A paean to a grocery store

I've been missing the comfort of  shopping at a store I know well. This is Stong's after it closed but before the bulldozers moved in.

 Partway through demolition, you could still see where certain departments were. 

This is what the store looks like now; only one partial wall to the far right is still standing.

The new Stong's just up the street  is supposed to be open before the end of the year. We'll see.

What a mess some grocery stores are! How poorly stocked, how oddly organized, how badly lit! The music is terrible! Even the clerks are strangers!

As you might have guessed, I'm missing Stong's, the grocery store where I shopped for four decades. Forced by its closure to try different stores in the area, I have found them pathetic substitutes. Their clerks may be nice, but they're not my clerks. There may be logic behind their organization of shelves, but it makes no sense to me. And their stock is not convincing. Where are the 20 brands of canned tomatoes I'm used to seeing? The yards of shelving devoted to different kinds of yogurt? The meat department with butchers in bloody white aprons hacking away in the back?

With Stong's, I knew its quirks, I knew its aisles. I knew where to ferret out that special bread for dinner guests. I knew which clerks could pack and which would make a cock-up of eggs at the bottom and milk on top. I knew not to go there Sunday morning, when everybody in Dunbar rose simultaneously and went out to do the weekly shop. And I knew that you could shop there three days before Christmas but not two: that meant an hour-long wait in an aisle-long lineup.

More than anything, this enforced suspension from Stong's has made me treasure my regular landmarks -- those places I can go knowing exactly what to expect without any nasty surprises. Sometimes, a person needs a sense of stability and order. Sometimes a person needs to be able to do an entire weekly shop on automatic, the brain almost completely disengaged.

Meanwhile, the bulldozers have eviscerated my old shopping mecca, leaving its guts exposed to whoever wants to see where the meat and produce departments once stood. But two blocks away, the new Stong's is rising like the phoenix. I will be glad when it's ready for shoppers so I can learn its aisles, pick from its 20 brands of tomatoes and reacquaint myself with its clerks. I can't wait to be able to park my brain at the door of a grocery store again.

Heartbreak through real estate

A favourite house-- the stone chimney, the landscaping --  on our street has just gone up for sale. Pricetag: $3.48 million. It's pretty much a given that every old house like this will be demolished and replaced with something bigger.

At least one movie was shot at this perfect little house with its huge trees. I was heartbroken when the for-sale sign went up.

This house may not look like much now, but it was beautifully landscaped on a big treed lot before it went up for sale. The orange in the windows means it may have asbestos and demolition will be done carefully.

This house is not for sale, but it's one of the perfect English cottage-y places I love in Vancouver. What a chimney, what windows, what a garden!

This isn't for sale either, but it's an example of a house built on two lots. Look at the luscious extra garden space! The developers must be drooling. 

There are now five buildings --some multiple dwellings -- on what once was one huge lot with a fine old house and a beautiful garden with ponds and trees. Nobody can say the city isn't densifying!

For awhile, I thought it was personal. I thought somebody somewhere had figured out which houses I loved best in my neighbourhood, then deliberately targeted them for destruction. As if my heart had painted them with a big X -- and that was the spot where the bulldozers should head first.

My favourites were houses with character, as English-y as possible, surrounded by big gardens. Perfection was ivy-covered walls, steep roofs, leaded-glass windows and maybe some nice brick or stonework. The perfect garden had big trees, lots of shrubs and English-country-style roses and hollyhocks.

Because of its British heritage, the city actually did have many houses with at least some of these features, and in the days when land wasn't the gold it is now, many lots were big. Some people even bought two lots so they'd have plenty of garden room.

 "During the 1920s and '30s, Kerrisdale, Dunbar and West Point Grey had filled up with the comparatively small "Storybook" houses, and the larger lots of the west side evolved into a leafy landscape of gardens and trees that epitomized Vancouver for many people -- especially those of British ancestry, who dominated the city at that time," wrote Michael Kluckner in Vancouver Vanishes, a book about the demolitions and changes in the city.

Today, an old house on a big lot is known as demolition bait. Character, charm, and leaded-glass windows count for naught. The new buyers want everything new and as huge as zoning will allow. As for the grounds, the bigger the lot, the bigger the house that can be built. If a lot is big enough, it can sometimes be split into two, three or even more lots, as happened to a property several blocks away from us. Instead of one $3-million house -- five! How can a piece of charming history compete with that?

It was a sad awakening, but I came to understand that the developers' targeting of my favourite houses wasn't personal at all. I realized that the very things that made me adore these places made the developers adore them even more. And in such a contest, guess who wins?

Surprises

One of the best things about walking around Vancouver is the chance of encountering the  unexpected. You look up and suddenly . . . there is something amazing. A view you hadn't seen before or that is suddenly different. Somebody's sense of humour on display. A flourishing something behind a net, in a garden bed or decorating some garbage cans. Here are a few of the surprises I have encountered in my walks lately:

A sudden burst of purple phlox and foxgloves stopped me in my tracks one day on my regular route down the Dunbar hill.

This ghost-like apparition rose up in front of me one day. 

Under the net, safe from birds, bunches of cherries ripening.

This was a surprise on a route down  the 16th Avenue hill that I hadn't walked for awhile. The house on this lot had obviously been torn down  long enough ago to allow a full field of  foxgloves and weeds to spring up. I was struck by how quickly it had returned to wilderness. The North Shore mountains are in the background. 

I'd photographed these vegetable beds several weeks earlier, but when I passed them again, they had grown so much that I couldn't resist recording their abundance.

Why not make the back lane beautiful, even if it has to accommodate garbage cans?

Somebody couldn't resist turning this stump into a bathroom fixture. It's hard to see in the photo, but there is even a handle for flushing on the square board attached to the seat back.

The Point Grey waterfront is always beautiful, but the combination of lavender and weeds gone to seed caught my eye this spring. 

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.