~ Sunday, August 18, 1991 - North Shore News The essence of ereat nostalgia IE WOULD argue that nostalgia isn't necessarily a disease of the aged and in- firm. {, for instance, a mere youth Gulla couple of months shy of 50) am given to moments of nostalgia. But then I've always been prone to moments of nostalgia. When | was a nine-year-old, | distinctly remember being wiped out with nostalgia for the days when I was five (pre-school). I lived in London, England, during my twenty-first year — alas, far too little time! Having to leave, I spent the next decade be- ing sick with nostalgia for the place. After turning 30 (gasp!), I spent a long period being nostalgic for my entire lost youth. Turning 40 (over the hill for sure), 1 fou.d myself suffering overwhelming bouts of nostalgia for the exciting days when I was in my thirties, which now seemed — strangely cnough — like the best period of all. Then the forties turned out to be even better. ff it keeps escalating like this for another couple of decades, Ell figure I got my money's worth out of life. But lately — hardly ever any nostalgia! Tt suspect that | am just too busy right now to have any spare time for nostalgia. Life gocs on through cycles, as we know, and I just happen to be in a busy phase. Hope it ends before too long. Because, the truth is — | miss nostalgia. And then the other night, a real hint of nostalgia knocked me off my feet. On a scale of one to [0, (d give it a nine (J mean, maybe it can get stronger, impossible as it seems, so you've got to leave the possibility open). Back in 1974, when # first got Bob Hunier STRICTLY PERSONAL together with the Lady Love who is now my wife, we lived together for a summer in an old floathouse in False Creek. It had been used for years by a group of North Shore medical students while they attended UBC. It was a barely-floating old shack mounted on seven soggy cedar logs, tied up to a rickety old dock behind the partially torn- down Vancouver fron and Engineering Works building, a massive structure which was even- tuaily bulldozed to make way for the 72-acre False Creck develop- ment, The fact is Che house was floating in a chemical stew, a broth so potent that after we foal- ishly dived in one evening, we found our skin blighted with rash the next day, burning cyes — a feeling that a decade had peeled off our lives. Most of the boats clustered around the floathouse in a dogieg-shaped intet in the southwest corner of the Creek were rustbuckets and junkheaps. Typical, in a way, was the dope dealer living on the plywood District council reviews street-naming policies A RECOMMENDATION to call a street leading cast off Prospect Road, Coventry Way, met a roadblock Tuesday during a North Vancouver District Council meeting. Ald. Janice Harris was opposed to the name suggested by the district’s street-naming committce. “T think we would like to keep more in touch with our historical roots (in the district). [ don’t see what English-castle names have to do with our street here,” said Harris. Harris suggested Barker Street was morc suitable because Barker was the name of a local pioncer. But according to the recom- mendation written by street-nam- ing chairman N.J. Nikkel, Coven- try Way was suggested because there was a “general theme of English-castle streets’? such as Balmoral and Kensington in the area of North Lonsdale. Guce NORTH VANCOUVER DISTRICT COUNCIL Ald. Ernie Crist pointed out that the street-name commitice was sect up so council wouldn’t waste time on the issue of naming streets. Ironically, Crist made this statement on the second successive evening council met this week. The second meeting was scheduled because of outstanding agenda items left| over from the first Council took from 7 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. to complete the Ald. Joan Gadsby was sup- ported by the rest of council when she called for a review of the strect-naming committee. She ask- ed for the committee’s terms of references. INTERIORS We’ve been making homes beautiful for 30 years Lower overhead, Lower prices e coset dens wall coverings © blinds _ ed custom furniture’. Call for free in-horne consultation 929-3277 929-3277 Uimaran that was kept afloat by hundreds of empty corked wine bottles and chunks of styrofoam. In any kind of wind, the hull tinkled in synchronicity with the movement of everything else in the universe. The house was green, covered with shingles, and had a huge white *‘Snoopy’’ cartoon character painted on the front wall, [t had a king-sized waterbed in the bedroom, which caused the entire house to tilt a couple of degrees. Ah, the sloshing of the great waterbed, the creaking of the house on its logs, the smaller creaking of the dock, the awaken- ing rattle and shudder of the city, all perfectly meshed, like a sym- phony, with the lapping of the water in the creek. I remember promising myself on the spot never to try to explain it, but for an instant there, life made perfect sense... This is comforting. This is the essence of great nostalgia. Something was perfect. Of course, if 1 choose to remember all the other things that were actually going on at the time, J would quickly be reminded that the paradise | remember with such Poignancy was a flawed, all too human, all too real place. During most of the time we were there, for instance, the City of Vancouver was trying its damnedest to kick us out. There were political hassles, emotional hassles, workaday world hassles. Whew! The wonderful thing about nostalgia is its selectivity. I’m sure I must have banged my thumb with a hammer, tripped on the dock in the dark, cursed the plumbing, gotten sick of the stench on hot days. But what excellent nostalgia reflexes do for you is shovel all the rest of it aside. A good nostalgia blast is like a great painting. It doesn't try to express the whole reality, only the part of it worth looking at. i experienced a longing so pow- erful it made my heart pound. | almost wept at the cruelty of the barrier which prevents us from going back, which pitilessly snat- ches all that has happened to us away, flinging it into an unreachable past. But, boy, did 1 feel good! I needed that. PUeN BRITISH COLUMBIA LE GEM & MINERAL Ss Sy SHOW “WORLD OF GEMS” South Delta Recreation Center 1720 56th St., Twawwassen, B.C. 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