10 October 2025 – Given this is a simple post about a simple walk on a route we have walked before, you and I, it does seem excessive to lead with a philosophic tussle about the nature of “change.” But tussle we shall. Precisely because , for me anyway, same-old and change are a package deal.
On the one hand, French critic/novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, who, in 1849, penned the epigram we quote to this day: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (The more things change, the more they stay the same). On the other hand, Zen Buddhist monk Shunryu Suzuki, who, when asked after a California lecture in 1968 to express core Buddhist philosophy in a way ordinary people could understand, replied: “Everything changes.”
The “same,” in this post, is yet another walk along Lost Lagoon. You know the route! Bus ride to the edge of Stanley Park; Lost Lagoon trail out to Second Beach on English Bay; Seawall for a bit up toward Third Beach & down again; out through Morton Park; on down Denman Street; that same bus, reverse direction.
Ohhh… let’s just toss French philosophers & Zen Buddhist monks to one side. Let’s acknowledge what every walker of familiar pathways knows: the same is never the same.
Each time, you & your mood & the place & the weather & all the swirling molecules of the universe dance together in new patterns to create a new experience.
It is therefore my pleasure to offer you moments from this day’s totally different version of the same old Lost Lagoon walk.
This specific Canada Goose, pensive on his rock in Lost Lagoon…
specific people & pooches along the way, including Hamish the wag-tail dog and the Vivaldi fan listening (very quietly) to The Four Seasons while resting on a weathered Seawall bench…
and another bench, the bench itself and the plaque it bears both brand-new.
We carefully cross the bike path and move closer. Flowers, notes, CDs and plaque — a multi-dimensioned tribute by local fans to Hong Kong Mandopop artist Khalil Fong, who shot to fame with Soulboy in 2005 and died this year, just months after the release of The Dreamer.
Out in English Bay, this specific moment’s arrangement of the same-old tableau: rocks & tide & freighters & Seawall pedestrians & trees & sky & clouds.
Up close: tidal flats silvered in this afternoon’s watery light.
Also up close: a burst of green & ochre.
And then, medium-distance, a moment’s drama, out there in the bay.
We have just watched this couple strip to bathing suits and stride into those chilly waters. Chest-high, no hesitation.
It is all about to change. He (L) is about to duck-dive and fully embrace the moment. She (R) is about to un-embrace the moment, and head smartly for shore.
We, snug in our fall clothing, head smartly for Denman Street, Delaney’s Coffee House, and a flat white & latte respectively. And then, warm inside & out, on down Denman to the bus.
2 October 2025 – I’m over at St. George & East 6th, hunkered down for the view south along this stretch of the St. George Rainway.
Then I pay serious attention to the map — to the lost small-c creek and to the lost big-c False Creek as well, lost when (1915 onward) they filled in the final stretch to create industrial & railway land. I trace my finger along that bright turquoise line, showing us the shoreline that used to be.
I study the 1889 photo…
and then I go study the 2025 reality, from that same Main & 7th intersection.
26 September 2025 – Not for the first time. and especially not for the first time in fall, I stop at the W 41st & Oak Street entrance to the VanDusen Botanical Garden, and wriggle happily at the colour contrasts.
Citrus yellows! Deep furry greens! Deep glossy greens!
And, while I’m wriggling, how about the reds palette in that shrub?
Leaves toss in the breeze, proving even their undersides have their own blushing story to tell, a subtle counterpoint to all that show-off stuff on top.
We meet, my friend and I, and start walking later than intended — but for irresistible reasons.
We get talking with a Calgary couple who decided to celebrate their 43rd wedding anniversary in take-a-trip style. Conversation ranges from where they live in Calgary (since friend & I each have Calgary histories); to what colour is the most fun to dye your hair (Calgary woman’s daughter once had hair that glowed in ultra-violet light, great for nightclubs); to their anticipation of the free cart tours the VanDusen offers people whose enthusiasm outpaces their legs.
