Daffodils
This is weird. This is how life happens. First you think something is nothing, like turning a corner or saying hello to someone. Then the hello turns into another meeting, and that turns into coffee, which turns into coffee every week for five years. And you have something that changes your life.
Gary Tapp was waiting for a video recording disc. Gary is the chief operator of the microwave and satellite trucks. I parked near to where he was waiting and said hello.
He said to me, “Why don’t you do a story about daffodils?” He had seen some blooming that morning and thought they were beautiful.
I thanked him but I didn’t think that was a story. That was a picture.
Gary is on the road a great deal of the time. He is always behind the screen whenever you see a live talking head and a reporter. He is always working through the six o’clock show.
And on this day he was waiting in front of the post office, which is a tiny imitation of a post office. Can you imagine that the major mail collecting and sorting plant in British Columbia is now a parking lot for movie crews? If you buy a stamp there, which you still can do, you have to mail your letter in a mailbox. It used to be that you put it into an opening that went to the sorting room but the sorting room is no more.
No one writes letters. Fewer send Christmas cards. If it were not for bills from Hydro and Telus you would get no mail. Okay, you can still count on the god-loving industries that want to you to send them money to help others, the others of whom they send pictures.
I wrote “god-loving” in lower case, because there is no real God in their loving. They want your money. That is the only god most of them love.
On with the story. Gary Tapp was waiting for the arrival of pictures that will fill fifteen seconds of the noon show.
Cameraman Steve Murray was at the Seawall where there was a ceremony for the death of someone who was very nice. He was an esl teacher who loved his students and they loved him. The teacher sat close to them where they could gather around. He taught them not only English but the fun of learning.
Then he was riding his bicycle on the Seawall at the moment when a homeless guy was digging through the garbage of a large bin. How does this happen? How in all the universe does a good fellow on his bike happen to ride by a lost soul who has found a chunk of metal junk and throws it out, violently, over his shoulder, in disgust because it is in the way of him finding an empty soda can?
How can it be that that piece of metal flies out over the bike path, hits the teacher in the head and knocks him off his bike and, even with a helmet on, his head hits the ground hard enough to knock the life out of him?
How does this happen? How does selfish mindlessness take over goodness and kindness? There is no answer, because we couldn’t bear to hear that nothing matters and it is all a question of luck—or lack of it. We desperately want justification for why the good guy was killed by the totally random thoughtlessness of a guy who wasn’t bad, just laced with self-pity and anger, but we are not going to get that justification. Living is not easy.
And then the homeless guy pulled his head out of the bin, unquestionably saw the fellow from the bicycle lying on the ground, and left.
Steve was there at a memorial organized by dozens of the dead fellow’s students and friends. They all wanted to give a speech on how much he meant to them. Steve had to get a picture that could run on the noon news. It was ten-thirty a.m. and speeches don’t make the news, unless it is Donald Trump being an idiot, and thankfully his speeches are short.
One speech followed another. Steve waited. It was 10:45. It doesn’t take long to get pictures on the air, but it does take some time. There is the fact of taking the video, then walking, quickly, back to the truck and driving to the microwave van, taking the disc out of the camera and getting it into the machinery that transmits it. At the other end there is the receiving and cutting it down to the size that will fit into the show and then pushing the right buttons to make it happen.
Time goes by quickly if you are Steve. The brief video is scheduled to run right after noon and Steve is still with the students at eleven and they are still making speeches of how much they loved their teacher. Steve is anxious. Sadness in front of him, expediency in his head.
Time goes by slowly if you are one of the grieving students. He was a friend and you want to take your time speaking in the language he taught you. His students are reflective, but you get in borderline panic if you are holding the camera. You want to capture the sadness and meaning of the moment and you want it on the air. It is after eleven a.m. but you can still do it.
Steve has recorded a few touching farewell comments, but there is nothing to see except the balloons that will be released. Someone in the crowd says they should each write a note to their teacher and attach them to the balloons.
Fifteen minutes later they are still writing.
Panic! Steve was supposed to meet me at eleven. I can wait, but the show can’t and it’s a five-minute walk back to his truck in the parking lot. If he doesn’t leave now none of the talks will make it, much less the release of the balloons that have not yet been released.
There will have to be a phone call to the station. You don’t want to make this phone call because even if you say the event has not happened yet, by the time the message gets relayed it will be “Steve hasn’t got the picture, drop the story,” and whose fault is that? Well, Steve’s, of course.
Then suddenly, the balloons are released and Steve shoots the video of the most touching thing the students can do for their teacher who died in a most undeserving way.
Then he runs, and the students see him running and possibly, just possibly, think that is not a polite way for the media to leave such a solemn event.
He phones, hands-free, while he drives to meet the microwave truck that would have gone to him if he had known it would be so late but he didn’t know and so the truck was set up downtown.
