Some foolish Magazine writer has said that Kitsilano beach in Olympic City is the third sexiest beach in the world.  Yo!  Not to take away entirely from Kitsilano, I went for a walk on our beach a while back. I hadn't walked the entire mile or so for at least six months but the tide was out and it was a somewhat dull and blowsy day with a little west coast drizzle. My walk was sexy.
    There were three river otters playing and cuddling and watching me about fifty feet from the shore. They stick their heads way out of the water because they are curious. I think two of them were pups.
     There  were over a hundred Canada geese eating eelgrass that was lying horizontal in the tide, waving about, and some of it probably still has remnants of herring eggs still glued on. Protein!
     There was a large  sandbank of geoducks I crossed over and if I touch the siphon gently with my foot  to tease them they give me a big squirt!
     The beach is dotted with small humps and pits where Roland and I have been digging for little neck and butter clams from time to time. The tides have not fully smoothed out the humps yet.
     One lone eagle flew across the harbour and two turkey vultures cruised the shore overhead. The wind was pretty brisk so they had updrafts. The sandbanks have periodic congregations of sand dollars to encounter in the millions but they still are localized.
    The oyster beds seemed diminished to me but there were still large oyster collections on the outcroppings of shale that dot the beach. They are Japanese oysters since we no longer have indigenous oysters here.
      I saw someone had built a large and attractive new house by the beach down the way. I hadn't seen it before. There was no one on the beach during my walk until I arrived back at our beach stairs. A young woman and a dog on a leash walked by, but she hustled and averted her eyes. Training I guess.

In the olden days the crow was considered an omen of death, hence that ancient designation of a bevy of crows that we enjoy on Lotus Island, swooping, frolicking, linguistically diverse, usefully omnivorous, collegial and remarkably intelligent;  hardly ominous for a group once considered as a murder of crows.
   My neighbor Bob had a nice Sweet Cherry. Stella, a self -pollinizer that produced delicious black cherries on occasion when the crows forgot to come there, or were otherwise engaged in our place.
    One spring when the trees were in early bloom and the expectation of fruit was high Bob took action unlike him and shot a couple of crows, murdered them really, and put them in his freezer beside Helen's frozen chickens. When the cherries started to ripen in June Bob hung the crows on his young tree branches thinking the omen for the crows would serve as a warning.  It certainly did and the ruckus was immense. The cherries were left alone to mature into black, soft, sweet, plump and delicious looking fruit.
     The night before Bob's designated picking time some unanticipated visitors came and in the morning the pickers found a family of raccoons who had dined on the softened rotting crows, stripped off most of the cherries for dessert and damaged some branches.
      It has seemed to me at the time when he shot the crows that it was rough but smart action on Bob's part, but I learned otherwise to my blessing. We had two Stella trees in our orchard as well and I then on, accepted humbly my place in the order of natural precedence and I acknowledged that fact is an omen of life , not death. Therefore, murder of crows on my farm has no place for any murder of crows that happen to know where they belong and are willing to share it with us.

When 80 year old Mary Soames* wrote of life with her father Winston Churchill, she , as an i8 year old through the dark days of the beginning of the Second World War in Britain described the visit for several weeks of Harry Hopkins.  Hopkins, an American, son of a harness maker, now a Federal Undersecretary was sent by Roosevelt to assess the situation there and determine what needs America could and should supply.
    Mary remembers the intimate time Hopkins spent with her father and their family through the withering time of the Battle of Britain when the British felt alone and abandoned and her father was so pressed. She recalled the family dinner given for Hopkins on his departure. He stood and spoke to them all that evening and he said, in passing,  "I suppose you wonder what I will say to President Roosevelt when I return. This is what I can and will advise them for our countries. ----- Where you will go, we will go, and where you lodge we will lodge and your people will be our people."
       Hopkins, son of a harness maker found nothing more expressive of the connection  with Britain, America, and the family of Mary Soames than he found from the Book of Ruth. But it says more-----" your people will be my people and your God, my God and where you die I will die also." Harry Hopkins was as good as his words.

