OOPS!…I DID IT AGAIN (CHRISTMAS EDITION)

Second year in a row. Does that make it a tradition? 

 

THE SETUP

There’s something about a guerrilla public tree decorating that gives me a festive lift this time of year. Last year, it was a solo effort. I worried my cheery idea might come with consequences. It wasn’t like I was going to chop down a pine tree in a public park and drag it home. No, I’d leave it be, roots intact, its perilous fate subject to other conditions, natural and otherwise. Still, I wondered if a police officer might approach, stand at the bottom of the ladder I’d “borrowed” from my condo building and await my descent (or just knock me off for his own holly jollies), then handcuff and haul me to the station, charged with public mischief, vandalism, theft and bad decorating. 

 

Was it worth the risk? I’m generally a rule-biding citizen, apart from an entrenched habit of jaywalking and crossing dead intersections against the light as other Vancouverites stand at the curb and stare in horror at such blatant disobedience. Vancouver puts my asterisked rule-biding inclinations to shame. I if I lived in New York City, I’d have a drawerful of civic commendations.

 

After some fretting, I took the risk and evaded arrest. This is Canada so maybe I’m on the Most Wanted list. Me and that otter who raided koi from the nearby Chinese gardens.

 

This year, I had accomplices, aiders and abetters. I’d lured both of them into bad decorating, a burgeoning gang, The Red Garlands. 

 

THE SETTING

First, however, some background about the setting. After some research, I feel it’s important to share.

 

I walk by a neglected pocket park every day, only a block from home. It’s a stopping point for the unhoused to sit and to maybe smoke something legal (cigarettes, pot) or otherwise (in a bubble pipe). I don’t judge. How does anyone cope with life on the streets? Sometimes there are a couple of tents set up. I imagine that, even though it’s right by the railroad tracks and trains run throughout the night (I know this firsthand!), it’s a less chaotic spot to try to sleep than so many other purported options. 

 

Officially, the park is known as Wendy Poole Park, described in a single sentence on Vancouver’s Board of Parks and Recreation website: 

Wendy Poole Park is a tiny park at the foot of Main Street, with a curving pathway, trees, and outlook to Burrard Inlet.

I could contact the board, give them an update. Trees is an overstatement. The dead skeleton of a tree with only two remaining branches—a stick tree—was removed at some point over the past year. It’s now down to one, a sad-looking pine, twelve feet tall, dwarfed by the tall building immediately to the west and the concrete overpass to the east. With its lower limbs removed, it’s a lollipop of a tree, mostly stick, not much pop, and definitely nothing that would conjure some fanciful image for lolli. 

 

Honestly, I don’t think the Parks Board cares. Its attention to this tiny space may have ended in late 2000 with the naming of park after First Nations and Downtown Eastside (DTES) groups and individuals lobbied to have it dedicated to Wendy Poole, a member of the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation. In January 1989, she was a twenty-year-old woman, pregnant with her second child. She’d moved from Northern British Columbia to Vancouver six months prior, looking for something more, finding her way, starting out by working in fast food. On January 26^th of that year, she was stabbed to death in her second-floor co-op, a murder that remains unsolved. She is one of many murdered and missing women remembered in Vancouver every Valentine’s Day during the Women’s Memorial March.

 

Had I not committed to giving the tree in the park a little seasonal spark, I would never have known the story behind its naming. There’s a plaque and a lovely rock with words etched in it. Like most of us in the community, I passed these markers by, unread. I’d seen the name. It’s really big on the rock. I’d foolishly assumed the place was named for a moneyed, prominent Vancouverite. Elsewhere in the downtown area is Jack Poole Plaza, named for a highly successful real estate developer who’d led the official campaign to bring the Winter Olympics to Vancouver and Whistler in 2010. I mistakenly assumed Wendy must have been his wife. Jack and Wendy’s lives were so starkly different.

 

There’s the history. Wendy would have turned forty-five this year. Let sharing be part of honoring and remembering her. (Sadly, I can find no photo.)

