6 November 2026 – I don’t notice these things because of mathematics. I assign numbers later, to unite them in a passingly acceptable theme. Truth is… I notice them because I notice them. Because I’m walking down a street and down an alley, and my eyes tell my feet to stop. My feet stop, and I pay attention. Then, later, to amuse myself — and you — I give the resulting post a title.
As promised: Math
2 bikes + 4 bike racks flaunt shadows.
1 wall flaunts 2 hits of colour, door + vine.
1 tree flaunts even better colour. (So there.)
And… and…
1 alley flaunts 33 acres of beer.
I stand here a stupidly long time, “stupidly” long only because I don’t even like beer, and I am mesmerized. Shiny stacked cans! Deep dark doorway! Shiny barrels! Wooden barrel! All this in a grotty alley!
It is even sillier, even more wonderful, up close.
Smiley-face emojis on every can!
One last backward glance, with even more wooden casks thrown in…
and I take my besotted self off home.
Where, also as promised, the Two Backstories come into play.
Looking at that colourful vine + doorway, I notice white letters — pyrrha — on black in the companion panel. I look up “pyrrha.” I learn it is a local boutique jewelry factory & showroom, and I am not interested until I read the building is an example of a Heritage Revitalization Project. The oxymoronic potential of this phrase has me wary. Are any of you also old enough to remember how the American army “pacified” Vietnamese villages? By blasting them out of existence, was how. So I sniff this phrase suspiciously and read that, in exchange for retaining and restoring a 1909 single-family residence, the developer was allowed to build this 6-storey tower on the same site. Hmm, well. But also, hmm-well, it does provide artisan industrial space for local entrepreneurs.
I fiddle with some more online maps & citations, and discover my alley-entrancement is the unglamorous back side of 33 Acres Brewing Co., a Vancouver company which, on its street side, offers a bar and a tasting room and other delights. Those smiley faces on the cans? In addition to a long list of beers with dramatic names (33 Acres of Sunshine/Darkness/Euphoria/Nirvana… ), the brewery also offers the straightforward cheer of Fluffy Cloud.
I am now quite done with promoting ornaments I don’t buy and a liquid I don’t drink.
Still… Look at all the local factoids I have learned, just because, out there on the streets, my eyes made my feet stop.
1 November 2026 – I hadn’t planned a capital-W Walk for today, I only had the “stops” part of this agenda in mind, but spectacular weather pull me out the door and onto the streets for a more ambitious adventure.
Late-morning timing and brilliant sunshine offer me “shadows.”
So here I am, me and my shadow, heading off north on Scotia Street. My destination — very eventually — will be St. James Anglican Church at Gore & Cordova in the city’s Downtown East Side (DTES).
More shadows on Station Street as I approach Pacific Central Station, thrown by a flaming maple tree not only on the sidewalk, but on the equally flaming Construction sign, which shows us the obvious: the new St. Paul’s Hospital / Providence Health Care campus, just ahead, is one massive (and much needed) project.
I’ve been chattering with people all along the way. We’re all beaming at each other, wriggling with pleasure in the brisk-but-friendly weather, exchanging the usual social small talk, agreeing it’s a great day for a walk, yessiree, it sure is.
Canada geese, here at Thornton Park just past Pac Central, agree with the humans. I stare at this trio calmly stepping their way across Station Street…
and think of Lynette d’Arty-Cross’ post on 19 October, A Duckie Adventure, with adorable ducks crossing a much busier street. (If you don’t already know her blog, Pictures and Stories of Life, here’s the moment to pay it a visit.)
I have to do a little navigating, in order to weave northward around the construction while still avoiding Main Street (a game I like to play with myself). This particular weave benefits from conversation with a DTES woman who describes where best, at this stage of hospital construction, to cut through barricades and make it to Gore Street.
I follow her advice. It brings me to the foot of Gore, between Prior and Union streets, where homes still display their Hallowe’en pumpkins.
