Sunday's Walk

 

Sundays have always started early for me. I never knew why until recently, when my Mom was telling me about all the partying she and my father used to do when I was a kid, and how good a boy I was because I always slept through it. Could it be that Sunday's early starts were related to another (this time sudden) recollection: Saturday's almost-criminally early bedtimes? What else could account for those early starts, my tip-toeing around the house until my parents got up at noon.

Yesterday I was up at 6am, the sun shining, the birds chirping. Rather than float about in my pyjamas all morning, as is my habit, I decided to get dressed, see what happened. What happened was me leaving the house at 8:30am for a walk that included the length of Commercial Drive, where I spoke with artist Keith McKellar, who was setting up a display of his hand-drawn city scene prints across from Grandview Park, and further south, in front of the post office near Broadway, artist Lobsang Tenzin was doing the same with his small water colours, one of which I purchased (pictured up top). Nice huh? How Ukraine's yellow and blue meet in a restorative green?

Though their work is very different from each other's, both men are in similarly great shape for their ages (early 70s?), with thick heads of (grey) hair, good skin and bone structure, athletic movements and an inner peace I associate with a rich spiritual life.

Aglow with these encounters, and a little hungry, I stopped at Subway for a 6" turkey sub, to eat on my way home. As I was heading west on 13th, a woman rushed past, then quickly turned around to say, "Hey, that smells good," and I told her what it was. "Do we know each other?" she asked, and it turns out I was talking to Denise Britt who, with her co-vivant Trent Hignell, owned and operated Black Sheep Books in Kits in the mid-1990s.

Denise hadn't changed a bit, which, oddly enough, does not account for why I didn't recognize her, at least not right away. After she fetched Trent, the same. Standing with them in their front yard, they told me how the bump that was Denise's tummy the last time I saw them had just completed his first year of university at my alma mater, UVic. So more to glow over as I floated home, alive with my encounters.