Many Waters Revisited

A letter to my daughter from 27 September 1998 (a year or so before I purchased my first computer)

Hurricane season on the home front / All the weak of heart are leavin’ town / Baby an’ me ain’t up to goin’ just yet / Maybe we’ll just drink until we drown / Me I freshen up a pot of coffee / Baby puts the chain across the door / And pretty soon she’s seein’ things that I don’t see / Like alligators on the bathroom floor…

Tom Russell, Hurricane Season

With news of the worst gangin’ up of tropical storms since ’92 (that’s 1892 so they said) — and frenchies à that: GEORGES, HENRI, ISIDORE, JULES ET JIM (the last possessing two eyes!) — we lashed our possessions to the faithful Avalon & took the Back Route to the Northland with Holly & Cam sleepin’ off the previous night’s carousin’ while blasting back subliminal doses of Smashed Pumpkins & Dar Williams on disc & walk men…

            We arrived…had an uneventful lunch…and started a new cycle of activities when Momma spotted some Eyres clearing brush suspiciously close to our property line & went out to casually question them about their intent…when that mighty oracle- Ann Eyres herself — came out modeling her latest bathing suit and announcing that a TORNEDO WARNING was in effect (& had nothing to do with the beef Tournedos she planned to serve her brood that night before returning to practice her puts on the green that was being clear cut even as she spoke…

            Momma switch’d to immediate PANIC BUTTON PUSHIN’ MODE & commanded that I cook dinner before the inevitable power outage (she being somewhat of an oracle herself)…I sprang into action, don’d my chef’s hat & apron & rushed the Shaken’n’Bake white trash ’taties into the oven. As I cooked, the sky became ominously dark & the power began to waver…SUDDENLY! The power was out and Momma screamed “OVER TO WENAWAE’S!”

            I have to backtrack. Momma’s second reaction after sending me to cook dinner (a scant 1 ½ hours after that uneventful lunch) was to start phonin’ around (whilst she still could!)…Grandaddy suggested we get back to Toronto pronto (I pointed out that I didn’t feature a 3 hour drive through lightning, tornados & whatever else Ma Nature had up her voluminous sleeves…this being hurricane season an’ all)…Rita the Rockette spoke of her plans to spend the night in her basement with her red slippers and her little dog, Toto…I mean, GINGER… Momma finally called Wenawae (on Wen’s own phone!) to see if we could shelter in the crawl space which Michael (who had also been phoned) had let slip existed next door.

            So now we had fantastic winds (the likes of which hadn’t been seen since that Prout’s Neck holiday above the post office). Momma rushed about gathering all the candles. I gathered up all the puppies as the power went off & lightning thundered fast & furiously…

We didn’t stay in the crawl space all that long (tho’ long enuff for Pippa the claustrophobic puppy) as the wild breeze calmed down somewhat and I went over to bring over the food. We dug in & I braved the outrageous bolts of lightning one more in order to get the chocolate pudds that I’d missed in the darkness.

            The power never came back on so we slept at Wen’s…Momma slept with one eye open ready to shepherd us all back underground if things got really bad…we were awakened briefly by a bolt that seemed to be in our (make that Wen’s) bedroom. My theory was that since Wen’s place had already been wasted once (page 5) Momma figured we were safer there than at our own place. Next morning…still no power…I cooked a vestigial breakfast on the barbecue and then started lugging buckets of water from the lake in homage to days gone by…we had twice as much cleaning to do as a result of spending time in two domiciles…we left at around noon (lunching at McDonald’s to avoid dirty dishes!) & drove home wondering why we had bothered to go to the cottage at all…maybe it was just to supply a theme for this little letter.

Love,

Daddy

P.S. The number motifs are snapshots from Momma’s mind of the fate that inevitably awaited us!

