Urban Birds

Image from Audubon Portland

Urban crows can be bold, as I discovered today while enjoying a coffee on the balcony of the Art Gallery.

One landed, then stepped along the edge of the marble table with his flexible scaly feet, stretched his beak and squawked.

The last time I was that close to a crow was twenty years ago, when one swooped down to a balcony table and stole my three-year-old daughter's bun. "Bad bird!" she scolded.

This one turned his glossy black head to the side and fixed me with a beady eye. When the waiter came to clear, he said the birds were attracted by the food. "There isn't much for them to eat in the city."

"They could fly down to Stanley Park," I suggested, "It's not far."

"They like it here," he answered. "They recognize a good thing."

Later, walking by The Bay, the oldest downtown department store, I happened to look up. In each corner of the square boxy building stands a tall metal post with some sort of ball-like contraption on top.

I have no idea what those are for, but the gulls know. There were two of them up there, one on the very top of each post. Their heads were moving like radar, taking in the view.

A couple of weeks ago I saw a tiny city songbird eye to eye in a tree, and today, the urban crow and two gulls.

Maybe for me it's the year of the urban bird.

The Perfect Consumer Product

The purchase was an accident. I'm not making excuses, but the labeling wasn't clear. I did wonder why they were wrapped in plastic.

I would never knowingly buy tissues infused with Vicks. Still, you have to hand it to the product developers. It's marketing at its most lethal.

Rather like the gift that keeps on giving, this is a product that perpetuates demand for itself.

The need to blow your nose means you need a tissue, which in turn makes you sneeze, which means you need to blow your nose...

You get the idea.

Won't work on me though. I'm NOT about to become a dedicated lifetime customer.

I tried these tissues three times. Each time, a sneeze ensued, and I had to use a real tissue, from a different box.

But I don't like waste, so I plan to use the remainder for emergency mop-ups -- like when the cat has indigestion.

Perspective on Trains

The new dark blue Sky Train cars are sleek and elegant, putting the Metro Vancouver commuter in mind of the Shinkansen or the TGV.

Lighted digital signs on the front show destinations, and lighted dots on the route maps inside reveal the precise location of the car.

Useful features for a drowsy traveler who suddenly wakes, unable either to see the station signs through the window or recognize the location by scenery and platform in time to decide whether to get off.

But what interests me most about trains is something elemental.

King George is the terminus station, and after the sleek machine slid alongside the opposite platform and disgorged its passengers, I watched it roll down the track, stop, reverse, and then flex like a snake and approach our platform.

Seeing in perspective the huge difference in size between the leading car and the last one, I remembered the magic of my first train ride between Edmonton and Jasper.

As the train climbed the foothills of the Rockies, I leaned out over the iron half door on the moving platform between cars, far enough to see the long train round the curve. I was amazed that while the last car looked distant and tiny, the car next to me loomed huge.

Like some events in our lives. One moment they seem large and important. Then they shrink with time and distance almost before we know it. Knowing that helps keep things in perspective.

Permission to Procrastinate

During the course of a wide-ranging conversation I had with a friend recently, I confessed that although I had the plot of my novel worked out, I hadn't been generating any more pages, and I felt bad about it.

"If I die it will be gone," I said. "I have to get the rest on paper."

My friend had a different perspective. She said it was good that I had been working on it in my head.

"That's where most of the work is done," she said. "Remember when we were at university together, and I used to leave my essays till the last minute? Then, the night before, I would write them whole."

It wasn't that she didn't think about the writing ahead of time. In fact, she carried the ideas around for a long time, working through them in her head until the essay was whole and ready. I did the same.

Her comment gave me a wonderful new perspective on the process of writing my book.

I am working on it, I realized, and when I sit down, it will come out. Not in a single night, like an essay, but in chunks, as they are ready. Just as the first forty pages did.

Perhaps the reason I don't yet see all of it in my head is that a lot of the "cooking" process takes place in my unconscious mind.

Now I know. My main job is just to sit down and record what is already there. That makes the prospect far less daunting.

Lovely Long Lunch

Today I had lunch with a friend I had not seen in a long time. Though there is nothing in her external appearance that betrays the fact, she is gradually losing her eyesight.

For me, seeing her after long absence was like experiencing a vision. She seemed illuminated, infused with something indefinable that I was unable to see before. As if veils had been lifted away, I saw her simultaneously in the here and now and in a sequence of memories going back over many years.