They await their cart. We veer off to the right, my favourite VanDusen walks almost always starting on the floating bridge through the Roy R. Forster Cypress Pond. After that, one path leads to another and choice doesn’t much matter, because they’re all worth walking.
Colours definitely now on the shift. Shapes also, as leaves fall and seed pods develop, and more sculptural lines emerge.
A whole dazzle of yellows, up in the sunflower beds.
Yellow-yellow…
and yellow-yellow with tawny-orange colleagues farther back…
and then a reminder that the range on display is not only colour, but height as well.
Giants gravely bend their heads, as if to inspect these tiny humans down below…
while bees (count ’em, two) prove…
they can visit any height they want.
Time out to take souvenir photos for some visiting Peruvians.
“¡Queso!” I cry; “¡Queso!” they chorus back at me, all of us laughing that “cheese” works equally well in both languages, to evoke a smile for the camera.
A pearly shimmer, in path and seed heads, among all the shades of green…
and then we spend yet more time walking up and around the grounds before looping back down again.
Still happy with whatever path our feet happen to discover, and still discovering more plays of colour, in this annual seasonal dance.
Greens falling away, in deciduous trees…
allowing all those yellows/golds/oranges/reds to have their moment. All that, against the quiet majesty of coniferous dark green.
And then… look!
a coyote.
And farther down the path…
an owl.
Still farther…
another winsome coyote, one paw raised.
I later discover they (and more, in this harvest celebration) are works by Burnaby BC artist Nickie Lewis, whose eco-creatures I first saw in a Burnaby park back in 2021. (When we all badly needed charm and delight, in our pandemic-hedged lives.)
We re-meet the Calgary couple, who can’t rave enough about their cart tour of the Garden. They’re now off to a slap-up expensive lunch in the serious restaurant — that anniversary deserves every tribute they can offer it — and we head, equally cheerful, for the café.
What with both Calgary and those twig coyotes built into my day, it’s perhaps inevitable that I now start reminiscing about Coyote Pancake Mix. It’s an Alberta brand I discovered in my Calgary years, its image the silhouette of a coyote and its slogan (wait for it): “a howling success.”
Quite possibly, all this means more to me than to my friend — oh, you think? — but she is generous in her friendly attention. We enter the café, well pleased with our day.
19 September 2025 – You come back home with fresh eyes for your own city.
I wake up yesterday and, just before 7 a.m., stare awe-struck at the grandeur of clouds drifting above and among the mountains, in a still-opalescent sky.
Aand today, just now, I fall into fits of giggles at the decals on this slightly battered car.
First, the grouping as a whole…
and then, the exquisitely perfect placement of the cat claws vis-à-vis the dings in the car body.
After that I stroll the perimeter of Dude Chilling Park, just ’cause it’s my local park and I love the way The Dude watches over us…
from his perch on the south/east corner of this ordinary patch of grass.
“Ordinary” to the eye, that is — not-very-large rectangle of grass, some trees around, some benches around, and that’s it. But people gravitate, in considerate and companionable ways, and they enjoy themselves and they thrive and they make magic.
Today’s magic: what I find at the south/west corner of the park.
A pop-up street sale is underway, one I’m sure no City authorities ever heard about (let alone licensed) and who cares, because it’s only a few tables and lots of good humour. I learn this young woman has clothes on offer because she’s moving to Rome tomorrow and can’t take everything; I learn this other young woman collects stuff and then moves it on, y’know?; and I learn that grizzled guy, the one with the racks of old LPs, is a Rolling Stones fan. I learn this last factoid because, when I tell him it was a thrill to see the name of jazz great Joe Pass once again, he replies, eyes a-gleam, “With the Stones!” I manage to contain my enthusiasm for the Stones, he ditto for Joe Pass — but we agree in our enthusiasm for Dude Chilling Park.
14 September – And then, from morning to afternoon, I leave Toronto and land in Vancouver. Here I am, looking through slight drizzle to the mountains, with one last love-letter I want to offer “T.O.” (Tee-Oh, Toronto.)
My T.O., that is, nobody else’s — my own mix of memory and re-discovery, blind to what others would notice, alert to all my own triggers.
