Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian NATO base in Baden-Sollingen, Germany, and raised in West Vancouver, where he still resides, in a house designed by Ron Thom. Among his best-sellers are Generation X, Polaroids from the Dead, Microserfs, Miss Wyoming and City of Glass altogether in print in some 30 countries. Less well known is the fact that he is a graduate of the Emily Carr School of Art and Design in Vancouver and that his ongoing design experiments include everything from launching a line of furniture to Smirnoff vodka ads. He also exhibits his sculpture and furniture collections around the world, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Wired and the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung.
Counting the Names
Over the past year I've been in and out of Vancouver-area storage lockers, looking through more than a hundred thousand archived items from the Marathon of Hope. There are too many of them to even begin listing, but the two categories I noticed most were the staggering number of get-well cards—floor to ceiling stacks of boxes filled with them—and the equally staggering number of letters and cheques sent in by choolchildren, most of them postmarked 1980 and 1981. I thought that after I'd spent a few hours of sifting I'd become immune to the sentiments expressed inside them, but no, I never did and I doubt I ever will. Their messages are too pure and too real.
Leeane from Victoria has breast cancer and is worried that soon she'll be too weak to drive, so she won't be able to get her daughter to her violin lessons on time.
Mark from Fredericton had an osteosarcoma in 1975 and wants to tell Terry, You can make it pal!
Tracy from Oshawa remembers her grandmother being sick from methotrexate and being unable to eat Thanksgiving dinner.
Greg from Edmonton lost his older brother to leukemia and wants Terry to finish his run—Greg is willing to come along to help!
And then there are cards to Terry from your mother—my mother—so many mothers wrote to Terry, fathers, too, often unbeknownst to their children. All of these mothers and fathers wished Terry safety and health and peace, and they thanked him for his courage and for making our country a better home.
Helen from Toronto had five children who all left home decades ago. Terry, I think of you as the son who never left.
But here's what floored me the most and what makes me write these words: the signatures. In the Fox archives, signatures by the tens of thousands faced me from every direction: on jumbo cheques, on homemade cards, on huge rolls of paper sent in by entire schools, on pink floral cards like your grandmother uses—names and names and names of everyday Canadians, walls of them—all of them yearning to count, to mean something. I think I was on my second day in one of the storage lockers when suddenly all of the boxes and all of the paper fell away, and all that remained behind were the constellations of names hanging in the air like stars, like a universe. I don't think I've ever felt as safe as I did for that brief one-minute window on a Vancouver weekday, surrounded by the goodwill of so many Canadians. Collectively, those names testify to something divine—our nation, our home and our soul.
Douglas Coupland, June 2004
