Are You A Working Girl?

"Are you a working girl?" he asked. I looked up from staring into a storefront window and took a moment to process the question. A middle aged man, dressed in the blue shirt and pants associated with a "blue collar" worker was looking at me inquiringly. "Are you a working girl?" he repeated quietly. I was killing time on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver while waiting for the BC Hydro office, in it's mosaic tiled building on Nelson and Burrard, to open. It was the first day of my first real full-time, grown up job and I had allowed too  much time to get from my family's home in Richmond by bus. I was due at the office at 8:00 AM and it was only 7:30 so I had decided to walk a few blocks in the beautiful morning sunshine.

This looks like a working girl!

It was 1974 and a perfect September day in Vancouver, like we are experiencing now,  a bright blue sky, a fresh crispness to the air after the summer's heat with the warmth of the sun slowly drying up the morning dew. I was preoccupied with my thoughts of the day ahead. I had never had a job other than babysitting or cutting hair or doing alterations for friends and family. Casual stuff of a teenager's life. Three months earlier I had graduated high school and turned seventeen but wanted my last summer of freedom before I started looking for full time work.  When I was ready a mother of a friend of a friend had gotten me the job as a favour and it was quite a big deal. It was hard to find work in a sea of baby boomers graduating high school and college and  BC Hydro was considered a great employer.  I could hardly wait to get started on my new life. Full time work, a generous paycheck, lots of time off. The world was awaiting me! I was so glad to be done with school, the boredom and monotony of my final years there was sloughing off me like an unwanted sweater on a hot day.

Walking off my nerves seemed like a good way to spend the extra time I had that morning. I can still remember my outfit, carefully picked for the occasion. A long, denim blue corduroy skirt with matching blue sandals (hey, it was the seventies!) and a short white jacket I had made in high school sewing class. Shiny, blow-dried hair and a bit of make up on my face that still carried the baby fat of youth. The early seventies clung to the glory days of the sixties hippie look, disco had not yet hit us all with its curling irons and heavy make up so the term "fresh faced" applied.
So there I was, full of importance about my first job at such a big firm. Was I a working girl? You bet I was! Me and Mary Richards. I said "yes" to the man asking the question. "Do you have any time right now?" came his next inquiry.  The universe walloped me upside the head and shouted "Dummy!"in my ear. So much for my fresh faced look and carefully coordinated outfit.  I didn't look ready for work in an office, I looked ready for work in bed! It never occurred to me that men picked up hookers at 7:30 in the morning on a weekday. I was a girl from the suburbs but well aware of what went on in the dark of downtown Vancouver, I just hadn't factored in the daylight hours stuff. I guess this guy had recently finished a night shift and wasn't ready to go home to bed alone. There were no other women that I could see strolling the streets where I was so I got the offer.


Not wanting to seem foolish or unsophisticated for misunderstanding the man I replied, ''no sorry, I'm busy now." So grown up. He apologized for disturbing me and walked away. Welcome to the adult world, the moment seemed to say. You are tired of high school and boring Richmond and living at home and playing at life?  Well, here it is. I laughed at myself, at my huge sense of self importance that had allowed me to misread such an obvious question. I was still a child in some ways but I felt I had made a tiny step onto the ladder of adulthood. I'd been mistaken for a prostitute! How adult was that?  I looked up into that gorgeous sky and if I had of had a hat like Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show did I would have thrown it into all that blue.

It Never Rains in Southern California

I have the great fortune to be spending some time in Palm Springs right now. And it's true, when you are here in the desert it does feel as if it never rains in Southern California as Albert Hammond tried to tell us. Although he did go on to sing that it "pours, man, it pours". And so it does some years. It has been a rainy and snowy year for California and they are about to experience the flooding that comes with the snow melt but here on the desert side of the San Jacinto mountains it feels like another world. I have included a picture of the blue sky so that those remaining in Vancouver can have a reference point.

Before you get hating on me I will let you know that I did my time in Vancouver this year. I was there for it all, the month of snow, then more snow, the unending rain in March. This was the first winter in many that I did not get an opportunity to escape to somewhere warm and sunny, warm enough to be in a bathing suit for part of the day. So I had to scrape the mould from behind my ears as I boarded the plane for California and the greenish, algae-like tint is slowly leaving my skin the more time I spend in the sun here. I feel your pain.
I am a born and bred Wet Coaster. Lived all my life in BC, most of it in the lower mainland. I know rain. My parents were born and raised in the area, rain is mixed in with my blood. I am used to it. But this winter has tried the spirit and soul of even those of us born to the wet weather.

When climate change was first discussed it was all about the idea of global warming, we would be growing lemons and oranges in our back yards, no more skiing in the snow-less mountains. Palm trees would abound, why, Vancouver was to become the new Los Angeles as Los Angeles withered up and blew away or sank into the sea.  Now the buzzwords are global climate change. Ah, that is a bit different. That leaves things open to all kinds of interpretations, expect anything! Los Angeles and Southern California were deluged with moisture this winter as were we in the Vancouver area. And still are according to reports I'm getting from friends at home. There won't be any orange groves in Vancouver surviving the snow we saw or flourishing in the few hours of tepid sunshine this spring has had to offer. Even our native gardens didn't survive the weather we had. Lawns turned to mush and then froze. Thawed and got rained on again and are now mostly moss. Trees that were never meant to carry eight inches of wet heavy snow were snapping their branches off in desperation to be free of the weight. Hedges splayed outwards, long branches escaping their tidy boundaries, requiring amputation.  In my neighbourhood the city workers were still cleaning the fall leaves off the streets in February, leaves that had been caught under the snow and ice and could finally be swept away.