* From A Daughter's Tale; The Memoirs of Winston Churchill.  Mary Soames

The indigenous berries produced on the prairies where cultivated fruit was rare, provided a bonanza in the fall; a gift from Mother Nature for the taking.  I'm not talking about the later cultivars developed at the universities or experimental farms, but the original shrubs we harvested berries from in the olden days.
     Low bush blueberries (Vaccinium augustifolium) in the Hudson Bay Junction area where we lived on the edge of the Canadian Shield.  Your fingers were blue from the bloom on the berries and your back sore from stooping. Your ears were alert for sounds of bears grunting and eating and your legs ready to run. And High Bush Cranberries ( Viburnam trilobum)  from the same area.  Not related at all botanically or horticulturely to the common cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon) , these  little red berries on a tall bush made a tart and piquant jelly. The Pincherry  (Prunus pensylvanica) also was a favorite of the jelly maker. A tart and delicious jelly was created, particularly good for game and meat.
        My favorite as a child was the Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana). The flavour from this berry, in the jelly is unique. A slice of homemade bread slathered with butter and chokecherry jelly was ambrosia.
        Because it took a long time to pick most of these small and thinly distributed shrubby lttle fruits the preserves were special, a treasure trove and treated with care.
       The Saskatoon berry (Amalenchier alnafolia), on the other hand was wide spread throughout the prairies.The  berries made very nice pies  and were easy to pick. Saskatoons became the prairie icon of sorts but less for flavour and more for its ubiquity.
        The cultivars that have arisen as a result of plant selection have undoubtedly improved the production of these little trees but they will never supplant the fruit flavours one remembers from one's youthful taste buds.

In 1979,while working in the orchard pruning apple trees and sitting at the base of a tree taking a breather, I saw Gramps, the pianist's father, walking up the road beside the orchard to my right. He walked slowly and haltingly because he was breathless from an advanced lung cancer that was no longer amenable to treatment, but he was still in good spirits and mining all he could from the seams of his remaining life.
     With the alteration of his gait and slowing of his steps we could have orchestrated with some form of  music, the cadence of this piece. He had emerged from the kitchen door on the right of the cottage, closed it quietly, and seemingly had a location in mind. As I watched and thought about him and his life ebbing away after so many years I still saw spirit and desire. I knew he was going up the road for a smoke.
       There was a flash of movement on the path on the left side of the cottage I suddenly saw. The sliding door had silently opened and closed and my fourteen year old daughter Ruth had emerged, ostensibly unnoticed,and quietly walked up the pathway to the left of the orchard, clearly on her way to have a forbidden smoke. She had spirit and desire and was going to try everything, childhood ebbing away.
          As they proceeded apace, unknown to one another, and known to me in silence, I saw this as a drama, a point and counterpoint, interdependent harmonically yet independent in rhythm and contour. Three players engaged in the small rhythm of life.

It was often my habit on a work day to go fishing at daybreak off the waters of Lotus City. I would start at 5 am and finish before 8 am, change on the boat and go to work. I fished alone at that time of day and there was nothing more pleasant than to troll along side the Discovery Islands at Strongtide Bay on ebb-tide. with the wire lines humming and the trolling bells rhythmically ringing with the gentle tug and swell. Because it was early morning, nature usually called sometime shortly after the setup, and in the cabin on the throne I would rest a bit, watching and listening to the bells through the open cabin door, in repose, with an air of contemplation and expectation.
      The joy I felt on the briny deep in pursuit of the salmon was enhanced by the embrace of Mother Nature who was mine alone at that time of the morning. The world was still asleep! My lines were fishing deep, the depth maintained by planers, that when tripped by a strike prompted the rod's bells to ring urgently. The planers rose to the surface quickly with the fish on, resulting in line slack. The fisherman needed to react with alacrity to get to the rod and tighten the slack so the fish wouldn't throw the hook. In the midst of my meditation on the throne, suddenly the bell on the rod on the starboard side rang stridently. With great speed I hopped off the throne, pants dangling at the ankles; I bounded to retrieve the rod from the rod-holder and began to reel in the line slack to play the fish. I suddenly heard great cheering and looked up to see high fives from a quartet of tourists on the guide boat fishing long side me, starboard. My boat had low freeboard so I wasn't sure if they were cheering my catch or crotch. Thank goodness it was a time before cellphones with cameras or youtube.
         You can't hold your rod and wind up your knuckleduster reel and pull up your pants all at the same time unless you have three hands. Something had to be let go and it wasn't the fish.

e  Our family owned what was one of the more ugly boats on the wet coast. It was a wood planked, 26 and one half foot semi-planing  displacement hull with a smoky diesel engine. It traveled by a propulsion with a single screw and reached a maximum of 7 and a half knots. I bought it for 2 and one half thousand dollars in 1968 and we had it for over 20 years. It was the kind of boat you could hammer a nail in anywhere, to hang any thing you wished to reach, mainly fishing gear. The pianist made curtains and nice mattress covers for the bunk beds and made it homey as best she could, but much of it remained "dressed up ugly". We were very fond of our boat as a family of five and used it constantly so it never let us down. A boat in constant use remains a faithful companion. " If you don't use, it you lose it."
    Every time I went down to the Oak Bay Marina where it lived, to paint it I went fishing instead.  When it needed caulking, I was a fast caulker so he cabin continued to leak, but we had more fishing time. Often I would just go and sit with it and make boat coffee and meditate. In those early days the marina was a particularly heterogenous mixture of the sublime and UBS (ugly but satisfactory) so no one worried over a pecking order.
      We went for a  summer cruise in the Salish sea for a week and the weather became squally. We were caught at sea in the squall and our clothing became wet partly due to our cabin leak. The pianist jury-rigged a clothesline and we hung our clothes out to dry when the sun came out and put into Bedwell, the nearest harbour. Bedwell is aptly named as it is a secluded refuge for over nighters. As we pulled into the harbour we could see nothing but a flotilla of large, white sleek, beautiful boats, with a clutch of glistening people in whites, deck shoes, and big hair, cooking steaks on their Hibachis at wharfside. My 14 year old son said, " Shit, we should get out of here." I;m sure he spoke for all of us but by then we were already committed.
        As I eased our smoking, ugly stinkpot into the moorage the disdain from the boaters seemed palpable. Certainly the pianist's clothesline added to the picture, flags of Salish hillbillies. I did think however we may have been one of the few that owned our own boat and knew how to manage tight corners with a single screw.

