Vancouverite with Vagabond Tendencies segue to
‘Having Being’ Part I, II,III Read and Sung by Joan Boxall
May 11, 2012 TWSRead @ Take 5 Café, Vancouver
Growing up in a protective environment gives rise to rebellion. The secure home where I lived was a corner lot, fenced in, conifer-lined, and cast late-afternoon shadows. Other homes like ours were linear with bedrooms up and down; Mum and Dad on the main floor. Control central. Linear homes, linear streets, east and west, north and south, set blocks divided by streets with tree names: Arbutus, Vine, Elm, Balsam, Larch, and battlegrounds: Trafalgar, Blenheim, Carnarvan, Dunbar…lines drawn.
Expanding one’s horizons meant walking to/from school, bike rides to the Fraser River, to a field hockey game, a track meet, cross-country, to UBC. Weekend jaunts to Stanley Park; a family walk on the seawall. Round we go; round the block, the field, the track, the wall. But the vagabond wants to stretch.
Vagabond, from the Latin, to wander, but I like the sound of it: vaga, vaga; like a vague,indefinite, hazy, uncertainty. And bond, bond: an obligation with a slap of Lepage’s glue. A vague bond imprinted me at a young age to a place I return to like a salmon to its stream. A magnetic bond; a seared brand.
Vaga, vaga, bond, I’ll find you
Vaga, vaga bond, I know your smell.
Vaga, vaga bond, I love you,
You are my home, I know you well.
I sometimes drive by the old lot; that home (two up, two down) long gone; the neighbourhood; gentrified. The hill that seemed so large where I rode my tricycle; a molehill. The perspective is sort of distorted, and I, who was so bonded to that place, have wandered…to water, beaches, pools, across bridges to forests and trails and fish hatcheries and reservoirs; the Capilano, the Seymour. I’ve viewed Vancouver from the air, from the hill, from the seawall, the downtown, the delta, the east and west side, the west end, the water-encircled gem…the spaces where I’ve worked and played, and now travel, sometimes no further than her aqueous boundaries to view her during the Sun Run, the Vancouver Marathon, readers/writers’ Fests, the Jazz fest, to tap my toe: to celebrate her…and further afield, to long for her from the tropics and compare her with crowded cities lacking her westerly, fresh outlook, her myriad of parks and green spaces, just the breadth of her.
All vagabonds can follow a whim in this city: of space and light and temperate rainforest. We rebel in it. She sets us carefree to rove. She shapes us into who we are. But isn’t she one step ahead of us? Do we know who we are?