November 2006
Monthly Archive
bounce and tickle!
Posted by squirrley on 28 Nov 2006 | Tagged as: home
I went to lunch with a friend of mine who has known me all my life. She had been asking my sister about my writing so I brought along leftover photocopies from my poetry class (same stuff I posted yesterday).
“Bounce and tickle?” she asked, holding the paper far from her face in the way of the non-bifocaled. “Is this guy a Brit?”
It turns out, back in the day, ‘bounce and tickle’ was an expression among ex-pat Brit salt of the earth types–loggers and longshoremen–for seeking out a little lovin’.
My poetry was declared superior, and as we watched the student waiters mix up our order with another table (we were lunching at the hospitality vocational school restaurant), she reminisced about her first job peeling potatoes, onions and carrots in the root cellar of a Greek restaurant in Kamloops during the 30’s. The cellar had one bare light bulb, and Dolores and her friend, “two of the silliest girls to ever walk this earth” came straight from school and worked till 8pm. “I learned to always look busy when the boss came in”, Dolores said–it served her well in subsequent jobs. Later the girls graduated to being waitresses. Some evenings near the end of her shift the cook would lean over to tell her “I saved a delicious mistake for you!”, a plate that a customer had sent back. It was the tail end of the depression, and Dolores’s mum used to tell her how lucky she was to have that job, and to eat so well some nights.
We talked about the BC Lions–as a widow with young kids (her own and I think a foster child from the tiny isolated logging settlement/native community they had lived on northern Vancouver Island) she took an office job in Vancouver with a firm that sponsored the Lions franchise when it started up. Their first slogan was “The Lions will roar in fifty-four!” Nineteen sixty was not such a good year for slogans–nothing comes close to rhyming with sixty, except “shitty”.
I had to send my salmon back because it was raw in the middle. The maitre d’ came out to apologize, with our student waiter in tow. “You tattletale!” Dolores cried to our server. He looked a little taken aback. But Dolores was joking. When earlier he had lain our forks reversed (prongs pointing at our diaphragms) she grunted “Straight to the heart!” and we both burst out laughing.
It was a fun lunch, and it made me think back on Vancouver’s history. We were in an old part of downtown, by the cenotaph and the Cambie building. It’s one of the few areas that has most of the original buildings from eighty or ninety years ago. I walked down close to the railyards to get a glimpse of Burrard Inlet and the mountains cloaked in snow right down to the waterline.
Because the road conditions were so terrible–even with my studded front bicycle tire, the icy sheet of Adanac was too dangerous to contemplate–I took Powell Steet home. I cycled through the cobbled streets of gastown, then by the mission and soup kitchen (with a long line-up extending down the block) and Oppenheimer Park, where they usually lock up the washrooms to keep drug dealers out. The area is also historic Japantown, from before the deportation of Canadians of japanese ancestry in the early forties (how ironic that the loveliest blossoms of spring, pear and plum and cherry that line our streets, bud off japanese trees).
The neighbourhood held lots of memories for me, from my first job through to when I lived in Strathcona and had friends living on Cordova, in heritage houses that abutted drug trade alleys and a strip joint, and housing projects with coils of razorwire topping the chain link fences.
But the view was lovely, and even more lovely as I pedalled past the industrial port, with the rust, pumpkin and teal containers stacked in the railyard, and huge red cranes glinting in the setting sun.