I watched the fish. Actually, I couldn’t see the fish because they went straight to the bottom of the pond, but I pretended I could see them. Then I went to bed and dreamed of the fish.
The raccoons, it would seem, had no trouble seeing the fish. When I rushed out in excitement the next morning there was major destruction, nasty devastation and a real mess. The raccoons had rolled the rocks in the pond, pulled up the plants and somehow not missed a single fish.
If you know the story I’ll get to the end quickly. I put a chicken wire fence around the pond and bought more fish and more plants. The raccoons went under the fence.
I hammered the bottom of the fence down with tent pegs, bought more fish and plants. The raccoons went over the top of the wire.
I put wire fencing across the top, bought more sacrificial living things, and the raccoons ripped apart the wire.
I put a second layer of wire everywhere. More fish. More plants. It was war and the raccoons were eating their way to victory.
One last stand. I put in more fish and promised them they would be okay. I think I heard them praying. Then I put plywood between the layers of wire on the sides and over the top.
I win! Except I couldn’t see the fish or stones or plants or water.
“That’s worse than the hole,” my wife said.
And that of course meant something much deeper than just those words. I took it all down, the fish were given away, the hole was filled in and zucchini were planted, but the story has a new ending. Actually this was in the free book I gave away last Christmas, but forgive me.
I got two fish and a bowl for my granddaughters. They could see the fish. They were happy, and there is nothing better than that.
Behind the Art Gallery
It is such a simple instrument, sort of. Played by those who do it well a harmonica is like an orchestra played by gremlin musicians hiding behind the lips. Sometimes they are moody, sometimes touching. Sometimes they dance and move as fast as a Maritime fiddle.
I met and have gotten to know the fellow who plays a harmonica behind the art gallery. His name is Tim and he creates a microscopic symphony for the passing audience on the sidewalk.
He makes his living from his harmonica and a doll that dances to it. With one hand he gives life to his little performer and with the other holds his music machine.
And when someone passes by, which is almost constantly, he pauses the music and says, “Good morning,” or “Good afternoon, mate,” or “You’re looking good today.” Tim is a joy.
He carves his little people from pieces of driftwood. Their arms and legs are held to the body by wire. He showed me how he bores a hole through the end of a sliver of wood and then threads the wire through another hole in the body. A twist of the wire and the arm comes to life. More wood, more wire and you have both arms and legs—and feet. It is extra work but you can’t forget the feet.
Add a head, of course, with a smiling face from a felt pen, and presto, a dancer is born. He squeezes a stick into a hole in the back of his new friend and with that in his left hand the dancer takes to the stage, which is a slab of wood resting on a cardboard box.
If there were a curtain it would be coming up.
“Hush.”
That’s me thinking. The street noise never quiets but I want to say “Quiet” because the orchestra is about to begin.
First of all, “Good day to you.” Then the song, the symphony, the music of the street. His harmonica is as much alive as his dancer clicking on the board.
He has his begging box on the ground. Some days he makes ten dollars, some days twenty. Some days, bad ones, it is raining and folks are in a hurry. He never asks. He just plays and his little people dance.
And all the while he stops to say, “Good day.”
Now walk cross the street, Hornby Street at Robson, and there is another man. He is kneeling on the ground on a piece of cardboard. He is so close to the crosswalk you have to walk around him.
He is about to begin his pitch. It is not a song, it is not music. It is a whine backed with aggression and anger.
“I hope you enjoyed your breakfast. I didn’t have any.” The sarcasm is nasty.
“Don’t you see me? I’m hungry. You have money to buy food. I don’t.”
He has a line for each time of the day. In an hour he will be saying, “I hope you like your lunch. I didn’t have any. I’m hungry. Go ahead, pass me by like I don’t exist. What do you care?”
Most pass by because he has been there every day, except when it rains, for the three years I have worked downtown.
“Doesn’t anyone see me? I’m hungry. You just ate and I’m hungry. What kind of people are you?”
The tourists give him money and get an impression of the city. The esl students who have just learned the words “money” and “hungry” sometimes give him money. And the little old ladies who come to meet their friends because they haven’t been to Robson Street for years give him money. They open their purses and take out whatever is in there.
After that they are sad. I can see their faces. I can hear their voices. Their day on Robson Street has had a bad beginning.
A few weeks ago I thought he was sick. He was bending over the newspaper boxes on the corner. But, no, he was talking on his cellphone and trying to hide it.
There is nothing wrong with a beggar having a cellphone. It is none of my business, and anyone who can afford one is entitled to have it. Tim with his dancing dolls and harmonica doesn’t have one.
Tim was sick a few weeks ago. “I had something bad in my chest. Hurt. So I checked myself into the Sally Ann. They take care of me.”
Then he added, of course with a smile, “I sang for my supper every night.”
