Wednesday, June 29, 2016
I just learned of Hazel's passing when I ran into Hugh and Doris at a public meeting. I wasn't living in Canada at the time of her death and, when I finally moved back to Halifax in 2010, I tried to contact her because she had given me her address at 5565 Cornwallis Street at some point when I must have run into her sometime in 2008 or previously as I used to come to Halifax quite often. I so wished I had followed up but I left Saint John for the UAE in August of 2008. When I last saw her, she was fighting to save the mature trees on Chebucto Road and had told me she had been arrested. I just looked up the link and see there is a picture of half of Hazel (I mean half of her picture. She was wholly arrested.) being cuffed.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/protesters-arrested-as-tree-felled-on-chebucto-road-1.725864
The last line of the report is "None of them live in the neighbourhood affected by the street widening, police said." I guess we are only supposed to care about what affects our own property. Such is the world that Hazel and many of us have to put up with during the reign of greedy, stupid people, as Stephen Hawking recently deemed them.
At the time of the arrests the police used excessive force. Were they ever reprimanded for their brutality? Doubtless, they live on, ignorant of how people like Hazel Lawrence felt and acted for something she held dear.
http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/the-monumentally-embarrassing-chebucto-road-widening/Content?oid=964051
I never forgot the calligraphy in which she inscribed a chart of, I think it was, the Rules of Good Sportsmanship (but may have been something else). Regardless, it was a series of beautiful, idealistic sensibilities coined in the most articulate evocation that reflected the values of our beloved Annapolis Royal Regional Academy, at least that's how it appears to me in memory. (If anyone remembers this, would they let me know?) She rendered it magnificently and it was framed and hung outside the Gymnasium at our stately neoclassical red brick high school under its own two hundred fifty year old elms.
We played on the high school basketball team together and later I knew her a little when she ran the health food store with her husband in south end Halifax. I related to Hazel when I chatted with her because of her seriousness over things that mattered to her like ecosystems, nature and animals and how she stood up for them. We could really use her now in this struggle to stop the greedy, stupid people who are still running the world (as Stephen Hawking coined them recently) and feeding a sick system of profit over people and the planet.
Hazel was very popular in high school--universally well-liked and she contributed a lot to school life. She had the blessing and curse of being more astutely aware and compassionate than most. It's a tough world for those who care for more than their own backyard.
I remember her with fondness and as the concerned, but always jovial and giving person I knew her to be.
