None of This Was Planned Read online

  “Really?”

  “Yep, I used to come up here looking to find someone bird watching, except the bird watchers were scared away. You can’t bring binoculars to a place where ugly-looking guys are passing packages back and forth,” I said.

  I told him you could watch a car pull into the lot, circle once or twice and then pull up alongside a parked car. The window went down on the passenger side of one car, then the window on the driver’s side of the other car went down.

  One arm went out with something and dropped it in the other car. Then an arm came out from the other car and dropped something in the first car. Then both cars left.

  Imagine this happening right next to the glass dome with the birds and fish living in a garden of warmth and peace and love.

  “No drug dealers now,” Todd said.

  “Nope.” I pointed at the southwest corner of the lot where there is a giant antenna with spikes and hoops sticking up about four storeys.

  “The police put one of their transmission relays here. The drug dealers were sure it was heavy with cameras, which it probably is, and presto, puff. Drug dealers gone.”

  “Neat,” said Todd.

  But no story, and the rain was coming harder.

  We saw someone with a red shirt and cowboy hat playing golf on the pitch and putt course. Todd grabbed his camera and jumped out.

  That is good, except the red shirt is way over there and we are way over here. We watched him hit a ball and run after it, then hit it again and run again.

  “He’s running faster than us,” I said. “And it’s in the other direction.”

  Todd got back in his suv.

  “Where should we go?” Todd asked.

  “Kingsway,” I said.

  Someone at work had sent me a note about seeing a man dancing with a sign in front of a used furniture store. It is hard getting a note like this because I don’t want to tell him that many people have that dancing job.

  The difference between me and the fellow who sent me the note is he had never seen it before. He was excited. He wanted to share it, and that is exactly what I tell everyone they should do.

  Go out every day and actively look for something, anything, and when you find it tell someone. I tell people that is what I do every day and I am lucky to have made a career out of it.

  But what happens when someone tells you something that you already know about?

  You could say, “Oh, yeah, you think a pink-spotted parrot is something? I’ve seen pink-spotted parrots all over town.”

  “Yeah, well, the one I saw had a lot of spots.”

  “How many?”

  “How do I know how many? I didn’t count but it had a lot and I don’t believe that you’ve seen any pink-spotted parrots.”

  “Oh, yeah, you want to fight?”

  And that is the way wars start.

  In my case, I just did not want to disappoint the fellow who had told me about the dancing man with the sign.

  “Kingsway,” I said. “There’s a fellow dancing with a sign.”

  “Seen many of them,” said Todd.

  “Maybe this one will be different. Maybe this one will have prosthetic legs and will be an inspiration. Maybe.”

  I pause for a reality check.

  “Well, at least he’ll be dancing in the rain and that’s something, sort of.”

  We get to the used furniture store. No one is dancing. No one is walking. No one is standing. Everyone is smart. It is raining.

  “Okay. Trout Lake,” I said.

  Trout Lake you will read about many times. Properly called John Hendry Park, it is at Victoria Drive and 15th Avenue, and it is the motherlode of all golden stories. If you haven’t been there, do go and visit.

  It has a pond surrounded by a walking path. At one end is a dog park where your unleashed friends can swim. At the other end is the smallest beach in the city, with sand and a lifeguard.

  You can walk around the pond from the beach to the dogs in five minutes, without speeding.

  In the late 1800s and early 1900s it supplied fresh water for the giant Hastings Sawmill (owned by John Hendry) on Burrard Inlet where Vancouver was actually born. I once found part of a wooden pipe that carried the water that long, long distance. The pipe was at the north end, just where a couple of dogs were splashing in the water.

  A few months later I tried to show someone where it was, but nature had taken it back and I never saw the pipe again.

  But the best part of the park is the people. Victoria Drive was originally inhabited by folks who worked on the railroad or in sawmills or corner grocery stores and they all walked to work.

  Their kids grew up with the pond as their world. They were lucky kids. The parents could let them play there all day without worry. Lucky parents.

  Now, no more railroad, no sawmills, and the corner stores are either turned into homes or coffee shops and no one walks to work.

  But they are the same people. It’s their neighbourhood, their park, and if you go there you will feel like it is your park.

  Unlike Stanley or Queen Elizabeth Parks, there are no tourists and no one is parking their luxury car in the lot. Also, unlike those parks, the parking at Trout Lake is free. Okay, read that line again. It’s true.

  There are no statues of people who were never in the park. There is only one painting of one woman, and I will tell you about her later. There is no army of gardeners (just one who is super) and there are no sculptures of things that you are not sure what those things are, but there are baseball fields, which are used. The big parks don’t have baseball.

  I once saw a Little League game being played there—a lot of shouting and cheering and pinging of balls against aluminum bats, all the things that make baseball good—and then I saw something better.