Glimpses from streetcars, for example.
A rampart mural by Shalak Attack, which I remember watching her paint, many years ago…
the distinctive two-tone brick and architecture I associate with my own decades in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood, but common to the city in that era…
and Streetcar Dog. Not unique to Toronto, but part of my own memory bank of riding the TTC.
Then there are my re-discoveries on foot, all around the Grange neighbourhood and the Art Gallery of Ontario, where I was for years a volunteer and therefore an area where I came and went, a very great deal.
Bronze turtle watching martial-arts in Butterfield Park, the new-since-my-time refurbishment of the land just east of Grange Park and south of OCAD (Ontario College of Art + Design) University…
Henry Moore’s Large Two Forms, looking very at home in its new home in the reinvented Grange Park, with the brilliant blue rear wall and distinctive Frank Gehry staircase as backdrop…
and, once inside, the soaring glulam arches of the AGO’s front-façade Galeria Italia.
Unchanged, these arches. Ditto, the way the Galeria invites you to look out across Dundas Street. Native son Gehry made sure his design honoured and welcomed the neighbourhood of his childhood as its own visual final wall.
I am in the AGO as much to walk old ground as to see current exhibitions, but in the end I do both.
The Joyce Wieland retrospective, Heart On, speaks not only to my memories of her bursting on the scene, but also to how current she now is, once again.
Wieland was a fierce ’60s-70s feminist and, despite (or perhaps because of) long years in New York, a fierce Canadian patriot as well. She often used the soft “feminine” skills of embroidery or quilting to express strong political convictions.
For example, with her 1970 work, I Love Canada – J’aime Canada.
Awwww. (Twist finger in cheek.) So sweet.
Now read the signage.
And read the embroidered fine print.
Wieland’s narrow definition of Canadian identity is now out-dated — but the rest of her analysis is Elbows-Up contemporary.
Some hours later, I leave the building. I still have more circling and prowling to do.
I check out the S/W corner of Dundas West & McCaul. It is also the N/E corner of the AGO footprint and, in my day, was still home to Moore’s Large Two Forms. For the first time, I see what now sits on that corner — Brian Jungen’s commissioned work, Couch Monster. (Read more, here, in a fine post by our WordPress colleague, Canadian Art Junkie.)
I circle the work, and also take in the larger view, including the top of an old mural by veteran Toronto artist Birdo, now obscured by newer construction and backed by even-newer construction.
Finally, and not with terrifically high hopes, I take myself across Dundas West and into the alley between Dundas and Darcy Street to the north. I am eager but also dreading to see what it’s like, these days. My memory is of an alley bursting with street art, full of the “garage-door art” that I associate with my memories of Toronto.
And…
there it still is. On and on, to the west, beyond the frame of this image. Not exactly as it was, of course not, but alive and current and so-very-T.O.
I turn right on a second, N/S, alley, passing delicate tendrils and other art as I go…
and emerge on Darcy Street.
Where I drink in an enclave of old downtown residential architecture, oh look, some still survives…
and then pivot on my heel to look east down the block. Out to McCaul Street.
Still some old brick homes, and still the spire of St. Patrick’s Church (the 5th-oldest Roman Catholic parish in Toronto) as well — plus the immediate examples of all the new towers now exploding skyward.
There it all is.
The whole jarring/exhilarating, cacophonous/euphonious, forever-evolving symphony of the city.
12 September 2025 – More old + new, here in Toronto. The joy of time with old friends and familiar places, but also the joy of discovery.
For example, Biidaasige Park — some 40 hectares once complete, down at the mouth of the Don River and part of an even larger overall program to re-gentle, re-green and detoxify the sprawling Port Lands for what we now understand to be wiser, more multi-purpose and more inclusive use. Read more about Biidaasige (“Bee-daw-SEE-geh” with a hard “g”) on the City‘s website, on an analytical design website, and in her 6 September “As I walk Toronto” post by our WordPress colleague, Mary C.
