Have Cheap Luggage, Will Travel

The land beyond the lamp post...

I sometimes forget how small my existence is in the scheme of things and am usually rudely jerked out of my inwardly focused trance with a blog in mind.

Vancouver is a beautiful place. When I first arrived, I walked along the harbor observing my surroundings. A flock of geese grazed to my left and in the harbor to my right, people were kayaking and tossing balls in the water for their dogs to chase. A handful of sparrows jetted in front of me and all around me were groups of people playing with their kids, grilling out and chatting over local wines. The area was full of people enjoying each other but it was 5 PM which means that they all had to get off work early to be here by now. My first glimpse what kinds of ideas frame this place.

The skyline is littered with tall condos and all of these buildings far out way the office buildings. So, the question is, were do all these people work? I imagine that you can find them at Starbucks, restaurants, manning gas stations as well as in the office buildings. While I was there, only one young person served me my coffee or brought me my breakfast. I guess they think that your job doesn’t define you and that careers aren’t the main focus. Weirdos.

The city is nice but it isn’t new. Most of my meetings were in buildings that would be considered run down in Dallas. In fact, my first meeting was with the Canadian Country Station of the Year for the last three years and when I walked into the lobby, I thought I went in the wrong building. They obviously built the building in the 70’s, moved in and have never renovated. There is nothing really wrong with it. It just smelled musty and everything is orange and peeling. Almost all of the buildings are like that.

I watched a man dig through the trash behind my hotel, but he wasn’t looking for food. He was foraging through everything that we threw away and organizing it into piles. Glass bottles here, cans there. He was making a living off what we threw away. While he was digging, a ton of other trash fell out of the dumpster on the ground. When he was done, he cleaned all of the extra trash up and made sure that it looked like it did before he got there.

Life is just different there. White people are the minority. Homeless people are considerate of their surroundings. People care more about what they are doing after work than work itself.

At the end of my trip after I had observed all of this, I felt really weird. Like I had stumbled past the lamp post into some fantasy world that didn’t really exist. Was I the weirdo? Were my ideas of life shallow? Was this the real world or was the world I came from real?

As I considered staying in this place and abandoning everything that I previously knew to be true, I settled into my seat on the plane flying direct back to Dallas. And then I was jetted back to “reality” by conversations flowing around me.

“Your shoes are so cute, where did you get them……I am going to e-mail George and let him know that I saw his name in the paper…….I don’t give a –bleep- if we missed the numbers, they are just going to have to deal with it.”

Ah, Dallas and real life. The question now is, do I tell my klan about the world I saw beyond the lamp post? Will they call me a hippie and roll their eyes? Will they send me back there? But more importantly, will I be different? I hope so.