Stanley Cup; that was then, this is now...

So the Vancouver Canucks, our local hockey heroes, are hoping like hell to score that Holy Grail of hockey the much-coveted Stanley Cup - tonight here in town and it's been a long (very long) ride to get here, not just because the hockey season itself runs from September thru June, but moreso because this is first time in 17 years that the Canucks have even made it to the actual finals of the National Hockey League's Stanley Cup Playoffs. Tonight is do or die and all of us in and around Vancouver will once again be excused from work early to flood the buses, skytrain, roads and highways in an effort to beat the decidedly madding crowds racing to snatch up every last seat at the nearest bar to bow (praying and cursing) before the great honking big screen TVs - of which there are now a gazillion in Vancouver - too many in fact. For me personally, I’ll be headed home where I’m guaranteed a prime seat, the beer's better, the food's good and cheap and the company’s not quite so likely to smash the place to smithereens in the event we don’t actually win (least I hope not anyways).

I'm actually not a huge hockey fan, in fact I'm fickle at best despite the fact there's something I've always found quite hunky about all that energetic over-padded testosterone on skates. Which almost certainly goes back to one of my earliest crushes - on a blonde-haired freckly kid called Mark who played hockey at Grimsby Leisure Centre right after our Monday evening figure skating sessions. I'd purposefully dilly-dally, taking forever to dry off my blades and neatly pack away my skates into their navy-blue and white triangular bag (a gift on my 11th birthday, I was always so proud to carry that skating bag!) in hope Mark would arrive before I had to leave.

First competition ca 1980

- One of the great skating

dresses Mum made.

How could he resist me in all my short-skirt, lean and long legged figure skater glory??? Quite easily it seemed, especially since he always turned up with about 15 other pals equally pumped with their Lord of the Flies adolescence, ready to hammer the opposition into the ice. They all but slammed me into the boards as they rushed their way in. Admittedly not quite the 'body check' I was looking for. And, since I couldn't get Mark’s attention rink-side, I'd resort to 'casually' watching him from the upstairs cafe while we waited (for what often seemed forever) for my Mum to come pick us up.

Anyhooo, I find it's hard not to get caught up in the enthusiasm of all this Stanley Cup excitement - the city's awash in a sea of blue & white Canucks jerseys and the ever-increasing array of associated t-shirts. The air is truly buzzing with Canuck fever as everyone's talking (and dreaming) Stanley Cup - will they or won't they?

While I confess I've jumped on the bandwaggon somewhat, since we're so close to actually winning for once, and I’ve got 10 mangled fingernails as my witness, I haven’t yet parted with the $20 or so to buy a Canucks t-shirt, does that make me a cheap skate?  Haha, get it? Cheapskate? Hockey? Boom! Boom!

For me the whole buzz around these particular playoffs and Vancouver reaching the finals takes me right by to my very first visit (at this time in 1994) to this incredible city that has been my home for the past 15 years.

Vicky had, quite reluctantly as I recall, moved out here in August ’93 with her then husband, Robert. I missed her terribly - she's always been my best friend and the only person to whom I've ever told everything. I felt like I'd lost my right arm and yet, being left to stand on my own two feet without her, I was forced to think for myself, realizing how much I'd always relied on her thoughts, opinions and ever-sage advice. While we furiously wrote each other long and frequent letters, it had was the longest period that we’d ever been separated, physically and emotionally as well as by that anti-social 8-hour time difference, so I was very excited about coming to visit. More importantly, so much had happened for both of us in the time we’d been apart that the trip represented quite a milestone for us both.

Despite the breakdown of her marriage and all that came with it and the struggle to establish a new home, job and network of friends amid the cold and often harsh ‘slap-in-the-face’ reality of being a newcomer to Canada, Vicky had maintained her dogged determination to stay in Vancouver, taking it on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis, and I was in awe of how she’d persevered through moments where even the best of us (especially myself) might have seriously just given up. A remarkable inner strength that held on tight for what must have been one hell of a rollercoaster – and her resilience inspired me to keep marching as I too tried to come back from a breakdown just a couple of months before my visit. An accumulative and spiraling series of stressful events in my work, personal and love life had, in the space of a few short months, not only eroded my emotional and physical state into a post-tornado ruin and undermined the somewhat fragile foundations of my self-esteem, but also shredded my normally resilient and outwardly stoic coping strategies (read ‘façade’) to the point that I’d had to take a few week’s leave of absence (Dr’s orders) to just stop, breathe and endeavour to pick up the pieces. It was not a happy time for so many deep-seated and anxiety-laden reasons but I'd started to come back and had even quit my job the night before my flight out, which did not impress my boss one bit. That first trip to Vancouver was truly the light at the end of my dark tunnel despite it being paved with a certain amount of trepidation on my part, since Vicky and I had spent so much time apart with so much going on, at a profound level, for both of us, that I feared the distance might leave us in a bit of a no-man’s land with one another.

