A City of Fragments: Part 2

     5.            Jaffe’s Books, Golden West, Bob’s Books. Fair’s Fair, Hillhurst Used Books, Author, Author, Twice Sold Tales, Well Read Books, Aquila Books, Annie’s Book Company, Aaron’s Books, The Wee Book Inn, The Book Shoppe, The Owl’s Nest, Wordsworth’s Books.  The city has always had an abundance of second hand bookstores.  The people who run these shops smile and argue and haggle and talk endlessly about the likes of Barbara Cartland, James Michener, Max Brand, Tom Clancy, James Herriott, and the Oprah Book Club.  Some of the stores have evening readings by local authors and would-be authors. They have frequent buyer cards to encourage the purchasing of good books. They sell books at nearly half price. They shelve their books with a view to helping the prospective reader find Romance novels, Horror fiction, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Westerns, Classic Literature, Thrillers, Travel Books, Cook Books, Self Help or New Age books, Art books, Humour, Children’s Books, Literature and so on.  Some even offer a beverage and biscuit to make the book experience relaxing and inviting. I can think of one of these stores that harbours a fluffy cat that purrs for the customers. A good book deserves a comfortable setting. Calgary, no doubt, has a well-read citizenry.

     6.            Heritage Park: Calgary is a city with a past.  What city isn’t?  The past here includes a replica of a paddle-wheel steamer from British Columbia, the Moyie, a small carnival ground with rickety rides such as the merry-go-round and the ferris wheel, a prairie sod house that may have come from Saskatchewan, trains that passed this way a century and more ago, perhaps even carrying royalty, chairs and tables made from dead animals, an oil derrick reminding us of the gusher days, an Opera House removed to this city park from Canmore, Alberta, and the wooden walls of a fort than never existed on this site or any other for that matter.  The various houses and stores, the blacksmith shed and newspaper office, the church and hotel, and the school and Mounted Police post come from various places about this province. The past here is a regional past. Calgary’s past is something of a fantasy, a made-up history that serves now and then for mise en scene in a Hollywood film.  The visitor can enjoy ice cream from another historic town, Cochrane. The heritage celebrated here is the heritage a visitor can buy for a few bucks. This return to the past is yet another simulation among myriad simulations. Even the grand steam engine no longer runs on the energy from burned coal or wood; the majestic train with its chugging engine is nothing other than a huge toy simulating a former grandeur. Tickets please, and all aboard to a past that never existed.

     7.            Skyline: Calgary has big sky and from one of the city’s several hills – Signal Hill or Nose Hill, for example – you can see the city in panorama, a great vista of sky above, sometimes wild with cloud, sometimes intensely clear and blue, a conglomeration of tall buildings centering a huge sprawl of roadways and smaller buildings and houses as far as the eye can see.  To the east the horizon just keeps receding until it disappears somewhere on the faraway prairie; to the west the line of Rocky Mountains marches from north to south beckoning weekend revelers. This is Calgary. It could be Houston or Dallas or perhaps some other Midwestern American city, Denver perhaps.  It could not be Winnipeg or Halifax or even Edmonton. Maybe the dramatic arch that signals the Chinook every so often, especially in winter, is the distinguishing feature. What might this tell us? The Chinook brings change, blowing away one barometric reading and replacing it with another, for a few moments. Then comes the return. The wind in Calgary signals not so much change as recurrence. Fair stands the wind for stability, stolidity, and standardization in Calgary. Let the four winds blow, let them blow, let them blow. Plus ca change, as they say. The only thing we know for certain about Calgary is that it will remain staunchly conservative amid the winds of change. The skyline announces nothing tumescent this way comes.

    8.            Hot Air and Balloons: in the later 1980s and early 1990s, Calgary went hot-air-balloon mad.  On any given day the sky above the city sported familiar-shaped and colourful hot-air balloons, some advertising local Real Estate companies or other businesses, some in a variety of shapes from ice-cream cones to houses, to cars to dragons. The phone book Yellow Pages rode the sky as did water coolers and gasoline pumps. If my memory does not misfire, then I think one was in the shape of a Maurice Sendak Wild Thing.  Some days the sky was filled with these flying baskets, and when they came low you could hear the sound of the gas as it warmed the air and caused the balloons with their dangling cargo to rise slowly and gracefully into higher regions.  The sky was a carnival where, by day, the dance and drift of balloons gave salute to a city dry with money and high on economic success. The balloons were a reflection of the city’s spirit, buoyant, colourful, lightsome, creative, and high-flying. For three or four years these dandy flags of freedom floated above the city’s skyline, and then they were gone. Their disappearance signaled not a downturn in metropolitan fortunes, but rather the mercurial vagaries of fashion.