Tailored shirts and chicken gravy

*Youlogy: Cuz why wait til they’re dead?

This is how I survived the pandemic. Every day during that weird first year, whichever of us would wake first would text the other: Having coffee. Meet you on the corner. 

I would toss some snacks in my pannier and ride out into the eerily quiet streets. Playgrounds wreathed in yellow danger tape. Sidewalks empty except for the occasional bemasked dog walker. No traffic roar, no industrial hum. Only the sound of birdsong and my wheels, rolling through the cherry blossoms mounded by the curbs. Under a diamond sky uncut by contrails. 

Jenn would be waiting on the corner, mounted on any one of her bikes in random rotation – the fixie, the racer, the rusty beater, the custom touring machine. We’d head out wherever: UBC, Steveston, the Fraser Foreshore. Over the Granville Bridge on the very bridge deck, devoid of cars. Every day we played bananagrams on empty picnic tables or browned our bodies on near-empty Third Beach. Meet you on the corner? In half an hour. Every day we kept each other sane.

Jenn has an intimate relationship with materials. She is crafty with wool or fabric or wood or food, stylish even in hand-patched jeans. The word that most comes to mind is ‘meticulous’, mindful, never half-assed in her actions. I find traces of her visits in the sofa cushions re-arranged by tone, or the plastic bread bags folded into tiny hexagons.

Jenn and I were housemates once upon a time but we drifted apart, for a decade or so. One day in 2019 I was prepping to head to Cortes Island to work as a manager, busy hiring staff. I ran into Jenn and said hey, do you want to come be a Host at Hollyhock? Yeah sure, she said without hesitation. She packed her stuff on her bike, rode up to Cortes, and jumped into wholehearted service as a table-wiper and baggage-toter. Although she is a wide-ranging world traveller she doesn’t live to log air miles. She finds adventure in a corner grocery or a dish-pit as easily as in an Indian marketplace.

One of Jenn’s accomplishments is having retired from her government job at age 50 — although as of writing, ‘retirement’ looks like working at her friends’ brew pub in Kaslo BC, from where she reports that she jumps into the cold lake every day to expunge the smell of chicken gravy. We are kindred in no kids, no mortgage, no car, no stuff (except bikes but bikes don’t count). We share the secret of living rich by living small.

Through the years I have watched my friend move through many lovers. Her willingness to accommodate has sometimes sold her short. With each relationship she has shed tears and gained strength and self-awareness, and she seems at last to have established a solid partnership based in mutual respect, ease, and enjoyment.

Chicken gravy, or life in Kamloops. Life is curious and adventures never end.