“Eh?” by Dan Brook

Photo of Stanley Park by Dan Brook

“Ah, to be alive here and now”, she thought to herself. As a fairly recent immigrant from Haridwar, India, she was simply in love with Stanley Park and made it her business to go there every day. Before arriving in Vancouver, Aditi had never heard of Stanley Park, indeed had never dreamed that such a magnificent place could exist.

Some days were what she called land days, when she would walk through the park, getting mentally lost in the density of the trees and imagining her adopted homeland in its full forest mode.

Other days were water days, when she would walk along the Burrard Inlet and English Bay trails, imagining all the boats and ships that had come and gone past where she was presently privileged to be. And she never tired of passing Siwash Rock, a dramatic symbol of beauty, strength, and patience for her. That rock was her guru.

Aditi would occasionally go to Beaver Lake, sit down, gaze over the water lilies, and write nature poetry, often haiku, in her little yellow notebook that she always carried with her. Sometimes, she would make zetabetical lists of seemingly random things, just for fun. Nothing felt random to her.

Aditi never knew about the indigenous, Chinese, and others who were evicted from this sprawling, wonderful park, some violently, so for her it was a purely happy place of pilgrimage. She got excited every time she spotted a great blue heron, even though it wasn’t particularly uncommon. Aditi often thought she could spend the rest of her life there. She sometimes missed home, but never when she was in Stanley Park.

While lost in thought, grateful to be in her favourite place on this beautiful early Autumn day, a strange man said something to her which she didn’t quite hear. She hadn’t noticed him walk up to her, either. “Are you OK, need some help, eh?”, Aiden enquired. Aditi took this as a micro-aggression, a form of implicit racism she recently learned about, angry that he thought she was a foreigner, a tourist, a damsel in distress (she really liked this phrase even though she resented the phenomenon). With her citizenship, she was as much Canadian as he was, even if newly so for her, and she was extraordinarily proud of her citizenship and angry at the man.

But Aiden had awkwardly said that he needed help and asked if he could please borrow her phone, as he had somehow lost his, and needed to notify his friend that he would be late for their dinner date. When Aditi gave a confused look, he grew concerned. Perhaps it was the suicide prevention course he took at University of British Columbia several years prior that heightened his concern. Perhaps it was being surprised by a man that heightened her fear.

Having thankfully straightened out their misunderstandings, Aditi and Aiden wound up having a lovely conversation with each other, losing track of the time. Apparently, talking about squirrels and azaleas can be spellbinding. It is true that the squirrels of Stanley Park are descendants of the squirrels from Central Park in New York City, which Aiden informed Aditi about. And it is also true that there are over 10,000 cultivars of azaleas in the world, which are native to Asia, Europe, and North America, a fact that Aditi enjoyed for personal reasons, which she informed Aiden about.

Having agreed to meet in the park’s Rose Garden at the same time the next day, Aiden departed, while Aditi lingered to enjoy the afterglow of her unexpected encounter. “He’s a good guy, eh?”, she said to herself. Catching that she had just said “eh” for the first time in a natural way, she triumphantly announced “I am Canadian!” and she didn’t care who heard or saw.

Copyright © 2023 Dan Brook

All Rights Reserved

Dan Brook is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at San Jose State University, from where he organizes the Hands on Thailand program. His most recent books are Harboring Happiness: 101 Ways To Be Happy, Sweet Nothings, about the nature of haiku and the concept of nothing, and Eating the Earth: The Truth About What We Eat. More information at https://about.me/danbrook.

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