There’s an impressionistic wash of rain on Granville Island. I’m strolling around the place, getting my bearings, sniffing the air. In the foreground, houseboats form undulating row-houses in bright pastels. Beyond dull metal arches of bridge, almost-postmodern buildings of glass and metal whoosh and bend toward dark water.
I’ll be giving a talk at Emily Carr tonight. I turn the corner and there is the college – post-industrial like CCA, but more cramped and vivid. Someone has applied the word “SILLY” to a high window in what might be a studio building. The students are familiar – rainbow-haired, clothed in celebratory mismatch, smoking cigarettes, ignoring the rain, utterly absorbed in their scene. A boy’s voice says, “I love you” into a mobile phone.
I think, I’ve been in scenes like this for fourteen years – it seems like such a long time and such a far cry from the corporate lives I led. I am suddenly aware in every cell that I live here; I love it here. Likely no one notices the older lady in the black coat as I smile mildly past the kids on the wet sidewalk. But I belong.