La Coppa Della Vita
"I have started a new chapter..."
Hello! After sharing some photos from a Bob Dylan road trip in my last post, we’re back to perusing the pages of the old drawing book, a sketchbook journal I kept in the late 1990s. This next section is about a new beginning. After living in Calgary for about a year, I moved to a new apartment! It was time to take stock of the things I owned.
Looking at this inventory of items… I’m surprised to discover that, all these years later, I still have some of those things. The set of pink cups and saucers. The small brown teapot. The big blue rug. Even the wicker basket!
The Brother Patrol
I have three brothers, and back in those days, all the brothers lived nearby. It seemed like they were constantly surrounded by crowds of friends. It was like a large extended family of extra brothers. So when I needed help moving, of course I called the “Brother Patrol!”
I drew some of those extra brothers in a recent post about Calgary indie rock band The A-Team. But now: back to my new apartment. Here’s a page I drew after waking up on one of my first mornings there (only readers of Tolkien’s Elvish script get to find out what my dream was about).
On that last page, I wrote that I seemed to have started a new chapter in my life. For a few years, I’d been in the habit of thinking of “My Life as a Book” (I wrote about that in this early episode of The Drawing Book).
On the page above, I also mention a previous Drawing Book page, which I’d labelled “the esoteric page of wacked-out flakiness.” You can see that page in this episode about “Flaky Introspection.” On that old page, I’d speculated about whether anything was “really mine.” In this new chapter of my life, I was starting to feel as though maybe some things were mine, after all.
The new apartment, for example. It was on 5A Street SW in downtown Calgary, right beside Western Canada High School. It was on the second floor of an old house. It was really expensive: $750/month!! But, I loved that apartment. The old house is gone, now.
I found some photographs of it.
One of the weirdest things about it was the gas burners in the kitchen, set at an angle from each other in the countertop. (Was that safe? Was that legal??)
I was a little short on furniture, but I felt at home right away. Later, I painted all the walls, too.
Ways to deal with people who cause you problems
The new chapter wasn’t without its challenges, though. Now that I was feeling a bit more confident, I still had to learn how to “deal with with people who cause you problems.” Here, I Iisted a few cryptic ways. I offer them now without comment, except to mention that there are references to two movies of great cultural significance, A Room with a View and Flash Gordon.
The Next Chapter
At last, I found the right name for the new chapter in my life that I’d embarked on. I called it “La Coppa Della Vita” after a then-popular song (my title was in Italian, because I didn’t realize until later that the song was actually in Spanish & it was called “La Copa de la Vida”).
The language didn’t matter! What mattered was the idea of “the cup of life,” and the birth of new emotions that it signified for me. At last, I was finding my feet in my new city, and figuring out my identity. It had a lot to do with having a new home.
At the bottom of this page, I mention three things:
A Room with a View, a movie I have sure mentioned a lot in The Drawing Book so far… I always compared myself to the heroine of that story.
A German hip hop song that was always playing on TV during my layovers in Frankfurt (“ANNA” by the band Freundeskreis… I still like that song.)
A self-portrait I had painted, at the beginning of the chapter of new emotions. I still have that painting!
Thanks for joining me on the journey through an old story about a new chapter!
