A Loud Explosion In Vancouver, And It's Gone

There aren’t many of those places. They unite us, they sometimes divide us. They’re our comforting past, our pondering present and can represent our fettering, occasionally fearsome future.

Ask any mature person in this small corner of the world we call the Lower Mainland, and they will have a recollection, an anecdote or a fading picture of what they regard as the heyday of the place.

For me it was a big place to a little boy. It was a place where family worked, where Christmas trees talked to you, where you could buy anything you wanted. But foremost it was toyland for me. It was where I could get all those action figures I could only find while visiting Dad in Vancouver. Victoria’s stores just didn’t size up. We’d do the whole strip back then. I might go with him to the Carnegie where he’d play guitar on occasion, and we’d walk into Chinatown and have a coconut bun.

That's from Keefer's account of what happened in Vancouver this weekend. It's at the top of his Vantopia series, all of which is well worth reading.

Me, I spent the weekend doing fundraiser-readings on Saltspring and Galiano, for these people, and these people, so I was too far away to hear the big bang. But I felt it, somehow.