Acquisitions

John amid the boxes and books of Janice and Jim's West End apartment, where they are packing up for a move down the street.

Jim's old kilt fit John perfectly, so with his Scottish ancestry, he couldn't resist!

Some of the many volumes of Great Books of the Western World that will move from Jim's bookshelves to ours.

John and I both know that at our stage of life, we should be paring down our possessions instead of acquiring more. But how could we turn down the offer of a free Scottish kilt, with all the fixings? Or the complete set of Great Books of the Western World? All courtesy of John's cousin Janice and her husband Jim, who are moving a few blocks to another apartment that is a bit smaller than their current place, but offers two elevators instead of one that breaks down a lot.

We knew we shouldn't take the kilt, but it fit John perfectly and it's the real, hefty deal. Made in Glasgow, its label says it is "Hunting Stewart, Canadian Scottish Regiment." Its provenance is murky and it has a few moth-holes, but it comes complete with jacket, stockings, garters, sporran, and yes, a nasty-looking dirk. As for why would John wear such a thing, both his paternal grandparents came from Scotland, he took Highland dancing as a pre-schooler, and his pride in his ancestry includes reading How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Now the question is how to invent an occasion for John to wear this outfit: Perhaps the people at our local beach on Saltspring Island should be very afraid.

As for the books, they include such authors as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Lucretius, Shakespeare (lots), Darwin, Gibbon, Goethe, Marx and Engels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Freud. At one time, most of these names would have horrified me, but my liberal studies course at Simon Fraser University has given me at least a glancing acquaintance with them. None are easy, but they now seem possible, and maybe even an enjoyable challenge. The books come from Jim, an English professor, who always calls his books his "friends." Now I hope they will become mine.

Losing Linda

John and Linda MacAdam chat in the back yard of the Dunbar home where she grew up. She has sold the house, which will be demolished along with the garden. She doubts the tree behind John will survive.

John with  Linda's rose arbour, which she is giving away before she leaves.

Bare spots remain where Linda has given away plants to neighbours instead of leaving them for the bulldozer..

At our place, the arbour will likely support the roses to the left.

Returning home late at night from social events, Dunbar resident Linda MacAdam began to wonder about her safety. Many of the houses surrounding hers were vacant. If she screamed for help, who would hear? It's one of the many reasons she's looking forward to her move to Vancouver Island, where she has bought a pleasant home in a welcoming community. Linda is just one of many Vancouverites who are selling their Dunbar homes in an extremely hot and controversial housing market to move elsewhere.

But she is a bit of a special case, in that for many years she has been a prime source of information for Dunbar residents about what is happening to Vancouver's housing situation. Long before the issue became part of almost every newscast and news site, Linda began seeking out information about what was going on. Her neighbourhood was being demolished, the homes replaced with huge new vacant ones, and she wanted to know why -- both for herself and for her neighbours. She knew most people were simply too busy to dig for that information, so she spent a few hours every day scouring the internet for stories, reports, studies -- anything that would help explain what was going on -- and posted links on the Dunbar listserv. Not everybody appreciated her efforts, but at a time when most of the media were ignoring the issue, she steadfastly carried on.

She has a final plea to the community she's leaving: If you're selling your home, make sure you get the right to save anything salvageable instead of leaving it behind to be crunched up and sent to the landfill. It pains her to think of the valuable goods she has heard of being wasted when the bulldozers move in -- things that can be used by people who can't afford $4-million houses. It was as part of Linda's salvage effort that I became the owner of her rose arbour. She put it on the listserv, free to anyone who wanted it. On Wednesday, John and I picked it up. It will make a nice addition to our garden, but it won't make up for the loss of Linda's ever-vigilant eye on the listserv.

Five heads on a beach

This photo of five young men at English Bay, taken by my friend Ros Oberlyn, is the kind that once had a good chance of making the front page of the daily newspaper.  Times have changed. 

In the days when newspapers were flush with cash and staff, photographers who didn't have enough assignments to fill their shifts were sent out "touring." This entailed driving around the city to find pictures -- of anything at all -- that might amuse, interest, engage or enrage the next day's readers.

Most photographers had favourite haunts. The Vancouver Sun's Ralph Bower would always head for Stanley Park; his many photos of the critters there included a Canada goose attacking a mounted cop who strayed too close to its nest. Other photographers found the beaches, or the Downtown Eastside, the best places. Others found "touring" -- with its serendipitous nature and spotty radio contact with the office --a good chance for a snooze in the office car. My partner John, a Province photographer, once came home to mow the lawn: he knew there was no space in the next day's paper, and besides, he hadn't had his lunch break.

