Only if you write, “’Twas the night before Christmas . . .” can you get away without using pictures. I didn’t write that and Greg saved me.
A few other editors and the tree:
There’s James Buck, who gave me the brilliant line at the pond at the end of the pne story. He put a decoration on the tiny boughs.
He is another person involved with marathons, like Jeannine, but he just goes to them with his wife. She’s been in seven. “She runs, I carry the bags and meet her at the finish line,” he says.
He also knows more about baseball than I do, although he was impressed when I told him I saw Jackie Robinson play, once.
And there’s Vinh Nguyen, the editor in the Vietnamese immigration story. He opened his door, snatched up a tiny star and put it on the top. Then he closed his door.
In truth, it is 12:45 p.m., the show is still on the air and last-minute stories are still being put together.
Vinh is the one who made everyone cry at his wedding. Less than a year later his wife was pregnant. He ran, well almost ran, through the edit hallway and most of the rest of the newsroom showing everyone an ultrasound picture saying, “My son, my son!” He was truly the happiest man on earth. The same as his stories.
Adam Lee is another newcomer, a newcomer being anyone who came after me. The first time I walked into the room where he was working I saw a baseball on the desk next to his editing computer.
“Why?”
“I like baseball,” he answered.
This is going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, I thought. I would have told him that line came from Casablanca but I figured anyone smart enough to like baseball would know that.
Adam and his wife went to San Francisco for three days, during which they saw two baseball games. They will have a happy life.
Simon DiLaur is another new editor. He came here from Ottawa because his girlfriend moved here. Right away you know he is a good guy.
We were working together one day when he told me he and his girlfriend were going to New York. He told me all the sights they would see and the things they would do.
I was nodding.
“Have you ever been there?” he asked. We have much to talk about.
It is now one p.m. The show in the next room is over. Deloris, the chief editor, who is truly a mother to all of this group (including Greg, who is older), looked at the tree.
“I knew it,” she said.
Deloris is now retired but before she left she passed on the storage location of the tree to James, the new chief editor. It is now a family tradition.
(Now that James is in management he goes to meetings and then more meetings and then more. Meetings take time away from editing, which he is a genius at. If only management knew how to meet less. What they need is a good editor.)
Now the tree was covered with decorations and lights, no longer an artificial piece of old plastic that was packed away for a year. It was a glowing—okay, tiny, but nonetheless welcome—window to Christmas.
How did it get decorated so quickly? The same way those presents appear under the tree on Christmas morning. Someone must have done it.
● ● ●
There is one more visitor down the hallway. Her name is Alex Turner. She is not an editor, she is a writer in the newsroom. Writers are even more unrewarded than editors. All those things you hear the anchors saying come from the minds and fingers of writers in the back, almost literally in the shadows. They spend their working lives turning out story after story after . . . you get the picture.
Try an experiment. Type something on your computer and time how long it took you. Then read it and time that. Writers spend more time writing than readers spend reading—and then the readers get the credit. Television is like life.
Alex is the daughter of an editor with whom I worked long ago. Chris Turner was one of the legends: shirt wrinkled sometimes, hair uncombed usually, coffee cups half-empty always.
This is not criticism. This is praise. He was an artist. He looked like one and he acted like one, oblivious to the world around him, even though that world was one of deadlines and time limits.
What he did was turn out videos that became alive. These were stories about fires and death and storms, proving anything can be made into art, and by the end of each story his shirt was even more wrinkled.
All this makes his daughter an honorary editor, but that is only part of the reason that I mention her here. The other is that she was, as the Bible puts it, with child as she looked at the tree.
It just seemed right.
ps: Like many artists, Chris Turner discovered that living off art is impossible, and he is no longer an editor. The last time I saw him, just a few months ago, not only did I not recognize him but I didn’t believe it was him even when he shook my hand. Suit, tie, neat haircut, polished shoes, and if we’d had coffee together I’m sure he would have finished it and it would probably have been a latte. He now sells real estate, but to someone else he will be “My grandfather, the crazy artist.”