The soft nimbus of curls around her beautiful and animated face is now a fine pale grey, a sharp contrast to her very dark brown eyes with their inky pupils.

Watching my friend's lively hand gestures as she spoke, hearing her voice, I apprehended the precious miracle of her unique individuality. I remembered many perceptive, funny and poignant things she has said over the years.

How glad I am to have met and talked and laughed with my soul sister over a lunch that lasted all afternoon. I feel profoundly grateful for the unique experience of seeing my old friend as if for the first time.

Misguided Social Engineering Erodes Societal Trust

New rules and increasing attempts to control the public reflect a steady erosion of public trust in ordinary men and women.

At gas stations, we must now pay for gas before pumping it. When this law was first changed, customers were asked to leave credit or bank cards with the cashier before they fueled up.

The message was clear: gas station owners no longer trusted their customers but customers were obliged to trust gas stations if they wanted gas.

Unfortunately, around the same time, gas stations were among the places where credit card and bank card numbers were being harvested for fraudulent reasons.

Besides, shouldn't trust go two ways? Hasn't that kind of goodwill always been the basis of sound business relationships?

At the gas station where I'd been pumping before paying for twenty years, the manager was sympathetic.

"We don't like it either," he said, "But it's the law now." Then he assured me that he would make sure his staff knew that I could just leave my BCAA card and they would turn on the pumps.

That was more like it: a manager who understood the value of relationships with customers and was willing to be accommodating. I decided that day that it was worth remaining a loyal customer.

The law was conceived by well-meaning people with poor thinking skills. It changed after a young clerk was killed trying to pursue a thief who pumped gas and ran. Tragic as the case was, it was no justification for routinely treating customers like criminals.

It's just one among many cases of the tail wagging the dog. Society should be based on the assumption that most people are well-meaning, honest and civil, yet more and more stupid rules are made to catch the people who aren't.

Making laws specifically to stop lawbreakers doesn't work very well. After all, they are by definition, people who break rules. Meanwhile, the rest of us suffer inconvenience, distrust and disrespect.

The socially engineered public washroom is a similar case. Apparently people using the facilities can no longer be trusted to flush the toilet, turn the tap off, or decide how much soap to take from the dispenser.

Was this done with the intention of economizing on supplies? It hasn't worked. In many washrooms now, the toilets, drunk with the new-found power to flush themselves, do it two or three times each time someone uses a cubicle. Negative progress, definitely.

Signs on the washroom walls now tell us to wash our hands with soap. Being assumed to be ignorant as well as dirty is another irritant. And as for those unfortunate few who didn't learn in kindergarten to wash their hands after using the toilet, a sign on a bathroom wall is unlikely to induce them to change.

Then we have to contend with the automatic tap and soap dispenser. We wave our hands in frantic circles to induce a brief spurt of water. The soap dispenser is perfectly timed to delay until the hands are moved away, whereupon a blob of soap falls on the counter. Messy as well as inefficient and user-unfriendly. And again, irritating.

Such misguided attempts to control people represent a worrying trend. The self-fulfilling prophecy identified by psychologists suggests that we get what we expect. If our self-styled social engineers expect ignorance, rudeness and incompetence, isn't that what they'll likely produce?

Public behaviour is not perfect. Still, for a long time, most people have behaved quite civilly in public. Experiments with game theory have even demonstrated that the most productive approach to life is to assume that most others will treat you well until you have proof to the contrary.

The antisocial behaviour of the few shouldn't be allowed to unduly constrain the simple freedoms of the many. Besides, rules have very questionable influence on the few determined rule-breakers who spoil it for the rest.

The Glass Record

Next month, Philip Glass is coming to the Chan Center. Looking at the ad in the Georgia Straight, I recalled the first time I heard of him.

A callow university student recently arrived from the hinterland, I was listening to a conversation between my seminar professor and some very arty students.

"Have you heard the new glass record?" he asked.

They had. They raved about it, the pristine sound, and so on.

I thought it was a new kind of technology. My mind went off on its own little track, trying to imagine how the vinyl in the long play records, or LPs, could be replaced by glass. How could they lay the tracks on glass? And why? After all, plastic was much cheaper.

Fortunately I kept my mouth shut. It was many months later when I saw the name Philip Glass, and put two and two together.

Ah, the callowness of youth. Sometimes I feel an irrational nostalgia for that very naivete.