Riding home one night, I was surprised to see a woman in a white fur coat in the factory district near science world. She was kitty-corner to my favourite building on my route to work, a huge red building that would have been smashed to pieces years ago in a city properly attentive to the destruction of old things. A less laid-back/pot-addled city would have updated this into industrial banality, and deprived the world of physical proof of the past -- for as we know, the past is best left to books, photos and absurd Hollywood revisionings.

Despite the appeal of this area, it was still odd to see a woman, who as I rode closer also turned out to be wearing high-heels, standing alone in this secluded place. Was she under the mistaken impression that a bus stopped there? Or, my creative mind bounced, perhaps she had been abandoned by a cad in a limo, who, upon disagreement on some small point, had let her out among the dust and dark and gawking cyclists... Certainly she looked put out, and certainly she was glamour--

As I passed her my brain. independent of my mind, figured it out. She was a Lady of the Night. A prostitute, which I was used to seeing in groups of two or more, in black, and in areas with lots of traffic. What was she doing here?

Then it came to me. She was here for the sailors, of course, who are always in need of her services. I could even imagine a jaunty white capped lad, brusque and confident and flush, strolling along the gravel beside the road and admiring the large red building before the blonde caught his eye.

In the real world, a station wagon, complete with baby seat, slowed and ingested the hooker.

I keep waiting for my naivete to be smashed, once and for all, but an occasional dent is the most that happens. And even the dents, given time, pop back into smoothness.

Many Vancouver houses haven't the usual driveways in front of the house, opting instead for small parking facilities in back. Naturally, this necessitates backroads -- and a new public space is born.

The backroads are curiously private for public space, zones where the neighbourhood children can meet on equal footing. The roaring and deadliness of cars are humbled to a crawling acquiescence; an exceedingly fat man trying to squeeze back to his theatre seat, apologizing as he goes.

Backroads may be frustrating for drivers, but for the person on foot, they're ideal. Contrasted with the thin, stingy sterility of the sidewalk. the wide avenues of the backroads allow for the natural weaving and ambling of the sloppiest of strollers. Sometimes gravel, sometimes paved, these uncharted avenues are the backstage of the city; here, an unpainted wall is no shame, a patch of unruly grass can riotously thrive.

Walking them at night, one feels the comforting embrace of homes on either side and is oddly touched by their frank openness, their battered garbage cans and hanging laundry.

in other places

the natural world is used as trimming

a tree every four houses

jamplanted by rote and fed by machines

but here

for a week in may, because the season demanded

I pedalled to work on a thin carpet of pink blossoms

my tires were feathered with lovely spring blossoms