A new home base & an old home town
How I ended up in Calgary.
The last time I shared some stories from my old 1990s drawing book, they were about my life in Toronto as an art student at OCAD University. You can read those stories here. But those days were coming to an end. The story of the drawing book continues with me saying goodbye to my classmates and my house in Toronto’s Kensington Market. I said goodbye to my godmother, too.
I needed a job! I applied to work for Air Canada as a flight attendant. I was hired in the spring of 1997, just around the time my OCAD year was coming to an end. My training up at the Toronto airport started so early in the morning… I don’t know how I survived. (Art school is not a great preparation for early mornings.)
Air Canada hired me because they needed flight attendants who spoke German! I’d minored in German at the U of T, and I’d spent some time in Germany, so I passed the language test. Why did Air Canada need German speakers? They were starting a brand-new direct flight from Calgary to Frankfurt. All these new German speakers were based in Calgary. I couldn’t believe it. Calgary was the city I’d grown up in - the city I had tried my best to get away from. And now I was heading back.
Back in Calgary, I sketched the candidates of the federal election. Wow, there’s Preston Manning! If you want to see a good sketch of how Mr. Manning is looking now in November 2023, check out my friend Eric Dyck’s new comic strip about him here.
And there’s a sketch of my friend’s sister having a nap on her mom’s couch.
A whole new thing
But now I had to get used to my new life flying to Germany every week. Luckily it was a night flight - so I could go back to my late-night art school hours. No more early mornings for me!
I’m skipping ahead, but it’s kind of interesting to note that the Calgary-Frankfurt flight ran (pretty much) daily during all the years since 1997 when I started… until 2023, when Air Canada announced that it would no longer be a daily flight. When I heard that news in September 2023, I remembered an old comic I wrote about my life working on that route (spoiler: I stayed working on that YYC-FRA flight for 15 years). Here are a few frames from that comic. You can see the whole thing here.
But for now, back to 1997 and my new life renting a house with my friend in Calgary.
To read that tale of rollicking wild adventure, it is mentioned in my Substack post about seeing Bob Dylan play a show in Toronto! Here’s a picture just to give you the general idea.
As well as seeing Dylan’s show in Toronto, I also caught up with my friends there. I’d only been away from Toronto for about two months. I was definitely not feeling like a Calgary person yet - that would take years!
As I travelled around, I drank a lot of coffee. This page about coffee was updated during the months I kept the drawing book, so there are a few coffees on this page that refer to places I travelled later on.
My new life consisted of flying around to cities where I (mostly) didn’t know anybody, and then coming home to Calgary, where I didn’t really feel at home. I was so disoriented. I missed Toronto - but my life in Toronto had not been perfect, either. I’d struggled with depression during my year of art school, and I was still figuring my way out of it. I often imagined myself standing on an ocean shore - this was the place I went to in my mind when I felt gloomy.
It would be awhile before I’d get off that gloomy shore. But it would happen eventually.
Stay tuned for more comics soon! If you liked these ones, please subscribe to make sure you don’t miss any! And if you are already a subscriber, thanks for being here! It’s fun to share these old stories with you.