Jack o’ Lanterns are a seasonal icon; over the next few blocks, I encounter three more icons with staying power.
Black Strathcona: This lamp post plaque is a tribute to Hogan’s Alley, a narrow lane home to Black immigrants “that became a flashpoint for its vibrant night life and for urban renewal schemes that ultimately destroyed it.”
Asian Strathcona: referenced in the sidewalk mosaic of lotus and koi at the corner of Gore and Keefer.
A crow! Of course. All the time, everywhere, with this particular one at Gore and East Pender.
Finally I reach Gore and Cordova, and this 1930’s take on 14th-c Gothic style architecture. The building is the third iteration of St. James Anglican Church, this one in durable concrete, unlike its vulnerable wooden predecessors (the first having been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1886).
I’ve attended architectural tours of this building, and would do so again. But that’s not my purpose today. Today is all about the church’s magnificent Casavant Frères organ — a three-manual, 31-stop organ of 1,760 pipes — installed in November, 1938. I and other event attendees, ranging from the deeply knowledgable to the humbly fascinated (like me), are here for a show-and-tell-and-play with the church’s Music Dirctor, Dr. Abraham Ross.
You see? I am now moving from the “shadows” of this post to the “stops” (and everything else to do with organs).
It turns out, I’m not quite done with shadows yet. I step into the church, where I am struck by the play of shadows among the sun’s rays, as light streams into the Lady Chapel.
Dr. Ross (“Call me Abe”), rounding off his first year in this post, wears his knowledge lightly, a characteristic that I deeply admire. We listen, we question, we discuss, as his fingers and feet dance and his words and music fill our heads and hearts.
Later, when he invites anyone interested to sit on the bench and make music, both Red Jacket and Blue Jacket (above) respond. They had each listened intently and asked thoughtful questions — no surprise they each also play the organ well.
Smiling and thankful and light-hearted, we all wind back down the steps, ready to leave. Then… a surprise. The organ again swells through the church, this time with a soprano voice in soaring duet. (I remember Dr. Ross’ comment, that in commissioning this organ, St. James instructed Casavant to adapt away from classic French cathedral style toward the Anglo-Catholic style of the Church of England, a more mellow sound suited to the C of E interplay between organ and choir.)
I look up from the nave to the gallery, and, transfixed, watch and listen for another moment: the singer standing to the left of the seated organist, an observer off to the right.
Then finally I do leave.
Because the day is so extraordinary, and I am so buoyed by both day and music, I do not turn toward home. Instead, I follow Cordova Street on east, deeper into Strathcona. Eventually it occurs to me that while music and sunshine are all very fine, lunch would also be fine, ’round about now.
So I say good-bye to Cordova at Hawks Street, and follow Hawks south to Keefer and to the Wilder Snail.
I’ve visited this venerable café/grocery store before, and I’ve already shown you its mammoth suspended snail mascot at least a couple of times. “Snail” could have been the third “s” in this post’s title.
But it’s not. Because, while I’m charmed by the spooky-season addition of a black tarantula, I am even more charmed by another discovery.
Along with its vintage wooden floors, and its vintage trick of steadying wobbly table legs with folded bits of paper, the Wilder Snail has genuine old vintage steam radiators. “S” for “steam.”
I warm my insides with broccoli-cheddar cheese soup, while the radiator gently warms my outsides.
Then I take my insides and outsides back home, and put on my lined jeans. T’is the season!
24 October 2026 – I’m waiting for the red light to turn green, out there on a Kitsilano street corner, but, mostly, I’m admiring a flaming yellow-orange tree. This tree, ‘way over there on the right against the brick wall.
Red light turns green, away I go. Thinking, as I go, about green trees turning red.
All part of the seasonal shift, and I enjoy the added bonus of a pun: each fall (whenever it happens to be fall, in your hemisphere) the chlorophyll curtain falls… and all those other colours are finally on view.
Oh, the maple trees! A child of eastern Canada, I’m big on the bravura performance of our maple trees each fall. For good reason a red maple leaf is smack-central in our flag.
