News from Vancouver

It's been a quiet week in Vancouver my hometown on the edge of the ocean. It's the middle of summer.....ah the magical time of the year when things slow down, people slow down and take holidays, have friends and family over for BBQ's. The days are hot and slow. People think more slowly and stop to look at things such as the mountains or a beautiful flower. They watch in admiration as a bee goes by, stopping at the flowere to collect nectar or whatever it is they collect. They may stand there watching for five minutes, marvelling at the sheer magic of bees. Normally people here wouldn't do that because they're too busy living their lives, but because it's summer life slows down and is somewhat suspended for a time until the fall rains come. And meanwhile we gaze about us in awe at the magic of summer.

Catherine Shore's baby arrived early, much too early in fact; about 3 months too early. The little thing must have gotten tired of sitting around in the womb and wanted to get on with life and tripped the escape door and came out; all 680 grams of her. Now, instead of waiting in the comfort of mother's womb she lies in an incubator. I guess she'd rather be able to look around and see things and perhaps get into a child's art class and start painting or something. Anyways, she's doing very well, she's up to double her birth weight and getting stronger by the day. Needless to say mother, father and grand parents are all doing almost as well as the baby who the parents have called Willow Leigh. Leigh is the name of her maternal great grand mother who will soon arrive at her 88th year on the planet. Willow should hopefully follow in Leigh's footsteps at least as far as longevity is concerned. No one knows why she is called Willow, there's no one else in the family, near or distant by that name. It probably means that the child is about to begin a whole new chapter in the history of her forebearers which no one to this date has done. Or perhaps Catherine named her after the last street you see before entering the hospital, which incidentally is called Willow St. It's best if you ask her parents yourself.

Summer is travelling time so many family members are off to different parts of the world, some to Europe to seek adventure, some to Disneyland to stand in long lineups for a 55 minutes to go on a ride that lasts 3 minutes. Lineups really show the character of a person. Some use it as an opportunity to make new friends while others complain about the length of time and make a few enemies in the process. Travelling allows us to reconnect with others to find out if what we've been saying about them is really true. It leaves us with a good feeling if such is the case and if it isn't we have something new to talk about when we get back home. And here in Vancouver, where the winter nights are long and the days can be damp we need to accumulate a lot of material to get us through those winter months. That's why we travel. We're afraid that we might not have much to say for 10 months. People have been known to go crazy and disappear during that time because they hadn't gathered enough new information to last for the entire time. So we have to go out and gather and then we come back at the end of the summer and prepare our stories and reports and arrange our pictures. That's the way things are done here.

That's the news from Vancouver, where people are mostly average and a few are above average and there's always some who are just a little below, but not enough to be a problem to themselves