VICTORIA – When Gary first moved from The Prairies to Vancouver Island, he could be a bit grumpy. "What the heck am I doing on a freakin' island?" he asked. "I don't like water and I don’t like boats. I've seen 'Jaws' for gosh sakes!"
At least in the back of his garage, he could find some comfort in fixing things. "Being a country boy, you got to make things work," Gary explains. "It's not like you can just run to the store and get new things."
So when his granddaughter asked him why pantries are called 'pantries' if there's no pans in them and it's not a tree, Garry answered by fixing-up a couple pieces of cookware. He painted three pans and hung them from a couple branches. "Thus the Pan Tree!" he proclaims, pointing at the tree in the front yard.
The Pan Tree proved popular. "I'd come out in the morning," Garry remembers. "There would be another pan or two under the tree." Garry accepted all of them (except for one electric frying pan), painted them bright colours, and hung more than twenty from the tree. "People think, 'that old farts got nothing to do,'" Garry laughs. "Let's give him a pan to paint!"
Now, no matter how bare its branches, the tree blooms bright.
"I'm sorry. We're going to have to break this interview for a minute," Garry unexpectedly tells me and the videographer, before pointing to a dog walking down the street. "He gets a biscuit."
Garry stops the interview twice to feed pets that are not his. Now – eight years after moving here – nothing seems to stand in the way of appreciating his neighbours.
So what happened, you may wonder, to that water-loathing, 'Jaws'-watching, grump? "I think there's kindness in everybody," Garry explains. "But sometimes it takes somebody or something to bring it out." Garry says Maggie did that for him.
You may recall a story we did last year about Maggie the dog. She was the golden retriever who struggled to get out and about until Garry built her a brightly-painted cart, and took her for daily rides around the neighbourhood.
Gary says he was inspired by how Maggie's unconditional kindness made a positive impact on the people they passed. Although Maggie has died, Gary is carrying on her legacy.
Now Gary regularly helps his neighbours fix the things they can't. Although he's still not a fan of water, Gary now considers the Island home, and is planning to plant another pun in the front yard. He says he's going to paint bright hands on a coat rack. "A hand stand!" he laughs.
"A smile's supposed to be good for you," he says with a big smile. "That’s what this is all about."