Steve gets there just a few minutes later and hands the disc to Gary in the microwave truck. Gary puts it in a machine and feeds it to the station and presto, at 12:10 the video of the balloons is on the air along with words that tell of the tragedy.
“Daffodils,” Gary says to me in a calm voice.
Steve and I leave to find something, but it will not be daffodils because I don’t know where I could find them and even if I did I wouldn’t know what to say about them.
We go to Queen Elizabeth Park and circle the top and bottom roads. There is nothing.
“Would you mind doing it again?” I ask.
I believe that going over the same road twice is as good as going over a new road. The second time there is a fellow playing basketball by himself. Maybe he is trying out for the school team and is practising because he almost made it last year but did not. This year he would.
“Nope, just killing time,” he said.
Then we see a fellow playing Frisbee golf. That is not the official name—it is really called disc golf—but if I say Frisbee golf then you have a picture of it. It can’t be called Frisbee golf because of copyrights.
By the way, just in case you don’t know where it came from, the Frisbee is one of those most wonderful stories.
In 1937 after a fellow named Fred Morrison and his girlfriend, Lucile, had finished eating a pie on a date on a beach in Los Angeles they began tossing the metal pie plate back and forth. They could spin it and it was fun.
Someone offered them a quarter for the plate. Not bad, they could buy them for a nickel. They went into business and got married.
One hitch: World War ii and he was in the Army Air Force flying propeller-driven fighter planes. Then he was shot down and captured.
While a prisoner of war, in addition to figuring out how to escape and how to survive he thought of his pie plates. He was a pilot and he knew what kept things in the air. With a few modifications he could make t
he plates out of plastic and the spinning would cause the lift that would make them travel much further than a pie plate.
After the war he did just that. He called the first one a Flyin-Saucer and then after more modifications it became a Pluto Platter. He sold them at county fairs for a dollar apiece.
Then came the biggest success of all, one of those things you cannot do on your own. Someone somewhere saw the Pluto Platter and told someone else who told someone at the Wham-O toy company, which bought it.
Morrison had the patent, Wham-O could mass distribute it and everyone was happy getting rich off a spinning platter.
Then someone at Wham-O heard that kids at a college in Connecticut were playing with the Pluto Platter but were calling it a Frisbie. The name came from the pie company that had sold their goods on metal pie platters decades earlier, when Fred and Lucile hadn’t been the only ones spinning them through the air for fun. Wham-O dropped Pluto Platter and changed the name to Frisbee.
Morrison hated the name, but with the new name sales soared and Morrison soon loved the name.
So Steve pulled over and I talked to the man with the discs throwing them into a wire cage. It’s a neat sport and it’s free but he was just practising.
We went to the top of the park and while Steve parked I saw a couple carrying a plant. I followed them.
Why, etc? It was a gift for the woman’s mother.
Wonderful but, “No,” she said. Embarrassed? In a hurry? It doesn’t matter, no is no.
There was a patch of daffodils near where I was getting rejected and, thinking of Gary, I looked and looked but could think of nothing to say about them.
And then I looked up at a tree very close by and there, where the tree split into two branches, was a dried and dead bouquet of roses. They were wrapped in cellophane and next to the stems of the flowers was a Kit Kat.
It was a memorial for someone whom I’ll never know. It was like the balloons that Steve had photographed an hour earlier. It was something that meant so much to someone.
Someone had been in pain. Something had ended. But a few steps away something was new and beginning. It always happens. It is what religions and poems are made of but most of all it is what keeps us going—spring. Pictures of the roses and candy. Pictures of the daffodils. And one picture of both.
And of course Gary didn’t see it. He was working. But thanks anyway.
Stones and the Woman
She was making a clean break with the past and that is very hard to do. Things she had collected and treasured for years she was leaving behind.
She was on the beach. So many great things happen on the beach. I think it is because it is a divide between two worlds and we get to stand on one and touch the other.
She was in both worlds. She had placed the small stones on the sand and then spread more sand from a jar around the stones.
“I got this in Hawaii,” she said, holding up one stone. “And this is sand from a beach that I walked on almost every day.”
“So why are you putting them here?” I asked.
She picked up another stone, looked at it and remembered something that she did not share.
“It is time to let them go,” she said.
Some were from the Maritimes, where she had lived. Some were from other places that she had visited and many were from Hawaii where she spent a few years.
“In a little while the tide will come in and when it goes out it will take them with it.”
She was stronger than me. I have a stone that is black and that answered a question for me and that I hold dear.
● ● ●
I was kind of desperate . . . gee, that’s unusual . . . for a story and once again I was in Queen Elizabeth Park when I saw a man packing away his golf clubs. There is a pitch and putt course up there that is free in the winter.