  Outside the wire-caged dugout was one boy, maybe twelve, who was throwing a ball into a glove on his hand. It was hypnotic. It was beautiful. If you play baseball you know that many good hours have been spent just throwing a ball into a glove. It feels good.

  “What you doing?” I asked, knowing he was going to say, “Nothing,” because throwing a ball into a glove is nothing when you have to explain it.

  But no. This kid said, “I’m breaking in a glove.”

  Well, that’s nice. In fact that’s a painstaking art that takes a long time.

  “It’s my coach’s glove.”

  Now it is beautiful.

  “Why?”

  “My team’s not playing today and I came down here to watch and he asked me to.”

  It was like the girl making a bracelet out of dandelions. Breaking in a glove, making something from flowers, both doing nothing if you asked them, and yet both doing something on a level of transcendental meditation, whatever that means, or even better.

  ● ● ●

  So I was thinking of those things when I said, “Let’s try Trout Lake.”

  But before we could set off there came a sign from on high, and you can’t ignore that. This one was on the second floor of a building on Kingsway. It said “Billiards” and it had Chinese writing around it.

  Perfect. Indoors. No rain. Two old guys playing for years and neither one better than the other.

  As Todd and I walked to the front door we passed a brake and muffler shop on the other side of the parking lot.

  “No matter how bad this is,” I said, “it’s better than working over there.”

  Todd nodded.

  My imagination was pumping as we approached the pool hall.

  Two guys are up there. They don’t speak English, so I don’t have to interview them, but someone in the pool hall knows them and tells us their history.

  They grew up together, moved here together, worked together, maybe even both became widowers about the same time. The more I thought about it the better it becam
e.

  One problem: the door was locked. Someone passed by and said they open only at night.

  That was disappointing. Of course we would go on to Trout Lake, but now the camera, which had come out of the truck again, was going back in. Another defeat, and defeats may make the spirit stronger but they are not good in real life.

  While Todd was locking in the camera (it is not good to go to the boss and say someone took it) I looked across the parking lot at the brake shop. Above the noise of the traffic on Kingsway, I could hear music—not the chest-vibrating mega-pulsing of hard rock like I would expect from a brake shop, but something that was almost opera.

  I walked closer. It was in another language and it was sweet and smooth and calming.

  A worker walked up to me.

  “Nice music,” I said.

  “Vietnamese,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, brilliantly. “Why?”

  “We are Vietnamese,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “We. He and me,” he said pointing to another mechanic.

  “Does your boss like the music?”

  “We are the bosses.”

  “Oh,” I said again, this time like I had just won the lottery, because at that moment the sun came out, flowers were blooming and if there had been a choir nearby they would have been singing.

  Of course it was still raining and cold and miserable, but if they are the bosses then there is a story here that needs telling.

  I told him who we were and what we would like and he said, “Oh, no. I don’t want to be on television.”

  I think, Oh yes, you do.

  “Just show us the music,” I say.

  “No,” he says.

  I can see he will need some coaxing or I will need some cyanide pills for myself.

  “Just show us the records,” I start to say, and then change it to “cds,” which I think is up to date.

  He looks at me in a strange way.

  “Show us how you play it,” I say and somehow out of pity he leads us to the back of the shop where there is a small box under large speakers.

  He picks up a tiny thing and even though most of you know what it is, I don’t. But he has on white rubber gloves with grease stains on them and I know Todd is pointing his camera at his hands and I am happy.

  Honestly, to me it is like a moment with Picasso. It is little things that make everything good, and right now it is a neat, clean computer thing held by hands in greasy work gloves.

  He pushes something and out comes beautiful music. It is not rock, it is sweet and smooth and a woman’s voice.

  “What is she saying?” I ask.

  “She’s singing a poem about the night coming and everything will be all right.”

  He looks happy telling me.

  “What else do you like about it?” I ask.

  And that is when he started telling us that it reminded him of his childhood and his parents and what the moon looked like when he was little and the excitement of everything.

  In short I was listening to a monologue of memories while the song played softly behind him. Todd was recording it and that alone was good enough to tell the world.

  For a fellow who did not want to talk he would not stop. Then he introduced us to his partner. The third owner was away on vacation in Vietnam.

  “How did you wind up here?” I asked.

  “I was born in a refugee camp in Malaysia,” said the second fellow.

  “I was one of the boat people,” said the first guy.

  They had worked for someone else who had owned the shop for several years until he quit and sold it to them.

  “Now we work twice as hard, but it is ours,” said the one born in a camp.

  I was warm and happy. A couple of hard-working fellows who started with nothing and now have something and they keep their history alive with music.

  Then one changed the music and out came rap.

  “Vietnamese rap,” he said. “Don’t know how that got in there.”

  And I am thinking, what could be better.

  And we were done.