 

THE ADMISSION

Last week, with only days until my boyfriend Evan’s next trip up from Seattle, I floated the idea of him being my partner in Christmas mischief. He didn’t hesitate. That’s my guy. Man of many talents. New skill for that LinkedIn account: elf.

 

Upon his arrival, we scanned the long aisle of decorations at a downtown dollar store and I returned the next day to buy all the tree trimmings. (Nothing was a dollar, of course. It’s self-apparent that The Few Dollars Store doesn’t have quite the right ring to it. Still, the glittery haul was a bargain.)

 

Rain got in the way of decorating. Heavy rain. Bah, humbug, Mother Nature! Heavy snow would have been perfect. Tomorrow then. Or the tomorrow after that. Or not. (I didn’t want the decorations to get swooshed off the tree in the first hour. I also didn’t want to break my leg, slipping on an upper rung on the ladder!)

 

On the morning Evan was to return to Seattle, the weather cleared. Not sunny but anything not involving rain is a gift this time of year. I grabbed the bag of decorations and we headed to my building’s parking garage to grab one of the ladders. (It’s a building of lofts. These ladders are for common use…or at least that’s been my assumption. Why ask? 

 

Hi, officer. Just talking the ladder for a walk. No dog so you gotta make do, right?

 

Last year’s graffiti had been painted over, now replaced by new tagging. Bigger! Bolder! Only one tent was pitched as we arrived to decorate the sad little pine tree. A gentleman sat at the lone picnic table, smoking a cigarette, not paying any attention to two guys with a ladder.

 

I decided to put the star on first. It would be the trickiest part. It also required standing on the highest rung. Let me get that over with before any dormant fear of heights awakened within and before I got too casual from all the ups and downs, less alert, more accident-prone. The star wouldn’t stay. Evan offered directions from ground control, but I got flustered. Your move, Evan. 

 

He’d only signed on to be a helper elf. Ladder climbing wasn’t in the job description. But my merriness was in a precarious state. Evan’s all too aware of how quickly I can shut down when I decide I can’t do something. He climbed, he fiddled and fidgeted, he willed that star to stay. The ornament was heavier than the pine tufts it topped so there was a sag to its stance. Quirky. Let’s call it whimsical. I don’t care what Martha Stewart would say.

 

We switched roles again, with me navigating the ladder and Evan unpacking ornaments. As we decorated, I caught the man at the picnic table glancing over a couple of times. At first, I wondered if we were an unwelcome presence. Maybe he’d come here for some solitude only to be disturbed by a couple of wannabe elves. His face was hard to read. Then he called: “Need some help? I could hold the ladder.” 

 

And so he did. 

 

Last year’s project was a solo effort but, with three of us, it went faster and felt merrier. I noticed a few people smiling as they passed and one person shouted, “Dr. Seuss!” probably in a nod to the sagging star atop the tree. She followed up with a robust “Merry Christmas!” Was she always this excited or did we lift her spirits?

 

And yet he cropped just so to
keep the bags under my eyes!

My new ladder assistant held it in place each time we rotated it. He nodded off ever so briefly, hand still on it, committed, doing his best. He added an ornament to one of the lower branches.

 

We exchanged names. I took his picture, but he didn’t have a phone to forward it. He took ours, too. I could tell he was too close to get us and the tree. I knew the shot would be one of those flawed pics from the days of going to Fotomat. All the better. 

 

He said he was from the BC Interior and had come to Vancouver’s sketchy Downtown East Side to get his son but, in so doing, he’d relapsed. Addiction is relentlessly opportunistic.

 

Yes, Martha. That's the tree.

All done, Evan and I walked the ladder home and I turned my head back to see my ladder assistant walking slowly down the street in a different direction, his face blank again. It was a novel start to the day for each of us and a rare chance for strangers living different realities to connect, however briefly. 

 

This “tradition” is evolving.