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In the mid-1500s tulip bulbs were brought to Europe from Turkey, and they created quite a stir. No one had ever seen anything like the flower that came out of them. By the early 1600s, Holland, which is now part of the Netherlands, had become a centre for their cultivation, and ever more wonderful, rare and multicoloured blooms were being created.
They were quite amazing flowers—beautiful, tender and . . . “This must be worth a fortune.” Always money gets into the excitement.
Someone said the word “fortune,” and by golly he was right.
When you have something that no one else has and you promote it as the best thing ever, you can sell it at whatever you want to sell it for. Soon they became a status symbol for the rich and famous, tulip mania took hold and almost overnight the price of tulips was like gold, or like oil when oil was the price of gold. Everyone wanted to invest in tulips because there was a fortune to be made. Sure they looked nice, but mostly it was “if we do that we can get rich.”
And some did. You have heard of Ponzi schemes and pyramid schemes. Don’t worry if you don’t understand them; they are based on madness and greed. Tulips were sort of like that, only different in one important way. They are pretty. Beauty surrounded by madness and greed. Folks sold their homes to buy a tulip bulb. One brown onion-looking thing that would turn into a flower that would last two or three weeks was going for a year’s salary, then two years’, then more. Crazy. Like all crazy schemes.
Then someone said the obvious: “This is crazy. I’m not buying.”
And the tulip bubble burst, with petals falling on terrified heads—like condos or oil or other madness.
Now the Netherlands has turned tulips into an industry, a hard-earned beautiful product that makes the world better and gives a decent living to many.
You can buy a bag of bulbs for an hour’s worth of work, the way it should be.
I know you know all this, but thanks for listening.
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“Planting tulips?” my friend said to the woman.
“Yes,” she said.
People don’t often jump into conversations with strangers.
“They will look pretty,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Nice day for this,” he said, just pushing it a bit. He sensed she wanted to be alone but what the heck. Being annoying to a tulip planter is allowed.
“I bet you look forward to seeing them,” he said.
“I won’t see them,” she said.
“Moving?” he asked stupidly.
“No, dying.”
Oh, my gosh. Oh no. Where has this gone? He hoped he hadn’t caused hurt. He probably had. And, more importantly, what does he say now?
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay. I’m getting used to it.”
“May I ask? Why . . . ? What . . . ?”
“Cancer.”
When he told me what she said I was hurting. His hurt was worse, hers even greater.
“So why are you planting the bulbs?”
“So my neighbours can see the flowers after I’m gone. I like my neighbours.”
I know you have felt tears filling your eyes at some time in your life and there was nothing you could do to stop them. And then the tears went down your cheeks. Well my hand went to my face, and I was only listening.
“That’s nice,” was all he could say.
I took a deep breath. He told me he did the same, and then said to her, “Thank you.”
He walked away, but part of him stayed there—and is still there, along with a part of me.
Go for a walk. Talk to someone doing something. You never know.
Vimy Ridge
For once the generals got it right.
“By Jove, it will work,” said one of them. Maybe he said it like that, because that is the way they talked in 1917, especially when Canadians were trying to sound British.
“It is so simple it will catch them off guard, ha, ha,” another probably said.
“But if it fails we will be damned for not having a more complex plan.”
Most of them said that, for sure.
The idea was a child’s game: leapfrog.
“We will have the first trench attack. Damn the machine guns,” said the idea man. “Then, before the Huns can recover, we will have our next trench leapfrog over the first trench and attack.”
He slapped the side of his leg with his riding crop, or at least I imagine he did. If you are going to be a general in the first totally Canadian force you would have to act positively British. Slap away.
“And then the men from the first trench would leapfrog over the men from the second trench.”
And again, “Damn the machine guns.”
Ninety-nine years later to the exact same day, Alvin is picking up litter, which is really garbage, under the decorative helmets in Victory Square.
“Hate to bother you, but what’cha doing?”
“It looks so bad,” he said. “This is an important place.”
That was good enough for me to believe there was hope, even here. Victory Square has two main groups of citizens. The trendy office workers who bring their tiny dogs to work with them in baskets and at lunch time take them for a poop walk around the Cenotaph. (Yes, they pick up afterwards.)
And the drug dealers who skateboard and sit and lounge and smoke and push each other all day long, even on the anniversary of the men who leapfrogged.
The drugs got so bad a few years ago that the Park Board pulled out the shrubbery that grew throughout the park. The low shrubs were pretty but the dealers hid their stashes under them and occasionally they would steal from each other.
Only war is more violent than one drug dealer stealing the stash of another. And the violence was immediate and the location was all around the shrubs.
The Cenotaph is at one end of the park, the shrubs at the other, so the dog walkers and their little hairy friends were not in peril as long as they pooped quickly.