The Very Brief Meeting
I hadn’t noticed him. That’s why I almost bumped into the cart of bananas he was pushing.
I was in Walmart. No, I have no prejudices.
“Sorry,” I said.
“No, it was my fault,” said the man behind the cart.
“No sweat,” I said.
He looked at me for a second, maybe recognizing me, maybe not. The look I saw was blankness.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “It’s been a bad day. We lost one of our own.”
When terrible things happen, when wonderful things happen, the urge to tell someone overpowers the strongest silence.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. And then not knowing what else to say I asked, “Was it an accident?”
I was trying to read his name tag but I didn’t have on my glasses.
“No, I don’t know the cause but he was young.”
And then, with the banana cart next to us, he lowered his head and the words came out, first to the floor then to me.
“He was special needs, but he was always so happy. It really hurt all of us.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Jocomo,” he said.
Italian, I thought, but no accent so he was probably born here. There I was, analyzing the only thing I could, but it was the only way to share anything with him.
And then he said, “I was so glad I spoke to him. Pretty often. I said hello a lot and asked how he was.”
It was then that Jocomo smiled. He had found a good memory. He had something to hold onto. He and the poor fellow who is no more had a relationship.
If Jocomo hadn’t talked to him the death would have been just someone in the store. Because he did talk, the death was personal, and the thought that he had given something of himself to someone else meant that he was part of the other.
That is about the best way I can explain it, because Jocomo could not explain it beyond saying, “I was so glad I spoke to him.”
And then he excused himself and went on pushing the cart.
I got out a piece of paper and wrote “Jocomo” on it. I didn’t want to forget his name. I wouldn’t forget the story.
Going Home
The bucket list for many people says Spain, followed by France, Germany and Italy, or the opposite order. Fred just wanted to see the old porch in east Vancouver, and I was lucky enough to be there when he did.
Now, here are a couple of things in order. Fred Ko is one hundred years old. People who reach that age are getting to be common but it is still an amazing number, especially when you are like Fred.
On his one hundredth birthday, on March 28, 2016, he climbed the front steps of the old, very old, house at 616 Princess Avenue. He climbed the four steps with no cane or support from anyone else.
He said they were wood when he played here. It is concrete now. He said the little girl from across the street and he would play on the porch when it rained.
He looked at the narrow part that was covered by an overhang.
“It looked so big back then.”
It always does. We grow, our past shrinks. Under your kitchen table was once a fort, a forest, a spaceship, a hide-out. Now you bang your head if you try to reach under it to pick up a napkin.
You know all this. You know that when you go back to your old neighbourhood you see things that are invisible to those now living there. You see your friends who are gone and the dirt pile that is now paved over and the front steps that were wood and now are concrete.
That is what Fred Ko saw, while a crowd of children and nieces and nephews and their husbands and wives stood on the sidewalk taking pictures of him.
They will look at the pictures and say this is Grandpa, father, Uncle Fred on the porch where he grew up. What their cameras will not get, of course, because even digital cameras don’t have souls, is Fred saying, “This is unbelievable.”
“I walked to kindergarten.”
“You what?”
“I walked to kindergarten.”
Kids on the street now are driven there, three blocks away.
Of all the possible birthday presents on earth—a trip to Spain or Hong Kong or even tea at the Empress—none could have been better than going home.
Happy Birthday, Fred.
Steve Saunders
“No, I didn’t read it.”
“Are you kidding? It’s got all the history in it.”
Steve Saunders is driving. We are looking.
“I told you about the Grandview ditch, right?” I said as we were approaching the Grandview ditch.
“Yeah, I remember, sort of.”
“What do you mean, ‘sort of you remember’?”
“It had something to do with a railroad.”
“Did you read my book?”
Steve drove over the overpass over the ditch on Victoria and Broadway. It is one of the great wonders of the city.
“No, I didn’t read it. Not yet,” he said.
“What? That’s one of the best stories of the city.”
“Well I bought your book, but then I gave it to my in-laws.”