But, this year, I’ve started noticing other trees, other shrubs. I’m paying attention to the delicacy of their shade ranges, as chlorophyll drops away. I am amazed by what I start to see. (Isn’t that the way? First, you have to look. Then, you see.)
This, for example…
and this…
and this, my absolute favourite. Theme and variations.
Now that I’m paying attention…
Days later, seated at a bus stop in the east end of town, I idly glance backward through the glass. At first the view is an unprepossessing tangle of background gas pumps and foreground traffic bric-à-brac storage, including a white barricade. There is also a something-or-other wrapped around the barricade, and my idle gaze sharpens to interest.
No bus in sight. I have time to walk around the bus shelter for another angle.
I laugh out loud. Somebody (probably waiting for a bus, killing time) found a bit of construction warning tape, wound it around one end of the traffic barricade, and neatly inserted into it… one leaf, caught in its brief, bright moment of glory.
Well, of course somebody went to all that trouble. We do love the leaves of fall!
15 October 2026 – At a first quick glance, walking along East 10th, I think it’s just another Hallowe’en-themed front yard — the usual cliché cemetery.
Then I step closer, and realize we are being offered quite a different category of deaths.
The colours of ordinary street-side plantings that much richer, with their faces fresh-washed in the rain.
I pause on the south-east corner of East 7th and Scotia, with two of the area’s iconic buildings in eyesight — Main St. Brewing opposite and (to the right) the back of the stone-and-brick Brewery Creek Building at East 6th.
I’ll be heading that way, north on Scotia, but I’m momentarily distracted by the shine that is almost literally at my feet.
Even a discarded mirror fragment works magic, when it shimmers a hydro pole at us in blurry brilliance.
At East 6th, some magic that doesn’t depend on rain — though somehow rain makes its story all the more vivid, and all the more poignant.
This handsome bronze cairn reminds us that although rain now courses down a steep roadway, until early last century rain simply added yet more water to a tumbling creek: Brewery Creek.
We are where the maps says we are (in turquoise letters lower right): on the banks of the old creek. In 1897, it still ran free. Now it is underground. The buildings opposite are not the ones shown on this map — Vancouver Brewing and Thorpe & Co. — but they are direct successors. Main St. Brewing, uphill, is the artisan beer company now occupying the 1920s building that was originally a garage for Vancouver Breweries (the amalgamated version of the original brewery), and the Brewery Creek Building, opposite, went up in 1903 as an expansion to the Vancouver Breweries complex. This structure later went through a succession of uses, including candy factory…
before 21st-c. restoration and expansion transformed it into live/work spaces for artists.
The “brewery” tag was, and again is, apt. Early breweries made use of the creek; a collection of new boutique breweries makes use of that history. The whole area now preens itself under the collective label of Brewery Creek.
Another plaque takes us back to much earlier history — some three millennia back — and to those earlier uses of the watercourse and surrounding forests.
Kitty-corner to the plaque, the Native Education Centre it references, and its gardens.
My mind full of what used to be, imagining a creek to complement the rain, I walk on. Walk “downstream.” There is no visible creek, but there is real rain, and colours punched that much brighter as a result.
Including plastic colours, here at East 4th.
But I’m not focused on those tip-tilted chairs, I’m watching the horizontal black umbrella beyond the chairs (upper right). It belongs to a member of the coFood Garden Project that occupies this space, who is carefully shoulder-balancing it with one hand as he uses the other to wrest something out of the tree overhead. Branches interfere, I have no idea what he is doing. (Rescuing an injured bird? Snatching up some Spanish doubloons? Leaving a note for a secret lover?) There is suddenly a loud crack, he pulls his umbrella again vertical, and walks away. Mission presumably accomplished.
One last look north, watching water rivulets course downstream, again imagining a creek instead of pavement ..
and I turn to walk my way back upstream.
