Ninety-year-old Jean Davidson has seen and heard many things in her lifetime, but she was happily impressed by a bit of Christmas magic ringing out from Georgia and Granville streets.
"It's remarkable. Everybody's got their hands out and they're doing nothing, but here he is and he's doing something," she said yesterday afternoon, after depositing a toonie on the keyboard of busker Mark Hartmaier. "I think it's great," she said.
In Vancouver, strangers ask for loose change at just about every major intersection, but 37-year-old Mr. Hartmaier earns his living in a most unconventional way.
Born with stubs for limbs, he plays his electronic keyboard, which is stacked atop copies of free newspapers. Rich-sounding music fills the street as coins from passersby jingle into his hat.
"My right arm is doing the melody -- no cheating," Mr. Hartmaier explained. "My left arm, you could say I'm cheating because I'm doing pre-augmented chords.
"The joy is, you don't need fingers any more."
On any given December afternoon, he's a constantly smiling figure sitting still in the hurly-burly of the city. The traffic zooming past him includes buses with poems in their advertising spaces, including one about how the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was too worried about the prospect of crippling disability to risk shaking anyone's hand.
Mr. Hartmaier may not reach the same musical heights, but neither does he possess a scintilla of standoffishness. Pedestrians who meet his gaze are usually greeted with either a smile, a "Happy Christmastime!" or his arm, which he frequently extends for handshakes.
He offers up metaphors too.
"Behold the mighty turtle -- he only makes progress when he sticks his neck out," said Mr. Hartmaier, who added that he has always been an outgoing sort.
"I am not a compete jigsaw puzzle," he said, "but I always teach my daughters that winners never quit and quitters never win."
His able-bodied children, who live in Ontario, are aged 17, 15 and five. Asked what he's getting his youngest for Christmas, he said simply, "Me."
"My little five-year-old is sleeping with photographs of daddy under her pillow," he said. "It's a magic age where she's just figured out what Christmas is."
Mr. Hartmaier is a travelling musician who hopes soon to return to Ontario, where he began playing keyboards nearly 20 years ago.
It was a way to support himself when he had few other means. Back in the 1980s, he made headlines for threatening to camp out on the Ontario premier's desk unless he got more help with housing. Eventually, the government obliged him.
But Mr. Hartmaier did not become a homebody. Rather, he was often found plying his trade at a busy street corner in Toronto's Chinatown. He still works there in the summer, but decided to start coming out to Vancouver in the winter a few years back.
While Ontario's climate makes winter work impossible, B.C.'s temperature is a lot less tough on his arms. Still, the weather is a double-edge sword.
"The degenerates are better able to sit outside," Mr. Hartmaier said, speaking of the times he has been robbed in Vancouver.
"There have been more crime-related incidents in a short period of time than there has been in Toronto," he said. "It's happened three times in just under the last three years here, and probably three times in 15 years in Toronto."
That's not to say he finds Vancouver unfriendly. In fact, he said that the last time a junkie tried to rob him, a lesbian couple tackled the woman and made her give the money back.
Besides good Samaritans, he also has a business partner to look out for him. Richard Rayfield is at Mr. Hartmaier's side to help him in all kinds of ways, from setting up his keyboard, to handing him lit cigarettes, to converting change to dollar bills.
The friendship goes all the way back to high school.
"I was the only guy with a Mohawk and an earring," Mr. Rayfield says. "He was the most socially adept guy in a chair."
While people with disabilities have long tended to bear the brunt of discrimination, both men find that Vancouver is a very tolerant place to be.
"We have a quad [quadriplegic]for a mayor now," said Mr. Rayfield. "Honestly, out here, nobody makes a mention of it. It's a non-issue."
Colin Freeze