Thankfully, while my memories of those two weeks are very fond even if the first few days were a little mixed due to all that had gone on prior, Vicky and I are two halves of one island and thankfully we reconnected on a new and possibly even stronger level. All this while hanging out amid all the contagious city-wide - nationwide even - excitement about the Vancouver Canucks hockey team gunning towards finally winning the Stanley Cup.

The day I arrived in Vancouver I (foggily) remember Vicky taking me downtown to some Japanese noodle house for dinner, seated at the bar, after which we wandered around a few shops and where I'd deliberated about buying a dress that I’d completely forgotten about by next day. I remember a heady haze of activity around me while my scrambled (jet-lagged) brain tried to figure out why on earth shops would still be open at 2 in the morning  - which of course it wasn't.

I love it that she took me to The Yale, where said jet-lag really started to get the better of me after my first beer and I began nodding off, head-bobbing (and no doubt drooling), in my bar seat. I can still hear people laughing and saying, “She’s had a few too many, eh?” to which Vicky jumped to my defense proclaiming, “Nooo, she’s just really, really jet-lagged. That’s my sister and she only arrived from England today.”

Funnily enough (or maybe not) it was a couple of days later that, just in front of the Yale’s seedier neighbour, the Cecil strip club (which has just recently been demolished to make way for yet another concrete condo tower), I saw some shirtless and bedraggled drunk guy literally passed out, star-shaped, in the road. Traffic simply slowed down and drove around him as if it was quite normal he’d be lying there, until an unmarked cop car came on scene. I remember feeling like I was caught in an episode of Kojak – sleazy blues bars, strip clubs, drunken hobos lying in the street and the TJ Hooker-looking cops who knew them only too well.

Typical Vancouver tourist pic

Over the next several days Vicky took me out and about around the city, showing me so many of the tourist things with the ease of a long-term resident already – including Vancouver Aquarium, Granville Island, the Seawall and Kits Beach, which became our regular meeting point after she finished work at the accountant’s office in the decidedly seedy Yaletown as it was back then. And yes, straight from Vancouver Tourism 101, chapter 3 ‘Gastown’, I even joined the bajillion worldwide tourists who’ve had their picture taken in front of the famous Steam Clock on Water Street. Even though I’m committing a huge What Not To Wear faux pas and wearing pleated-front pants, something I would NEVER do now.

Aside from all of the above, the things I distinctly remember about that priceless time together are;

• Vicky taking me for sushi at a bamboo-fronted sushi joint (on Cornwall Ave?) with a speed-talking friend of hers at that time who seemed so ‘american’ to me for all her talk of therapists and her twice-weekly ‘Overeaters Anonymous’ group therapy. I didn't like sushi then although I muddled through and, much to Vicky's constant (friendly) frustration, I still hate the stuff and can't  even attempt to eat it
• The skinny, dodgey looking guy who stepped out of a 7-11 on Granville Street right in front of us, leant against a small tree, threw up on the sidewalk, then nonchalantly peeled and ate a banana as he walked off  like nothing happened. We stopped dead in our tracks, scared to look down in case there was pewk on our shoes
• The odd awkwardness of the few hours we spent with Robert, by then Vicky’s ex, after they picked me up at the airport and took me for a bite to eat. Such a mix of feelings hanging in the air over the three of us - similarly on the afternoon it took us forever to go out briefly to his new place (I can't even remember why) which was a long, very hot walk in the sun beyond the very last skytrain stop. Their lovely dog Sheba was there - I remember when they adopted her back in England - and I met Johnny-Cat, the handsome yet feisty feral cat that had adopted Vicky. It still makes me sad when I think of how she told me how Johnny had tried to follow her down the street when she moved out.
• Going for a beer with Vicky's good friend who laughed his head off when she came out with a mish-mash english-canadian expression saying, 'You think you're hot boogers on a silver plate' instead of 'hot snot on a silver platter'
• The hot, sunny evening we took the Aquabus water taxi from the beach at English Bay to Granville Island where we couldn’t help but notice a party atmosphere on the newly opened patio of the Arts Club bar. Feeling spontaneous n’all, we joined them and drank several Corona’s from the bottle with a slice of lime, which Vicky thought was to wipe around the rim of the bottle as a disinfectant….till we realized everyone else had actually squeezed and stuffed theirs into the beer (doh!)
• The grey day we decided to walk across the Granville Bridge but got hit half way by heavy rain and a strong cold wind – we hopelessly fought with our inside-out ‘brollies’ till we gave up and started yelling “AAAAAARRRGGGHHHH” at the top of our lungs instead, right the way across the bridge.
• Having to go to an actual ‘liquor store’ to buy beer, which we dropped into the barrel-shaped ‘chiller’ of cold water while we went next door to buy a few groceries, then came back to pay for our nicely chilled cans ….unfortunately it was Kokanee, which can hardly be described as ‘beer’ per se, but hey, we were still on a Canadian learning curve back then.   

