Two unrelated things that have come to mind recently:

1)

When I was very young—about four or five years old, I think—I used to have a recurring dream about our living room couch catching fire spontaneously. It was the chocolate corduroy couch that had its’ back to the windows that overlooked Hope St.

The brown corduroy was my favorite couch for several reasons. Boy, our fat brown tabby, would curl up on one end. I would lean up next to him and he would purr while I petted him with my left hand and sucked the thumb on my right hand. The couch was also in the living room, as opposed to the family room—the living room being the more genteel space that my parents reserved for adult friends and glasses of adult beverages and fires in the fireplace. Kids and toys belonged in the family room. So the brown couch represented a clean, comfortable, restricted world.

The couch would always be burning on the right hand corner, opposite the cat’s corner. No-one would be nearby to help. I don’t know if I ever cried for help—I just ran my little self into the kitchen, and got the orange plastic mixing bowl, and then I dashed to the kitchen sink—I could just reach the tap on tippy-toe—and I filled the bowl up and ran back to the couch to splash the water on it. I ran back and forth, but the fire was more than little orange bowls of water could extinguish.

I always woke up feeling frustrated, angry. Abandoned. Where was everybody? Why was I doing this terrifying grown-up thing all by myself?


2)

In second year Fine Arts, I had a little solo show in a Summerland café. I had titled one of the mixed-media paintings “The Magistrate’s Daughter”. It was a head and shoulders drawing of a dark nude—her eyes black and far away, her expression mournful and exposed. A young couple bought it. The husband asked me about it—why did I name it that? I thought—I don’t know—that I couldn’t come up with anything clever to say. So I blustered and smiled around the truth, thinking that the truth would be lame and mundane. I told him “I don’t know… she just sort of suited that title. Don’t you think?”. I could tell that they were unfulfilled by my response.

The truth is this:

I have two European prints from my maternal grandparent’s house—they have both long since passed away. But I remember looking at the prints as a child, and wondering about them. One is a watery picture of a bridge over a city canal. It is called “Malines-Belgium”. The other is of a European townhouse, called “A French Magistrate’s House”. The etching is stark and straight, the front of the building ornate and imposing. I acquired the prints in my early twenties, around the time I started working on my BFA. I hung the prints in my Kelowna kitchen, and I would spend minutes at a time looking at the picture of the Magistrate’s house. Who was he? What was his family like? I built them lives, personalities. The daughter grew up, she never married… her oppressive and important father had something to do with this. She turned to secret night-time affairs to try to claim some piece of her life as her own… but she never became who she really wanted to become. She never got to become herself. And I held her back even more, because I didn't let her become real for that couple, either. I horded her story, kept her secret.

Summerland couple… do you remember my name? Have you ever googled me? I hope you do. I hope you find this story, and connect it to the portrait hanging in your living room or den. This is who she is. She is a somebody. One day, I will show you the print of the Magistrate’s house, where she still lives.