News from Vancouver

It's been a quiet week in Vancouver, my hometown, on the edge of the ocean. The weather took a slight turn for the worse with clouds and occasional rain arriving. It was as if God were reminding us that we weren't quite out of the forest yet, that there was still a little pride there that He was working on. So we went around on tip toes looking over our shoulders occasionally in case a large bus was headed our way with a crazed driver bent on destruction. We started checking our cars in the morning for tell-tale burn marks from lightning strikes that might have happened while we were sleeping and other signs of impending doom, but for the most part we seem to have survived the week unscathed. This behavior may seem somewhat strange to people who haven't lived here. The weather can get gloomy from time to time and we mirror that gloominess occasionally with sudden urges to jump off bridges or steer into oncoming traffic for no apparent reason. And more of us would give in to these urges were it not for the fact that we know that if we'll just wait a day or two streams of glorious sunshine will come pouring out of the heavens. When that happens we can get downright giddy and even silly. We might stop someone on the street and tell them our life story or stop in front of a flowering cherry tree and weep at the sheer beauty of it all. But that's what happens when you live on the edge of the ocean nestled in amongst the coastal mountains. Anything can happen to the weather and our personalities tend to reflect that.

Sister Annalies left for Holland a few days ago. She called from the airport to her brother to say goodbye. She's off to visit the relatives and participate in the VE day celebrations. A good part of Holland was liberated by Canadian soldiers during WWII and so she's going there for a month to bask in the limelight. The people of Holland are very appreciative of what was done and treat any Canadian with honor whenever they visit. In fact things got so bad during the war that the Dutch royal family came to Canada in order to escape and while they were here the queen who was then a princess gave birth to one of her offspring. It appears that the royal couple were quite busy while they were here. The Dutch are very practical you know. You can't let a war interfere with God's injunction to go forth and multiply, so they did. And Canadians did their best to accomodate the situation. You can't have a member of the royal family be born in a foreign land, so the Canadian government graciously declared the hospital where the new child was born to be Dutch soil thereby avoiding the necessity of having to send the mother back to Holland to give birth and perhaps be captured. That would never do. So, ever since, as a token of their appreciation the Dutch government has been sending Canada tulips and those tulips are planted all around the parliament buildings so that if you go there you might think you're in Holland, at least that's what I imagine it might look like. I haven't been there for a long time so I'm only imagining what it might look like. Which begs the question, what if every country would start sending tulips to each other. Suppose Britain had sent Hitler tulips every week. He probably would have gotten confused and forgotten what his plans were and delayed attacking his neighbors. A lot of wars might have been avoided that way. Just imagine it, an evil ruler somewhere causing mayhem and grief.... gentlemen, it's time to load up the tulip train..... and when the tulips arrive and they are planted in the gardens around the ruler's palace......at first you see nothing because it's just a plain brown bulb and it's buried in the ground.....but all of a sudden, one bright spring morning the millions of tulips start poking their green shoots out of the ground and then suddenly without a word of warning masses of brilliantly colored tulips, red, yellow appear everywhere. It would be almost impossible for anyone to be thinking about starting a war. Instead, you'd be thinking about where else you could plant tulips. There's always a corner somewhere that you'd say, You know dear, that spot would look a lot better if there were a few tulips there. Come to think of it, the Dutch stopped starting wars back in the 1600's when they discovered tulips and they've been shipping them all over the world to this day. I wonder if there's a connection. It reminds me of an old judge in the deep south of the US who once remarked, You know, I've never had a juvenile delinquent in my court who loved fishing. There's got to be a lesson there somewhere. But I digress. Anyways, sister Annalies couldn't speak for long as she had to run to the toilet before boarding her plane so she said good bye. Perhaps she felt the need to leave a small gift in Canada in case she didn't make it back. Her mother Leigh checks the nightly news report to see if she can catch a glimpse of her daughter in the crowds over there. So far she hasn't seen her, but you never know.
That's the news from Vancouver, where people are mostly good looking and the children above average.