  And, as I asked a bunch of pages ago, how does it happen? I have no idea.

  Trout Lake

  After leaving the brake and muffler shop we passed Trout Lake, with all the memories and stories that it holds for me, all from one park:

  Mona, who drives every day when the weather is good from New Westminster to a park bench near the lake to have her lunch, is a sweetheart. Her skin is wrinkled. “I’m eighty-nine for God’s sake. Of course my skin is wrinkled—but give me a hug.”

  Yes, I can’t wait.

  The first time I met her I asked to look in her lunch bag. How else can you get to know someone? In addition to a sandwich and thermos she had a can of WD-40, a wrench and a set of screwdrivers.

  “Why?”

  “Well suppose someone needed something and I didn’t have it. What then?”

  I knew at that moment I was in love.

  The first story I did about her was simply her daily trip.

  “Why?”

  “I like it here,” she said.

  I wrote about her several books ago.

  She was born nearby, she grew up swimming in the lake and getting in trouble with her mother because she would go home covered with mud. She met her husband near the park. She got married near the park. She raised a family here.

  “What more reasons would anyone have?” she asked.

  “But it is a long drive.”

  “Only if you think it is,” she said with deep wisdom. Time and space is not what we think it is—or it is whatever anyone thinks it is. It’s a short drive if you want it to be. That was good enough for one story.

  The second came about when a friend of Mona’s was chatting with her when we arrived.

  “Want to know the real reason she comes here?” said the friend.

  Mona raised her fist from the seat at the picnic table.

  “Don’t you dare tell,” she said, but it was half a laugh, like one of those things you want someone to tell but you have to protest.

  “Please tell,” I said.

  “She buried her husband’s ashes under this table,” the friend said.

  Mona was beaming, embarrassed, beautiful. She smiled. She was mischievous. She was a law breaker. You can’t spread ashes anywhere in public spaces, but she was in love. She was married fifty years.

  “I told you not to tell,” she said to her friend.

  “She also sprinkled some in the lake,” he said.

  “Oh, come on. Now no one will swim in there,” said Mona.

  This is in a lake that has been around at least a thousand years, now with constant aeration from a tall pipe that sucks up the water and shoots it out ten feet above the surface, with dogs swimming at one end and kids at the other. As I said, it even has a lifeguard.

  “No one cares,” said Mona’s friend.

  Now we know why she makes the trip.

  And there is one other thing you should see if you go there to visit her. About fifty steps from her bench is a steel storage shed. The gardener keeps his tools inside. In a rare good move by the Park Board they hired someone to paint flowers and trees on the shed. He got some neighbourhood kids to help.

  He was painting when we were talking to Mona. He listened to the conversation and then went back to work.

  By the time Mona had finished her lunch and was heading back to her volunteer work at the food bank in New West, he had painted a picture of her sitting at her table eating her lunch.

  If you pass by someday and see the shed, you’ll know why there is a picture of a woman with snow-white hair in the park—the only one.

  The picture will be there for a long time. I hope Mona is too.

  ● ● ●

 
; Then there was the little lost pony. There was a picture posted on a wooden pole, saying “lost.” It’s good to check everything that you pass by. You never know what prizes may be there.

  “lost. One plastic pony, three inches high. Brown. Reward.” There was a phone number. We called.

  Yes, a small boy had lost his favourite toy in the park.

  “Did you find it?” his mother asked.

  “Sorry, no. But would you like us to help?”

  Helping is always nice. We did a story with the boy describing his pony and the next day, presto, a woman called the boy. She had found it.

  Story number two about the pony: the reward was five dollars, but the finder turned it down. When the boy insisted that she take it she did, and then she walked with him and his mother and the pony around the corner where they got ice cream.

  I looked out over the grass in the park. There is a lot of it, but somehow the woman had happened to be looking down at the exact moment that she was passing over the lost pony.

  She hadn’t seen the poster. She didn’t know someone was looking for it but, instead of just passing over it when she realized it was just a tiny, lost toy, she picked it up. She thought there was no chance on earth that she would ever find the owner but she held onto it just in case.

  Then she watched the news.

  The first story ended with the boy almost crying. The second story ended with him eating ice cream and trying to feed some to his pony.

  It’s a pity every story can’t end like that.

  Locked Out

  When I first saw her I said we will talk to anyone but her.

  The girl was sitting in the pagoda in the middle of the park. It is really just a place to get out of the rain. It has several picnic tables and benches.

  Her head was down on a table. She has problems, I thought.

  I walked by her, just to see if she was crying or showed any sign of needing help but all I could see were her hands cupping her head and her face pointed down.

  Not good. I would not step into her world.

  Instead we wandered the park. We wandered here and there and back to here. There is no point in detailing each failure. We all have them and if we talk about them too much it gets tiresome.