None of This Was Planned Read online

  “Nice little spot you have,” I said. You have to start somewhere.

  He nodded.

  “Been here long?”

  He nodded.

  “High tide,” I said.

  He looked up at me. “King tide,” he said.

  Super-high tide. The water was not far from his toes. What a beautiful picture—an artist’s studio with no room for him to move his feet. That was the kind of stuff a Hollywood film starts with.

  “Hi, we’re from ctv. Can we talk to you?”

  “Who are you?”

  I love that; someone who is pure and not part of television and is not interested in someone who makes a living from it.

  I told him. He shrugged. I was happy.

  Jock was his name and he said he had worked in the corporate world but had been pushed out of it. That happens. The only thing that hurts more is when those doing the firing tell you, “This hurts me more than you can imagine.”

  To mend his soul Jock had walked around Vancouver’s path by the ocean, which is better than going to a therapist or psychiatrist, or taking pills or drugs or drinking. Try it. It works.

  He passed a spit of land that had the broken branches of a sapling sticking out of the sand. They barely came up to his knees. He was told that the Park Board had ordered it to be cut down, and each time it grew back they cut it down again. This happened three times.

  “It was broken, like me,” he said.

  He climbed over the Seawall and decided that was the spot where he would look for his own rebirth. It was also where he could protect something besides himself. That was ten years ago.

  Every day he walked to the broken tree, climbed down from the Seawall and set up his stool and his pieces of stone, and there he spent the day cutting, carving, sanding and turning stone into art.

  By the time we met him the tree was twice his height. If the Park Board workers had come by during the day they would not have touched it. There is a policy against confrontations—and the gardeners don’t work at night.

  “It is my living room,” he said.

  The way he said “living” he did not mean it was like a room in a house. He meant it was his place for living.

  “The tree has grown strong, and I have too.”

  I went away feeling good—and worried. Long ago I met two women who put socks and cookies in plastic baggies and hung them from a small Christmas-looking tree in one of the parking lots of Stanley Park.

  The Park Board took down the baggies. The women put them back. The Park Board took them down, the women replaced them. Down, up, down, up.

  “You just can’t change the natural surroundings like that,” was the official position.

  Then the women hung more baggies with socks on the tree, decorating it just like a Christmas tree should be decorated.

  Finally those in charge of everything could stand it no more and they cut down the tree.

  “We have a policy, and you know that,” were the official words of the official response. “What if everyone did that, what then?”

  The tree Jock is looking after is growing on the wrong side of the Seawall. That is why they cut it down.

  I fear someday Jock will show up and his tree will be gone. If it happens I will let you know, but meanwhile go by and visit. Look at his tree and his art and his living room. It is right down from the Sylvia Hotel. You will feel good.

  Close My Eyes

  Some stories are little more than an image. I close my eyes and I see a bride in white, in a wedding gown, and her husband in a tux, all black of course.

  They are standing in the rain. No, not just rain—pouring, drenching rain. They are standing in front of the lighthouse at Brockton Point in Stanley Park. Someone, a friend, is taking their picture.

  “Why?”

  “We came up here a few years ago from California. He asked me to marry him right here,” she said.

  They went back to California, lived, worked, got married, and then she said, “I want a wedding picture by the lighthouse.”

  What about the rain?

  “What could be better?” she said. “I won’t remember the other pictures.”

  ● ● ●

  Brockton Point Lighthouse is much more than just a beautiful backdrop. It was extremely important for all the years before radar, keeping wooden ships from sinking, which many sailors were happy about.

  One of the duties of the lighthouse keeper in the 1800s and early 1900s was to tell the fishermen it was time to come home for supper.

  You just might know about this because it was in an earlier book, Haunting Vancouver, a good book if I say so myself, but if you missed it I’ll tell you again.

  And the neat thing about telling you this is that it is basic to my philosophy on collecting stories that might be worth telling. Every time I go by the lighthouse with someone who doesn’t know the story I say, “Do you know what the old lighthouse keeper did when he wasn’t lighthouse keeping?”

  “No,” they say.

  “Ahhh,” I say, and then I tell them this story:

  A century and a half ago the fishermen, mostly looking for salmon, were in small boats, really just large rowboats. Before dawn they would row out into Burrard Inlet or further out past the first narrows.

  They would use rod and line, hook and bait, and try to catch salmon, one at a time. They would be there all day. They brought some food—often dried salmon—for lunch, and some beer and bread, and they pulled in one fish after another. If they stopped to rest they were not making any money.

  If it rained they got wet. Most of them had a small pup tent in the middle of the boat, but that was only for when it was really coming down, as it was on the wedding couple. Even on those days they still held their rods out from inside the tent.

  Their day was supposed to end at six o’clock but they didn’t have watches or clocks (can you imagine a watch in a rowboat filled with fish and water?) so what to do? That is where the lighthouse keeper came in.

