My office at Statistics Canada in Ottawa left little to the imagination. Located on the 7th floor of the Jean Talon Building at Tunney’s Pasture (now reduced to a few strips of lawn cordoned off by busy black asphalt roads and ubiquitous grey concrete government buildings) my office comprised three fabric panels that were burnt-orange on one side and mustard-gas yellow on the other. Another panel was off-set to create a ‘door-way’ for my office and the one adjacent.

Within that space was a brown melamine and steel desk that seemed to have survived some war, an intrusive filing cabinet that held other people’s files, a burgundy ergonomic chair, and the usual accoutrements of office life – an institutional telephone that had seen better days and a new computer.

I didn’t have a view out of the doorway of my ‘office’ as there were just more panels creating offices and if I stood up I would just see more garish panels standing guard over their occupants. Providing the illusion of security and privacy which some took seriously, the litany of medical ailments, financial woes, affairs of the heart, illnesses in the family, accidents, recalcitrant children or spouses or neighbours or lovers or friends all filled the dead spaces between our panels.

Outside my office I could strain my eyes to see the top of the windows of two walls that defined the outer boundaries of our ‘division’ but the view was of dead air space, seven stories up as we were. If I looked the other way it was to choose between more garish panels or the bland beige walls demarcating the elevators or bathrooms. There was not much to ponder outside my office, but inside, there was an eclectic collection of postcards covering one entire panel of my office.

The postcards were all from places to which I had never been. They depicted a varied portrait of landscapes and scenes. The collection began when I donated some rain gear to Colin Angus for his first major trip. Colin’s mother Valerie Spentzos had taught at the same junior high school as my mother and they had become friends. Colin and I had not, because he was an infant when I was a teenager. Colin asked my mother what I wanted for the rain gear and when she asked me, I replied: “Ask Colin to send me a postcard.” So he did.

It was an aerial photograph taken of the beach at Cabo San Lucas. The green-blue ocean rolled on white breaking waves upon the coral sands; the whole scene topped by a cerulean blue sky the same colour as the eyes of the girl in the cubicle next to mine when I worked in the R.H. Coats Building at Tunney’s Pasture.

She had come to work as a summer student in the Centre for Health Information at Statistics Canada. It wasn’t just her long auburn hair, stunning blue eyes and ready smile that caught our collective attention: she also had the unfortunate habit of chewing pens into oblivion. She would start with the cap, and work her way along the barrel of the pen until it was resplendent with impressions of her teeth and useless as an instrument of writing.

One time a pen leaked ink profusely into her mouth and she spent the rest of the day amusing us with her blue lips and a smile that almost matched her eyes. On my way to work the next day I stopped to pick her up a small gift. At our coffee break I presented it to her: it was a twin-pack of Minnie-Mouse baby-soothers. We laughed, but she seemed actually somewhat embarrassed. I felt badly about the joke until lunch-time when I noticed as I passed her office that she had one of the soothers firmly in her mouth. I stopped and simply raised an eyebrow and she popped the soother out with a laugh and told me that it was actually helping. She hadn’t chewed a pen and felt more relaxed than she had in ages. When she left us to go back to school, she told us that she was first going on a Caribbean cruise with her boyfriend, and asked if I wanted anything.

I replied: “Send me a postcard.” So she did.

My collection grew as I met more people at work who liked to travel. As I told them of my growing postcard collection it almost seemed to become a rite of passage to have one posted on my wall. Within the confines of my little cubicle, I could watch the sun rise and set over mountains and valleys, rivers, lakes and oceans, over jungles or desserts, mud huts or towering high-rises. Needing a break from work, I could silently ask some man, woman or child, of a variety of races, where they lived, what they did each day, and what they dreamed about. Each became a part of my well-traveled little family.

We had exotic pets, of strange species and wild colours, some huge and lumbering, others tiny and fragile, some only came out at night to play but others scampered in the daylight, amusing us with their antics frozen in one precise moment of unabashed joy I could share when I lifted my head from the work before me.

The architecture fascinated me as well. The varied designs and decorations, built from mud or sticks, upon sticks to escape the mud and water, or languidly floating upon the water itself. Some were built on the side or top of hills, or into cliffs, or near mountains, but for each one the question was always the same: “Who lives there?”

It is a question I have asked since I could walk and talk. My mother related her mortification that as a toddler taken for walks in the West Side of Vancouver, I would run up to someone’s home, pound on the door with my little fist and demand to be let inside to ‘visit’. My mother never mentioned whether I had been refused entrance anywhere, but I doubt my chubby cheeks and curly blonde hair was seen as much of a threat.

My mother must have enjoyed those visits as well. She had a small bed-sit she shared with me, my sister and a hot-plate for cooking, a dresser for our clothes and meager possessions, and a small chair by a tiny window that over-looked the street below. It couldn’t have been much bigger than the confines of my office at work.

My early quest to visit everyone makes me believe that was why I became a sociologist. It was the one discipline that attracted me at college and then university, and finally became my profession at Statistics Canada. My work revealed a lot to me about our lives as Canadians, but no matter how many ‘portraits’ I researched and wrote, the picture of the world I had was captured in those little postcards on my office wall. They also gave me a sense of belonging in a new city and province. Knowing that, as others enjoyed their first-hand view of different parts of the world they had taken a moment to send a post-card home to someone who just wanted to know: ‘Who lives there?’