Kitchen Sink

"Mooi, Liefies (nice, love)," M calls from the study.

"Yeah, you think so?" I reply as I plunge my hands into the soapy water.
M's commenting on my latest vignette, 'Love on the Rocks.'

"I like 'Sexy or Functional' too," he adds.

I wash a dinner plate.

"They're just stories," I explain. "Some light-hearted reading somebody might enjoy. It won't change the world."

We fall into silence - M, busy with his evening admin duties in the study, and I do his kitchen duty (wash the dishes) and my own (dry them). With every sudsy wipe of a plate and fork and pot, I think about my frivolous activity. It's two months since our Canada Day bike ride (see Canada Day, July 2009) when I first thought to start a blog. I have been surprised by the joy it has brought me. I started 'North of Vancouver' in response to M's persistent encouragement that I write, not out of any desire of my own. Yet, it has added a new dimension to my life.

I go out equipped with our camera. I never know when I may stumble across a story and need the picture to go with it. Or I find a picture that's waiting for the right story to come along. I get up sleepless in the middle of the night to jot down part of my story so that I won't forget it. Not that I can have too many of those escapades, M does not like to have his sleep interrupted.

I wash my little red pot. After a good twenty years of making cheese sauces for me, it still looks good. It serves more of a function than my light-hearted blog. What purpose do my vignettes serve for a 22-year old black man in South Africa who commits suicide out of sheer desperation because he couldn't get an identification document which would afford him a job? How will they undermine corruption so that the young man could turn up for work today and support his siblings instead of lying cold in a morgue? How will they free the Dalits from sub-human oppression in India? What of the young man who sleeps in the store doorway between Esplanade and First on Lonsdale?

I fill our cat's yellow water bowl and put it on the floor. K2 (we didn't name her) looks at it disinterestedly. She's not much in the grand scheme of the world but we've made a difference in her little life. I think of other areas where we are making as much of a difference as we can. It still doesn't seem to make a dent in the sadness and injustice in the world.

Yet, if I make choices that are honourable and so does the government official and so does the storekeeper and so does my neighbour, it ripples out into the world. I'll choose not to cheat on my taxes, download illegal software or pirate movies; I'll choose to greet the stranger, to get to know my neighbour and to buy the youngster sleeping on Lonsdale a cup of coffee and a bite to eat. I know I probably won't always get it right but every time I participate in an indiscretion I'm as guilty as the government official with his hand out for a bribe.

No, 'North of Vancouver' won't change the world but it will change me and how I see it.