Generosity

When Pam and I first moved here, I remem­ber writ­ing about how nice every­one was to us, from the real­tor who helped with the pur­chase, to the banker who set up new accounts for us and got us cred­it cards, to our new neigh­bors and even the law offices who helped with our immi­gra­tion issues. The postal car­ri­er for our build­ing was help­ful and friend­ly, as was our build­ing man­ag­er and var­i­ous trades­peo­ple who came dur­ing our ini­tial months of set­up. I took some of this to be, per­haps, part­ly the West vs. the East coast, part­ly the Cana­da vs. US, and part­ly just being lucky.

These days, a lit­tle over three years lat­er, I’m now con­vinced it was­n’t luck, because the kind­ness and gen­eros­i­ty that we ini­tial­ly met with have con­tin­ued. This past month, a friend of mine sur­prised me with lunch and Canucks tick­ets out of the blue (I won’t embar­rass him with nam­ing him, but he knows who he is). For Pam’s birth­day a few weeks ago, our neigh­bor Estelle brought in sev­er­al vas­es of flow­ers, because she was leav­ing town and though Pam would enjoy them. She also gave Pam tick­ets to see the Speed Skat­ing tri­als at the Pacif­ic Col­i­se­um today. Yes­ter­day, my friend Dav­eO, who was work­ing at the happyfrog.ca booth at the Health Show, gave us free tick­ets. Last week I vis­it­ed with two of the first friends I met just as I moved here, Matt and Mak­taaq (in fact, I’m hap­py to have known them even knew them before they were mar­ried!), and at their Hal­loween par­ty, Ryan offered to lend me one of his bicy­cles.

The fre­quent gen­eros­i­ty of my friends has been seen online in this blog, with offers from Mon­i­ca and oth­ers to twit­ter that I was look­ing for work (as well as oth­ers who have put the word out on their blogs), mes­sages of good will on birth­days and anniver­saries, and even flat­ter­ing blog posts about me (com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed as well, I might add. Thanks Raul.). Com­ments from fel­low Bush Refugees Bob and David fre­quent­ly make my day. They also gave us a bot­tle of their own wine.

I’ve seen the fire­works from a fab­u­lous van­tage point in Yale­town with MJ and laughed myself sil­ly at a com­e­dy night host­ed by Tanya. I’ve got­ten patient iPhone con­sult­ing from John and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to write an op-ed piece for the LA Times, thanks to Travis.

I’m only scratch­ing the sur­face. With both Pam and I look­ing for work and liv­ing off of our sav­ings, and all the scary eco­nom­ic news (on CNN, main­ly) I still sub­mit that like George Bai­ley in It’s a Won­der­ful Life, I am tru­ly a rich man, because of friends, and they keep remind­ing me of this fact.