9 May 2025 – The #19 bus, as always, vibrates with worlds other than my immediate own. The route heads north through Chinatown, East Vancouver & Yaletown, and then slices west across the downtown core before its terminal stop in Stanley Park.

It therefore serves residents of all those communities, plus everyone who is just passing through — office workers, sporty types equipped for Stanley Park trails, urban culture-vultures with the art gallery or public library in mind, and assorted tourists puzzling their maps.

I find a seat in the crowded front section, and discover I’ve landed in a discussion — a dissertation — about “lifers” in the prison system. More specifically, about the reality check surely now being administered to a newbie in that system. He is someone known to Rhinestone Girl on my side of the aisle (applying extra mascara as she listens) and to Bare Knee Guy on the other side (his jeans simply worn out, not designer-chic).

Bare Knee Guy is explaining these facts of life to Rhinestone Girl, based on his own time inside. Their voices are loud, the vignettes are grisly, and the F-word once again proves its astounding versatility.

And yet! Their sentences are also grammatical & articulate, and the conversational tone is calm & engaged. Didactic, even.

I begin to feel I’ve fallen into a surreal one-on-one tutorial, as BK Guy describes how the “25-to-life” system works, here in Canada, and R Girl asks intelligent follow-up questions, never losing focus even as she switches from mascara to lip gloss and starts work on her lower lip.

The session grows even more learned when Shuffle Man inches painfully onto the bus, is offered the seat next to Bare Knee Guy, hears the topic of conversation, and joins in. “They changed it,” he wheezes. “Changed life sentences.” BK Guy agrees: “F**k yah! After Hell’s Angels blew up that bus in Montreal, killed that kid. Used-t’a be, kill one guy, kill a bunch, don’t matter, same sentence, but now they’re not consecutive, they’re back to back.” Rhinestone Girl breathes, “Holy f**k.” She understands the implication.

The tutorial breaks up ’round the corner on Pender Street, when Rhinestone Girl puts away her makeup, gathers her shopping, and asks Bare Knee Guy to help her get her stuff off the bus. He jumps up, lifts her two hanging plants (cheerful petunias, staples of summer balconies nation-wide), deposits them on the sidewalk, and gets back on the bus.

It’s cheerful, it’s helpful, it’s kind. I’m becoming quite respectful of BK Guy. Even more so, a few stops on, when a young indigenous couple get on, and he calls out, “Hey man! Ya dropped some money!” And they had–a $20 bill. BK Guy could have scooped it for himself, but he didn’t. The couple thank him, he bobs his head in acknowledgment. Somewhere along the way, Shuffle Man has disappeared. Eventually BK Guy and I get off at the same stop. Behind me, I hear him say exactly what I’ve just said, to the driver: “Thanks!”

We go our separate ways, me walking up Hamilton Street, my destination being a dance/literary event at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library. My route takes me past this dingy building.

It’s the Del Mar, which opened as the reasonably upscale Cadillac Hotel in 1912 but which, despite its heritage status as the one hold-out original building on this block…

and despite the rah-rah wording of this plaque, is now one of the City’s SROs, a single room occupancy hotel. After my bus ride with Rhinestone Girl et al., after that moment with their worlds, I look at the Del Mar with different eyes.

And then I’m past the Del Mar, I’m up at West Georgia, and I’m breathing in the ozone of this fountain that chatter-sparkles one corner of the 1950s Canada Post building, now restored and expanded into The Post, a full city block of offices and glossy shops.

Across the street, in Library Square, I enter my own next world. I slide into the VPL’s spiral embrace…

meaning to head straight for the elevator to the 8th floor and my destination event. But of course I get sidetracked, here in the soaring atrium, by the discards bin (between the bottom two pillars, on the left).

Which pulls me into Charles Darwin’s world.

Well, no. Into Darwin’s Orchestra, an almanac that promises readers “a daily dose of cultural history.”

I look up today, May 9, and discover it takes me to the world of Gulliver’s Travels, 1711. I notice that May 10, were I to jump ahead, would take me to Kenneth Grahame’s 1907 world of Wind in the Willows.

A full 365 days of natural- and cultural-history discoveries, for just $3!

I vow to come pick it up after my 8th-floor event.

The event, “Translating Rosario Castellanos,” celebrates the centennial of this Mexican author with Spanish & English commentary (about the author, translating her letters, the impact of her work) and then…

with a tribute dance up & down & around the staircase stage, created and performed by this trio of local Latino artists.

At the end we applaud them, they applaud us, and I’m back in my own world, with my own immediate focus.

Go buy that book!

Only to discover, after combing the bin very, very carefully, that somebody else has beat me to it.

Well… “Holy f**k,” as Rhinestone Girl might say.

I, however, being the WASP Old Lady that I am, instead laugh and draw the appropriate rueful lesson: Next time, don’t wait.

I’m still caught between amusement & chagrin as I leave the building. I promptly fall into a temporal/cultural/architectural whirlpool of worlds, sparked by the building opposite.

This building.

Those bouncy cubes comprise the Deloitte Summit, a 24-storey office tower that opened in fall 2022 and has always struck me with its visual contrast to the rounded, spiralling forms of the library it faces — the 1995 work of Israeli-Canadian-American architect Moshe Safdie, a building lauded by Travel + Leisure magazine as one of the world’s “Beautiful Libraries.” (Up there with the Bodleian, in Oxford; the Library of Trinity College, in Dublin; the Stuttgart City Library, in Stuttgart; and the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne, in Paris.)

Vancouver’s Merrick Architecture, Executive Architect for the Deloitte Summit, calls the tower’s design “a playful aggregation of reflective yet transparent stacked boxes.” Westbank, the project development company, says the cubes were inspired by this lamp, the work of 20th-c. Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi.

The urban architecture website Skyrise Vancouver says the design gives the tower “a sense of rotating motion that references the Colosseum-like Vancouver Public Library across the street.”

Me? I drop back to my native-Montrealer, 1960s world, and I say: oh yes, it references Safdie — but unintentionally, and not his Library Square project.

When my physical eye looks at the Vancouver building, my mind’s eye sees Habitat ’67, the Montreal housing complex that launched Safdie’s career and gave added punch to the exciting new design aesthetic of Expo ’67 as a whole.

See what I mean?

And then, full of all those worlds, I walk back down to Pender Street and catch a #19 for home.

It delivers no tutorials. I am left to my own thoughts, my own world, for the entire ride.