And many, many more…..

And of course, my original theme for this posting, the excitement around Vancouver being in the playoffs at that same time was incredibly infectious – cars honking each time a goal was scored while people held handwritten signs out the window showing the score, buses with ‘Go Canucks Go’ signs in their windshield, office and apartment buildings with the Canucks flag and, similarly each window showing a letter of  ‘Go Canucks Go’, buses crammed to overflowing at 4pm as people left work early to get home to catch the game, shouting, yelling, cheering, cussing and a lot of ‘ooooohs’…and ‘YESSSSSSS’ ricocheting around the open-windowed apartment buildings that surrounded Vicky’s little bachelor suite. (We took the above picture while watching the game on TV.)

Even now, as I’ve walked home from work this past week and heard the same kind of unison cheering and yelling at TV’s, I’ve smiled as I’ve thought back to the thrill I felt that everyone was so unified in their enthusiastic excitement about hockey here in Vancouver. It seemed such a stark contrast to the boarded-up shops and houses, the violence, hooligans and over-zealous police presence that have typically surrounded football games back in England. In Vancouver everyone was in favour of the playoffs, not in fear of them.

Sadly my trip came to an end just days before the actual 1994 Stanley Cup finals. Back at home (where I lived in the small, crappy town of Kettering at the time) I tried to find anyone who might have satellite TV that could possibly dig up the finals, but to no avail. With no internet back then and only 4 TV channels to choose from, my chances were big fat ZIP. I wanted to keep the energy of a trip that had meant so much to me for soooo many reasons, but alas ‘twas not to be. No-one knew what the hell I was talking about……”Stanley what?.....Cup? Ain’t got a clue, love. What’s that then when it’s at home?”  I heard later from Vicky that the Canucks lost and there were riots downtown – something I definitely hadn’t expected from the friendly, euphoric fans I’d seen during my visit.

Most importantly Vicky and I hadn’t missed a step with each other and the distance (till I finally moved to Canada) would still never keep us apart.

That initial visit was also my scouting trip of Vancouver, since I'd already applied for Canadian immigration (truly exasperated with life in England but warned by employment agencies in Bordeaux - where I really wanted to live - that unemployment was too high there at the time and I'd be better to stay put). Admittedly, during those first few days in this city I actually wasn't convinced this was a place I wanted to live - I didn't feel that, "wow, I want to live here" that I've always had about France and many other places, but my immigration papers were already in process and, by the end of my two weeks, I knew that moving here and being closer to Vicky again, even if I tried it for just a couple of years, meant so much more to me for many, many reasons, than feeling totally smitten with Vancouver per se. That said, it still took me close to 2 years to move here, thanks to a 1-year immigration process, a 7 month diversion in the Maldive Islands and a further 5 months of plain stupidity moving to Calgary (which is a-whole-nother story in itself).

But - here I am, 17 years later, a Canadian citizen, perched on the couch watching Vancouver playing in the actual Stanley Cup Finals….with my Canadian hubby and our two cats, living just blocks from Vicky and her family and still with cries, yelling and – hopefully soon – honking & cheering – from surrounding apartment buildings, cars and passers-by. The city is holding its breath for a goal…..and ideally a win.