Canada Day 2008

It is Wednesday morning and a sad and nostalgic one for me, knowing what I do today.

After a great Canada Day spent with my daughter and later alone I received an email from Ky saying that he’s lost his best friend Tommy, the one he went to Mexico with.

Apparently a couple of Ky’s friends were on a rooftop and Tommy fell…they had him on life support for several days but finally couldn’t save him.

My son wrote to tell me that his boss wants him to return for the funeral and then go back to NY to continue helping him.

By the tone of his email, Ky is in shock but I wouldn’t be surprised to find him back here in a day or so. He feels badly that he is not here to give support to his friends.

I was able to offer some words of condolence but nothing can repair what has happened and it is a tragic blow for a young man. The same thing happened to my son Chad at about the same age and I was not able to be there to console him, although he told me about it briefly when we met at the Duncan Folk Festival the year after I left the island.

I understand more so now why he cried when I held him in my arms during that brief window.

Anyway, yesterday was a beauty of a sunny summer day and Nika biked over to join me in a walk along the seawall, as her guy was in Whistler on the job.

We stopped for a coffee at Starbucks and walked with our drinks up towards 2nd Beach and past to Siwash Rock to say hi to grandma…it would have been her 86th birthday.

Along the way we paused at the corner where my friend Kent Avery was balancing rocks as he does every summer, watched by a large group of people with cameras who stopped to take photos and look at or buy his photos which were distributed along the seawall’s edge. Many made comments in his open notebook placed there for that purpose and most that did made a donation of some kind.

We talked briefly and on the way back we got to witness him climbing easily onto a large rock and putting a final stone in place at the top of an already impossibly high column of them. He held it in place for several moments, tapping it lightly at the end as though to channel some of his energy into it. There was no single moment of insecurity or hesitation in his movements.
The silent crowd was wowed and awed as were we.

He is at least my age too, and with his long grey hair flowing out from underneath his tall straw hat looks a little like a modern day Gandalf.

I was able to give Nika a copy of the disk of photos of our trip to India in 1986 (which I recently had copied from the color slides) when she was only two and afterwards she biked over to Kits with another copy for her mom.

I then took an afternoon nap and woke about 7 p.m. when I headed back down to the seawall to enjoy the sunset.

Many people had their little Canadian flags displayed discreetly on their clothing or tucked into a breast pocket. There was something gentle and non-ostentatious about all this. Families were quietly picnicking and playing along the grassy areas and on the beach. There was little or no noise…

As the late afternoon deepened into evening the sun dropped behind the rippling shadows of the landscape leaving a soft aureole of gold and lavender in the sky, and I continued to walk and sit alternately watching the people as they passed.

Finally I ascended the cobbled walkway at the Aids Memorial and made my way up to the grassy knoll at the edge of the parking lot where I took one last look at the darkening beach.

Then I turned homeward, at peace but still unaware of the unsettling news awaiting my return.