I was thinking about touring and newspaper photography because my friend Ros Oberlyn just sent me a photograph of five young men leaning against a log at English Bay, only their heads visible. "I took it with my iPod and couldn't see through the viewfinder because of the glare," she wrote. "But it still makes me chuckle." She said that while she was taking the picture, a woman walking behind her saw the humour and took a picture too. As for the men, "I think they were oblivious to it all."

Ros's photograph is a perfect example of the kind of picture the touring photographers of old would have brought back to the office. The perfectly spaced five dark heads against the sand, the ocean with its ships and seagulls, the bird in flight -- a perfect story of leisure, youth and summer in Vancouver. Depending on the news of the day, space, and other pictures in the running, it would probably have made the paper, maybe even the front page. In those days, photos were allowed to tell stories on their own, and a good front-page photo was known to increase newsstand sales. Now, as papers shrink, there is no interest in one-off photos that don't illustrate an accompanying story. That a picture like this -- with its local flavour and its own little story --  is unlikely to show up in a newspaper today is a sad reflection of what has been lost.

Strange welcome

What is this enigmatic figure on the Coal Harbour seawall saying to the tourists below?

Plaque includes poet's words written on sculpture.

Boats, mountains, Stanley Park; there's lots else to look at on the seawall.

Most seawall-walkers have their eyes on the scenery, including the unusual green-roofed convention centre.

The statue of a semi-naked man on the Coal Harbour seawall has always seemed strange to me. Surrounded by condo towers, shops and cafes, he stands on top of what looks like a cliff. A film of water runs continuously down the cliff, semi-obscuring some words written there. The man is situated high enough that he's easy to miss, and most of the people walking the seawall on Monday were ignoring him, as I always have. But I was with a friend and we had time to linger, so we took a closer look. Under the water, the writing says: "in the last of warmth/and the fading of brightness/on the sliding edge of the beating sea". The lines are from a poem by Earle Birney, a novelist, poet, and long-time creative writing professor at the University of B.C., who died in 1995.

The 2003 sculpture, called sliding edge, is by artists Jacqueline Metz and Nancy Chew, whose webpage says they explore ideas of "place and perception, landscape and culture." They say the sculpture's name refers to the always-moving edge of the waterfront; that the black stone waterfall suggests the coal cliff of historic Coal Harbour; and that the "enigmatic figure" on top is looking north and "acting as our compass."

Hmmm.

The poem they used, November Walk Near False Creek Mouth, was written in the early 1960s and does not appear to be a happy one. Literary critic L.R. Early says it represents Vancouver as "the last issue of an attenuated civilization, threatened with nuclear destruction and waiting for the end." It refers unkindly to the masses who walk there -- a lanknosed lady, wrinkled tourists, snorkeled manlings. Tom Marshall, author of Harsh and Lovely Land: The Major Canadian Poets and the Making of a Canadian Tradition, says that in Birney's poem, "a solitary man broods upon human incapacity, decay, selfishness and vulgarity in the face of impending disaster, solitary man on the furious edge of an ocean of chaos and irrational violence."

Which makes me think it's a good thing there is so much spectacular scenery to draw tourists' gaze out over the water as they walk the Coal Harbour seawall -- the mountains, the seaplanes, the grass-roofed convention centre. It may be best if they don't inquire too vigorously into the meaning of the strange figure looming over their heads on the opposite side.

Backyard Sunday

Sometimes it's just a day to stay at home and enjoy the back yard. Sunday felt like the true beginning of summer, with temperatures (on my sun-exposed thermometer at least) soaring to 35. I haven't put in many annuals this year, so I'm depending on perennials for blossoms. Luckily, the delphiniums, which I started from seed many years ago, just keep coming up. The hydrangeas and hostas are tough, the roses survive my neglect, and the hedges and trees just keep growing. Here are some scenes from my garden on Sunday:

I love the weeping birch in the background, which hides the neighbours' houses and makes the yard look luxuriously green. The spot of blue in the centre is my little patch of delphiniums, and the white blossoms in the foreground are hydrangeas I planted two years ago..

I try to keep some colour going in this planter, but it dries out quickly in the heat.

Those white hydrangeas again, with the birdbath behind. It's well-used.

Mom bought this bench many years ago. I remember the day she painted it on her balcony. Time for a refurbishment!

A couple of months ago, there was a 10-foot-deep hole where the lawn chairs are sitting now. We had the oil tank removed; it had leaked and the removal people had to come back three times to get all the contamination. We are trying to forget it all now by planting lots of grass seed and making this a sitting area.

Mr. Darcy on a mission  somewhere. Sometimes as he walks purposefully around the yard, I expect him to consult a wristwatch and say: "I'm late!"

