To thine own self be true

High school girl going by yesterday with t-shirt: Not a Morning Person in big letters.

(best seat in the house, The Teahouse Restaurant at Ferguson Point looking onto English Bay)

(view of city centre through showers from highest point in Vancouver, Seasons in the Park restaurant, Queen Elizabeth Park)

(window table, Seasons)

(plaque outside of Seasons)

(afternoon, 28th floor, harbour view of English Bay, Coast Hotel & Suites)

(sunset)

(evening)

(morning)

(mythical beast by the rhododendrons, Van Dusen Gardens)

(3-headed sculpture, Van Dusen)

(hanging light, Hotel Vancouver, afternoon tea)

(“The Departure”, sculpture, Van Dusen)

(rhododendron path)

(author in rhododendron garden, Van Dusen)

(peonies)

(looking toward Davie St. and Starbuck’s beside English Bay)

can you stand inside a hollow tree in Stanley Park,

would a group of Tai-Chiers block the top entrance to Queen Elizabeth Park,

would you find a park bench plaque dedicated to a major Asian superstar who committed suicide (someone that most Canadians would never have heard of),

or a sculpture garden of laughing men on a beach

or a sculptured water fountain on a quiet residential street corner

or a crosswalk light for bikes

or a crossing sign for squirrels

or a sculpture of a photographer waving a rube out of the way.

Other: A four-way crossing painted in rainbow stripes onto a Davie Street intersection. A rappeller on a high-rise condo (c.f. poem that follows). A planned zipline for a quiet, conservative park. A pot day shutting down normal traffic flow in city centre followed by a reminder from the feds for those in attendance that pot is illegal.

Across from the Banana Republic near an armoured truck, Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser” blaring from the corner Starbuck’s, he sat on a Robson sidewalk awaiting the Second Coming with his tattered New Testament, green porcupine exercise ball, and a selection of hotel body-wash bottles; his newspapers weighted to the pavement by a lint roller and leopard-spotted umbrella. Head-down, he was passed by an endless parade of hand-held screens, tattoos, suits, low-cut blouses, leashed dogs, veiled faces, and sunglassed-mothers with fraps and Winners bags wheeling babies by, their eyes closed to him, too. He only awoke when I dropped a fiver into his empty black food tray, smiled and said “Ya know, I was just dreaming of my mother taking me to school for the first time back in Thunder Bay.”
–April 21. 2015, Vancouver

“Stand by Me” playing in 1961 on my 2-transistor radio as I delivered Tribunes on a hot August afternoon in Winnipeg. Segue 54 years later to the underground Denman Mall (Vancouver) looking like a geriatric facility with senior shoppers shuffling past to piped-in Ben E. King still singing this classic as fresh and young as that precious first time.

(black-figured-rappeller on 23rd floor of Vancouver high-rise, 2nd white section from the right)

Something about nonchalantly
throwing a leg over
the top-floor guard-rail
25 stories up
creating your own story–
the hero of imagined possibility;
no one else about
to stop or question you
about the legalities of such,
inching slowly down
like Spiderman
peeping in tenants’ windows
giving them a giddy wave,
peering into their own-imagined
pseudo-private worlds;
it’s really only ego
conquering a hi-rise
like a still-life mountain,
the edginess of some lives
inviting the moment
when lines snap–
and the descender feels
an even greater rush
trying to aim where
she might land
and then walk away.

merely by the limits of others and limited expectations they have had of/set for me.

The best stuff was what had been imagined/imaginative possibilities/what had been dreamed, and then made to happen/created/come true/ and often pleasurably shared.