the right side of the tracks

Once upon a time a girl grew up in a lovely suburban seaside community. It was a sleepy fishing village and ferry terminal. Idyllic. She and her best friend promised to live next door to each other on the same suburban street when they grew up.

Fast forward several decades. The girl now lives several bridges away (each bridge equalling a drop of $300K in house value) and the friend lives in the Outer Hebrides, also known as Abbotsford, because it was the only place where she could afford to buy a house in the '90s.

I ('girl') was in that town where I grew up today, on a mission to track down the rare and elusive Lesser Solution of the Paternal Eyedrop for my dad, who's still tethered to a hospital bed in the suburb next door. While approaching Shopper's Drug Mart (the place where I ogled the magazines and make-up for which I had to save my babysitting earnings as a teenager) I caught sight of the window of a real estate office. I guess the agent behind the glass saw me smiling, because he almost fell over himself in an effort to accost me and give me his card. Little did he know that the smile on my face was not due to enthusiasm for his fine product, but a smile of delight at the prices on the houses. At one time I was quite alarmed to see the value of West Vancouver's houses escalate at such an unrealistic rate (so much for being able to live in the community where you grew up). But now it's like a game: c'mon -- shock me some more. You want $900,000 for that tiny 1950s bungalow on a small lot on a main road? Not good enough? How about $2 million for the rancher with a view my parents bought for $21,000 in the '60s?

What I want to know is, where's my piece of the pie? Between my dad and I we managed to scrape together the $2.50 for the eyedrops. But what's really weird is that I didn't spot a single person under 60 today, except for the employees at Shopper's Drug Mart. In many ways West Vancouver is as fantastical as Disneyland now, and there's about an equal chance that I will ever live in either place.

Monday update: Whoops. Looking at this morning' comments I'm guessing that this post didn't really convey the tongue-in-cheek tone I was after. I don't actually regret not living in West Vancouver. By most standards I'm a 'have' as opposed to a 'have not.' It's just that those who live on Vancouver's North Shore are either old or 'haves' in such a spectacular way as to be objects of curiosity. By the way, if you didn't catch it the first time, look closely at what happens to the driver in the video.