“Where are your in-laws?”
“They live downstairs in our house.”
I took a deep, deep breath and held it. But you know what happens when you hold your breath.
“You what? Your in-laws have your book and they live in your house and you can’t borrow my book?”
“Well, I’ve been busy.”
There you go. Multi-tasking is the ruin of history.
“So a new railroad wanted to come into Vancouver,” I started saying, “but the only route was uphill, so they hired some Chinese folks and said start digging and . . . Oh, forget it. Borrow the book.”
First, something about Steve. A long time ago he quit his news camera job in Vancouver to move to Australia for an adventure. He was there for several years before he got homesick and came back.
It doesn’t matter if that puts you behind in the seniority list. That is the kind of move that lets you see how others see things, and that is one of the greatest lessons in life. Now Steve is writing a screenplay about a murder mystery. Okay, that’s one excuse for being busy, but still.
Then I asked if his in-laws still owned their pub?
“No, that was years ago.”
Their pub was named after one of the greatest figures in British Columbia: Billy Miner. It makes my heart sad to think I haven’t written about him for years and it makes me glad that he is always there to remind me how amazing life can be.
The Billy Miner Pub is just off the Haney Bypass, and not far from the scene of his most historic moment in crime.
First you should know that Billy Miner was a thief, an armed robber, a kind man, an elegant gentleman, a most loved fellow and a prison escapee. I would wish to be like him minus the years in solitary confinement when that meant a freezing concrete floor with no light, no bed, no toilet, no sink and only bread and water when the guards felt like feeding you. That wouldn’t fit into Canada’s food guide.
It meant having cold water thrown on you and on the floor for sport. It meant beatings for the same reason.
Apart from that he had a great life.
He was American. He robbed stagecoaches when there were stagecoaches and went to prison for doing that. When he got out there were no more stagecoaches so he robbed trains, and one of them was just past Mission on the way to Maple Ridge. It’s a fascinating story. Either get the books or I’ll tell you it now. Okay.
Well, he got away with stacks of loot, which greatly upset the Canadian Pacific Railway. It wasn’t that they lost the money as much as their reputation. They were the carrier of gold and stocks and cash. There was no other way to move it. If one rotten outlaw with the help of a couple of other guys could stop a giant train and escape with the goods, what was the future for the rich people in this country?
So they hired a trainload of private police to track him down. Meanwhile Billy Miner was living in peace in the interior, well protected by the local folks who said he was the nicest, most generous man they had ever known.
Once in a while he went away on a business trip.
After years of more holdups the police caught him, of course, and he went back to prison—this time to the penitentiary in New Westminster, which was surrounded by towering grey walls.
And there he met the warden’s daughter. Now as I and everyone said, Billy Miner was a nice guy, in prison only because he made a mistake, and whatever he said to the warden’s daughter he clearly didn’t appear to her like a hardened criminal.
The short of that was that a ladder was found near the wall that he escaped over. They never caught him. At least not here. The next train he robbed was on the east coast of the us.
He died in prison in the States, but the townsfolk there all put together some money and saved him from being buried in the pauper’s ground. He got a beautiful headstone in the city’s main cemetery.
How could you not like him? That is a history to be proud of.
And Steve’s in-laws ran the Billy Miner Pub, which is almost as good as being on the railroad tracks when he said, “This is a holdup.” He never fired his pistol.
● ● ●
Then Steve and I went to Trout Lake and found the little girl with the owl on her knapsack and the guy with the bike tires (but without Billy Miner’s heart or intelligence or consideration) and then the artist whose description of colours was, well, artistic. It was a good day for us.
And now I am glad I wrote this book. Thinking about all of you and writing about you—everyone in this book and everyone not in it, not yet—makes me happy, which isn’t a bad return for sitting down, closing my eyes and typing what I am thinking. I’m a lucky guy.
But Steve, if you buy this book and give it to your in-laws and they come upstairs and say, “Did you read this?” and you say, “No, too busy,” we will have to have a little talk.
Thank you, everyone.
—Mike
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