Today, errands took me to Vancouver’s Granville Island. The sun was out and so were the tourists (checking out the food market, artisan shops, etc. and avoiding the cement trucks and other “working” elements of the island, which is not really an island). Here are some images from my visit:

And two images as I left the “island” and headed for the pedestrain tunnel under Granville Street:

Although I’ve confessed to liking birthdays, what I don’t like about getting old is the memory potholes. You know, you walk into a room and forget what it was you went in there to do, you forget the name of someone you work with, etc.

The other day, I went all the way to the downtown library to pick up a book I’d placed on hold. I got to the library, dropped off some books I’d finished with, found a chair to sit down and jot some notes about the next scene in my story, which I’d been thinking about on the way to the library, then I left. I got all the way home before realizing I hadn’t picked up the hold book. (Ironically, the book I forgot to pick up was “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter” by Kim Edwards)

But I did take these photos by the Stadium Skytrain station. I liked the juxtaposition of the living trees against the built walls, but also the way the walls have a kind of organic look with their layers and colours, and the tree with the peeling bark has the look of a wall covered with peeling advertising posters.

Some women dislike birthdays. I am not one of these. In fact, although my birthday is today, I have been celebrating it the whole month of January. Yesterday I went out for lunch with friends and was greeted by this haiku chalked onto a sign hanging in front of the Naam restaurant (in Vancouver’s east side).

This morning I opened this present (below right) sent from my friend Jean-Pierre in Japan:

In keeping with the lucky cat theme, I thought I’d also share a couple photos and comments sent to me by people responding to my Quest for the Lucky Cat post. From Jodi at floatingclouds.wordpress.com in the U.S., here is a photo of Kiki, “a rescued feral calico cat and my lucky cat…which she promptly knocked off the shelf and broke as soon as I brought it home from SF Chinatown. I had to glue it all back together. How lucky is that?”

The rather spooky looking black cat at the bottom of this post is a giant Maneki-neko Jean-Pierre found in an antique store in Japan.

Craftygreenpoet.blogspot.com author, Juliet, also shared a comment about the lucky cat in her flat in Edinburgh Scotland. Lucky cats around the globe!

Making connections with people is one of the things I love about blogging.

While I was visiting my parents over the holidays, an old photograph surfaced of me before a high school dance. There is much I could say about this time in my life, but when I look at the photo, it’s hard for me to get past the hair.

As a teenager, I was very self-conscious and embarrassed easily. When I decided (shortly before this photo was taken) to get my long hair cut and permed, I was hoping for a slightly new look, but not a drastic, attention-drawing change. Not too short on the sides. Not too curly. When I ended up with what could be best described as poodle head, I was horrified.

How could I face the stares and jeers of everyone at school? (Yes, it sounds self-absorbed and superficial now, but this was high school, remember). I called up my boyfriend and we agreed to skip school the next day and drive to Victoria (about an hour away) – where no one would recognize me.

I can’t remember exactly what we did all day, except that we spent some time wondering around the neighbourhood of James Bay near Beacon Hill Park. Maybe we parked the car and walked or maybe we just drove around. In any case, one house caught our attention, and we stopped. On the grass in front of the house, sat a small brown monkey. Neither of us had ever seen a live monkey up close before. When we approached, a middle-aged woman came out of the house. She was very friendly, let us meet the monkey, and chatted with us for quite awhile.

It ended up being a good day, but with a strange quality – as if we had stepped out of our regular lives and even out of time. By our return home, I had grown accustomed (or at least resigned) to my new hair and bolstered enough to face school the following day.

I didn’t give the episode much more thought until two years later, when I was living in Victoria going to university and became interested in the artist Emily Carr. I had known about her before, but now something about her paintings and her life seemed to speak to me in a new and personal way. She had grown up in the Victoria neighbourhood of James Bay (she was born there in 1871) and had lived there as an eccentric older woman with many pets, including a monkey named Woo. As I looked at an old black and white photo of a middle-aged Carr standing in her James Bay backyard holding a small familiar-looking monkey, an eerie feeling of deja vu came over me. Is it possible I might have seen the ghosts of Emily Carr and Woo on that fateful bad hair day?

I’ve walked around James Bay many times since then, trying to remember which house was the one where we’d seen the woman and the monkey, but I never could find it again. If it really had been the ghosts of Emily and Woo, did they appear just to help me through a bad hair day? Or was there some profound message that Carr would have liked to pass on (a P.S. about art or trees or life, perhaps)?

A few days ago, I paid one last visit to “Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon,” an exhibit which just ended at the Vancouver Art Gallery. As I walked through the rooms of Carr’s paintings, it occurred to me that she doesn’t need a ghost to pass on a message: her paintings have never stopped speaking. This is not to say I wouldn’t have a few questions for her, if I did meet her ghost….

[Click on “My Books” in the right sidebar for info on the two novels I ended up writing about Emily Carr’s childhood]

Here is a page from my Christmas photo album:

(Given last week’s wind storm, I’d rather have a tree fall in the house than on the house!) Merry Christmas!