Homeless in Vancouver: The magical morning my mind wanders downtown

This morning, as I looked at a gilded sliver of downtown Vancouver visible from West Broadway through the screen of auburn leaves flanking Birch Street, I imagined the great variety of people over there.

And I saw how the people that I was thinking of would likewise be thinking of somewhere else at that same moment.

High up in the glittering office towers, there would be hundreds of men and women quietly working against the clocks of distant time zones. Their minds would be on Fulton and Gold in Lower Manhattan, Adelaide Street West in Toronto’s financial district, and Exchange Square in central Hong Kong.

Many of them would be absently drinking a venti half caff served to them by a barista on Georgia Street whose mind would be half-focused four hours ahead of her sure hands, on her second part-time job.

She would have counterparts employed in retail shops all over the Central Business District, similarly preoccupied forwards or backwards in time, with the more interesting and urgent parts of their lives.

And not even a kilometre north, in the Downtown Eastside, many more minds would be somewhere and some-when else, as hundreds of Vancouver’s poorest residents would either be well into enjoying the brief “Mardi Gras” of government cheque day or anticipating it.

I was as guilty of magical thinking as any of them. While part of my mind was traipsing all over the downtown core, the rest of it was already fixed on enjoying my morning coffee, five minutes in the future and two blocks away.