5 July 2025 – Not a theme even remotely in mind yesterday, when all this began. But then came today.
Yesterday I am increasingly grumpy as I stomp down some farther-south blocks of Quebec Street. It is all very boring. My end of Quebec is good fun; this southern stretch is bland good taste.
Until!
Inactive
I don’t assign the category, not then, but it fits. This driveway object is definitely inactive.
Finally something to look at! I am actively grateful, though I bet the neighbours are not. With an admiring glance at the one bit of this ancient Ford not under tarps…
I walk on, good humour restored.
Interactive
Today it’s once more to False Creek, and right there in Olympic Village Plaza — which years ago briefly hosted a chalk-art labyrinth — I discover a very precise maze. (Labyrinth = in, to the centre, out the same entrance/exit; maze = separate entrance & exit.)
That man is patiently walking the maze, with much back-tracking but no cheating. He succeeds, too — I can testify to this, since I watch him with admiration as I try my own skills at the challenge.
I do considerable back-tracking and brain-scratching as I go. As do these two women, following soon after me.
The exit rightly admonishes me. I did cheat, but only once, and I am unrepentant. I reward myself with Okanagan yellow cherries from the farmer’s tent just off the exit…
and dip into the bag as I double back to read the other words, back there at the entrance.
“Interactive Art by Gregory Smith,” it says. (Sorry, I can’t solve the Gregory Smith mystery.)
“Interactive Art.” I like this concept. And, as mysterious Gregory Smith surely intended, it here applies to physical interaction, feet on maze, and not to the cerebral/emotional interaction we have with any work of art.
I find myself applying the concept more broadly. Human physical interaction with inanimate objects.
For example, “Interactive Books.”
All those community take-one-leave-one bookstands, each one brimming with books left by the active choice of individual local donors and taken away again by someone else.
Yesterday, at Main & East 41st, this trilingual welter of options in a kiosk run by someone in the adjacent apartment building:
Look at the range — Hemingway to Lévi Strauss; bios of both David Bowie & St. Paul; the cruelty of depression but also the mystery of wholeness; and French and Spanish, photographic art for the former (perhaps the Drummondville museum) and US political analysis for the latter.
Farther north on Main, a table inside Sweet Thea Bakery:
Merely (!) bilingual this time, but again, what a range: Peter Carey, Amor Towles, John Irving, Jane Smiley… And Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 treatise on education. And a bathroom reader.
Earlier in today’s False Creek walk, yet another example, run by the Creekside Community Garden people…
with impressive (& trilingual) variety in its limited selection.
Vegetarian cookbook; an Italian journalist’s challenge to the accepted view of Italian resistance during WWII; the francophone guide to this year’s Canadian Pride celebrations, complete with a “tartlette au buerre” reference on the cover; even a talking words factory for the kiddies.
(Later, in retrospect, I decide the interactive maze of course led me to interactive books. Winnipeg author Carol Shields followed her 1995 Pulitzer Prize winning The Stone Diaries with her 1997 tribute to maze-building, Larry’s Party.)
Still dipping into those yellow cherries, I head for the little footbridge at the west end of Olympic Village Plaza. And that’s where I discover…
“Interactive Rocks.”
People celebrating summer warmth, each other — and low tide! — on the stepped stones to the south of the bridge…
and hanging out on convenient boulders here on the north.
I’m warm, but not too warm, and nicely cherry-fuelled. I keep walking, past the Spyglass Place dock, past Stamp’s Landing, all the way to Leg in Boot Square.
Where I discover…
“Interactive Music.”
Today, unexpectedly & exceptionally, there’s a live trio of Celtic fiddlers in the square.
We are transported to Cape Breton. We are all, young and old, jigging away in our chairs.
The cherries are now in my backpack. I remind myself not to lean back. Turning cherries into cherry purée is not an interaction I care to discover.
WALKING WOMAN 
valeriemeredith
/ 5 July 2025What a wonderful and interesting post. I felt as if I was with you on your walk and almost tasted those cherries. As I lay in my bed here in Wales having woken too early as usual I read your words with a smile on my face. We also have a growing tradition of places which have been repurposed into lending book libraries- old telephone boxes, redundant bus shelters full of an amazing range of donated books. I used to think that they were just abandoned books but have come to a similar conclusion about the books being chosen by someone to be left then chosen by another to be borrowed.
icelandpenny
/ 6 July 2025I love to think I was part of your early morning — thank you!
restlessjo
/ 5 July 2025Do they taste the same, yellow cherries? I’ve never seen one. Mazes unsettle me, but that one, being so open, perhaps I could fathom it. Probably not! Love those bold stone steps. And books! Books! Books! Happy Sunday, Penny xx
icelandpenny
/ 6 July 2025It was the first time I’d tried yellow cherries, and it was like a disconnect between my eyes and my mouth — the mouth said ‘these are cherries’ and my eyes said, ‘but they’re yellow!’ apparently they’re a big product in the Okanagan Valley (interior of BC, nearish to us on the coast) but this was the first I knew of it
Bronlima
/ 7 July 2025With so much troublesome news in the world, how pleasant to see the calm. Seeing well- being!
icelandpenny
/ 8 July 2025yes, exactly — seeing well-being, bien estar, in action
J Walters
/ 8 July 2025Loved this interactive walk – books, maze, water, music, and especially yellow cherries. I would have tried them. I’ve never seen them before. I also love musing on the origin of books that end up together, such never-see-elsewhere combinations, fascinating.
icelandpenny
/ 8 July 2025These yellow cherries must be western; I’d never known them while living in the east. It’s a funny contradiction between your senses: eyes say, “Not cherry”, mouth says “Yes cherry.” Re the book clusters, one of the things I like best is the multiplicity of languages! such a reflection of who, the many who’s, we are…
Mary C
/ 16 July 2025The phrase “bland good taste” is wonderful and very apt for too many places. I like your penchant for checking out the offerings of the little libraries – little sociological neighbourhood studies