Friends & family, real and imagined

Old sketchbook comics about the people in my life. Most of them were real!

Hello! It’s time to look back into The Drawing Book, my sketchbook journal series from many years ago! In the last few weeks, I wrote about my brief romance with an American boyfriend. That story ended with a trip to Italy. But somehow, I missed a few pages that took place before that Italian voyage, earlier in the spring of 2000.

Today, let’s fill in those gaps, starting with a page I drew while flying to San Francisco. It was an impulsive decision, fuelled by my desire to see the boyfriend… and maybe a little foolish! I remember drawing this while the plane was circling… the landing in SFO had been delayed for some reason, and I was trying to pass the time with silly quotes from movie heroes.

In case you don’t recognize those old heroes of mine:
Frederick Wentworth, from Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, was portrayed by Ciaran Hinds in a 1995 BBC movie version of the story (Nick Dear wrote the script. I really LOVE that movie. It was released right around the time my parents were splitting up. I wanted them both to see it, but they didn’t want to go to the movies together. So I went to see “Persuasion” with my dad, and then I went again to see it with my mom. It was that good!)
Why did I draw Nick Cage (Ronny Cammareri of “Moonstruck”)??? He is kind of a flawed hero, to say the least. I guess I have a soft spot for fans of Puccini.
George Emerson, as portrayed by Julian Sands in “A Room with a View” - well, I’ve written about that movie already.

But those were just “dream men.” The plane finally landed, and I made it to the home of my real boyfriend (and his roommate).

According to the next page, it looks like I managed to get back to Canada by taking a flight to Edmonton, and then luckily getting a spot on a flight to Calgary. Ah, standby travel!

It looks like I drew part of this page on a later trip to BC, where I did my annual Air Canada training. Another page, another airport… that’s what my old flight attendant life was like!

Back then, I was in touch with so many friends! It was a lot easier to stay connected, when flights were cheap and plentiful, and I had lots of free time. Here are some of those friends. Funny I put my dog in there too! (I wrote about my dog in this previous episode.)

On a trip to Ontario, I sketched some of my relatives. It says “pretty lousy pictures,” but I actually always really liked the way these pictures turned out. They’re sketchy, but they bring back memories of those folks. I just saw my uncle and aunt, a month ago! They haven’t lived in Milton for over thirty years now, so we finally stopped called them the Milton Burgeners.

Last of all, here’s one of my favourite drawing book pages. Back then, aged twenty-six, I tried to imagine what my life would look like, ten years later. Now I’m looking at this page about fifteen years AFTER this imagined scene. I still like the way it looks.

Let’s see. Did I really end up doing any of these things?
1. I still like grey rainy weather, and I did get to paddle a kayak a few times, but I still live in dry old Calgary. (Although, it’s raining today… the first really rainy day of 2025! Hooray!)
2. I am not writing or illustrating children’s books, but I am, somehow, earning money doing art that I like! (I wasn’t when I was thirty-six, though. I really only started making a living as a full-time artist when I was in my early forties.)
3. I still love coffee!
4. I don’t have a dog, after all.
5. I don’t have a red-haired son called Silvio, but I do have two sons. The first one was not born till I was thirty-five, so my parenting journey started a little later than I imagined in this scene. (By the way, who was Silvio? He was the kid I imagined, when I used to wonder what my future kid might be like. I called him Silvio because there is a great Bob Dylan song called “Silvio” which always sounded to me like it was being sung by a wise old person who’s giving some life advice to a younger person, maybe called Silvio.)
6. This hypothetical scene is taking place in 2009, at which time, Dylan had released 34 studio albums… along with a few live albums and compilation albums, so who knows - maybe 53 was a good guess!

Thanks for reading. Hope this finds you in a place that your ten-years-ago self would have wanted to end up!