Walking with my granddaughter Lauren, 13 to my car near a shopping centre a tall, blonde woman was opening her car door with a plant in her hand. Since I was near her I said, “Is that a phalaenopsis?” She answered, “No, it’s and orchid.” So I said, “That’s what that orchid is called.” She instantly and coldly said, “If you knew, why did you ask me?”
While at the Dunbar Public Library (while my family lined
up at the Dunbar Theatre for the lastest Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I noticed that a woman was
toying in taking out the DVD The Theory of Everything. Next to it on the shelf was The
Imitation Game. I told her, “If you think you will like that one you will also
like The Theory of Everything.” Her answer was, “No, I’m not interested.”
Tonight I watched the first 10 minutes of Under the Skin
with Scarlet Johansson. I found it bleak, alienating and immediately realized
that this was a film I would not see.
The two encounters with the women and Under the Skin all
made me feel enajenado and (to stress the point) away from a much needed human contact. Even
Lauren had told me, “The woman with that orchid was rude.”
As we prepare ourselves with our slow move to eventually live in our more compact quarters I attempted to chat with what will be our new
neighbour. Our neighbour is in the front part of the duplex that faces the
street. Both our neighbour’s house number and ours are hidden by a very tall
bamboo. I asked if it would be possible for me to put a sign in the front by
the sidewalk. My neighbour’s answer was, “Definitely not, if people want to
find you they will.”
I recall that when we first arrived from Mexico in 1975
some new friends had invited us to stop by one evening. I asked my Rosemary, “What
is an after-dinner-drink?” It was then I came to the conclusion that the
residents of Vancouver were as cold as their tap water.
This lack of warmth has rarely dissipated in our years
here. And this is most noticeable in the always bleak and rainy November when it gets dark early.
Because we are moving we have been looking at interior
decoration magazines, Ikea catalogues, Crate & Barrel catalogues, etc. All but a few
feature spartan, black or white, furniture with mostly straight lines. The
kitchens look like some high tech version of a morgue.The pictures on the wall ooze ice.
I wonder if this new age of keying in or touching screens
for communication and entertainment has affected our ability to laugh, feel,
have passion and warmth towards other human beings in the flesh?
I perused my extensive files of photographs looking for one that would illustrate my present feeling. I waded through portraits of my granddaughters, all mostly looking sad or serious. But this one of my daughter Alexandra Elizabeth taken some years ago at La Conner, Washington seems to be just about perfect. Every time I mention to Ale (as we call her) that she has in inherently sad face she protests. Ale was born in Mexico and unlike her younger sister Hilary who is as cheerful as her name, she is very Mexican in her ways. We lived in Mexico for many years and I found many of its inhabitants fatalistic and sad.
I perused my extensive files of photographs looking for one that would illustrate my present feeling. I waded through portraits of my granddaughters, all mostly looking sad or serious. But this one of my daughter Alexandra Elizabeth taken some years ago at La Conner, Washington seems to be just about perfect. Every time I mention to Ale (as we call her) that she has in inherently sad face she protests. Ale was born in Mexico and unlike her younger sister Hilary who is as cheerful as her name, she is very Mexican in her ways. We lived in Mexico for many years and I found many of its inhabitants fatalistic and sad.