The park is very much a work in progress, but some elements are already in place. They include several imaginative children’s playgrounds, one of which has as its guardian spirit, Snowy Owl.
Not only is his open tummy a stage for all kinds of child-friendly events, the interior of his body is open to visitors as well. You can walk inside…
and start climbing. Stairs, then ladders, and up you go.
Bang-thwack-ouch! Smack your head a few times and you finally realize the structure is child-scale. You learn to bend and duck accordingly.
Your reward? You get to look out through the Owl’s eyes, across the undulating playground, across Commissioner St. and westward toward downtown.
I scramble back down. We take ourselves off to explore trails down in the marshy areas around the various channels.
I am awestruck. This grubby, much-abused waterfront is being transformed. We lean on the railing of this pedestrian bridge and admire the grace of the new vehicular bridges, the abundant wild greenery along the banks, the habitat all this must offer for so many species. (Plus the knowledge of habitat yet to come, in plans for housing and further human community and settlement as well.)
And then… we move on.
The day is hot, and sunny, and, thanks to on-going park construction, noisy. We want still to be close to nature, but somewhere that offers soothing shade and a lack of noise.
All of which leads us to discover…
Mailbox Spider.
He is only some 4-5 km. away, slightly south-west of Biidaasige Park…
but in a very different world. The world of the Toronto islands.
More specifically and of importance to me, we are on one small island within that larger cluster: Algonquin Island, which is reached by a pedestrian bridge close to the Ward’s Island ferry dock.
Trace your finger over that pedestrian bridge and tap the intersection just off the bridge: Omaha and Ojibway avenues. Got it? Right there on that corner lot, almost invisible within its own mini-forest of trees and shrubbery, there is a white cottage. The white cottage where, 60 years ago, I used to live.
So it’s heavy-duty nostalgia time for me, and my friend is generously indulgent.
We stop, immediately off the bridge, to explore the community take/leave stand. It was active decades ago and, to my delight, is still active now.
A couple of Algonquin residents are near-by, people about my age. We chat, I explain I used to live here, I name a few names and they smile. We three didn’t know each other, but we each knew these other people.
Then, my friend and I, we just weave slowly up and down the narrow, car-free streets. (It is on Ojibway that we meet Mailbox Spider, with his blue cottage tucked away in the rear.)
The atmosphere is leafy, and peaceful. It is now a world of pretty smooth relations between residents and City — the welcome resolution of the long fight by residents and supporters to protect any residential community at all, in the face of the City’s desire to remove everybody and make the entire islands cluster into one big park. Now most of the land mass is park, but residential communities are recognized and stable on both Ward’s and Algonquin.
We reach the foot of Ojibway Avenue, down at Seneca, which runs along the island’s harbour-side waterfront, and offers panoramic views back across the water to the city core.
Including that CN Tower. I gave you only a distant and slivered view in my previous post; here it is, front and centre.
Still on Seneca, a good example of visitor/resident co-existence:
a bench for tourists and residents alike; one of the island’s many art boxes, again for the pleasure of tourists and residents alike — and a hammock in a resident’s front yard. For that family only, thank you!
Finally, my nostalgia satisfied and our minds and bodies refreshed by the peaceful environment…
Somewhere north of Gillam, the sun not yet visible, but the horizon glowing…
and, an hour and a half later, the first glimpse of Churchill, its massive port structure.
We arrive. We scatter, each to our own priorities.
Mine will take me pretty directly from the train station (the dark oblong near the top of that bottom blue loop) straight through town to Hudson Bay.
Not quite directly. First a stop to refuel in the Seaport Hotel’s coffee shop.
It is clean and cheerful, unpretentious, and near the station. A convenient pivot-point. (I have no idea of the dramatic role it will play in my life, later that day.)
Fortified, I take my own boots past a boots mural…
straight-lining it to the water.
And there it is.