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

Now that I've Deep Sixed all the book publishers I used to work for and illustration has fizzled out thanks to masterstrokes like Stock Images … I find myself with a new quest: reviving the lost art of letter writing. This is not going to be easy as I've already encountered some serious resistance. Somebody told me that their 80 year old parent communicated with them via Skype while another snapped that he went digital 16 years ago and wasn't about to turn the clocks back just because some lunatic considers letter writing to be both vital and a (puleeeeeez) "lost art" … well, I won't be sending any letters their way. It figures that no sooner do I hit upon this concept that our wonderful government decides to end home delivery and prohibitively increase our local postage. Some people seem intimidated … the idea of actually writing a letter, finding an envelope and stamp, and a mail box puts them on edge. Fortunately I kept all my pens and esoteric writing materials (remember ink?) when I finally allowed a computer into my presence. Some designers threw out pens and pencils figuring they'd never have to do anything manual again. I recently threw out my unused drawing pad and electronic pencil … I'm much happier using my inimitable El Whacko© techniques.

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End of an Era (Part Two)

One of my longtime illustrator friends was somewhat taken aback upon receiving one of my End of an Era-themed dragon cards. Seems I’d forgotten to mention that the end of one era could herald the start of a new one … sort of like that overused metaphor about a half empty/half full glass of liquid.

            I’m not really depressed about my book design career crash diving into oblivion … if anything I’m more relieved that I no longer have to feel like I’m wasting away on behalf of the thoughtless, giddy creatures who seem to have hijacked the publishing industry with little concept at how to operate such an animal. Better to just let them stew in their own juices as e-books sound their own death knells.

            Now I have more time to devote to things that really matter. Things like what three generations of us did on Christmas Eve when we attended the annual “live nativity” at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church on St. Clair Avenue West. The shepherds arrived with live sheep. There was a live goat in the stable that Mary and Joseph arrived at with a real donkey. But the piece de résistance were two cameo appearances by a full grown camel. Plus there must have been around 100 humans (including a live Christ child!). There was an amazing phalanx of angels (one of the angels in the foreground was haranguing her neighbouring seraphim about the states of their halos, wings or other angelic gear … fortunately the microphones did not pick up this chatter. King Herod put in a stellar turn with an amped up acoustic guitar and a talking blues about the threat to his monarchy of the baby Jesus. The culmination (after a quintet of angels sang from a cloud high up above the marvelling congregation) were three fellows (with silent assistants) creditably sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Then we all sang Joy to the World and were dismissed but we weren’t fast enough to catch the grazing camel like we did last year. Guess we stayed too long with the goat and sheep.

            This is likely to become an annual tradition now that we no longer inevitably spend Christmas in Montreal.

            My friend seemed most disturbed by my NOW WHAT? gauntlet which was more me thinking out loud about what tack to take when I’ve finally exhausted the dragon theme. Still working on that.

Blog Rolling

Deep in the doldrums drawing dragons as an END OF AN ERA remedy. Hand wrought cards for the unsuspecting. Lots of cross hatching and ElWhacko© filigrees. Offers a good escape from Facebook Frenzy and assorted other Troughs of Time. Plus (as usual) it's all Good Practice. For what? Well END OF AN ERA is now slated as a closing chapter for my magnum opus HOKORI. With an even more ornate dragon guarding the chapter opening. I think I come by my obsession with dragons honestly ... as a child I visited the Schweppes Grotto in Battersea Park and apparently one of the sights was a fire breathing dragon with suitable incense pumped in. Some of my dragon studies are to be found over at my art website....

http://www.duvidoodles.com/dragon-daze.html

Duvi’s Trifecta of Death

One Tuesday in August I chanced upon a program on CBC radio while driving to the dump and going on a hunter/gathering mission to Robinson’s Country Store in Dorset. The guest was talking about the evils of using a language in the workplace but others might not be able to understand. When I looked at the day’s Globe and Mail obituaries I discovered that M— S— had died. The only person who had ever tried that other language trick on me back in the 1980s when I was working on a book project for him. One down.

