Stew & June Daymond

29 June 2022

One of the closest of my boyhood friends called last night to let me know that his father, Stewart Francis Daymond, had died, the day prior, Saturday 25 June 2022.  While it was clear that Stew, as he was known, had done well in building and running a successful business, what was not clear is how he and his wife, June, would use and treat their success.  They were outstanding in both regards but completely exceptional in the latter.

Of interest, in this context, are the layers of meaning I find myself grappling with. Friday, Stew’s last day, during a practicum interview for work as a interning psychotherapist, I arrived a few moments early.  Immediately on entering the building, in the rough-and-ready Corktown area of Hamilton, I could see it hadn’t always been a professional space-for-rent operation—it had bones that carried heavier loads than office furniture.  When I queried the receptionist, she reported that it had been a grain mill, which justified my structural assessment nicely.  But this is scene-setting, not the main event.

The main event is identity-based ontology, for within an hour of arrival I was both heritage architect and psychotherapist and even I wonder how that came to be and how these two identities are to co-exist in time..  And then there was the news about Stew which brings into focus two more identities: the 63-year-old man writing these words, and the anonymous long-haired, jean-jacketed teenager Stew Daymond picked up, in his BMW 2002 Tii at hitchhiker’s corner, in downtown Oakville, circa 1974.   When I got into the car, Mr. Daymond started speaking and I recognized the nasal tone, the rhythm of his speech, and his profile.  He had a thin, black beaten-up cigar in his mouth and an easy way of moving.  I said to him, “You must be Mr. Daymond.”  The cigar almost dropped.  “I go to school with Neil and Al—you have similar voices.” 

The architect and the therapist, above, are now seeking to find a place at the table somewhere between that hitchhiker and this 63-year-old writer.  My old friend, Neil Francis Daymond, asked me, last night, when I updated him on my educational endeavours, “Are you still an architect?”  How do I answer that question?  I answered it thinking in terms of taxonomic professionalism: “No, I haven’t really practiced in about three years.  I relinquished my insurance…”  But the truth, from around the table, is less cut and dried.

From the time I met Neil, his family were having a house built on the lake.  In Grade 9, when we became friends, I could not have cared less about a construction site.  So I declined his requests to visit the house rising out of that hallowed shoreline sand.  By the next year the house was up, so I visited.  And it blew my mind. 

There were magnificent wood and stone surfaces inside and outside of the house.  There were huge sheets of unencumbered glass between the living room and the glistening lake, and there were contemporary abstract oil paintings, as tall as me, suspended on the walls.  And Neil’s dear mother, the late June Daymond, was all over what she was witnessing in me.  A trained concert pianist and a shrewd social observer, she sat me down in one of the six Eames shell chairs, arrayed around a white Saarinen pedestal table, overlooking Lake Ontario, and opened a book of Arthur Erickson’s work walking me through it, as she fed us deli sandwiches and orange juice. 

Architecture, probably like most identities, is a way of being and a way of seeing.  It is a cruel profession as it teaches people to see meaning and beauty in so many facets of life and then throws them into a society that has no time for meaning or beauty but would love to have 5,000 square feet on the water for $200/square foot, this year, please. 

As a training psychotherapist, I tend toward humanistic, meaning- and interpretation-based modes of therapy.  And a mode of therapy is no different than a school of design thought—they’re both frameworks of supposition providing ways and means to move forward.  But what or where is that forward destination?  In design, it is the righteous creation of built form artfully suited to its time, place, and function.  In therapy, it is the righteous ordering of psychic space allowing a client to get one step nearer to self-actualization. 

Stew and June Daymond, Neil’s parents, decades before I was aware of it, inhabited an aesthetic and ontological space that framed a way for me—and many, many others—to witness seemingly effortless noblesse oblige in all of its nearly extinct glory. May their memory be for blessing.

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.