The little brother said, “No! I saw a square fish.”
“Didn’t.”
“Did.”
“Didn’t.”
Then grandpa came into the picture.
“I once caught a fish that I thought was square.”
Little grandson looked up with a smile.
Big grandson looked up with a frown.
“But when I got it on land it was different.”
Frown faded, smile held on.
“It was both fish-shaped and square.”
Two faces, two question marks.
“I think there are square fish and regular fish and you can find anything you want in the ocean,” said grandpa.
Two happy faces. Then little grandson ran up to grandpa’s belly and with the excitement of being with grandpa bumped into the protruding round target with his head and grandpa went “Humph.” And big grandson came running too but grandpa sidestepped him and big grandson missed.
“Close,” said grandpa, relieved.
Then grandsons went around in a circle again and grandpa stepped to his left then his right and he was the happiest man on earth.
Somewhere under the water of False Creek a square fish was happy being recognized as the only living, breathing thing a six-year-old from Alberta had seen today, even if it was a piece of metal lying on the gravel. If you believe it is so, it is.
The Blind Gardener
It is not the ideal spot for a garden. It has car exhaust and marijuana smoke and thieves and noise and homeless kids with their dogs sitting on the sidewalk.
It has transvestites passing by and drag queens and boys holding hands with boys and girls doing the same with girls. It has torn jeans and business suits and pizza eaten on the street.
It is not a backyard home garden with peas and peace and birds, although this one does have pigeons.
This is the garden at the northwest corner of Davie and Burrard Streets. Before the garden there was a gas station, so the soil needed a bit of remediation before planting carrots, but it is a beautiful spot and you can feel good just walking past.
Look inside. Most of the plots are neat and in the spring and summer most have someone oblivious to the buses less than four steps away watering their radishes.
Wait. Wait just a second. That man, on his knees pulling up weeds, has a dog next to him and the dog has a harness that Seeing Eye dogs carry.
The man reaches back and pets the dog and then puts one of his hands into the dirt. We move a few steps closer. He doesn’t see us. Of course he doesn’t. He’s blind.
We can see that. We can see his hand moving around the dirt feeling for weeds. There’s one. He pulls it out, then reaches back and puts it in a small pile of other weeds.
He searches again and his fingers touch another infant plant. He runs the tips of his fingers over the top then moves on.
“Excuse me. I don’t want to bother you.”
You know the rest of it. Then I ask and he answers:
“Yes, I am blind. Yes I garden.”
He is waiting for me to ask a sensible question.
This is when there is a long pause, which I think is stupid on my part because he can hear me pausing but he can’t see me going through pain while trying to ask the next question:
“How?”
That only half came out.
“I mean how do you garden. I mean, how do you know . . .”
He was very kind. He interrupted me. “It’s hard to imagine, but I do it almost every day and it gets easier.”
He was still on his knees. “It’s okay, don’t feel embarrassed. I get this all the time. The garden was planted by my brother. He’s a doctor at St. Paul’s.”
St. Paul’s Hospital is half a block away.
“I weed and water and keep it clean.”
His name is Kelly.
His dog is Bonnie, a large dog. “Here, smell this.” He holds some mint up to Bonnie’s nose. She sneezes.
“She usually likes it,” he said.
He sweeps his hand across the dirt again and says, “Darn. This is what I hate.”
He holds up a cigarette butt, just the filter where the smouldering ash stopped. Someone on the sidewalk has flicked it into the garden.
“I get these all the time,” said Kelly.
He doesn’t add that he would like to catch someone doing it and give them a good piece of his mind but that’s what I am thinking. Of course I can’t say it because it would sound like, “I want to do something that you can’t do.” It is hard to talk to someone who doesn’t fit into the traditional groove of life.
“I hate to ask, but how did you lose your sight?”
He gets up off his knees and stands. He is much taller than me and much stronger. Funny how he will probably never know that, or care.
“I was hit by a car. Kingsway near Edmonds.”
That was it. He was on a crosswalk. He had the light. Someone wasn’t paying attention. Someone had something else to do that was more important.
“I was in the hospital for a quite a while. I got an infection in my eyes and that was it.”
He has one prosthetic eye and the other just doesn’t work. That would mean one was smashed too badly to stay in his body. The other could stay and do nothing.
I don’t know what happened to the driver, but my bet is nothing. I didn’t ask. This was about gardening and he said, “This is great. It gets me out of my apartment almost every day and I love it.”
He bent down and picked up the pile of weeds and the cigarette butt and said he had to get on his way. That’s where the story ends. It’s not dramatic or surprising or funny or sad the way most endings in most stories try to be. We watched him walk past the garbage cans where he dropped off the intruders in his brother’s plot and then left, joining the crowd on the sidewalk.
