.

That's a wrap on episode 79 of Bite-Sized Blessings and my really fun interview with the author Cooper Lee.

I'm going to have a link to his book on the website under the episode show notes.

I hope you all get a chance to check it out.

And yes,

This episode was a really good reminder for me that amidst all the divisiveness and the media kind of stirring up the hatred and the animosity for those who don't agree with us,

That in a pinch,

We humans are miraculously,

Usually there for each other.

The trick is to kind of make sure that we're there for each other when there isn't a crisis,

When things aren't going downhill.

And I think we all are there for each other in lots of different ways as we go about our lives,

Giving someone a ride to the hospital,

To the grocery store,

Helping someone with childcare.

There are so many different ways that we can be there for each other.

Daily life,

Helping each other.

That's what this episode is all about.

I need to thank the creators of the music used for this episode,

John Bartman and Sasha End.

For complete attribution,

Please see the Bite-Sized Blessings website at bite-sizedblessings.

Com.

On the website,

You'll find links to music,

Artists,

Creators,

Playlists,

And of course,

Cooper's book.

Hopefully some of those things will lighten and brighten your day and remind you that this world is a good place.

Thank you for listening.

And here's my one request.

Be like Cooper.

Be there for people.

It doesn't have to be a car crash.

It doesn't necessarily have to be volunteer work or cooking at an AIDS hospice,

But just be there for people.

Again,

How can you be of service to those around you?

And that's it.

That's episode 79.

And I'll see you next week for,

Can you believe it,

Episode 80.

We are almost to a hundred.

We're so very close.

20 more episodes,

But next week it's episode 80.

So I'll see you then.

That was my mother's idea when I was like in seventh grade and I had to build a Rube Goldberg contraption.

Do you know what that is?

It's like a nightmare for someone who's not literal thinking and you have to build something that gets a ball from over here,

Down over here.

And I totally just made something that poured chocolate sauce on ice cream because I wanted to sell things.

That's like the best solution,

Right?

Like who cares about a little like ball bearing sliding from point A to point B like let's get the chocolate on the ice cream.

Yes.

Then I sold it.

You did?

Yes.

My teacher was a little appalled,

But I was like,

I want ice cream at this event that I'm forced to go to.

So I just sat there and ate ice cream in some grade.