Roses and delphiniums from the garden bring the outdoors into the house.

Lonely street

It's easy to photograph Dunbar Street on a Saturday afternoon without catching any pedestrians.

This produce store has picked up business after Stong's closed a few blocks away.

The old Stong's site is empty of all the shoppers who once kept its parking lot hopping.

This was the site of an old-fashioned bakery that later reopened as the Butter bakery. It soon moved elsewhere.

Raise rents for businesses while cutting the local population, and the result is what's happening to my little Dunbar shopping area, according to a University of B.C. professor. "Dunbar is a poster child for what can go wrong to a once-thriving neighbourhood," Patrick M. Condon, chair of UBC's Master of Urban Design Programs, says in a Saturday story in The Vancouver Sun. The story deals with the city-wide phenomenon of small independent businesses being forced out by higher rents as older commercial buildings are torn down and replaced by shiny new ones. But exacerbating the problem in some areas, including Dunbar, is the increasing number of vacant houses, which means fewer locals to patronize whatever businesses do exist. "There's quite a few vacancies there which are a consequence of hyper-investment and an absolute decline of population," Condon said of the Dunbar shopping area. He said Main Street was once floundering too, but is now  thriving thanks to a younger demographic moving in, good transit and the fact that most buildings are occupied. Thinking about this, I walked up to Dunbar Saturday afternoon to have a look. The last word that came to mind was "thriving." The block where Stong's and a long-time autobody shop once drew a steady stream of customers is desolate behind green fencing, awaiting the bulldozers. Also empty of people is the block where the new Stong's and a condominium development are under construction. Elsewhere, there are a few papered-over windows, but mainly what struck me was the lack of people, either inside the businesses or outside on the street. I've noticed that in the last few years, the type of businesses opening on Dunbar seems to have changed. Hair salons and martial arts studios have sprung up like dandelions; the key seems to be that no big investment is required. They could move elsewhere in a day, a fact that doesn't exactly create a vibrant, stable shopping environment. So far, the key businesses I use -- the produce store, the drugstore, the veterinarian, the bank --  have survived on Dunbar. But especially after my view of it on Saturday, I realize that it is beginning to look  like a very lonely street indeed.

Cat watching

Cat lovers, like dog lovers, notice their favourite animals wherever they are. My sister Betty, when visiting from Quebec and separated from her beloved dog Molly, is always happy to meet a dog, give it a good pat, talk breed, age and habits with the owner, and watch her favourite critters romping in the dog park. Cat lovers have to be a bit sneakier, as cats aren't out in public so much, and there aren't "cat parks" where we can gather to admire them. (Although a new Vancouver cafe called Catfe offers cat-lovers not just coffee and treats, but a selection of pat-able, adoptable cats to enjoy.) Among the cats I've met recently during my walks around the city was one on a leash, which of course set the 1966 song "Walking My Cat Named Dog" ringing in my ears. It is a nonsense song if you look at the lyrics -- (Me and my cat named Dog/We're walking high against the fog) and (Dog is a good old cat/Now people what d'ya think of that) -- but somehow it sticks. Apparently the California singer/writer Norma Tanega who was responsible for it always wanted a dog but could only have a cat, so she called it Dog. I don't know what the owner of the leashed cat calls it; there was a bit of a language barrier so I didn't get the full story. But he was very patient as the cat took its time exploring, and I noticed that it had not just a leash, but a cat coat as well! I think this is one very well cared-for cat. Here it is, along with a couple of other cats I was able to surreptitiously snap. You will have to look hard for them as they blended so well into the background:

Patient owner waits for his cat to sniff everything.

With both a leash and a coat, this cat is carrying a lot of gear.

Dreaming among the cabbages: the cat is the grey lump on the picnic table. It was having a wonderful snooze in the sunshine.

The black and white spot to the left of the door is the cat. It blended almost perfectly with the colours of its perch.

The birds

The entrance to Camosun Bog; This is the habitat birds need for survival.

New condo development on West 25th Avenue is one of many going up in Vancouver.

Across the street, another huge development is on the way. Behind the white screens are single-family homes with gardens that will all be demolished, taking any greenery with them.

The backyards of two new houses, with garages, that replaced one smaller house and big plant-filled garden. There's not much space for bird habitat now!

I have two friends who are bird aficionados--one watches for birds on her walks on the Steveston dike; the other goes out to the prairies every year to help a like-minded group of people do bird-banding. They find nests of raptors like owls and place bands on them -- not without difficulty -- so the birds can be tracked.

