Geezerville

When I was a kid and the world was still in black and white, Ronald Reagan was a pitch-man for General Electric.  This was between his careers as a Hollywood actor and the president of the United States.  Anyway, at the end of the GE commercial, Reagan would give us that avuncular smile and say:  “Remember, at General Electric, Progress is our most important product.”

That seems to be the case with the powers-that-be in Michael V. Smith’s new novel Progress.  In this case, progress includes bulldozing houses and even graveyards to make way for a hydroelectric project near a small town.  So when prodigal son Robbie returns to his childhood home, he finds his sister paralyzed with indecision as the clock ticks on a demolition order for the family home.

Rain.  Showers.  Drizzle.  Gullywasher.  Liquid sunshine.  Monsoon.   Scotch mist.   Spate.  Sprinkle.  Sunshower.  Drencher.

There are almost as many synonyms for rain as there are rainy days in a Vancouver year, which on average is 166.   That’s five and a half months of gray days that swallow mountains, and cloud even the sunniest disposish.  Seasonal Affective Disorder sends people to tanning salons and other sources of UV rays.  Everyone wears black, as if in mourning for the lost light.

Vancouver gets about 44 inches of rain a year – almost four feet.  But this isn’t the wettest city in the world by a long shot.  In fact we don't even crack the top ten.   Henderson Lake, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, clocks in at Number Eight, with 256 inches a year.  And Cherrapunji, on the Bangladeshi border north of Dhaka, is awash in almost 500 inches a year. 

Google “blackberry” and the first several pages of hits refer to the handy little device made in Canada by Research in Motion.  Even Wikipedia’s first reference is to the electronic device.  Now that’s a good algorithm.  

The blackberry, in fact, is a “...climbing thorny rosaceous shrub...”, according to my Oxford Dictionary, which doesn’t mention RIM’s device at all.  And according to the green thumb bible Botanica, the blackberry is an "... aggregate, consisting of over 2,000 micro-species...".  Blackberry describes the shrub, the fruit and the act of picking. 

The blackberries were late this summer.  They stayed green on the vine well into August.  Eventually they turned a Prada shade of magenta that deepened into irridescent blue-black like Superman’s hair.  Blackberries should slip off the stem into your hand.  Too ripe and they crumble into their constituent little seed pods.  Not ripe enough and they will resist picking, leaving your fingers looking bloody.  

Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s song rings as true today as it did when the Drifters had a hit with it in 1963.  In the summer we live on our roof.  It’s a little like a cottage, except open to the elements.  It’s not grand.  The decking is basically wooden pallets.  The furniture is rustic.  But the view is terrific – downtown Vancouver and the North Shore mountains.  It’s a great place to start or end the day, and it really is an escape from “...all that rat race noise down in the street.”

The dog likes it up there too.  He lets the sun soak into his old bones for an hour or two, then retires to his cozy corner behind the hydrangea and oleander, where there is shade for most of the day.