Lunch with Chaya, Nika and Jerika

It is a cloudy Thursday morning after a brilliant hot afternoon yesterday, but it was also a day that began like today.

My girls were going to pick me up for a late Father’s Day picnic but as it was cloudy and cool we opted to go to Granville Island where we decided to shop the food booths in the central market.

Chaya was driving as Nika and Jeremy have taken truck #2 off the road to save cash.

We stopped briefly at Chaya’s place near the market, built on the same land where I used to lunch under the trees while working as a courier at Adanac Customs Brokers and where a bird once directed my attention to a silver fountain pen someone had dropped on the ground, a pen that helped fill my journals over the next year or so.

Chaya’s boyfriend’s apartment is a big fancy one overlooking the marina and both the Granville Street and Burrard Street bridges. I visited briefly because she wanted me to see where she lived and she also needed to change clothes from job interview earlier in the day.

The stroll to the market was pleasant as the summer sun had returned and Nika found us a table near the main busker’s stage while Chaya and I brought back the lunch. Mexi-style steamed burritos and root beer!

The busker was talented and the music was pleasant and Latin flavored, a perfect accompaniment to our quasi-Mexican meal and by this time baby Jerika had woken in her stroller and was looking around at the beautiful summer colors and shapes. We were sitting under a small leafy green tree and the baby was looking up through them towards the sky.

I tried to talk to baby, but she was not paying any attention at all to the distraction coming from my side of the table. Her wide innocent eyes mirrored the emptiness of the sky above the leaves.

Nika looked tired and bedraggled as did the baby…I guess they had been up most of the night. If not for Chaya’s early knock at their window, they would’ve slept in and there would have been no meeting for us.

After lunch we strolled back to the Kids Only Market past the water park where we used to frolic as a family when the girls were younger. I pointed out the turtles basking on the sunny rocks to Chaya which she had apparently been unaware of and she pronounced: “I’ve been Turtle-ized,” in a Schwarzenegger-esque accent.

How quickly time flies...it seems that it was only just yesterday I came here to play with my two small girls.

Nika picked up the pace just after we crossed back under the bridge along the seawall and ran with her baby in the stroller, laughing and erasing the tired worry lines from her face. It is not easy work at home with a new baby as I recall only too well.

I decided against taking a water taxi and opted for a walk home past the armories under the growing heat of the sun, over the Burrard Bridge back home where an old man scolded a young woman for being in the pedestrian lane with her bike.

She smiled sunnily at him...it was just that kind of day.