Last week, at 9:45 a.m. on Sunday, I saw the complaining one coming up from the SkyTrain station at Burrard Street. He walked half a block and then set himself down on his knees across the street from Christ Church Cathedral. He was just in time for the ten a.m. service.
“Doesn’t anyone care about me? I’m hungry. You had breakfast. I didn’t.” He looks the churchgoers in the face and adds, “You are going to church and you don’t even see me.”
Many give. He does very well. I can only guess after watching on and off for three years that he makes well over a hundred dollars a day—tax free. That is for a four-hour day. Not bad if you can do it, and I have no argument with his act.
The only problem I have is with his whining, which doesn’t add anything good to the day. It is like the person with the loud muffler who takes over whatever space he is in and pollutes it for most others.
And then the hungry man, who, like me, has gained a few pounds since I first saw him, takes the train home.
Across the street, just at sunset when I was downtown late, at the end of ten hours of playing and dancing and smiling, I saw Tim pack up his dancing dolls and his box and start walking home to Stanley Park where he has lived for the past four years.
My only point: if you are at Robson Square give Tim a dollar. Then have a good day for yourself. He will have earned it and you will deserve it.
ps: I’ve gotten to like Tim. He’s always there, always filling the day with his music and his dolls. On St. Patrick’s Day I was passing him when a young woman give him a tiny bouquet of tulips. So nice.
“Come back,” I shouted.
She did. “Are you giving these for St. Patrick’s Day?”
“No,” the Chinese woman replied. “Someone gave them to me for a charity and I don’t want them and I want to give them to someone else.” That is very kind.
“Beautiful,” I said because I liked the kind answer.
“Now would you do something else for us?”
Before she could say “No,” or “I am in a hurry,” I said, “Sing ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.’”
She looked at me blankly. Now s
he was frightened. This was a test and she did not have the answer.
“I don’t know it,” she said.
“Tim will teach you,” I said, and he did. That was worth five dollars.
Survivor
I hate to tell you this. I hate to admit it. I am on the edge of not telling you.
Okay . . . fifteen minutes have gone by between writing the “you” in the last sentence and the “okay” at the beginning of this one.
How can I admit I watch Survivor? I mean, “Get real,” and “Really?” and “You’re kidding me!” and “Oh, I used to watch it, five years ago, or was it ten?” or very simply, “That old thing? Can’t you get onto something new?”
Maybe I will retract the last fifteen minutes and not admit it.
In truth, it’s more my wife who watches Survivor, not me. I think it is nutty and repetitive and silly.
Sure, some people have trouble making a fire and, sure, the girls are young and beautiful and wear skimpy bathing suits, and the guys are young and have big muscles and I hate them.
And sure, there is one old guy or woman in each group and he/she is held onto long enough to keep some government agency from complaining about age discrimination.
Then they get voted off.
And of course the girls wearing bikinis, who I do not look at, ever, have parts of the television picture blurred out when their bikinis fall off, which happens in most of their challenges.
For heaven’s sake, of course I don’t watch that. I am watching this with my wife and when the blurred-out parts come on she can look at me and see me looking at the ceiling.
● ● ●
It all started a few years ago when we were with a group of friends and the subject of Survivor came up.
I said, “My wife loves it.” I was trying to add some inclusiveness to the talk.
Immediately someone else said, “Why doesn’t she join our group? We watch it every week.”
I have to admit that most places my wife goes, outside of her flower club, I go, and I am happy with that, but at home when she watched Survivor I stayed in another room. This was a good time to polish my shoes, or clean my desk, or think deep thoughts.
I would spend an hour trying to decide what to do, and when the show was over and my wife came back and asked what did I do with my time I would tell her I’d been thinking of polishing my shoes or cleaning my desk.
“And did you?” she would ask.
“No, I was thinking of it.”
“You would not survive on Survivor,” she would say.
I didn’t tell her about the deep thoughts. I’m told that with deep thoughts you can survive anything. I just haven’t had any yet.
Then this group invited my wife to join them and not to my surprise I went with her.
The group consists of the guinea-pig people whom I told you about earlier, Ingrid and Bob. Their guinea pigs run free, so while you watch people in the show trying to force themselves to eat rats you have little furry creatures scooting between your feet.
Then there is Julia who has rabbits in her apartment. They hop around, also free. They are trained to do what they do only on the part of the floor that’s covered with something on which they can safely and cleanly do it—which is good.
On the Survivor show they have never killed and eaten a rabbit. The contestants have eaten many life forms that humans would not normally eat without the prospect of winning a million dollars, but when it comes to rabbits, the producers know there is a line that they cannot cross. That is a good thing because Julia would throw her television out the window if a rabbit was hurt, and that would be very bad because she lives twelve stories up.
There is Nancy who is Native and lives on the Capilano Reserve. She has a dog and a cat that live in peace and harmony, unlike many humans and entirely unlike what happens on the show where everyone is backstabbing everyone else. Nancy’s dog and cat bring peace to the gathering.
