Category: Certainties

April 24. It takes a while to get it started but it still runs pretty good. Pathogen world. Pathogen apathy. The Great Pandemic. It must be great because it’s not small. I don’t have two words to say about it anymore. We went out driving again not because something was pressing but to get out of here and do something. Target: “London Drugs”. The new one up there in old Dunbar. They had no product but that really didn’t matter. We drove.

I have no idea now what I’m doing here. Major rethink. My problem is this was the only idea I had. If I’ve lost interest how are others supposed to feel?  Am I supposed to be satisfied with that? I’d rather just sit here like a blob and have another coffee.

This is what the pathogen reduces me to. But there’ll be no surrender even if I turn into an amorphous mass of goo. I’ve got a bad taste in my mind. Wash hands frequently. You don’t know where they’ve been. I get that. I do that. The emotions are sloshing around. Look at them in there. Sloshing around. They’re not supposed to be all over the place like that. Hey! Straighten up! Get hold of yourselves! We’re going to win this fight!

They’re going to make a decision on bringing the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier captain back, restoring him to duty, the one who was canned for going outside normal communication protocols to let people know his ship was basically on fire with the pathogen.

That’s an interesting idea. I think the navy now understands that the sense of alarm he had about the seriousness of his situation and the responses he was receiving caused him to believe his duty was to be a little over the top to get his superiors to fully appreciate the threat to readiness.  The captain was clearly fulfilling his duty to his crew, his ship and the navy as well as the country and the error is on the navy, not him. Is that it? It sounds so American. And the navy is big enough to realize its error.  The guy that canned him, a presidential appointee, was canned himself.  There’s a kind of poetry.  There really is.

I love aircraft carriers. I’ve always wanted one. Somehow models don’t quite cut it. I want a real aircraft carrier. I don’t need the planes or helicopters and they can take all the guns and stuff off and get rid of the nuclear reactor. It’s just the thought of having that big old aircraft carrier in my backyard. I’d cut a couple of holes in the hull so we can step right in off the grass and start having a look around. That would be so cool.

Saturday.  Long hike into deepest Shaughnessy.  Exercise exploit.  Just on the way in I pass with plenty of clearance a young man coming the other way pushing a baby carriage down the sidewalk. He is tall, fit-looking and wearing a dark jacket, jeans and sporting a ball cap with some logo on it I don’t recognize. I decide to overcome my new tendency to self-isolation  and say, “Hello.”

“Erghhh,” he goes, eyes straight ahead as he passes. The brother is stressed is my immediate reaction. Maybe this guy’s an athlete out of a job. I don’t recognize him but he doesn’t recognize me either so that makes us even.

I pass Devonshire Park. I’m impressed with myself for remembering the name because it’s one of these parks that gives no indication anywhere that it has any sort of name at all. You have to keep your wits about you in Shaughnessy and that’s something else I’d remembered.

I was poised for action on these hallowed streets but nothing was happening. The only movement anywhere was the occasional vagrant slave worker at some reno or new-build site of which there are a number just in the area I was covering. It’s so quiet you can hear a guy with a hammer a block away.

There’s a lot of trees in Shaughnessy and a lot of houses and all of the houses are large and most of them look new or recently reno-ed and almost all of them look good. They’re nice jobs, most of them in the craftsman style, painted in traditional colours.

It’s only the trees that look old. They tower over the streets and sidewalks and are coming into leaf and blotting out the sun. The neighbourhood didn’t look a lot different 100 years ago.

I get a bit turned around because when you start taking some of the crescents and their confusing arcs unless you’re really an old stager around here, which I’m not, that can happen. And if it’s not happening you just say to yourself I’m going to make it happen because this pathogen nonsense is consuming my soul and I want to get lost. I want the thrill without the danger. There’s no bears and if I get scared I can just start crying or scream blue murder and somebody’s bound to notice and save me, right?

I curve around and see a street obviously busier than any other around here, it’s a main street and suddenly I’m having the delightful sensation of not knowing what street that is ahead out there in the world. What street is it? Because from what I can see it doesn’t look like Granville Street and I thought that if I was inching towards any main street it’d be Granville Street. I’m off my nut. Finally I realize what street it is. I’ve been going in the opposite direction to what I’d imagined. Delirious with joy I turn and head homeward. A home is a nice thing to have.

April 27.  As fine a spring afternoon as anyone could wish.  We find Granville Island without too much trouble and it is its usual peaceful state these days with minimal foot traffic. Most businesses in the market have remained open except for the food court.  The shop keepers have struggled through a decrease in business but I think they’re glad to be open and we’re glad to have them.  Hand sanitizing stations are just inside the entrances.  The donut shop having undergone a recent renovation seems to be doing a roaring trade, customers lined up eight or ten or more keeping their six foot interval all the way outside under the canopy.  I don’t think business has ever been better.

