23 January 2025 — My legs want to go celebrate the relatively balmy temperature (4C) and the lack of anything heaving down at us out of the sky. Rough plan: bus rides to Morton Park on the edge of Stanley Park; my own two feet back through the West End on the Comox-Helmcken Greenway to downtown; a visit to the Outsiders and Others art gallery on Howe; and then … well I don’t know. It’ll sort itself out.

Fun, right from the first bus ride.

Old geezer hops on, sporting a grubby old hockey sweater bearing this logo:

I squeak with delight, shake two-thumbs-up at him, and soon we’re deep in our old-geezer memories about Rocket Richard, Boom-Boom Geoffrion and other heroes of the 1950s/60s Montreal Canadiens hockey team. I bail, to catch my Beach bus on out to Morton Park, but the hockey talk continues: he and another geezer start arguing the merits/stupidity of current Vancouver Canuck team strategy.

Second bus ride is as larky as the first. We would-be passengers put in an extra 30 seconds at the stop while the approaching driver brakes and waits for a solitary gull to walk — very, very slowly — across Station Street in front of the bus. We climb on board cheering the driver.

(He later proves equally considerate of human life forms, making a safe but illegal stop that allows an elderly lady to get off a bit closer to her destination, the Aquatic Centre.)

So I am buoyant with good humour and confidence in the day, as I turn turn off Davie Street onto Bidwell to walk on over to the Greenway. Right at the corner, I’m charmed by Fiona Dunnett’s design for the City utility box, with its happy musicians in a local park…

and I am equally charmed by the message I see on a stickie pressed to the top of the box, on the other side.

More street art, or at least street-viewed art, at Bidwell & Pendrell, where the base for the fence around Lord Roberts Elementary School bears design work by its 2016/17 students.

At Comox, I join the Greenway. The intersection is marked a pair of comfy black chairs (prudently bolted into place) — a repeating feature of this corridor, with its emphasis on restful human interaction.

This pair has an impromptu addition: a decidedly unofficial, and decidedly battered, wooden chair left by some anonymous donor. It is not bolted into place!

Street-side gardens everywhere, even if, mid-winter, there are more bare branches and bare earth than plants. This plaintive notice near Nicola, for example, seems unnecessary…

but no, I’m wrong.

Half a block on down the street…

I see my first snowdrop of the year.

The accelerating trend to glossy new towers, so visible on Davie Street, is less apparent here. Here so far, and this far west, architecture is older, smaller-scale and somehow more restful. A vintage brick apartment building faces an only slightly newer wooden equivalent at Comox and Broughton.

Volunteer-tended Green Streets gardens are prevalent — a feature here, as elsewhere, of the City program to promote greenery in (and I quote) “traffic-calming spaces.” Often accompanied by benches or pairs of those black chairs, the garden surroundings are indeed calming. You don’t have to love jargon to love the result.

Though sometimes, as in this garden at Broughton, I don’t much love the aesthetic, either.

But then… ohhhh, I get over myself. What’s not to love about gnomes & plastic owls & toads & toadstools & bunny-rabbits & watering cans & even a startled bird atop a column of improbably turquoise plastic vine?

Furthermore, there are gardens I really like a lot. So there.

Like the one at Jervis.

No… more precisely, like the brightly daubed fire hydrant next to this garden. With its elephant on top. (I did promise you an elephant, here he is.)

I’m also very fond of this garden near Bute, with its bike-wheel tribute to the joys of cycling.

Right at Bute, not a garden, but another expression of community and joy and creativity.

Chalk art.

I don’t know who Baba and Addy are, but this young artist wishes them well, and so do I.

I’m on the diagonal now, slicing through Nelson Park, passing between happy dogs in the off-leash park on my right and happy kiddies in the playground of Lord Roberts school annex on my left. I meet Bella, a slightly skittish Pomeranian/Husky cross, who eventually decides I am to be trusted and gives my hand a nuzzle. Her owner reaches the same conclusion, and allows me to feed her a treat. All three of us are pleased with the encounter.

I pause at a tree. It has pussy-willow-ish catkins on it, though I don’t know for sure that’s what they are. Anyway, that’s not why I pause. It’s the ornament that stops me. The world’s tiniest baby rain boot, bright green and adorable, dangles from a branch. Some infant kicked it off, and some later pedestrian has hung it high, in hopes the parent will come searching and find it.

Once on Nelson Street, I’m heading for the business/entertainment/financial district — serious downtown. At Burrard, the Wall Centre rises tall. It’s arresting in its own right, even more arresting as it throws Gaudí-esque reflections of buildings opposite.

Still arresting when I’m right in front of it, fountain spray adding further dynamics to the scene.

One last image: the quiet majesty of Arthur Erickson’s Law Courts Complex, seen from Nelson at Hornby…

before I turn onto Howe, make my visit to Outsiders and Others, with its decidedly different sensibility, and finally walk on north to Pender Street and my bus ride home.

No hockey sweaters or hockey talk, this time — instead, a loving young father gurgling nonsense at his toddler son. Everyone within earshot is as charmed as the baby.