  At the top of the hour he would tie a stick of dynamite onto the end of a fishing line, pick up the pole, light the fuse and cast the explosive out as far as he could—even farther if the adrenalin kicked in.

  Bang! Or rather BANG!

  “I thought it would never come,” said the fishermen, and they rowed back in and sold their fish to the middlemen who took them to the canneries, which helped build what was at one time British Columbia’s second-biggest industry.

  Then came a gift from Victoria. It was not really a heartfelt gift. The keepers of the capital were just trying to clean out their closets, and over there, taking up valuable space where they could put a statue of a politician, was an old cannon.

  “What shall we do with it?”

  “Give it to Vancouver. They’ll take anything,” one may or may not have said.

  So they shipped it over the strait and the Vancouver aldermen said, “Wonderful. But what shall we do with it?”

  The new Stanley Park was desperate for any kind of decoration, so there it went—a decoration and a possible lifesaver. Can you imagine what would have happened if the line had got tangled while the lighthouse keeper was casting out the sizzling dynamite?

  So with city officials standing around the cannon, six o’clock came and a half-pound of gunpowder was ignited.

  BOOM!! That was a really big BOOM!! Much bigger than the BANG! of the dynamite.

  It was basically the biggest, loudest dinner bell in the country, maybe the world, and at six o’clock every night for a while the Six o’Clock Gun was fired. Yes, it was called the Six o’Clock Gun. What else would you call it?

  That is, until the mothers who were trying to get their kids to eat dinner could take it no longer.

  The boom was heard loud and clear across the city. It shook windowpanes and dishes and the concentration of little
ones eating their burgers and fries. Okay, there were no burgers and fries then, but no doubt the kids were dreaming of them.

  “Stop running to the window,” said the mothers to their misbehaving children.

  The next night it happened again: BOOM!! And the next: BOOM!!

  Finally some of the women of Vancouver marched on City Hall and demanded a stop to the gun play.

  “But we are not playing,” the city fathers might or might not have told them. “This is serious manly business. We are telling the time.”

  The mothers might or might not have said, “Well stop or we’ll give you a miserable time all the time.”

  If you are married you know that’s a convincing argument. The fishermen were not consulted, but the politicians had to make a hard decision, they said. Politicians are always saying that, as though the rest of us don’t.

  Anyhow, the politicians decided in favour of the women in front of them rather than the fishermen who were way out in the dark on the water waiting to be called in to eat.

  In a short time the booms were changed to nine p.m. and the gun then became the . . . well, you know.

  That is what I think of when I close my eyes and conjure up an image of the Brockton Point Lighthouse.

  And what I always say (I know I’m boring about it) is get a story you can tell, and tell it. It beats television.

  ● ● ●

  Some of the stories that come to mind are not really stories. They don’t have the beginning, middle and end that all stories need, but some of them are still memorable.

  I was near Sunset Beach when a woman pedalled past me on her bike. Then she stopped and came back.

  Her name was Beatrice and I had bought airplane tickets from her a long time ago, before everyone did everything on computers. That was when we talked to each other.

  She reminded me of meeting her and then said out of the blue, “The story I liked most was the little girl from Germany who was making dandelion bracelets for herself.”

  That was at least thirty-five years ago.

  “I loved that one too,” I said, and truly I did.

  There was something so simple and beautiful about a girl, maybe ten or twelve years old, in a park near downtown passing the time and making art that would last such a short time.

  I remember her saying her father was in a conference and that he travelled around the world and often brought her with him. She had nothing else to do while she waited for him.

  There were no other adults around, which I then did not find unusual. Now I wouldn’t dare speak to a kid without a parent nearby and without asking the parent for permission.

  In fact now, as you know, you would find very few ten- or twelve-year-olds, especially girls, out by themselves.

  The world has changed. It is turned upside down from the way kids were two generations ago. Now the parks are mostly empty, unless there are adults watching the kids. The streets have fewer and fewer hockey games abuzz with shouting ten-year-olds.

  Of course there are still some, but a few decades ago all the streets were filled with them. Now there is fear of being outside combined with video games that keep you inside and texting and earbuds that keep out all sounds of living except for the programmed hit music.

  Street hockey? Not today. It’s sad.

  The scene of the girl making the bracelets from yellow flowers was beautiful. It made Beatrice and me feel good to remember it—and nothing happened in that story. Maybe that’s the story.

  High-Class Dining

  Today is Family Day. I have a cold. I have the flu. I am dying. This will be a challenge. My head hurts, my chest hurts . . . I could go on but you had the same flu sometime over the winter so you know what hurts. We might have given it to each other.

  Yes, I could stay home, but everything would hurt just as much and there would be no chance of getting the pain out of my mind. At least if I am working I may think of something else and I will feel less awful.

