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I

am the flower thief of Vancou-

ver. I’ve been a predator of

beauty all my life, and beauty

has had many faces.

As a child of the ’50s, beauty

was a plum tree glistening pur-

ple, with dripping sap, cracked

plums and ecstatic yellow jack-

ets circling my semi-naked

monkey body as I clambered

through the branches, somehow

unstung, filling my T-shirt with the

sweet, sticky crop from the tree.

At first, my predations were mostly

gardens, though I did branch out into

comic books and chocolate bars until

my ruthless, righteous mother caught

me. Oh the shame of being marched

down to the local convenience store

and abjectly apologizing while I paid

everything back.

My crooked ways soon returned. I

was an incorrigible child. We discov-

ered the old lady’s carrot patch down

the street. We would crouch in her gar-

den and yank the tender young carrots

out, rub them clean and munch them

down like Bugs Bunny before running,

shrieking for our lives when the cane-

wielding old lady appeared.

This was followed by the discovery of

the watermelon farm. How I miss those

seedy, ineffably sweet watermelons,

along with the cow corn we ate raw,

also sweet, only starchy. I miss smash-

ing the stolen melon with my bare fist,

scooping out the red flesh. I miss the

seed-spitting contests in the shade by

the creek. Then, in the summer heat,

leaping into the rushing, clean water,

clothes and all. Today, both creek and

field are potentially toxic, while the

new hybrid watermelons have lost

their teeth-hurting intensity.

One day, we kids were raiding the

ancient man’s garden across the street.

He grew the best raspberries. Sud-

denly, the man came hobbling out the

door wielding a broom and I scurried

home. He followed me to my door—

and then inside! My parents were at

work. I was terrified, so I slithered

under their bed as he stalked through

the rooms, grumbling and waving his

broom. He shoved it under the bed

where I was hiding, just missing me.

Fortunately, he couldn’t manage to

lean down far enough to see me. He

left the house, slamming the door,

cursing his way home.

MY NEFARIOUS INSTINCTS returned

again when I was a student at Simon

Fraser University. A lovely woman had

joined me at my home in White Rock

and, while walking the beach road, I

noticed a row of enormous sunflowers

growing alongside a shed.

That night I returned with a knife,

hacked off the largest head and kept it

in a jug on the kitchen table. The sun-

flower impressed the lady, though a

few days later the guilt crept in and has

stuck with me ever since, almost 50

years. The more I took to my own gar-

dening, the more I regarded myself as

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62 may 2020