Here it is the night before the night before Christmas and I’ve just been visited by the traditional Three Ghosts: Past, Present and Yet to Come.
Christmas Past bears a passing resemblance to Don Bell, who has represented both the district and the city for a zillion years, but he’s still going strong as a city councillor, so maybe I’ve got my ghosts mixed up.
Anyway, Christmas Past took me back to our first Christmas on the North Shore. It was 1989, and earlier that year, we’d moved into a house in Norgate, which we purchased for $167,000. It’s probably “worth” over a million now.
Previous Christmases were spent in deep freezes in Winnipeg and Toronto, where giant furnaces that took up entire basements kept us warm. In the Norgate house, there was a little closet in the living room that hid a furnace about the size of a pomelo.
The house also featured a “Florida room,” which is real estate-speak for “unheated, uninsulated lean-to tacked onto the back of the house.” It was one step up from a tent, but because it was 11 degrees on Christmas Eve, we were snug as bugs.
But there’s no time to enjoy that sense of smug relief that comes with enjoying Canada’s only green Christmas, as Christmas Past dumped me onto the sled with Christmas Present, who also resembles Don Bell. We were immediately stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Upper Levels.
“If you think this is bad,” chuckled Christmas Present, “wait until Christmas Yet to Come, specifically 2041 when there will be 63,000 more people living on the North Shore. And every one of them wants a Lexus for Christmas. Ho ho ho! Might as well take the bike lane.”
Eventually we were able to get off the highway at Lonsdale, but if you ask me, we should have stayed stuck in traffic, as we ended up in Lions Gate Hospital and its weekend contingent of drug overdoses. If you’ve ever been to Lions Gate ER on a weekend, it’s likely many of the beds are occupied by people with self-inflicted damage. And so it is tonight, where alcohol and drugs are the featured crisis.
The greatest mindblower of Christmas Present, apart from the fact that Donald Trump will be the president of the United States in the new year, is the fentanyl crisis.
So far in 2016, 755 people have died of drug overdoses, more than 60 per cent involving fentanyl, a dangerous opioid which has found its way into other drugs like heroin, cocaine, crystal meth and oxycontin. So many ways to die.
This is an unbelievable number. Last week, 13 people in B.C. died in a single night, six of them on the cold streets of the Downtown Eastside. In North Van, “only” five people have died of overdoses this year, but each one has a family who will never get to spend Christmas together again.
You’d think that with so many dying, people would simply stop with the fentanyl.
Yet good sense and fentanyl don’t mix. Here at Lion’s Gate, though, they do their best to save lives that people seem intent on throwing away. It’s not the best place to spend Christmas Eve.
So, after another couple of hours in Upper Levels traffic, I’m standing on the corner of Esplanade and Rogers in Lower Lonsdale, where I’m met by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and whaddaya know? He bears a resemblance to Don Bell.
We are standing at the corner where the past meets the future. It’s the site of the North Vancouver Museum and Archives, which will be housed in a condo development scheduled to open in 2019.
It’s only fitting that this ghost looks like Don Bell too, as the actual Don Bell calls the museum approval the culmination of a 30-year-dream.
But we don’t stand around because this Christmas, it’s not 11 degrees. Global warming, my, um, foot.
We’ve ended up at another place where yesterday, today, and tomorrow do a meetup – the End of the Line Coffee Shop on Lynn Valley Road at the entrance to Lynn Headwaters Park.
If you’ve never been here, take the time to visit this holiday season. You’ll discover that North Vancouver already has a museum of sorts – a place, maybe the only place on earth, where you can buy a latte and jawbreakers, licorice whips and Pez.
It’s a combination candy store and toy catalogue from 1956 plus a panorama of the sights and sounds of North Vancouver when it was very young. I can’t decide if I feel young or old. But I guess that’s the point: I’m all of that.
Happy whatever you celebrate!
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