Marpole

It used to be called Eburne.  Thirty-five hundred years ago it was an aboriginal settlement. In 1916 it was renamed Marpole, a community of under twenty-five thousand on the northwestern shore of the Fraser River, in South Vancouver.  There are two bridges that connect Marpole to Richmond, the flat islands that clog the mouth of the Fraser.  I grew up in Richmond, but in some ways I have always lived in Marpole. 
     There is nothing really interesting about this district of Vancouver with which it can commend itself.  Because it is crouched at the bottom of the south slope of Vancouver the legendary mountains cannot be seen and it is so far from the beaches and all the other attractions of Vancouver that it had might as well be in a different city. It was long known as the home for the poor old widows, Kerrisdale (the affluent district just north) being for the rich old widows.  My paternal grandmother was a poor old widow.  She didn't like my mother, who was of German parentage and sometimes felt as if her mother-in-law blamed both World Wars on her.  I recall that sometimes her tone towards my mother seemed disparaging or patronizing.  My grandmother was a Scot.  Even though she came to Canada as a girl of twelve (family legend has it that her uncle--she was an orphan--narrowly missed booking passage on the ill-fitted Lusitania) Grandma never lost her accent.  I don't know if there was ever a strong Scottish ethnic presence in Marpole, but it is the home of the Scottish Community Hall and friends of my father's extended family, all clannish Scots, lived or hung out in the area.
     My grandmother lived in a small house that must have been built just after or during the First World War.  I can always see it from the Granville bus.  The cherry tree still thrives in the back yard.  The house used to be white, then for many years it was grey.  Now it is painted a beautiful ultramarine blue.  My grandmother didn't choose the colour.  She has been dead for twenty years and many years earlier, when I was still a child she moved from the house to an apartment over the stores on Granville Street half a block away.  There was until two years ago a coffee shop and second hand bookstore just downstairs from Grandma's apartment.  I used to enjoy visiting this café and bought some of their modest selection of Spanish books.  A Chinese bakery has just opened there, speaking to the high Chinese population that has taken root in Marpole since the Hong Kong Handover in 1997.
     When I was a child of two my family lived for a year or so in Grandma's house, the site of my four earliest childhood memories: when I fell down the stairs; sitting on the living room floor at my mother's feet; riding in the stroller as my mother pushed me up the sidewalk; getting my arm caught in the washing machine ringer.
     My grandfather died in this house.  I heard it was from a heart attack during an epileptic seizure.  He was home alone at the time.  He had long been physically and mentally ill.  Now I wonder if he committed suicide.  I never met him since I wasn't born yet.  Grandma already worked fulltime in the laundry of one of the neighbourhood meat packing plants.  Marpole was, and still is, an industrial district, though less than when I was a child.  I remember the tall water tower, the smoke stacks and the fumes and how they somehow mingled with the sense of grey dark despair and depression that seemed to hang over this neighbourhood, as it hovered over my father, my grandmother, our family. 
     I have never liked Marpole.  There is something depressing, cramped, dismal and small minded about this community.  But when I open my eyes and see how it's changed, that it is much greener now with more parks and people who seem actually happy, or at least not miserable, then I wonder if I am still living in the quasi-nightmare of my childhood whenever I am in the area. When my parents' marriage headed south my father got two or three consecutive apartments in Marpole.  A decade later my mother moved there, first in one apartment, then another, her last.
     My father used to work in Marpole, in two different collision repair places.  The first no longer stands and he used to hang out in the beer parlour of the Fraser Arms Hotel across the street with his buddies and brothers after work.  They were all alcoholics.  Later he was at another collision repair place, which is down the street from one of the mental health teams that employ me.  I often walk past there.  He has not worked there in more than thirty-five years.  Now there are wild roses that bloom fragrantly next to the building.  I stop to smell them and think of Dad, even if my memories of him aren't equally sweet. When I am on the bus on the way to the mental health team, I pass on Marine Drive my mother's last apartment, where she lived till she died in hospital from cancer.  Like my grandmother's house seen from Granville I always make sure I see it.  I don't know why.  Perhaps to honour both these strong, stubborn women who raised me.  And maybe to remind myself of where I have come from.  It is a kind of connection, just as smelling the roses by Dean Bros. Collision connects me to my father (dead five years from Alzheimer's)
     As I have written in a recent post the mental health team in Marpole where I work, the South Team, is my mother ship, the first place that hired me after I did my peer support training.  When I mentioned to my employment counsellor about the family connection in the neighbourhood she suggested that I see this as an experience of redemption.  I agree with her.