There is Rosi who, like Julia, lives in a rented top-floor apartment. Both of them have views of the city and mountains that no one in the rest of the group has, even though they all live in houses. A view such as Julia and Rosi have could not be bought for any money, not even what is being paid by those who put down ten million dollars cash for a fixer-upper.
Rosi has a special needs daughter. I only tell you that because special needs children create special parents, especially mothers.
There is Leslie who also has a special needs son. He has severe problems and she has spent much of her life caring for him. She has never not been smiling or cheerful, and she always starts washing dishes before anyone else.
There are Kathy and Cam, who are in love. He is recently retired, so while it is young love, in his case it is young love in a body that is topped with white hair. As for Kathy she has said she never thought this could happen again at her age. It did happen. They have a cat.
And lately there is Kathy’s brother Alan who, like a few others in the group, no names, is in his seventies. He just moved back to British Columbia from New Mexico, where he lived for decades. He has two pugs that have separation anxiety problems when they aren’t close to him.
And there was Tanya who dropped out this year because she needs all her time to search for a job and a house and a new life. A year ago she took maternity leave when she got a new puppy.
Of course she didn’t really get maternity leave for a dog but she took off time from her job, vacation time, to bond with it. She called it maternity leave and because of that she made the front pages of the life sections of newspapers across the country.
Where on earth would I find such a group as this? Each week they . . . we . . . meet in one house or another for dinner and then the show. The dinners are fantastic, usually with everyone putting out the best of something to eat.
Then the show. Over the years I’ve been told by those who watch that the plot has changed from actually trying to survive on raw bugs and a handful of rice to something everyone can associate with—cunning, lying and nastiness.
The contestants no longer lose much weight or wear the same clothes for more than a month. Now they simply get healthy by being outdoors and moving their bodies. They often show up with freshly pressed pants and dry-cleaned dresses. The days of rags and hunger are over.
Now it is a continuous case of “I will be on your side if we vote off that person and gang up on the other one before they undercut us.”
And that is followed by the one who has promised to be on the side of the other one secretly plotting the demise of the first schemer.
The producers have figured out that starving is not as good for ratings as cheating. Watching someone sharing rice is not as compelling as watching someone stealing it, and seeing who can stand the longest on a thin board while holding plates on their head is not as good as listening to whispers between two enemies about how to chop off the knees of their friends.
This is reality. This is real ugly life in the comfort of your home without having a fight with someone in your family. This is what gives birth to gossip and sells the National Enquirer and starts wars and keeps the us Republican Party going. This is worth giving up part of your life for every week.
There is a lot more whispering and a lot more captioning in the show now. We don’t want to miss the poison in the secret talks, so now we can read it. The producers leave the captions on extra-long for those who have trouble doing two things at a time, reading and thinking.
The only problem with all this is that the folks in this Survivor group talk, while the show is on, because they each have their favourites and they think they know what is going to happen. It is like going to a children’s panto at Christmas.
“No, beautiful girl in the tiny bikini, they are plotting against you! Can’t you see that?”
And of course she can’t see it because she is the bimbo who can see nothing, bu
t she will be among those at the end who are closest to winning the million dollars.
“See, told you,” someone says to everyone. “The one with the tattoos over his back and sides and front and neck and arms and face is a nice guy.”
Because of this I record the show myself and when we get home I have to watch it again because, except for the captions, I missed most of what happened because of the talk.
The problem with that is, I know you’ve guessed it, I don’t have time to clean my desk or polish my shoes—but I do have some deep thoughts. I’m just saving them to see if the bimbo is smarter than me.
● ● ●
Later, one of Alan’s dogs died, put down—cancer of course. Rotten, sad, all the heartbreak that goes with that. Ingrid wrote him such a nice note.
I could not imagine guinea pigs doing much grieving, but apparently I was wrong. She said when one of her pigs stops living she lays it on a soft blanket near the other pigs. They take turns, two at a time, one on each side, lying next to it, sometimes for half an hour.
A few weeks later Alan brought his other dog with him to Survivor night. Almost everyone took turns petting it.
Tulips and the Lady
What if, instead of finishing dinner, putting out the garbage, washing the dishes, opening a beer and sitting in front of the television to let someone else have an adventure for you with guns and arrests and kung fu—or, more recently, buying or selling a house—what if you said, “No”?
What if you said, “Let’s do something wild. Let’s go for a walk.” Imagine what could happen. You could meet someone walking a dog and say, “Hello.”
Someone I know did something like this a while ago. “Hello,” he said to a woman planting tulip bulbs. He knew they were tulips. He doesn’t know much about flowers but they were fat bulbs and so he felt they were tulips, and he took a chance.
You probably know about the great tulip investment war of long ago. You don’t? Sorry. Detour.
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