Sitting in the quiet calm of my brother and sister-in-law's guest room, this feels like a good space to process the last two intense days in Vancouver, intensely beautiful, intensely ugly, and intensely sad.
I guess I regret not bringing a camera along, since I would've enjoyed highlighting these reflections with a few photos. But, since I didn't, I'll put extra care into describing the experience vividly and accurately.
The benefit of not bringing the camera, is that now I get to let my memory have final say on what's worth saving rather than whether or not I happened to take a picture of something.
So what stands out...
Delight, connectedness with my past (my family visited Vancouver in 1986 for the World Expo, aka Expo '86), formative experience, and the soberness of
The ride up Chancellor Blvd. and Broadway's West Coast retail, boardsport shops and designer sunglasses
Light wispy tree canopy, cement, moss-aged road
view of mountains, riding up the hill with a tea in one hand, young girl practicing skateboarding, forest trails,
anthropology, the big penis. oh what would Jon Hines say if he were here....
tour
tour highlights
potlatch
woman with face vagina and round, red circle lips
Bill Reid's raven on the old gun turret, an aboriginal creation story that incorporates and reclaims the Canadian military battlements
totem poles "outside"
enjoying nature, reading in the grass, the feeling of clean earth, mountains
meeting Eve, remembering what attracted me to her. seeing some beautiful things in her and Dave's life, and wondering if I also sensed something Dave wishes was different, or whether it was my imagination.
terrible collision
mangled bicycle, pool of half-dried blood on the road, a large pool. crushed helmet
I asked the police officer, how did this happen? He said, "A bike and a truck got together."
it took a minute or two to process, then I began to cry as I lifted my bike onto the rack on the bus, hoping this wave of tears would stop by the time I entered the bus to pay my fare
Sign seen from the bus: "Ours to preserve with hand and with heart" -Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR)
Needless to say, the cyclist fatality put a damper, a big damper, on the rest of the morning. It made me start questioning
it made me remember the value of life
solar powered trash compactor?
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2 comments:
Gah--what a disturbing thing to see... Sounds like you encountered many things in Victoria. What's the woman with face vagina, exactly? Do they just have monuments to genitals over there? Is that what the West Coast is all about?
--Mike
I think the over-sized genitalia is a West Coast Anthropology thing. I saw a few of them at UBC's Museum of Anthropology, and then more on the Facebook of a friend from UVic. (She's an anthro major and the photos were of a penis-shaped cake at her sister's stagette.) I guess we just don't have a history of celebrating our genitals enough here in Ontario...
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