The turbulent waters of Real Life

Old sketchbook pages that I drew in old Calgary coffee shops

In these posts from my old sketchbook journal, The Drawing Book, I’ve been alternating between two different subjects. One series follows the story of my life as a student from Toronto, who’s recently been relocated to my hometown of Calgary. The other series, Bob Dylan Comics, features stories of my adventures following Bob Dylan’s tour around. Last week, I wrote about a trip to see Bob Dylan in Italy. But this week, we’re back to my life in Calgary.

It was 1998 and I had been hired as a flight attendant on Air Canada’s Calgary-Frankfurt route. In between flights, I had lots of time to sit in coffee shops and draw whatever came into my head. On this page of the drawing book, I reminisced about some memorable shoes I had worn throughout the stages of my life thus far.

Here are those brown Oxford shoes mentioned in the first panel!

On that page about shoes, it’s nice to see a picture of my rebellious high school self reading the now-defunct Calgary periodical “Vox Magazine,” which was full of all the cool pop culture stuff of the day. It hasn’t been around for a long time, but you can find it in the University of Calgary archives here. And I don’t have any of those shoes anymore, either, except the expensive Bally shoes from Salzburg. They’re just sitting in a box - I don’t have much occasion to wear fancy shoes these days!

Taking the Plunge

If you look though past episodes of my old drawing book, you’ll see I often drew myself standing on an ocean shore. This ocean coast was a place I went to in my imagination when I couldn’t deal with the challenges of real life. It was also a metaphor for the way I felt a bit removed from really getting involved with things… and with people. But now I took the plunge - I dived into the waters of Real Life and started dating. The results were less than great, as shown here.

How could I protect myself from the creatures of the deep? I decided to build myself a ship! I blurred out some of the details about this ship, since that’s another story for another day.

I’m All By Myself

But an imaginary ship couldn’t save me from the fact that I was just plain lonely. Uprooted from my old life in Toronto, I still hadn’t put down roots in Calgary. Even though I’d grown up there, I’d been away for a long time. It didn’t help that my work schedule on the Frankfurt flight meant I spent most of my time out of town (or awake in the middle of the night).

On that previous page, I imagined Air Canada as the Paradise-Lost-inspired god who’d exiled me from the garden of Eden (Toronto) and left me out in the empty prairies. Of course, Calgary was full of interesting and cool cultural stuff of its own - I just didn’t know it yet. I drew myself sitting in Calgary’s Lido Cafe, which I didn’t even realize was an important historical spot. The Lido is gone now, but its sign remains, even now in 2024! (Here are two photos, one of the original cafe, and one of the old sign that continues to adorn the new building that stands there today. The photos are from an article published on the Kensington BRZ website.)

Community and Coffee Shops

I didn’t know it yet, but during all these days drifting between coffee shops, I was laying the groundwork for the life I’d eventually find in Calgary, the community I’d come to call home. I’m still there now, a quarter of a century later. Eventually, I’d find new friends.

I remembered those old days of feeling lonely and isolated in Calgary, during the recent pandemic years, when I experienced a new version of that story.

But there’s a solution for loneliness, and that’s community… and coffee shops! I’m going to see some of those new friends this Wednesday evening, at a new-to-me Calgary coffee shop, Congress Coffee! These days, I’m part of a local news outlet called The Sprawl, and we’ve been making some zines about Calgary history (You can read the most recent one here on The Sprawl website). We’re having a pop-up zine workshop at Congress from 7-9 PM on Wednesday, April 10. Come and talk about local stuff, fold some zines, have a coffee, or just say hi!

Maybe Paradise Lost can be found in a coffee shop, after all!