There, too, is one of the warning signs I’ve been told about. The polar bear “season” has not yet quite started. But this is the polar bears’ world, and they live by their own instincts, not the schedule of glossy tourist brochures. Every visitor is told to obey all the signs. Yes, I am told, go to the beach area, but no, don’t go to water’s edge, because bears can rise right up out of the sea, and don’t go near the rocks, because that’s where they like to hang out. As the tourism rep in the train station explains to the person in front of me: “You wouldn’t want to step on one.”
Lots of “don’ts.” I take them seriously. You have to respect nature.
So I do something very safe. I climb this convenient, if unorthodox, observation tower…
right to the top level.
Where, first, I view the forbidden rocks to the east …
and then, second, I focus on the beach right in front of me.
I focus, specifically, on the man way down there at water’s edge, walking happily along — man plus small dog, equally happy and unleashed.
This dog.
Not eaten by a polar bear, as you can see. The dog’s owner is a quite elderly Inuk, so I decide if anyone can give me reliable advice, he’s the one. I greet him. I say I watched him enjoying his shoreline walk, and I’d like to do that myself.
He explains he goes there because he likes to pick up stones. “Me too!” I cry. We beam at each other, dig in our respective pockets, and hold out our handfuls of stones for mutual inspection. Much murmured enthusiasm and poking at treasures ensues. After all that, I ask about safety. He says, “You have to watch. I don’t see any bears around right now.” He adds that if I position myself behind the sand bar, I should be fine, since I won’t be next to deep water.
With further compliments about our respective good taste in beach stones, we part company. He toward town, and I straight to the rivulet behind that sand bar.
Where (bottom left)…
I keep the promise I made my toes, that day on the Point Grey beach.
The day is cool — about 9-10C — but sunny and not yet windy. I continue walking the beach, completely happy. I see beluga whales cresting the water surface — just arcs of white, rising and falling, nothing dramatic, but clear enough for me to know they are indeed whales and not waves.
Finally, I walk west toward another line of forbidden rocks…
obediently stop short, and turn inland.
These bright, helpful signposts are all over town. This one is just uphill from the beach, and persuades me to visit the Granary Ponds…
with an initial stop in St. Paul’s Anglican Church, there on the left.
I look at various artefacts, including this 1930s Cree plaque quoting scripture from the Gospel of St. Matthew…
and I read the 2008 Federal Government’s Statement of Apology, signed by then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to all those who suffered under the residential school system. Here’s an excerpt:
The road out to the Granary Ponds leads me past riots of wildflowers, still vibrant so late in the season…
and then a closer view of the Port of Churchill…
which, if political promises are kept, will benefit from major expansion in the near future. (An initiative announced by Prime Minister Carney during a European trip — one more move in building stronger and more diversified relations with other parts of the world.)
I backtrack into town. My one goal is to walk. A lot. Though I’ve had only one prior visit to Churchill, in the early 1980s, I spent a lot of that decade going in and out of the Arctic hamlets. I haven’t the foolishness, the arrogance, to think I am any kind of insider, but I do still resonate with all of this. Young self did lots of jumping around. Old self seeks only to put feet on the land, to see and smell and hear the land, and be in this place. So I walk.
And, oh yes, I see very northern sights.
This truck decal, for instance…
and this komatik (sled), waiting for winter…
and this polite request in the doorway of Itsanitaq Museum.
But I also see streetscapes that could be anywhere in Canada.
There are community gardens all over Canada, as well…
though this one takes proper northern measures to protect the crops.
Right next to it, a happy pod of beluga whales, swimming a very different ocean.
And then… and then, no more pictures.
Because then, getting on for 5 pm, my gut announces that it is not pleased with the tasty falafel bowl I had for lunch in a highly recommended local bistro. My gut makes clear that it plans soon to start Throwing Out the Garbage.
This will be merely unpleasant, not dangerous, but also highly inconvenient. The train station is not yet open and I am not registered in any hotel. I’m again near the Seaport Hotel, so I walk in. What else can I do? They look after me. I am safe and sheltered. My gut can briskly go about its housekeeping detail in privacy. When I finally totter off to the train station, a fellow passenger, the station staff and VIA Rail staff are all equally practical and kind. Soon I am whooshed aboard the train, tucked up in my own sleeper-cabin. After a few more rounds of garbage-removal, I sleep. When I wake again, I am completely well. It’s all over.