  No, I will not infect anyone now. I am told the infection period was two weeks ago when I didn’t know I had the illness and I might have said hello to you. Sorry. That proves bacteria are very smart. They know how to get around before they are discovered. Bacteria evolved long before us.

  I am trying Reilly’s method. “I am not sick. I really am not sick. Darn it, I really, really am not sick.”

  Oh, golly. I am so sick.

  It is a clear sky so I don’t need to look for a hole in the clouds, and anyway it hurts just to look up, but I need help.

  We stop at Sunset Beach. A family—mother, daughter, son and baby carriage—are going for hot chocolate. Father is working.

  “Can we take a picture?”

  Yes.

  There’s a start.

  A fine big fellow is putting out plastic chairs around the metal tables, and I have an idea.

  This is not a hot dog stand. No. This is a four-star restaurant for which you need reservations. So in the story for television I say that, while four-year-old Simon climbs onto one of the plastic chairs.

  His sister, Adaline, puts on her coat. “It’s cold,” she says.

  She is dressing for dinner, I say.

  Their mother, Carmen, brings the hot chocolate. It is a Michelin Two Star creation, I say, with whipped cream on top.

  Adaline and Simon begin licking the sweet, thickened white mountain on top of the chocolate. In this super-polite society at this fancy restaurant that is the only way to eat whipped cream.

  And then, after Carmen lifts the baby from the carriage, Simon spontaneously gets out of his chair followed by Adaline and they hug their little brother along with their mother.

  It’s a tangle of arms and faces, all cozy and safe. That warm, nourishing entrée is served only in the best places and to the best families.

  I’m feeling much better, and I’ve done nothing.

  How Does It Happen?

  How does it consistently happen? I ask this over and over and it still happens over and over. It has done so for decades and it still leaves me dumbfounded.

  And my point is that it could happen to you. You could have an adventure every day or whenever you want it. You don’t need to do this for a living. You can do it just for living.

  You don’t need a tv station or newspaper behind you. You don’t need an audience other than the person sitting across the table where your teriyaki chicken is waiting, or if you are vegetarian then you can talk about this over carrots. Everything works.

  You just look for something neat or offbeat or colourful or weird or funny or sad (not a lot of that, because there is already too much) and tell the person you are eating with what you found. Simple.

  Don’t worry about how you will tell it. It will come out fine. You don’t need to be a writer to tell a story, you just need the story. It can be one sentence or it can last the whole meal.

  I tell many people this. It is better than collecting stamps. If you are young, stamps are things that you put on an envelope before mailing it.

  Sorry. An envelope is a folded piece of paper in which you put a letter.

  Sorry again. A letter is a piece of paper on which you write something with a pen, and a pen . . . oh forget it.

  What I am talking about is better than collecting money. Now there is a stretch of reality, right?

  Money, of course, will make you rich, but then the Canadian dollar will fall and you will be poor or the stock market will dive and that will have the same result. You will get sick and worry yourself to death, so forget about that.

  Stories are gold. Gold is not bad in itself but stories are better. The more you share them the richer you are, and that’s not true of the gold coins that you have hidden somewhere in a jar in . . . well, somewhere, but you can’t tell where because, well, you know. Just don’t worry about them. No one will take them. Don’t worry!
>
  See? Stories are better.

  ● ● ●

  “Where should we go?” Todd Gilchrist asked.

  “Left, then right, then left, then straight. Or go somewhere else.”

  We had a goal, not a destination. We wanted to find something nice, happy—you know the rest.

  We make a loop downtown and there is nothing. It starts to rain, which means that less than nothing is waiting for us. Whoever was out before, which was no one, has gone back inside where sensible people go when it is raining, and whoever was inside is not coming out.

  “Maybe Queen Elizabeth Park,” I say.

  “You’re only saying that because we’re at 33rd and Main and the park is just over there,” says Todd.

  “Over there” is one block away, and soon we’re at the park.

  “I haven’t been here for years,” he says.

  Why not? I think, but I don’t say it because there is no point in questioning someone who has my daily salary in his hands.

  If he doesn’t take good pictures I can’t do a story and if I can’t do that there is no pay. So I won’t question his lack of going places that I think are worth going. Don’t do it.

  “So why don’t you come here?” I ask.

  “Too far.”

  Okay, that’s a good answer.

  “But you are missing the conservatory,” I say, “which has birds and fish and trees and neat stuff.”

  “I played volleyball with my wife last night,” he said.

  Okay again. Volleyball with his wife is better than birds and fish and trees.

  “Did you know this is a reservoir?” I said, pointing down at the parking lot.

  “Nope, didn’t know that,” he said.

  “Did you know the whole park was once a volcano?” I said. (I’ll tell you later how I learned that.)

  “Nope, didn’t know that either,” he said with the same enthusiasm.

  So I tried something that would work on someone who lives in today’s world: “Did you know there used to be a lot of drug deals up here?”