The Bright Side

 

 

The ferries from Departure Bay to Horseshoe Bay are more crowded than ever. Even traveling on a weekday afternoon you will be glad of a reservation. And the traffic on the mainland is busier than ever so you'll be creeping along the Upper Levels highway long before you reach Taylor Bay. As you inch your way down towards Marine Drive, you'll see an advertisement for a new development billed as “a prestigious enclave on a natural rise” and featuring a Presentation House. Language these days is hyperbolic and always requires some translation. They’re actually just talking about a demo suite for some exorbitantly expensive townhouses on a sidehill.

 

But I’m learning to be positive about change, attempting to look on the bright side. As I drive across the Lion’s Gate Bridge I make a point of enjoying the view that looks like one of the Margraf paintings we so admired in the Seventies: blue-grey water and sky, shadows of mountains, ethereal skyscrapers against the Vancouver skyline. Of course there are a lot more of these gigantic structures now than there were then, and they do grow taller and more plentiful.

 

I don’t allow myself to drift into negative thoughts about the overcrowded downtown, the horrendous real estate prices, the homelessness. Instead, I take the first turn from the bridge and follow the winding paths of Stanley Park, through the trees and on to familiar landmarks: the totem poles, Siwash Rock, the Hollow Tree, Prospect Point. All preserved as they should be, although there are more cars, more parking spaces, and at least sixteen signs saying Pay Here, Pay Here, Pay Here.

 

Looking on the bright side, it’s a real pleasure to see so many people enjoying the park and the beach as they have done for at least the past ten or twelve decades, and the Sylvia Hotel has the solid elegance that impressed me on my first visit over six decades ago. The hotel, an inspiration when I was a teenager and my Vancouver bolthole for a great many later years, seems pleasantly unchanged, its stone and ivy façade as reassuringly tasteful as ever. But when I am signing in to the Sylvia, the young woman at the front desk asks me for photo ID as well as my credit card. This has never happened before. I used to know most of the staff, and even last year I received a Christmas card from the hotel which was signed by many of them. Happily, at least Wally is still here, hoisting bags, carrying trays, doing whatever is needed. As always.

 

Change is everywhere, but it doesn’t have to be all bad. As Alice Walker said, “You’ve got to learn to ride with it and even enjoy it.” Change does always extend possibility for improvement. After all, the infant mortality rate has been greatly reduced, dental care has been vastly improved, we have very impressive medical technology, illiteracy has decreased significantly. Our lifestyles have changed: smoking has become socially unacceptable; fitness has become fashionable, ethnic foods are now widely available. Lots of small but positive change has taken place.

 

Laws change, governments change, social patterns change. Often such shifts seem to be for the worse, but, in fact, they needn’t be. If millions of people could quit smoking, surely it is possible for us to elect good governments, to reduce climate change, create a just society.

 

I’m determined to be positive. Things look desperate yet, as Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” However, unless we are prepared to wait for a very long time, we might just need to put quite a bit of weight behind it.

Making Connections

 

 

In my mid-teens, I began to go to parties and hang out in the recreation rooms of friends who were experimenting with quantities of beer and pink gin, and my mother issued a stern warning: “Dypsomania runs in the family.”

 

The expression puzzled me. I gathered that she was issuing a warning about the danger of alcoholism but, as with her embarrassed explanations about how pregnancy resulted from a meeting of sperm and an ovum, there was a disconnect. In her lecture, the mystifying encounter in the fallopian tubes did not appear to involve actual sex as far as my limited pre-teen knowledge could register. Sex was invisible in those years, as were the dypsomaniacs said to be running around within my family.

 

Growing up, I watched my parents drink cups of tea each evening and only rarely offering pre-dinner drinks to guests. At Christmas or New Year’s Eve, there were some celebratory drinks but I didn’t see excessive imbibing. Only in their later years did my parents start to drink wine at dinner and have the occasional cocktail or an after dinner liqueur.

