Sad anniversary of lost bright community lights

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/06/2023 (832 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A few years ago, I wrote a column about the late Jai Pereira and Alana Lowry.

It was just a little story about how the pair touched my life so many years ago.

Pereira’s part came when I was a nerdy and awkward teenager, and he was the co-owner of SK8 Skates (an iconic Winnipeg institution) who let me loiter in the shop on Corydon Avenue, and gave me an abundance of free stickers, even though I never bought anything.

I met Lowry a few years later, when I was barely an adult, and we both worked together.

My interactions with them were surfacy, at best. We weren’t friends, but their acquaintance and our interactions left a mark on me.

Pereira was a legend; a pioneer of the skateboarding world. He was outspoken and cooler than most people.

Lowry was vivacious. She carried herself with a kind of main-character energy that would have been intimidating if she wasn’t so friendly.

I was awkward and kind of a geek, but they were always so kind and welcoming to me in different parts of my life, and I never forgot that.

People’s kindness often lives on, even after they’re gone.

When the pair died in a motorcycle crash June 27, 2001, I was devastated. I remember going to the gas station near my apartment in the wee hours of the morning in the days following the crash to pick up a newspaper and read about them and life in the aftermath of this tragedy.

I was gutted for their family and friends, and for the larger community I was a part of and was grieving the loss of the pair whose lives were unfairly cut short at 32 and 34 years old, respectively.

It was unthinkable.

Nearly 20 years later, I wrote my own little story about Pereira and Lowry in the same newspaper. I shared about my small, but meaningful connection to both, and wrote about how even all these years later, their legacy of kindness still impacts me.

After the story ran, people reached out to me, sharing their own stories of how they knew Pereira and/or Lowry, and reminiscing about the old times. I even connected with Pereira’s family.

His sister, Asha, and I have stayed connected, and she is just as lovely, outspoken and cool as her brother. Their father showed me the same kindness his son did decades earlier.

Tomorrow will mark 22 years since the pair died. A lot of life has happened, but their memory is still felt in our community. In 2018, English artist Mr. Cenz was commissioned to paint a mural of Pereira at the skatepark at The Forks.

In a 2018 Free Press article by Ashley Prest, Sk8 owner Colin Lambert said the mural was set up in a good place, “because it gives kids who never met him the opportunity to ask questions about who he was, what his impact was on the scene and to maintain his legacy.”

The pair were a lot of things to a lot of people.

For me, they were kind and they made an impact in my life. I’m grateful to have known them.

shelley.cook@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter @ShelleyACook