Easterners laugh at our bitching and moaning and tell stories of snow so high they have to shovel out of their front door in the morning. That is precisely why I don't live in eastern Canada, or central
Canada, or northern Canada. I live as far south and almost as far west as I can get to escape Canadian weather. If Canada, instead of the U.S. had managed to strike a deal with Hawaii, or we had annexed  the Turks and Caicos like it had been discussed in 1974 then I would be living in one of those two places right now, I'm betting. I went to Hawaii for the first time at the age of eighteen and fell in love. Not with a person but with the islands. I had no idea such a paradise existed so close to home and so accesssible and I  tried to figure out how as a teenager with few skills I could wrangle a green card and stay there. It was not to be. But if I had had the Turks and Caicos to go to at eighteen....

  Don't you want to be here right now?

Courtesy of Turks and Caicos Tourism

Americans really have the choice to live in any kind of weather they want while staying in America. The U.S. has it all covered, weatherwise. Dry, wet, cold, steamy, arid, scorchingly hot. I envy them that.  The plan to make the Turks and Caicos our eleventh province was floated around again in 2013 and I'm hoping one day the Queen will give it up to us Canadians. Let us have our version of Puerto Rico or Hawaii, a tropical  dream with Canadian currency, the English language, a Caribbean flair,  and lots of room for our damp and chilled populace to to flake out on the beaches. It would be nice if it happened before global climate change melts the glaciers, raises the sea levels and sinks the Turks and Caicos. Fingers crossed.

Home

I am out for a walk today in my neighbourhood in Vancouver.  It is a perfect fall day in the city, blue sky, fresh breeze, about 16 degrees. As I stride along the sidewalks, scuffing at the smashed chestnuts that have fallen from the huge trees I pass under, I can't help but think about the city I live in and how much I love it.

Crushed chestnuts on the sidewalk

People say all the time that Vancouver has changed so much, citing the traffic, the expense,  the influx of immigrants, the old buildings being torn down, the new buildings going up...the bike lanes. But on a day like today, walking between West 22nd Avenue where I live and Broadway so much feels the same. 

My sister and I moved to Vancouver when I was fresh out of high school and she had just graduated college. We both had jobs in the downtown core and it made sense to leave our hometown of Richmond behind. To our delight we found ourselves in an apartment in Kitsilano. It was love at first sight. The beach, the funky shops of West 4th Ave, the bars and restaurants. What more could a couple of young, single women want? 

Richmond is flat, and when we lived there many of the areas were newly built, the trees spindly and held up with stakes, the houses an assortment of the five different plans that the builder allowed. But in Vancouver.... the trees were huge, the houses  old and unique, streets undulated up and down giving onto fabulous views of the mountains and ocean, and the beaches were full of people like us. Heaven.

I left the city almost a dozen years later to raise a family and then moved back with my husband and grown kids seven years ago. It felt like coming home. Even though I had grown up in Richmond, spent twenty years in Tsawwassen, the years that I lived in Vancouver had imprinted itself on me. It was where I truly grew up. My father spent part of his childhood in the West End, selling papers on the street corners and my mother went to UBC almost seventy years ago. I feel like there is a little bit of my family DNA here.

Forty-two years after I first moved into Kitsilano I am walking its streets again.  Going to the same library at MacDonald and West 8th Ave. where I used to check out books, renewing my drivers license at the same Motor Vehicle branch where I received my very first driver's license.

The sidewalk stamp at 14th and Stephens

As I walk, I look for the date stamped into the sidewalk below me that tells me when it was laid. Some say 2010, or 1992 but many read 1929 or 1931. Vancouver is not an old city and despite the feeling of some that it has been wiped clean like a white board and replaced, small signs like this remind me that some of the early days still remain. The sun filters through the same huge maples, chestnuts and oak trees that have been dumping their boatloads of leaves on these streets for decades.

Big, old chestnut tree

 Many of the funky old homes have been discreetly turned into triplexes and quadruplexes but they still stand. Yes, quite a few homes have been replaced but the unattractive boxes from the fifties and the horrible "Vancouver specials" from the sixties that went are no great loss as far as I am concerned.  Many of the new homes in my neighbourhood are a vast improvement. And their picture perfect  gardens are a delight. 

Broadway now holds Vietnamese and Thai restaurants where Greek and Chinese ones used to stand but the feel is the same. Pizza shops, bakeries, produce stores and banks line the street just as they did forty years ago. Change is inevitable, everything and everyone is in a constant state of change, but that is not a bad thing. I've changed a bit and I'm happy to see that Vancouver has, too. There are new places to explore, different cuisines to taste, more cultures to learn about. These are all good things.  When I'm strolling along Spanish Banks looking at the North Shore mountains or walking around Kits Point to the planetarium these changes all feel so small. They are just the spice that makes the dish. 

Avenue of Stars
Original artwork by Jill Charuk

When I first moved to Kits it was full of joggers, brown rice and people smoking pot, now it's yoga, quinoa and people smoking weed. The more things change the more they stay the same. So I embrace my Vancouver like an old friend, she has a new haircut, she's put on a few pounds and speaks a second language but her heart still welcomes me home.