         Then I spotted that C— J— had died. The insurance agent who persuaded me to get a disability policy back in the 1980s which had magically vanished into thin air upon my reaching my 65th birthday … and now that I was 65 my agent had just as magically disappeared. Two down.

         Everyone knows that things like this come in syrupy threesomes so I wasn’t all that surprised for what came next. When I logged into Facebook I saw that there were three people having birthdays that day. Only two actually as two were the same person with two profiles. I had trouble wishing my first candidate a happy birthday … FB glitchery or dat ol’ debbil Mercury acting up again? … so I cut to the chase and went to one of the other people’s pages only to find that his friends were wishing him a “happy birthday in Heaven” or lamenting about how much they missed his ugly mug … E— C— had up and died on me. Three down. Or four if you count that he had two profiles.

         Problem with Cyberspace: it encourages bluster and keeps you away from whatever you should be working on!

PS When I got back to home base I found I had some poking possibilities. E— was now on offer. Along with two other long dead FB friends. Does the all knowing Facebook not know that these people are dead or are they sending me a subtle message. There is no reason to poke the dead … they are not likely going to return your pokes. BTW Holly feels I need a session of Facebook rehab.

The Wilderness

After the freak arrival of personal computers in 1988 I dug my heels in and told everyone that I wanted nothing whatsoever to do with them. Mel Hurtig had wanted me to reprise my 1985 TCE feat but on a computer this time. I went to one trade show where I was informed that I couldn’t possibly produce as many pages a day (approximately 70) using a computer. A few other pitfalls presented themselves and I regretfully told Mel that I couldn’t do it. (As punishment he didn’t let me design his junior encyclopedia at decade’s end … after that he sold his company to McClelland & Stewart and I never worked with Mel again … except to help him with his ill-fated National Party of Canada run at Federal governance in 1993.) A 2000+ page illustrated encyclopedia was hardly the thing to cut one’s digital baby teeth on.

         Thing was that I loathed most of the computerized design that I’d seen and I could see that it was going to spell the doom of typesetters in short order. (To this day Mono Lino Typesetting sits like a ghost on Dupont Street … and to think that we all saw it as an ideal place to work when our OCA class toured there in the late 60s.) I was informed by several production managers that they wouldn’t be able to use me as a designer unless I jumped aboard the bandwagon and got myself outfitted with an electronic studio. No thank you!

         So what did I do with myself? I continued to work as an illustrator … initially I was represented by Three in a Box but that proved to be too many artists with too few choice jobs to go around. I developed a new style … something I called El Whacko© … which I first utilized in a book called It Takes Two Judges to Try a Cow. The main purpose of this new style was to slow me down and make me more mindful of my artwork. I revived cross hatching and stippling … things I’d given up on as I had tried to speed myself up. One advantage was that the artwork didn’t have to be done in a single sitting anymore.

         Severed ties with Three in a Box once they wanted a cut of work that I’d generated myself (e.g. Red Deer College Press’s Money Midas). Not to mention that they could never reconcile my wanting to do original promotion pieces rather than just recycling old work like most of the other artists did. Continued for rest of 90s without a sales rep and handled my own self promotion with varying degrees of success and failure. My income was mostly just a fraction of what it had once been. But I wasn’t about to give up.

         In 1996 I had two concurrent book projects … pet astrology guides … one for cats and another for dogs. These helped me get through several bad patches in that year even if they didn’t bring in very much income.

         By 1999 I decided that maybe I’d made a mistake not buying into computerized design. So I bought a computer, a scanner, a couple of printers and got some useful programs and set about figuring out how to actually design books from scratch again. By 2000 I was back in the business of book design … just in time to find out that much of the book design had migrated to Third World countries where they worked for a fraction of our minimum wage. I got another sales rep but the business didn’t seem to be there.

         And so the wilderness continues….