But what to do about the fighting at the other side of the park? Eliminate the drug dealers or eliminate the shrubs? The choice is easy. No more shrubs in the park. That is the park that on one day every year in November is sacred, so we have a sacred park with no shrubs. Nice, if you like it.
As a side note, the totally beautiful Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Chinatown had the same problem. Half the garden is free for the beauty-loving folks who would stop by for mental, visual and emotional peace, and free for the drug dealers who would hide their day’s inventory under the bushes.
The result there has been the same—no more bushes. You hardly miss them, like you hardly miss anything after a while, even if it was calming and beautiful.
Sorry; back to Victory Square. I apologize for going back and forth like a ping-pong ball, but stories are like that. Life is like that. Think of one thing and immediately you are thinking of something else and you forget the first thing. Crazy.
Victory Square.
“What’s your name?”
“Alvin,” said the man picking up the garbage. “I’ve got to tell you before you talk to me that I’m an alcoholic and I’ve been on welfare all my life so whatever I say doesn’t matter.”
I wish politicians were so honest.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“This is an important place,” he said again, and he looked at the Cenotaph. “Many people were killed here.”
I said, “Not actually here.”
He looked confused.
“They were killed in a war, a couple of wars, in Europe.”
He nodded like he knew what I was talking about.
“Vimy Ridge?” I said.
Blank stare. Slow head shake.
“Lots of Canadians were killed on t
his day, a long time ago.”
Then that look from Alvin like he wanted to know more. What kind of look is that? You see it in kids when you tell them something about themselves.
“Thousands of Canadians were killed on this day.”
Alvin understood that. He nodded. He looked at the Cenotaph.
“That’s what that is for?”
I nodded. “And other wars.”
“I better get back to work,” he said.
He walked off searching for more garbage. We watched him pick up a syringe, a used needle and a plastic tube that had sent someone to heaven and then hell. Without plastic gloves—of course you knew that, I knew that, but it is important to say it again—without the plastic gloves that are mandatory for anyone giving any help to anyone now, he picked up the syringe and broke the needle in half. One end of it flew off and landed on the grass. Alvin picked it up and put it into the plastic bag he was carrying.
Ninety-nine years ago Canadian soldiers with razor-sharp knives at the ends of their rifles jumped into the trenches where German soldiers with razor-sharp knives at the ends of their rifles were waiting. There was stabbing and screaming and when the fighting ended 3,598 Canadians had stopped breathing.
Seven thousand more had holes in their stomachs or had lost legs or arms or parts of their minds.
An unknown number of Germans were face-down or face-up or broken in half in the mud of the trenches. Four thousand were prisoners.
“It worked,” said the general. “By Jove we will get a medal for this.”
In wonderful truth, four Victoria Crosses were given to soldiers who played the child’s game of leapfrog. They played it very well.
The last I saw of Alvin he was standing near the towering Cenotaph and looking up. He held his garbage bag in his hand. He was standing very straight, almost at attention.
The Little Lost Deer
omg. Oh my gosh!
We will only say it in a polite way. Oh my double gosh.
“There it goes.”
“Where?”
“There, but it’s gone now.”
The “Oh my gosh” was the deer that had somehow gotten into Stanley Park. The where was anywhere in the park where it had been and now was not.
For more than a week this deer had been spotted by some but photographed by almost none. It popped in and out of sight too fast to get your phone out of texting mode and into camera status.
Actually, since you were texting your friend to tell her/him that you were in the park and you could meet her/him for lunch in twenty minutes as soon as you could get out of the park because it was boring and there was nothing to do here, you didn’t see the deer at all. The friend you were with who wasn’t texting shouted, “There’s a deer,” and hit your arm, making you mess up the message you were writing and that got you annoyed.
Instead of saying, “What deer?!” with excitement you said, “You ruined my text!!” with a loud voice that the deer heard, causing it to run into the woods. It was then that you said, “What deer?”
Texting and wildlife are a disastrous combination.
Nonetheless, there was a deer in the woods that were once a forest that had many deer and beavers and a few bears and an occasional cougar and was surrounded on its edges by oysters and many fish.
Now there was one deer that had arrived there by accident—swimming, walking, maybe dropped off by an angel who wanted to see what would happen to a deer in the woods.
It made the front page of a newspaper. That was a lucky shot by a good photographer. Stories of it were on the radio. That was easy to do.
Then Jim Fong said, “There’s the deer.”
I wasn’t texting. I was just looking in the other direction.
“Where?”
But before he could answer he had already pulled over, jumped out, opened the back of the suv, taken out his camera and was running back across the street. I guessed it was there.
He managed to get two shots of the deer: one of its back end far away and the other of its back end even farther away.
“Nice,” I said. “Very good. Now let’s find something we can put on television.”
