A friend who was thinking of moving back home to Calgary picked up a newspaper in the corner grocery near her place in Vancouver and there was a photograph on the front page of a man in a cowboy hat surrounded by a herd of cattle.
A man I haven’t thought of for nearly thirty years became a smoker of five-cent cigars during the war, and when the war was over he became a despiser of nincompoops and began taking his whisky from a pocket flask engraved with a tiny laurel wreath.
When Malcolm Lowry’s shack on the beach at Dollarton, B.C., burned to the ground in 1944, he and his wife Marjorie were able to save the manuscript of only one of the novels that he was working on at the time. A few months later the same manuscript had to be rescued again when the house that friends found for them in Oakville, Ontario, also burned to the ground.
We were setting fires in a dry gulch in the hills at the edge of town, with crumpled sagebrush and bits of tumbleweed and no paper for kindling, and we had to start our own fire with a single match the way they did in the Cub Scout troop that met Thursday nights in the basement of St. Paul’s Anglican church on Battle Street.
Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.
I was walking down the street thinking about a friend I hadn’t seen for some time, and when I looked up, there was my friend standing at the corner with his wife and he was looking at me in some surprise, for as it turned out they had been speaking of me in the same moment that I had been thinking of him, and so we congratulated ourselves on having arrived there at the corner at just the right moment for these facts to be revealed to us.
The first time I met Andy Warhol he was wearing a black sweater and pants; the second time he was wearing white tie and tails (it was at Lincoln Center). The third time I met him, at Arthur, the disco opened in the sixties by Sibyl Burton, he was wearing a jersey made of silver mail.
iew.In the dispatch “Hospitals of the Mind” (Geist 66), Stephen Osborne shares his thoughts regarding twenty-four photos of Essondale, the mental institution in Coquitlam, B.C., taken in 1913 on the occasion of its official opening. In 1966, Essondale was renamed Riverview Hospital and in the mid- to late 1970s, when I was still young enough to be learning the order of the months of the year, I was taken on my first visit to see my father at Crease Clinic, one of the buildings at Riverview. »»
A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I “might know what to do with it.” Inside, glued one to a page, are twenty-four photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in New Westminster, B.C., taken around the time that Essondale opened in 1913.
In those days, when you saw a Woolworth’s store you thought of the photo booth, and if you had nothing else to do, you went in and invested a quarter in the history of photography.
