An Appointment at St Paul's

To St Paul's on Thursday for a yearly appointment. 9:30 a.m. is a reasonable time, since I am generally up at 6 a.m. on hot summer mornings like this one.

The six block walk to the #25 bus, then to King Ed Station, where I travelled three stops (north) to Yaletown Station and walked another six blocks up Davie to Burrard. It can happen in less that a half hour, but I give it an hour at least. You can't be late for these appointments.

If I make all my connections, the walk from Yaletown to St Paul's is a meander. Anything that catches my eye I stop for.

Granville is once again a scary street, scarier than it was before they took the cars off it in 1973, when they tore it up to give us a pedestrian "oasis" -- and one of Canada's largest malls.

Before 1973, Granville was old men in tie-less, crumpled dark blue suits and women in turbans and knee-length coats that hid their dirty hair and moth-bitten dresses. These people spent their days and nights sitting as best they could in tiny, decrepit hotel lobbies with smudged windows nipping at vanilla extract and Aqua Velva, chain-smoking, doing everything they could to not get kicked out. Many of the cheaper hotels where they lived were torn down to make way for retail shops and bars, places tourists like. Most of the people living "on" Granville today are without proper beds to sleep in or hotel lobbies to sit in. Everything now takes place on the street. 

Upon reaching Granville I decided not to cross it but walk along it. What I saw more than once were couples or families from Europe or Latin American standing terrified before a suddenly stumbled upon drug-taking cluster of tanned and skinny bodies, some of them completely naked in the scorching 9 a.m. sun. Again, it was not the bodies of those living on Granville that registered, but those of a travelling privileged class who had never seen anything like them.