Face it, you can’t just use the back end of a deer and hope to keep your job.
We circled, and after extensive hunting found . . . nothing. That is so typical. It happens to me, you, us, them, and even those over there all the time.
The thing is that all the positive-thinking books in the world and all the idiotic, pandering do-gooder slogans that say “Never Give Up” are ridiculous. To think that if you keep banging your head against the wall the wall will fall down is a big “No.” It doesn’t happen. Who would honestly believe that?
That’s what I think sometimes, despite Reilly. (You did read about Reilly, right?)
We found nothing. “Let’s go to Third Beach, again,” I said, in desperation. At least they have a toilet, and I have an ever-present need. And the sun came out, of course, as I knew it would.
Third Beach is my favourite spot. That is after Trout Lake and the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge, which may not be as long as the Capilano Suspension Bridge but it’s free. If you have visitors, take them to the Lynn Canyon bridge. They will be amazed and not broke.
Anyway, at Third Beach there is Tom the lifeguard. He is big and handsome, as lifeguards go, and strong and friendly.
He is also one other thing. He has been doing this job longer than anyone else and is not only still ready, willing and more than able to run into the water to save someone’s life, but he is not afraid of bureaucracy. Idiotic bureaucracy.
Let me just take a little diversion. For many, many years I have been doing stories about the parks and beaches. As I’ve mentioned, someone at the television station in Burnaby that we won’t talk about counted the number of stories I had done in Stanley Park. She stopped at one thousand.
Many were about gardeners. One was on a woman who worked with a rake by day but did something else at night. She was a pole dancer, and for us she demonstrated on a steel pole with a traffic sign at the top.
With her work boots on and her rough clothing, she climbed the pole and raised her legs and then slid beautifully down before moving up without showing any effort. You try that. I could barely hold on.
The story was beautiful (humbly I say that) and much commented upon.
And speaking of boots, which I just did, (you have to go back a few lines, to before the sliding up and down the pole, which if you are a guy is the only thing you were thinking about and if you are a woman you were thinking “I could do that if I had a pole with a traffic sign in my basement”) . . .
Anyway, speaking of boots, the gardeners have the most wonderful way of retiring. Just outside their lunchroom in the park they have a pole and on it are hung the boots of all the retired gardeners. Some have been there for years. They are tied on by their laces.
The pole is high, higher than the one-storey roof of the lunchroom. It has many boots on it. All are filled with rainwater. Most have moss growing on them. If you look closely enough you can see the soles separating from the boots. That would be a sign of passing into a new place in time and space.
I put this story on television when Rick the gardener retired. He was a wonderful guy. One of the best stories with him was about the fellow who was sad when he brought his wife’s ashes into the park to spread them around the flowers that she loved so much.
Before he could do that, this fellow, according to Rick, met the old keeper of the Nine o’Clock Gun. The old gun keeper loved his gun and his rum. He was sitting on a bench near the cannon when the fellow with the ashes came into the park. The fellow with the ashes looked sad.
“Want a drink?” asked the keeper of the gun.
“Just a sip,” said the man with the ashes.
The sip, as sips always do, turned into a swig and the
n a gulp and then a heads-back swallow.
The short of this story is the man with the ashes, with the help of the man with the cannon, put his wife’s remains into the cannon and at nine p.m. precisely they both sent her into the beauty of the afterlife with more of a kick than she may have ever known in life. Or maybe not. We don’t know.
Anyway, we did a story about Rick hanging up his boots when he retired. As a side note, this lifelong gardener of a thousand acres lives in a small apartment in North Vancouver and has a few plants on his balcony. He is one of the most gentle souls I have ever met.
I have another story about Rick. He is in one of the previous books so please, if you have read this, forgive me. If you haven’t, it’s a beautiful story.
I watched one woman pushing another in a wheelchair come into the park. They did this every day. The woman pushing was young. The woman in the chair was old, very old.
Rick and I were talking near the Rose Garden when he saw them.
“Oh, my heavens, I forgot,” he said.
He broke away from our conversation and ran, yes he literally ran back to a building. I watched him furiously clipping and then he ran back to me.
“I always give her a flower,” he said, and then he trotted down a path in the garden to meet the women.
I saw him hand the one in the wheelchair the flower. They talked for just a few seconds and then the two women continued on their walk.
Rick came back to me.
“They come every Wednesday.”
“And you give her a flower?”
He just nodded and smiled.
“Do you know them?” I asked.
“No. I saw them a few months ago and gave her a flower and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
The following Wednesday I was waiting with a cameraman. It took a while to talk Rick into it. He didn’t want to look like he was bragging about what he was doing, but I told him people would think the whole thing was wonderful and they would feel good. He agreed so long as the woman in the wheelchair got most of the attention.
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