So is the day in Churchill. Our train is now in motion.
I lie there, think about all that helpful kindness — and decide that my little bout of food poisoning was in fact the final heart-warming event in a thoroughly wonderful day.
1 September – I’ll be one day and a bit, in Winnipeg. On the land, and on the water too.
The theme of land and rivers, the two great pathways of our country, keeps gaining strength. Not because I intellectually seek it out. Because it is imposing itself on me.
A tear-off map at my hotel inspires my walk: down to the Red River, there behind the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and then along the walking trails up into Stephen Juba Park, back down and around the curve of The Forks (where the Assiniboine River joins the Red), onto the water in a 30-minute tour, and more river-side walking, both rivers.
The river, of course, is more important for reasons other than cereal and coats.
My path along the Red up into Stephen Juba Park leads me past old pilings, last remnants of the glory days of this port (before the Panama Canal opened, and offered shipping an easier, quicker route through the Americas).
This is also when I first tap my boots in the water.
Literal next step in a whimsical project I hope I can complete: having tapped toes in the Pacific (Burrard Inlet, cf. my post of 25 August), I want now to tap them in the Red River, Hudson Bay and Lake Ontario.
Did you notice the trestle bridge, in the distance of that last photo? Used for military purposes, I’m told, and now the train bridge. I’m drawn to it. I admire the utility of these bridges, their visible geometry and, once I draw near, the majesty (albeit scruffy) of the near end of this particular example.
After I turn, after I follow the riverwalk bend around the point of land, I am now beside the Assiniboine River. I tap toes in its waters as well — a bonus not part of the original plan — and, as I do so, I notice a yellow Waterways tour boat mid-stream.
There is a dock, there is a boat about to depart, I climb aboard.
Only one fellow passenger, this early in the day: a Montreal film-maker, in town to work on a production here. Our guide has an impeccably Spanish name and an impeccably Canadian accent: his family moved here when he was two years old.
Kayak going one way, we’re going the other. Miguel is powering ahead, having now explained those three lines on the bridge pillar. Each is a water level: blue for normal spring levels, yellow for the danger of rising waters, red for floods. (I think of my brother’s years in Winnipeg, and the spring he helped sandbag against that year’s inundation.)
Back on land, toes duly tapped in not one but two mighty rivers, I head for the markets within The Forks complex. While you can buy food aboard the Winnipeg-Churchill run, it’s the like of microwaved subs, I’ve been told — the same person then suggesting I lay in some supplies.
So I do. Bison Snack Sticks (Canadian), Thunderbird “real food” bars (American), oat cakes (Isle of Mull) and Gemini apples (very very very local). Tomorrow morning, I’ll snag myself a few hard-boiled eggs from the hotel’s breakfast bar as well.
Feeling sufficiently prepared, I leave The Forks. But not before I admire Caboose 76602, a permanent installation on the grounds.
Built in Montreal in the 1930s, retired from service in Winnipeg in 1988, it is now “dedicated to the thousands of CN train crews who travelled through Winnipeg and the ‘East Yard’ that is now The Forks.”
Tomorrow, 12:05 pm Central time, I’ll be back on board one of today’s trains.
22 August 2025 – I mean to walk right through Dude Chilling Park, en route farther east. Instead, I stop to admire a brand-new hopscotch chalked into the park’s northern pathway.
Squares a bit on the mingy side, true, but lots of them. And so carefully executed. With European cross-strokes for the 1s and 7s. And the flourish of two colours, not one.
Instead of walking on, I settle myself on the bench just beyond…
curious to see if anyone yields to the temptation, and starts to hop.
First up, a very young toddler and her mum. The child is clearly new to the act of walking, let alone leaping around. She does not attempt to hop. She stops, frowns slightly at this unknown design, and then, intuitively, gets the idea.