 

Not so with me. I drank unrestrainedly from my teenage years through my youth and on to my older years. Nothing was ever said about it. But, I have realized, people rarely tell you that you are drinking too much, even when it’s apparent.

 

Similarly, people rarely point out that you are eating too much, driving your car too much, traveling too much, buying too many new appliances or renovating your house too often. You might observe an occasional raised eyebrow, a knowing smile, a slight shaking of the head, but nobody will actually confront you about excessive behaviour.

 

Recently I visited a friend in the hospital who’d been advised that he should cut back on alcohol, which didn’t come as a surprise to him. “I’ve been drinking far too much,” he said. “You know how it is: one drink is too many and two drinks are not enough.” I was surprised at this, as I’d always heard it the other way around: one not enough and two too many. But his version fits better. For many of us, once we’ve had the second drink, we want more and don’t stop.

 

We have an insatiable appetite for more of everything: more drink, more food, more holidays, more beautiful houses, a better car, a bigger boat, the latest of technological computers, telephones, toys of all sorts. We consume and consume, and we continue to fill up the landfill. We take up more and more room, forgetting that old maxim that if one isn’t living one the edge then one is taking up too much space.

 

Reducing excessive consumption requires making connections. I and most of my cohort find it very hard to do -- but I believe that many young people are getting the message. Perhaps because of necessity and lack of opportunity, they do not see it as an expectation or entitlement that they will own their own home. A lot of them seem to prefer bikes to cars, and a great many of them are keen on buying locally and growing their own food.  I think they see a different way of living on the planet. I hope so.

 

And I too will try to do better.

 

 

Looking and Seeing: Responding to Our Tent City

 

 

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” So says John Berger in Ways of Seeing, his acclaimed book about how we look at art.

 

Seeing involves perception whereas looking is merely turning one’s eyes at another person or object. Seeing and being seen is, according to many therapists, the way in which humans connect meaningfully.

 

But seeing involves more than just looking, and Berger hints at that when he refers to the child recognizing as well as merely looking. Berger goes on to speak about our developing awareness of the fact that we can also be seen: The eye of the other combines with our own eye, he says, “to make it fully credible that we are ourselves a part of the visible world.” We are not alone. We are seen and recognized.

 

But sometimes the eye of the other may block us out. I know a man who can look a person in the eye in a way that prohibits any connection as he withdraws himself from the other’s gaze, his eyes a blankness, his face a mask. This demeanor is not a conversation starter and usually results in his companion speaking inanely or falling into silence. And I know a woman whose eyes turn black and glittering and dart from side to side when she is angry. The recipient of this gaze will often find a reason to apologize or excuse herself.

 

These are both ways of looking, but not of seeing. And they are powerful. It is not for nothing that we have the expressions like If looks could kill!

 

Such cruel looks are frequently directed at homeless people or the residents of our Tent City. The city has now issued an eviction notice, ordering these people to move on. but the residents say they will not leave.

 

Dickens gave us a vision of a similar situation in his novel Bleak House in which the policeman who holds the arm of Jo the crossing sweeper complains that he has told Jo to “move on” and Jo won’t go. The homeless boy responds as follows:

 

 “I’m always a-moving on, sir,” cries the boy, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. “I’ve always been a moving and a moving on, ever since I was born. Where can I possibly move to, sir, nor more I do move!”

Dickens, journalist, novelist and social reformer, reflects on this problem through the voice and vision of the empathic narrator:

“Do you hear, Jo? It is nothing to you or to anyone else, that the great lights of the parliamentary sky have failed for some few years, in this business, to set you the example of moving on. The one grand recipe remains for you — the profound philosophical prescription — the be-all and the end-all of your strange existence upon earth. Move on! You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the great lights can’t at all agree about that. Move on!”

Throughout his life Dickens wrote about the problems of the poor and the need for social reform. He is often credited with having contributed to major social reforms at the time.

Bleak House was written one hundred and sixty-five years ago, yet much of it still feels quite current.

His is a voice we need today and, with the decline of good investigative journalism, we feel the lack of it.