Handle with Care

I live in Vancouver. Sort of. I tell people who need to know these things that I live in Mount Pleasant, which cues them that my house is in one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the city, part of the ring that is the intertidal zone between Vancouver’s downtown and its more suburban-feeling neighbourhoods.

It has the lively street life (hopping Main Street and its 10,000 coffee bars) and the grittiness (drug needles, break-ins, traffic noise) of the city core, but it still has a semi-suburban tranquillity in certain places and times. My backyard is an oasis of green, where I watch the raccoons and the crows fight it out.

Mount Pleasant feels like a separate principality—I joke sometimes that I won’t travel the ten blocks to the next nearest arterial street, Cambie, because it is just “too far”—but it is not. In fact, I do not even have a city councillor I can call my own because Vancouver, unlike Toronto or Calgary, does not have a ward system. Instead...