Anodyne
Thursday, September 08, 2005
 


On Princess Street

Dream: downtown, in a little park in the West End, I run into a woman I've not seen since university. "We live in East Vancouver now," she says, showing me a snapshot of the little bungalow she and her partner bought together.

The house in the picture is my Kitsilano grandmother's, which was demolished years ago.

"You're living in my grandma's house," I say.

"You can, too, if you like," she says.

Other people crowd around us to look at the picture, and we are pulled apart by the crush of their bodies.

On the B-Line express bus, a tall man with a conjurer's hat and tails turns toward me with a crisp white index card in his gloved hands. "She lives on Princess Street," he says.

On the card, in blue ink, in my friend's familiar hand, is the address 3959 Princess Street.

I wake to the bright red morning sky. Cold air through the balcony door and the seagulls crying, circling above the hospital.

(No Princess Street in Greater Vancouver, according to Google. Photograph of my grandmother's house courtesy Sylvia's project, 3176. Probably the first time in my life that my subconscious has provided a detail like an exact street address; typically, dreams are full of deliberately blurred writing).
- posted by cjb @ 8:49 AM


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