Significant Structures

Last night I read an interesting essay by Douglas Coupland. The essay, Lions Gate Bridge, Vancouer, B.C., Canada, is published in Polaroids from the Dead (1996). The essay discusses how significant the bridge that connects Vancouver with the suburbs to the north is to the author.

Here are a two passages I find worthy of sharing:

"By urban planning and engineering standards it borders on being a disaster, but then isn't it true of life in general that nothing is more seductive than the dying starlet? The lost cowboy? The self-destructive jazz musician?"

"People speak of Lions Gate Bridge as being merely a tool, a piece of infrastucture that can be casually deleted, plundered from our memoriers with not a second thought to the consquences its vanashing might have on our interior lives...
... The bridge is not merely a tool, not a casually deletable piece of infrastructure, and it can never be deleted from memories like an undesirable file."

Obviously I am not a writer in the way the Coupland is, but I would love to be able to express similar thoughts and emotions about the parts of Saint John that are not always as popular or held to be as important as I think they are.