Somehow, that was the perfect ending.
A Mother’s Love
The Block Watch lady saw it happen, so you know it is a trustworthy account.
But first I want to tell you that when I was small the wildlife we saw were mostly cockroaches, which are not cute. We learned to kill them by turning off the lights in the kitchen, waiting half a minute and then flicking the lights back on.
“Go.”
And we would start smacking them—six, seven, eight—before they disappeared into the cracks in the walls or behind the pantry doors.
“I got nine,” said Jimmy Lee, who was a super roach killer.
“I only killed six,” said Buster, who later went into the Marines.
It was both sport and community service. The more we killed the fewer there were in the kitchen, at least for an hour.
It was good when you got the ones who were going to lay eggs, and that seemed like every third one. They had a black protrusion in the rear, so if you got one of them you really got a hundred, which was still only a tiny number.
We also fished for rats. This was not a sublime neighbourhood. We would lower a string with a hook, usually from your mother’s curtain rod, into the sewer. On the end of the hook was a piece of bread or salami.
Whap, there was a tug on the line, just like real fishing. There were two choices. One was to pull it up slowly without jerking and try to get the rat to the slots in the sewer before it jumped off. The other, the dramatic way, was to yank the string as hard as you could to pull the rat up through the slots before it jumped off.
Neither way worked very well. We were always ready with a brick to knock it on the head if we got it to the street but I don’t remember us ever getting the chance. Sometimes we got them up to the street but then we’d jump back because they were so big, and then they took off in a blur.
Besides that our wildlife were mostly pigeons. We once made friends with a one-legged pigeon that we called Stumpy. We would run home from s
chool and feed it with bread and cookie crumbs that we saved from our lunches.
We knew it couldn’t get much food on its own because the other pigeons would get it first, so we became attached to saving Stumpy, our friend.
After a few months he/she was gone. That ended the call of the wild.
Jump ahead some years and our family moved to British Columbia.
“Quick, look through the window,” I said to our daughter.
“Ahhhhheeeee,” or something like that. Raccoons are cute, but not when you see just the eyes staring at you through the kitchen window.
There are also hummingbirds, which are beyond amazing. How can anything move that fast or not move while moving so fast?
And eagles. After being almost wiped out by our love of chemicals to control everything they have come back with soaring beauty. Sometimes I see a pair, always a pair, gliding over our home. They are so high I can barely see them and I only noticed them at first by accident. Now I can’t take my eyes off them.
There are also crows. Now if you are from here you probably don’t like crows, but I didn’t grow up with them so I like them. So there.
What I like most is their social lives. I did a story on this once when I learned about their parties. If you live in Vancouver you see this every night. Of course if you live anywhere there are crows, but in Vancouver you can watch them blot out parts of the sky just at sunset. They are flying to Burnaby. Party town I suppose, at least for crows.
At Highway 1 and Willingdon they land on the rooftops of the industrial buildings that have businesses inside but I don’t know what.
Where those buildings are there were trees not many years ago and the crows landed in them. Now they spend their nights on the rooftops. They are adapting to a changing world.
But what I learned they are doing, after I talked to some crow experts, is partying! Every night. Gossip, talk, visiting, yakking it up.
You see, in the spring the couples—and they do mate for life even though they cheat a lot, said the crow experts—the couple start gathering sticks and things to make a home.
Then they get together and, presto, babies in the bedroom. You know about all the work that comes with babies. No time for parties. Mom and Pop are off to the supermarket on the grass every five minutes. Boy those kids can eat.
Spring is spent with little sleep for the parents. We could have warned them.
Summer is the same, except now the worry when they go out on their own is will they be safe? Will they find a good lawn with beetles that they can dig up before the human comes out and chases them away? Will they be able to fly out of the way of cars while they are feasting on the remains of something that was slower?
So much on the minds of parents. We could have warned them about this, too.
And after that there is the other problem of getting them to move out. “Go away. You’re grown up. Now go fly.”
“But we like it here. If we can’t find beetles or roadkill we know you will provide.”
“Go!”
We could have told them about that, too.
But finally comes autumn. The kids are gone. The home needs so many repairs it’s easier to move out. The sun no longer shines in our eyes when we’re trying to sleep.
“Let’s party!”
And so the sky darkens with tens of thousands of crows coming from Vancouver and Coquitlam and even Burnaby, all heading for the Highway 1 and Willingdon Night Club. Every night. No matter what the weather, these are hard-partying birds.
If you want to watch, look for MacDonald’s near the Willingdon on-ramp to the highway westbound. Park by the row of buildings that look a bit like factories except they are not.
Get out of your car—and duck.
“Howard, get back in the car! The birds are attacking us!”
