TEMPLE: Blue, gray memories of home

By John Temple, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published October 11, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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/Vancouver Sun

Vancouver has come a long way since I left the city more than 30 years ago. Downtown today is home to 100,000 people.

I see a city nobody else sees.

I see the ghosts of my own past, feel the feelings I used to feel when I walked its streets years ago. The colors - grays and blues - tell me I'm home.

I've been wrestling with the strange feeling of living in the present and the past at the same time ever since the plane landed last week in the town where I was born. I was with a group of Coloradans visiting Vancouver to learn lessons for Denver. (Read my column on BUSINESS 6 in Wall Street West.)

What the others saw was so different from the city I saw.

They could see only the present - a thriving metropolis in a spectacular setting at the mouth of a major river in the shadows of a ridge of mountains.

Yet everywhere I went with the group I could also see the city as it used to be when I was a child. The lesson from the trip for me was more about the role of memory and how mysterious layers of feelings as raw as Vancouver's raindrops hold a grip that's unshakable.

The memories felt as real as what I saw outside our bus window.

I could never have imagined when I left Vancouver at 18 - only to return briefly to visit my family or to work or study as a young man - that I would come back as part of a mission of more than 150 people, including a governor and mayors, hospital presidents and bank presidents.

These movers and shakers were looking for answers to how to build a great city. And some of those they did find. The city has taken great strides in bridging what was once a huge gap between the beauty of its location and the limits of its imagination.

Today the place I grew up is cosmopolitan - a little Hong Kong or Manhattan. It is a place that is proud of what it has become, of the construction cranes that are clear signs of its economic vitality and the thronging sidewalks that are symbols of why people want to make it their home.

It was different when I was a boy. The bus carrying us to our hotel drove past the site of the sawmill where my father once worked. Then we drove down the street where my grandparents' delicatessen had stood. My mind was flooded with images of my grandfather wearing an apron and spreading ice on the uncooked chickens, of the pickle jar on the counter and the pastries with pink icing. I remembered the smells of their dark house behind the store.

There was the brick wall guarding an old mansion on which I had sat as a small boy when the queen visited. Outside my hotel window I could see the train station that is home to one of my earliest memories - the arrival of my grandparents after their long trip from Hungary.

Every morning before dawn I ran along the downtown seawall into Stanley Park. The darkness and dampness reminded me of my time as a paperboy, when I would ride my bicycle through the wet streets.

I was home. But I was in a place that had changed. And so had I.

I don't know whether these same feelings come to someone who stays in the same place all his life. Although I've lived in Denver for 16 years now and raised my children here, I don't find myself carrying the same burden of memories every day.

Looking at today's Vancouver it was hard to imagine how I could have left.

When my mother and brother visited with me at the hotel, it seemed so natural. I knew when my mom went home she would drive over the Lion's Gate Bridge. I knew its slippery sidewalks from when we used to ride our bikes over it as children to play among the rocks along the Capilano River. And I knew it from below from when I steered a small oil tanker beneath its canopy into and out of the harbor, holding the wheel and thinking that life couldn't get much cooler.

The experience made me think of my own children and how they've now all left Denver and what it will mean to them when they return some day.

I thought of the lessons the group was there to learn. I realized that the biggest one of all was that the leaders on the trip must find ways to create memories that will hold people in metro Denver and make others want to come. It's their job to build a common story under the Colorado sun whose threads weave together lives of promise and hope, of opportunity and meaning.

That's no guarantee that many of our young won't leave. But it will ensure that many others will want to come, just as the miners did 150 years ago.

• October 11, 2008

  4:40 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  newsaddict writes:

  Reminiscing about the way things were when you were 18: That was way before the Internet. I bet people actually subscribed to newspapers back then and watched the evening news on TV.

  The times they are a changin'.

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