In the olden days of the late forties there were no Zambonis. The tribe of which I was a member, the rink rats, were proud to be noticed as we skated up and down the ice with our ice scrapers, caroming against one another, pushing our snow load to the big door at the end of the Kindersley arena. We cleared the ice of snow between the hockey periods and after the game. The biggest rat shoveled it out the door. We were allowed to watch all the hockey games free. The Kindersley Klippers were a great intmediate B team. We were all proud to be identified with them.
      I lived on third avenue east, half a short block from the rink, and like all small town rinks it was available for most of the time. Rink rats did a lot of other go-fer jobs as well. The entire rink management was of a volunteer nature. It seems now that we practically lived in the rink in the winter. Kindersley had PeeWee, Bantam,Midget, and Juvenile teams so the rink was busy. There was frequently shinny when the rink was  occupied, usually on the icy street on 3rdAve east near the rink. I don't remember any Junior teams of ours at that time. If we had anyone of that age that was good they probably went to Moose Jaw.
        Hockey was as natural for us as skiing for an Austrian or swimming for an Aussie. There was little money in those days, even for the players that made it big. It was love of the game . Player like the Bently's and Geordie Howe, or the Hucul's would have made more money staying on the farm. What was it that drove us? The pure love of the game and the sure knowledge that it was our game and still is in small town Canada. It had everything to do with participation and dreams. We played it in our sleep.

What if everybody in the world, at the same day, at the same minute, opened their window, looked at the sky, took a big breath, and yelled out their lungs saying,  " Thank you very much, thank you a lot. "  The view would probably change, suffused suddenly with light and color and clarity.
    On the other hand, what if everybody in the world, at the same day, at the same minute, opened their window, looked at the sky, took a big breath and yelled out their lungs saying, " I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore ."  The view would darken and sounds of sorrow, tears, and grief would arise.
      What if,  is only wistful thinking. It may be that we took everything for granted.  In a distant time and a distant place we were given a grant that allowed us to live in a place of light and color and clarity. We may have spoiled it by forgetting to say, thank you very much, thank you a lot, for the grant we were given, and fell into something like I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.
I think we are watching too much television these days. The movie " Network "  described television as  "indifferent to suffering,  insensitive to joy.  All of life is reduced to the rubble of banality."  Maybe that's a little strong, but the task of mankind is to recover the grant,  or at least what is left for the wistful among us. Not, as it were, taking the grant for granted.

Second year University French  was mandatory in the Pre-med Science programme at the University of Manitoba. I had only one year of high school French in Saskatchewan. It soon became abundantly apparent that I was out of my depth and destined for disaster. Most of the class were from St. Boniface, taking the class to refine their own working language and to belong to the French Club that met regularly.
       I was sitting with a senior student in the cafeteria eating my bag lunch  and probably had a doleful look  since my cause seemed hopeless at that stage and I saw no way out. He listened to my tale of woe, my putative career gradually eroding away in my mind, failure looming large.  "Hey listen, " he said, " If you get out the old final exams in French for the last ten years you'll see that there is always 50 % of the mark for an essay in French. They give you a choice of topics and if you choose something like a " trip to the farm" it'll probably apply to a topic choice. I received a glimmer of hope from my rescuer, but I'm sure I looked dubious.
         However , what that sage said was true!  The topic choices in the old exam papers I reviewed included, An Exciting Experience,  ( A Trip to the Farm ) , What You did Last Summer ,  (A Trip to the Farm ), An Enjoyable Journey, ( A Trip to the Farm ). This was the straw I was willing to grasp. Sure enough, the angel I met at lunch over my Baloney sandwich was right. Before the examination I carefully crafted a French essay, letter perfect, accent perfect, on A Trip to the Farm and memorized it.
         I scraped through French with little to spare. I learned a lot that year. If you have a lot of cunning you can get by if you have a will and a way, but it's not a substitute for smart.  The teacher who marked my paper must have wondered how a guy that dumb in the other 50% wrote an essay that was that perfect,  and didn't cheat.