Swarms of crows are descending on them. (I know the official word is a murder of crows but, honestly, that is stupid to say even if they do gang up for some killings occasionally.) And actually at Highway 1 and Willingdon they are flying everywhere and it just looks like they are attacking Howard and Margaret. They won’t really murder them.
“Margaret, it’s okay. I just wanted to show you how much fun it would be to go out at night.”
“In the car, Howard, this minute! I never want to come here again. And I am not going out at night ever again, not as long as these devils are out.”
Okay, it’s not an ideal night for everyone, but if you aren’t terribly fearful of many, many black birds flying over your head and if you never saw Alfred Hitchcock’s terrifying movie The Birds then you should be fine.
So go if you get the chance.
Now back to the start of the story, the mother’s love. This is the way the Block Watch lady, Christine, saw it from her kitchen window.
A mother bear and her baby bear were crossing the street alongside our house. This is right after they took a bath in our other neighbour’s backyard pond. She is Sandra and she said, “My dogs were going crazy.”
She has two tiny, really, really small, dogs. They are the kind that bark at bears, which shows complete insanity or total self-confidence.
“I looked out the window and the bears were sitting in my pond. Both of them. It looked so sweet, except they were wrecking it.”
Then the bears left and crossed the street to my backyard. This is where the Block Watch lady comes in.
“The mother bear climbed over your fence,” Christine said. The fence is about chest high.
“But the baby bear couldn’t get up. It kept trying to scratch at the fence but it didn’t work. So the mother bear climbed back over and with her front leg she punched a hole through your fence. Just one punch. Big hole.”
Christine is a very good Block Watch lady. She notices all the details.
“Then the mother bear went back over the top again and her baby followed her through the hole.”
I felt like saying, “Ahhhhh, that’s so nice,” except I now had a fence with a hole in it. On the other hand the simple, practical solution to a child’s needs is what every mother spends much of her life coming up with, and my fence had played a part in that.
I liked the story so much I left the hole for more than a week, in case anyone asked me about it. No one did.
“You should fix that hole; it looks terrible,” my wife said.
“But it’s about a mother’s love,” I said.
“It’s a hole,” said this woman who knows all about raising children and coming up with practical solutions to impossible needs.
The fence is now fixed, but I love that bear, even if I never saw it.
Charlie’s Tree
If only he had waited a hundred years. That is not much to ask. If he had, those who run a government agency would have finally come around to his way of thinking. But no, he didn’t have enough patience for that.
Charlie Perkins did what he did but if he had waited through his children’s lives and grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s, things would have been fine.
It is weird how the world changes. It always amazes me how Japanese tourists go to Pearl Harbor.
I, like many of you, was born when thousands of Canadian and American and British and Australian soldiers were dying getting onto the beaches of Normandy. Germans were killing them. Now Germans vacation there, next to tourists from Canada, America, Britain and Australia.
Decades later I was a tiny part of the war effort when tens of thousands of young Americans were being killed in Vietnam. Now it’s a vacation spot for young Americans looking for surf, sand and tours of the tunnels.
I don’t get it. I’ve said this many times. Why don’t we just skip the wars and take vacations.
It seems impossible now, more than impossible, but no doubt someday the children of Islamic terrorists, the ones who don’t blow up themselves before having child
ren (and dear editor, please don’t take out that line to be less hurtful), will be on tours of New York and Paris oohing and aahing at the sights and history. It has to happen.
Humans are not only scary; they are crazy.
Charlie Perkins was neither. He was wonderful and brave and did what he had to do. But if only if he had waited . . . a hundred years.
I’ve told this story before, but now it has a new ending, the hundred-year part.
Charlie was a farmer in the Fraser Valley who came of the age for early dying when World War i started.
Canada, supporting Britain, as was its duty and right, went to war with Germany from the beginning. Charlie, like all his friends, hitched up his horse and took the long ride to Vancouver to enlist in a trip that went to hell. They didn’t know that, but they did know this is what they should do, so they did it.
Charlie was bright and was sent to flying school. Airplanes were newer than electronic cars are now. Actually, that is a bad comparison. Airplanes were terrifying. Okay, they were exciting to watch, but the chances of them staying in the air were slim. Charlie was told to keep one in the air and to shoot the bad guys, which he did.
When he got back to his farm in Langley he was different. I never met Charlie, of course, but I have known others who come back after they have killed and seen others killed and they are different. All of them.
He was steadfast. If he was like most, like almost all, he didn’t talk about what he had seen and done. When the subject of “What did you do in the war?” came up he said . . . long pause . . . nothing.
But one day he was in his fields, which you know so well. Yes, you do. You know the land where Charlie stood behind a horse and plowed and sweated and looked up at the sky and said, “Lord, when will this day end?”
You know the farm. I’ll tell you why in a moment.
One day he said, “I should do something for the guys.”
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