CANADA COURIER: A rose by another name (09/21/97)

CANADA COURIER

by Christopher Guly

A rose by another name

In God's garden, Michael Strocen Kish was an exotic flower. Perhaps too exotic for some tastes.

Throughout his 45 years of life, Mr. Kish remained on the fringe while nurturing the lifeblood of the Ukrainian Canadian community. Often flamboyant in appearance, he nurtured through his many gifts.

Mr. Kish was a gifted florist. His eye for detail, color and beauty was revealed in the plethora of floral arrangements he made for churches, weddings, birthdays, anniversaries and gifts. The impact his flowers made was so strong that his name, in some circles, became synonymous with his work.

Mr. Kish was also a man deeply committed to his culture and religion. When the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church in his hometown of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba - about 53 miles west of Winnipeg - was going to be razed for a new building, Mr. Kish scrambled to remove some of the church's most precious religious artifacts and paintings.

Some ended up in his family's grocery store in town. Others were given to people who, like Mr. Kish, would cherish them.

The son of the late, great choir conductor and cantor, Marko Kish, Mr. Kish had his ethnic sensibilities entrenched in him at an early age.

Marko Kish, who, with his wife, Lillian, had two other children, was a strong and proud man. I remember the man with the booming baritone voice when I was a child growing up in Winnipeg. Marko Kish had stayed in my maternal grandparent's home when he first arrived in Canada. The elder Kish had an intoxicating way of instilling his own Ukrainian pride in others.

Shortly after Marko Kish died about a decade ago, Michael gave me a framed color painting of Taras Shevchenko - one of his father's cherished keepsakes. It bears Shevchenko's message on the importance of learning, reading and thinking.

The print hangs on my office wall today. A more important point, perhaps, is that Michael recognized the connection I made with his dad - a trait that signals another of Michael Kish's gifts.

Whether it was a priest's anniversary of ordination or a holy day on the religious calendar, Mr. Kish never failed to find the right literary passage, which he often read aloud before a gathering, or the right floral display to adorn a space.

Often, he was dismissed as a dandy. On the surface, the reaction was somewhat understandable.

I can remember Mr. Kish's fondness for blue velvet leisure suits and big blue felt bow ties in the disco-era 1970s. They always stood out, much like the silk scarves he would throw around his neck in later years. Michael Kish was the Elton John of the Ukrainian Canadian community, Oscar Wilde in Portage la Prairie.

More recently, Mr. Kish toned down his wardrobe during his recent and long bout with leukemia, which claimed his life in Winnipeg on August 13.

But to look at Mr. Kish simply by his physical appearance would do him injustice. Like a fragrant flower, there is a lingering scent to Mr. Kish's impact on the Manitoba community that extends beyond his colored petals.

He had a metaphysical spirituality about him - a kind of saintly mysticism not unlike that displayed by John of the Cross or Theresa of Ávila - in which he marked each day of his adult existence with a religious footprint.

In words, this came through in his references to the Church. The last letter I received from Mr. Kish, dated September 24, 1996, began with the line "Feast Day - Our Lady of Ransom."

In actions, his many practical good works revealed the spirituality Mr. Kish always wore like one of his splendid coats. He spent countless hours attending to elderly and infirm friends and relatives. Despite the painfulness of his cancer and just days before his own death, he doted on his ailing mother who has Parkinson's disease. Fittingly, one of his last acts was to rearrange the flowers in her Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate-run Holy Family Nursing Home room in Winnipeg.

But Mr. Kish was no ascetic. He was a bon vivant who enjoyed life and a good laugh through a wonderful, sometimes playfully biting, sense of humor.

Last fall, he sent me a clipping from the National Enquirer, which carried the headline, "Jilted Oksana [Baiul] turns to women to mend her broken heart." As a community outsider, Mr. Kish found some relish in the Ukrainian Olympic figure skater's tabloid brush that questioned her sexual orientation.

Below the photocopied article, Mr. Kish wrote to me, "This will certainly put the Ukrainian community back on its feet!"

Certainly, in his own way, Mr. Kish kept the often-staid community on its toes. But he remained loyal to it.

Michael Kish followed his and Taras Shevchenko's legacies. He taught someone else his culture and cherished it himself.

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