One final slight detour into a driveway, to admire one more example of shine in all this rain…
and at last I start thinking about dry indoors space and hot soup.
14 September 2026 – Late in the walk, both of them, one each for a two-part day.
Part One has me heading through Chinatown and back into the East Van neighbourhood of Strathcona. Since I’ll be attending an artist’s talk at the Paneficio Gallery on Keefer at Hawks, I walk my way in, all along Keefer from Main Street.
This taco truck stops me in my tracks just before Heatley Avenue. The big, bold colours and graphics, yes — but check the brand-name endorsements!
If the Blessed Virgin doesn’t convince you, maybe these guys will.
Next up, and almost immediately because it’s catty-corner from that truck: MacLean Park, and its giant notice board here at the north-west end. I read notices, impressed by the variety and fascinated by some of the names, the descriptions. This home repairs business, for e.g….
and this night club…
and… and… and I don’t know what this is.
I read it very carefully, right to the end, including the QR code instructions…
and it is then with some relief that I return to the physical, actual world.
I watch these musicians setting up for their free-concert gig in the park…
and, reassured by the normalcy of it all, cross back to the north side of Keefer and walk on.
Almost at the corner of Hawks, diagonally beyond that bicycle, there’s Paneficio, its bright façade dominating the street corner. The building is a complex of artists’ studios, living space and a small exhibition gallery. This is the last day of Yuri Arajs‘ show, Dust to Dust, and an impressive number of red dots mark the works that he discusses in his remarks.
Afterwards, I check the current offerings of what is surely the city’s sleekest little-free-library…
where a quick riffle through one of the books, Make My Curry! (New Indian Cuisine), by Uganda-born Vancouverite Sami Lalji, convinces me to scoop it up.
My south-west loop toward home takes me first through leaf litter on Hawks, bright with the golden tones of fall…
and then west on the alley between East Georgia & Union streets. Crisp shadows at my feet, seasonal reds and golds overhead into the distance.
No alley murals, just some tagging and (I say this with petulance) some scrawls. Sulk. I’m almost at Jackson, about to drop down to Union, when a garage door gives me reason to stop sulking and be happy again.
I know, I know, this is not terrific art. But they are cats, and they do have attitude. (And third eyes.)
So I make my way out to Main and back south with good humour restored.
The bus drops me just north of Broadway — and launches me on Part Two of my day.
Because this is Car-Free Day on Main Street (10th Av to King Edward)! The view south from the Main Street bus stop here at Broadway, aka 9th, draws me in. It is blissfully empty of vehicles and, a bit farther along, full of tents and people.
Tents on both sides of the street, a great jumble of foodstuffs, handcrafts, vintage and up-cycled clothing, pottery, jewellery, plants and veggies, and every kind of organization compatible with the neighbourhood and a “car-free” ethos.
The farther south I walk, the busier it gets, more and more adults, kids and leashed dogs, more and more ways for everyone to interact with each other and with all the offerings.
I watch two clever boys play chess…
I watch a cardboard pope smile gently while his human colleagues watch for opportunities to talk Roman Catholicism and St. Patrick’s Church with passersby.
I am definitely in Advocates Alley now.
Do you see the red and white COPE sign, just past the pope’s shoulder? COPE is one of the municipal political parties, gearing up for the 17 October civic elections here in Vancouver.
Next up, this duo: the sign on the right more obvious than the affiliation of the white-trousered, yellow-buttoned gentleman in the middle, who is trying to persuade the uncommitted listener on the left.
Sign on the right? You got it: the USA mid-term elections are coming up in November and Democrats, as always prior to an American election, want to pull in as many “abroad” votes as they can. Yellow-Button Man is with a very new party on the Vancouver civic scene called Vote Vancouver, and he is talking about our elections thank you, not theirs.
I accept a leaflet as i walk by… and then carry out my own act of advocacy.
I choose a bowl of traditional Himalayan steamed dumplings. This is only mid-September! I still have a whole month, to prep for my civic duty.
"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"