The idea is to collect information to help preserve them in a world that, when push comes to shove, doesn't care much about birds. On the prairies, my friend says, vast territories are being flattened in the service of the massive industrialization of agriculture. Bush areas are torn out, hills eliminated, sloughs filled in, to make every inch of ground accessible to computer-controlled machinery. As you can imagine, this doesn't leave many places for birds, and they disappear.

The same thing is happening in Vancouver, where large areas of trees and diverse plantings that provided habitat for birds are being destroyed. The clearcutting is for condos and other housing instead of agri-business, but the effects are the same. Native bird populations on the B.C. coast have dropped 35 per cent since 1970, with the main cause being habitat destruction, according to Vancouver bird strategy information cited in the online Tyee newspaper last week. (http://the tyee.ca/News/2016/05/25/Rise-of-Condos-Razed-Trees-Bird-Evictions/ )

The story, by longtime science reporter Margaret Munro, noted the city of Vancouver has lost 400 hectares of tree canopy -- about the size of Stanley Park -- in the last two decades. With 2,700 mature trees still being cut every year to make way for condos, new houses and laneway houses, enough trees to fill another Stanley Park could be lost in the next decade, she writes.

 I see the process underway every day in Vancouver as I watch bulldozers rip into big old trees and gardens as part of the current demolition frenzy. The size of the new buildings leaves little room for new gardens, and those that are planted seem to be for show rather than for nature. How, I wonder, will birds survive when their greenery is a tiny, carefully pruned tree, a new yew hedge, some ornamental grasses, and a lot of concrete?

The new movie experience

One of many changes: We don't go to movies here anymore.

The movie Love & Friendship, based on Jane Austen's novel Lady Susan, was good, but getting to it was painful.

Going to the movies used to mean: Driving to a theatre like the Ridge; lining up to buy tickets (with cash); going into a lobby where the chief feature was the buttery-smelling popcorn machine; choosing seats (moving if a tall guy sat in front of you); watching a couple of trailers, then settling in for the feature. This week, after a long hiatus from all things Hollywood, John and I had the new movie experience. Before we left the house for the Fifth Avenue cinema (the Ridge is condos now), John joked that he had entered the new world by buying our tickets and choosing our seats online. No more rushing into the theatre to get the coveted middle of the middle row -- our seats were reserved! At the cinema, we had our self-printed tickets scanned in -- no waiting in line for others to ponder their movie choices and pay. John was surprised by other innovations (I had been to a movie within the last year, so knew about them). There was a restaurant inside the lobby! You could buy booze! But when we went into the theatre, we realized there had been a tragic mistake. In choosing our seats, John had mistaken the front of the theatre for the back. "It's as if they put North at the bottom of the map instead of South," he said of the online theatre layout. Instead of three rows from the back of the theatre, we were three rows from the front! If it had been a play, we could have counted nostril-hairs. We tried to change seats, but every one except a few singles in odd spots had been reserved by all the other people who had also entered the new world.

 Then the real trouble started. We didn't know that going into a theatre 20 minutes early is a mistake; an invitation to be blasted with an endless lineup of commercials for many, many things you do not want. When we finally got to 8 p.m. -- the supposed starting time -- our spirits sank. It wasn't time for the movie; it was time for the trailers! The sound was pumped up to ear-splitting levels; you could feel it vibrate in your breast-bone. These future movies all seemed to involve beautiful young women, all seductive and floaty at the start, undergoing horrific trials and ending up in piles of reddish gore. I don't like suspense, I don't like gore. I shut my eyes tight; I plugged my ears tighter -- it was like being under attack. John seemed to be in a similar bodily position. So, 20 minutes of  commercials; 15 minutes of assault -- 35 minutes of pain before the movie even began. When it did -- Love & Friendship, based on Jane Austen's novel Lady Susan -- it was such a shift from what we had just been through that it seemed surreal. It was a good movie, funny and well-made, but it may be our last. If we are ever lured back, we have a strategy. We will know the front from the back of the theatre and reserve accordingly, but the seats will be on the aisle. Fifteen minutes after the scheduled start time, we will pop into those seats. We will make the new movie experience as close to the old as possible.

Trees

When I first came to Vancouver, it was the trees I loved most -- their size, their diversity, their beauty. I never got over it. Now, when I walk around the city noticing things, it is the trees that draw my eye again and again. My iPad is full of photographs of trees -- grand, blossoming, funny. Here are a few:

This Point Grey boulevard beauty stopped me in my tracks.

Walls of trees  hide condos  near Arbutus and Broadway.  

Sometimes a rhododendron is not a shrub but a full-blown tree.

A passerby told me the owner of these trees calls them "the herd."

This unusually clipped entrance caught my eye.

A long row of tall trees borders this sunny horse meadow in nearby Southlands.

My house: You can never have too many trees!