I talked to him about golf but that went nowhere. Then he told me he was in a rush because he had to get back to school.
“Learning?”
“Teaching.”
“What?”
“Geology.”
Wonderful, I thought. Rocks. “So you know what kind of rocks these are,” I said while hoping there would be something down on the ground.
“How about this whole mountain? Do you know it is one rock,” he said.
Wonderful, I thought.
“A few million years ago this was a volcano. That’s why it’s the highest point in the city.”
Oh super wonderful.
“The quarry in the middle is all that remains of the mouth of the volcano.”
Not only super incredibly wonderful but there is something to take a picture of.
Then he said he had to go.
“One more thing. Please, just one. Anything.”
“Okay,” he said. “You know as you drive north on Cambie Street, at about 41st Avenue you see a few houses that are built on top of stone?”
I nodded.
“Black stone, like a wall,” he added emphatically, like a teacher who did not want me to miss the importance of this.
I had seen the stone for years and wondered about it but I’d never done anything to find out, which is a sad thing to admit.
People say this kind of thing to me all the time and I get annoyed.
They say, “I pass by this unusual thing (fellow with a horn, woman with flowers who always sits at the same bus stop, whatever) every day and wonder what’s going on. Would you please find out for me and do a story and tell me when it will air.”
Seriously. At least once a week. But here I am admitting the same thing, without asking someone to find out for me. I had wondered and done nothing about it, for years. Guilty.
“That is a bit of hardened lava from the volcano. And now I have to go.” And he left.
What a lesson, in less than two minutes. After taking pictures of the quarry and then going down to the bottom of the park so we could take a picture of the mountain, which now is called Little Mountain although once it was a big mountain, we went to Cambie Street and 41st Avenue.
For the houses that were built on solid black stone I now had an answer as to why. A few more pictures and we were done with a story that actually contained information.
At the base of the wall of stone there were small pieces that had broken off. They are millions of years old. I wanted to have one, but there was a problem. They might be on private property. No, they could not be. Let me see. If I were the government I would make their property end right about there, close to the house, but if I were the homeowner I would think my property ended way out here, impossibly far out here.
Somewhere in between were the stones, at the base of a wall older than the argument of making the Lions Gate Bridge four lanes.
“Okay land owner,” I said loudly. “If this is yours, forgive me.”
I stepped off the sidewalk and took two steps to the base of the wall and from among the hundreds of tiny crumbs of rock I picked up a broken piece of black stone. It was, still is, about as big as my thumb.
It is right now next to my mouse pad. When I correct a word or a sentence or a chapter, I look at that stone and think, you are amazing. You are old enough to know what was going on before there were people or mouse pads or pitch and putt golfers walking over your back.
You have seen and survived many mistakes in your time, like putting up condos further down Cambie.
You have hung in through floods and fires, including at least one gigantic inferno from your mother, and you still look good and feel solid.
Long after global warming cools off again and the Canadian dollar goes up, you will still be hanging in there. How can I feel bad about making a mistake when I have something as strong and long-lasting within reach whenever I want it.
That is why I think the woman on the beach is stronger than me. She parted with some t
hings that were part of her life. I would hate to give up my lava stone.
On the other hand, the stones really were not hers. She said that. She had just borrowed them for a while and she was returning them.
My lava stone is not mine. It belongs to the pile of other stones at the base of the wall. If I returned it, it would be where it should be, and someday I will. Meanwhile it has not complained and I still have many mistakes to get through.
The Lucky Moles
If you are a mole you would have hit the jackpot to be in Vancouver. The official policy of the Park Board would drive most gardeners, homeowners and farmers crazy. Sensible but heartless people use smoke and flooding and poisons and spring traps with cruel steel teeth to kill moles, but not in the city parks. Here, just let them be.
You can see their hills almost everywhere. Always brown, always a neat pile of crumbled earth and always near another one—and then near another one and another one and, you know what, the place is filled with molehills.
After I saw those hills appearing almost everywhere in parks a few years ago I longed to do a story about moles because I feel so sorry for them. I could not imagine a lifetime underground in the wet and soggy everything. No warmth, no getting in out of the damp and never seeing anything.
I am standing with cameraman Murray Titus on a sidewalk near some molehills. Murray is very patient. He would prefer being on his sailboat facing into the wind. Now he is looking at molehills to pay for his boat.
Moles are blind, which you probably knew but I didn’t until I read about them.
Here’s what I learned. They are rodents that long ago sought safety by digging tunnels. They apparently liked it down there so they stayed.
After uncountable generations of living mostly in the dark their eyes slowly disappeared. That is the truth of the old saying: use it or lose it.
They did develop extremely strong front paws with even more extremely sharp front claws. If you find one wandering around don’t bring it home as a pet.
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