Very slowly, very carefully, she obeys the visual clues: just one foot here, but both feet there. And then one, and then two… Until she loses patience, that is, and a laughing mother carries her off.
Next up, by complete contrast, a geezer. (Being one myself, I can say that.) He also stops, contemplates. Then, with a grin, he tucks his cane under one arm and starts to hop.
Hippity-hop! And again!
Until… whoops. A wobble corrected, a tumble averted, and his cane is prudently back in use.
He grins at me, amused. “Maybe I’m a little old for this.”
My mind flashes to a particular cartoon in Searle’s Cats (Ronald Searle, Dobson Books Ltd., 1967)…
and its caption: “Acrobatic cat discovering quite unexpectedly that it is too old for the game.”
I grin right back at him.
We are complicit, he and I — fellow adventurers in this demanding but rewarding late stage of life.
18 August 2025 – I’m just off a False Creek ferry and walking uphill toward home, still full of Flat White and café chatter with a good friend, when I stop to admire another good friend. (Albeit in a different category of friendship: painted, not human.)
There she is, high a-top her alley home, her quizzical smile floating out across the neighbourhood.
Is she our Mona Lisa, 21st-c. alley-girl version?
No. Given the pace of local redevelopment, and the building that is her home, she is our Cheshire Cat. Soon she will be gone, with only her smile lingering behind, and only in memory.
I”m standing at 3rd Avenue & Ontario Street, the intersection at the north-east corner of that L-shaped site, outlined in red. This is the huge redevelopment site purchased by the PCI Group in 2021, whose redevelopment proposal finally received City approval in May of this year. Cheshire Cat Smile is mid-way down lot 5, on the south side of the alley.
I head down the alley. Not for the first time, but it’s different every time, isn’t it? (No need to repeat the Heraclitus discussion…)
Crow in a convex mirror! I’ve never noticed him before, so already the alley is different.
The actual crow, opposite…
which causes me, for the first time, to pay attention to the mural as a whole — signed R. Tetrault and, as I later learn, called Flight Path.
Murals both side of an alley and a whole line-up of hydro H-frame poles in between! Sigh. Life is perfect.
I tip my head, pay homage to the Cheshire Cat Smile…
knowing it’s tagged Lil Top but also knowing I’ve never been able to find any info about that tag. So Cheshire Cat she has become.
The woman I’d noticed under the nearest H-frame, as I photographed Flight Path, is now standing next to me, also enjoying the art.
“It’s people expressing themselves,” she says. “And we get to look at it for free! It makes us happy.”
She points: “Like that flower, that butterfly.”
I point to the message next to it, which sets us both laughing.
And then we go our separate ways, each dawdling where we each prefer to dawdle, walking the line of Ciele Beau murals opposite Flight Path.
I pause at a doorway, its notice as outdated as the reminder to “call your mum.”
Nobody, employee or otherwise, will be entering by this door ever again, I tell myself. Or by any other door, on this doomed brick building.
Ghosts of Eras Past to the north of me as well — torn fencing frames the Cosmic Breezemural on 3rd Avenue, painted by Olivia di Liberto for the 2019 Vancouver Mural Festival. RIP, VMF.
I leave the alley, turn the corner onto W 4th. I’m now looking at the block-long southern length of the site, Ontario to Manitoba. All boarded up, waiting for What Happens Next.
This artist’s rendering shows What Will Happen Next.
“Innovative industrial and commercial uses,” says the corporate website, “heritage retention and refurbishment, office, daycare and ground-floor food and beverage… centred around a new public plaza.”
Now that I’m home, and learning all this… I have to do a little rethinking, don’t I? And so do you.
Employees will once again go in and out of doors in the corner brick building, which is not doomed after all. And Flight Path may fly again. On his website, Tetrault explains he painted it “on plywood for removal and reinstallation on a new commercial development.”
"Traveller, there is no path. Paths are made by walking" -- Antonio Machado (1875-1939)
"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" -- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
"A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities" -- Rebecca Solnit, "Wanderlust: A History of Walking"
WALKING WOMAN 