Grandfather Shaw

Grandfather Shaw

By John Graham Shaw

In startling contrast with the stature and character of my maternal grandfather Newmarch, at barely 5’3” in his thick-soled working boots, my paternal grandfather Shaw was well below average height and was naturally self-effacing. As if to compensate for these disadvantages he deliberately cultivated a dignified, upright deportment, and affected the deeply resonant voice of a much larger man.

            Being a skilled machine fitter and lathe turner, he enjoyed an upper working class status, which, in those Victorian days, entitled him to wear a top hat between his house and his workplace.

            Before her marriage, his wife, my grandmother Shaw, as Louisa Trublood, had been on the vaudeville stage, with the comedy troupe of the great Dan Leno. Her professional life had peaked as a principal boy in a series of successful pantomimes.

            My father, John, was the first of their offspring, followed in quick order by uncles Charlie, Bill and Jim, then auntie Louise. Without exception the members of this family were naturally musical, and all could perform on a variety of instruments, including piano, violin, mandolin, banjo, one-string fiddle, and mouth organ. Just like their mother, all the children loved to entertain their guests with the latest romantic or ribald songs of the day, at their frequent house parties.

            Grandfather Shaw was a sound tradesman, who was never unemployed throughout his working life, as he moved between industries in need of his services to fit up or maintain their manufacturing equipment. His longest and most important period occurred in the employ of Merryweather, a firm specializing in the design and fabrication of fire engines and fire fighting apparatus, for distribution throughout the civilised world.

            He was also a very talented artist, well known for his black and white renditions of full-masted sailing ships, on realistically turbulent oceans. This ability had been passed through my father, who could draw a little, to me and my related careers in graphics and architecture; then much more fully realized, during my present retirement, in oil painting, watercolour painting and calligraphy. My own son, David, and his daughters, Florence and Holly, all possess this same natural artistic gift, most probably from these same genes.

            Unfortunately there is a dark side to this family saga, entirely the result of excessive alcohol consumption, characteristic of so many men of that era — including my own grandfather.

            This addiction, shared to a lesser degree by his wife, caused an accelerated impairment of his reliability and performance as a skilled, sought after artisan — so he descended into the swelling hordes of the hopeless unemployables of London.

            The status of the family declined rapidly, and poverty driven debts led to a drastically reduced domestic budget, with the pressing need for the children to leave school as they each reached the mandatory age of fourteen years, and were sent out to the first job they could get, to contribute their meager earnings to the household expenses.

            Frustrated by his continuous unemployment, sad and unable to control his chronic alcoholism, he became subject to violent fits of ungovernable temper, directed at his wife and her alleged deficiencies as a cook. After unflattering comments on the dish set before him, he was known, on more than one occasion, to fling the plate, complete with its offending contents, into the fire place or at the dining room wall.

            His children were appalled by this treatment of their long-suffering mother, and after her early death, in her mid-fifties, they all rejected him utterly, and left home to start their own family units … each an avowed, life-long teetotaler.

            Sadly, circumstances did not improve for the abandoned old man, and he slowly spiraled down, below the stages of chronic unemployment, into the “down-and-out” category. He was rescued from utter destitution when uncle Charlie and his wife, auntie Rose, took over the debt-ridden house, allowed him to occupy a small back room, with many stipulations to ensure his sobriety and future good behaviour.

            Soon after this, the rest of his children relented somewhat, and each gave him a small weekly allowance and with the cast off clothing from his sons, he regained a measure of respectable appearance.

            As one of his teenaged grandsons, the occasional sight of this little old man, strutting down the high street towards his beloved public library, clad in vastly oversized garments, and sporting an incongruous black homburg hat at a rakish angle, always caused me to intercept him and discuss the latest views of a very alert, well read and extremely intelligent close relative.

            At that stage he deserved some compassion and understanding, as a gifted individual, who was a victim of the Victorian edict of the unchallenged superiority of the male as the head of the household, the availability of cheap alcoholic beverages, and the incurable inferiority complex caused by his diminutive stature.

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