barbecues and strolls

Last night: off to a salmon barbecue chez Warren's sister-in-law in north Burnaby, along with 10 or so other guests and a few kids. Kimmie and I were among the last arrivals, settling into chairs on the old concrete patio, looking over the aging wooden fence at the lush green backyards of the neighbors, shaded under the swishing plane trees lining the street. Gas lawnmowers fired through the evening air; next door a trampoline thumped as the kids invaded it, probably uninvited. Warren moved intently from place to place, fitting some hellos amid various missions of setup and cooking salmon patties on a blackened gas barbecue. Crows fled the setting sun to find their roosts in the east. Kimmie, having grown up in that neighborhood, was entranced.

"I so want to move here," she said.

Max, Warren's 12-year-old son, his hair grown out to a mop of thick gold, took time out from shooting baskets with the other boys at a plastic mini-hoop set up on the patio to tell me that he'd read a couple of chapters of my book and that he really enjoyed it and thought it was a good idea. I thanked him, and thanked him again. For years he's had the ability to speak to adults in an oddly adult, but respectful, peer-to-peer way. But, from Warren's reports, he's far from being such a balanced, supportive, sociable guy all the time. Nonetheless, I'm happy to take praise where I can get it. Clearly, it takes an unusually intelligent, literate, and discerning 12-year-old to see the merit of my work. Clearly.

Annemarie, Warren's Dutch-born wife, talked a bit about her work as a web-project manager for a large multinational bank in Chicago, and soon Warren had the exquisitely cooked salmon burgers ready. We chatted with the couple sitting nearest us, the mosquitoes came out, and we left. I shook Warren's hand on the sidewalk in the strange dark-light under the plane trees, with bright sodium-light of streetlamps penetrating a little, and we said goodbye till next time.

Today: full-on summer sun. Kimmie and I went walking in the hyper-rich neighborhood of Shaughnessy in Vancouver, identifying trees in the oval park of The Crescent, one-time ground zero of Vancouver's urban rich, now perhaps less so (several massive houses, silent behind their wrought-iron fences, high hedges, and shady porte cocheres, were for sale). But for all the forbidding aspect of the houses, almost every single person we passed on the sidewalks (admittedly not many) smiled at us and bid us hello. You don't get that on south Granville, just a few blocks away.

Now: Kimmie and Robin are off to yet another birthday-celebration dinner for K, this time at her niece Lisa's place in Lynn Valley. I begged off--I have important blog posts to write, books to read, tea to drink.