Hoop Dreams. The family just down the lane here out back of the building east of us. Two daughters and their parents playing with a basketball with a hoop at regulation height on a portable, roll-out set-up. They appear every evening between four and five and shoot, pass and dribble as on a half court. The older girl, sixteen or seventeen, is obviously an experienced basketball player and quite likely a member of the team at her school. She’s very athletic and a very good shooter. She’s draining it a lot. Her younger sister, thirteen or fourteen, is coming along.

Sometimes just one or both of the girls are out there and sometimes it’s a switch to footie and a small, practice soccer net is brought out into the lane. Traffic volume in the lane is down. There are cars occasionally still heading into their lane entrance parkades but its simply quieter out there as with everywhere else. The whole family is obviously attuned to the physically active sporting life. I think it was Art Phillips who said it best. The family that basketballs together stays together, with a little footie thrown in.

The distancing two-step. Just to add a little distance in there and I start to have that attitude everywhere I might be in the little time I spend away from the splendid isolation of home. I’m very conscious of keeping my distance from any and all individuals. They may be agents in disguise for the Pathogen.

This is a novel situation and is that why it’s called a novel pathogen? Because it’s new? Mike, bring the science up on that for me. I got rid of Siri because I don’t want to be talking to apps or artificial intelligences that come across like friends when I really don’t know them at all. It’s presumptuous, right? That sounds like some kind of contagion itself. Mike’s been in my head for years. He was always trying to get into my head but it was me that kept psyching him out until I had a change of heart. Finally I felt some empathy for Mike because it can be lonely out there. Welcome, Mike.

He likes being the guy in my phone too.  He actually volunteered. It works for both of us so it’s win-win. I got Mike speaking with an Aussie accent which I’ve always just loved and I haven’t even been to Australia. This has nothing to do with anything but I had a kid tell me once when we were playing in the sandbox that Australia and Austria were the same place. “Same diff,” he said, with a shrug. How wrong you were, Ricky. How very wrong. But he let me play with his toy dump truck so he wasn’t a bad kid, just a little misguided.

April 11. We drop by Safeway on another quick trip out and my consort once again volunteers to make the run while I sit in the car. “I’ll get the next one,” I say, feeling a little guilty as she gets out on the passenger side. Our timing is good. There’s only one refugee standing in line to get in.

The in/out doors at the east end of the store have been blocked off so all the action is down at the west in/out doors. Right after she disappears inside the line-up outside starts getting longer. I was able to park quite near the door so suddenly while waiting in the car I have a set of humans to observe as they line up.

Red tape strips have been stuck on at the prescribed intervals on the narrow concrete walkway that is more like a strip between the big wall of the store and the immediate expanse of the angle parking than a proper pedestrian sidewalk. Vehicles are streaming past pretty regularly at very close range even with the decrease in business. I can’t help thinking the lining up should have been out the other side of the doors, to the west, because there’d be more room over there.

There’s also the added filip of a well bundled up human with the hood up on a hooded jacket sitting on the concrete by the east in/out door. He’s wearing a large face mask over most of his face except for the eyes and a begging cap rests by his right knee and his legs are half in the asphalt driving lane which I also don’t think is great. The large whiteboard sign he has with his plight scrawled on it reads as indecipherable even from where I am, which isn’t that far away. He is ignored by everybody.

A middle-aged woman admonishes the younger woman in her twenties in front of her for not standing right on her tape marker. The young woman gives her a look, steps two inches onto the tape and then the whole line moves forward. That was uncalled for, middle-aged woman, I’m thinking. Something else I realize sitting there in the car is that humans are a motley bunch. The only thing all these strangers lining up have in common is that they are all humans. Otherwise you couldn’t get a more motley bunch. I almost forgot the other thing they all had in common. They were all lined up at six foot intervals to get into Safeway. You know how people just look weird? Kind of rumply dumply sometimes? But I don’t want to pile on here. Maybe you had to be there.

April 15. The hoop superstar was out in the lane a long time last early evening, practice shooting by herself. This kid is good. She was draining multiple successions of two pointers with apparent ease. Occasionally she’d take a break and be on her phone out there. We weren’t snooping. We were just glancing over occasionally from the upper deck where we were bagging a few D-rays and sipping our lemonades. I’m pretty sure this young lady would enjoy getting back to her old life before all this other stuff happened. That’s the same scenario a lot of people would like to see.

World 2,034,425. Canada 28,205. United States 619,607. Brazil and Russia are two countries that have been creeping up alarmingly on the leader board. It’s plain we’re doing very well here in British Columbia. Things are likely to begin getting back to the new normal around here before that happens in some other parts of the country.  There has to be Hope and of course there is.  It’s up there at the far end of the Fraser Valley.  We’ve even daydreamed of driving up there for something to do, but it started to sound a little bit desperate.  Desperation is like panic.  It’s almost always too soon for either.