Well, not everyone is getting married

Romantic tales from The Drawing Book's back pages

Hi friends! It’s time for some more comics from my old journal, The Drawing Book. Over the past few months (ten months, I think!!), I’ve been sharing these old sketchbook pages on a weekly-ish basis. This weekly ritual is a fun excuse for me to look back and remember adventures both good and bad, as I make my way along a mostly-chronological journey through the old days when I was a flight attendant trying to figure out how I fit into my new home base and my old hometown of Calgary.

I’d been flying for about two years, and I was twenty-five years old, when it suddenly felt like all my friends were getting married!

I wasn’t exactly jealous. Getting married wasn’t even on my radar. Back then, I wasn’t even sure whether I wanted a steady partner, or which gender they should be, if I did. But I think I was a bit jealous of the way my friends felt certain about what (and who) they wanted.

On new year’s eve, 1999, I had a layover in London. I stayed over with an old friend who’d just gotten engaged. The bride- and groom-to-be had pretty different ideas about how they’d spend their honeymoon, which made for some fun sketches. I was pretty sleepy on the flight back to Calgary the next day (but luckily, so were most of the passengers).

Instead of getting married, I was thinking of a song about getting your heart broken. It’s sung by Katisha, the (ridiculous but still kind of cool) would-be villain from Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado. I’ve always loved that music - like Katisha, it’s kind of ridiculous but also cool. As I mention on this page, I’d also drawn Katisha (singing a different, but also great, song) on one of the earliest pages of the first drawing book (she’s on the last page of that long post).

Katisha sings a song about how she’s been betrayed by the man she loved. (You can hear the song in this 1987 performance of The Mikado. It’s at 1:02, about halfway through.) This was a lot closer to the way I was feeling those days. Instead of getting married like all my friends, I had plunged into the world of dating. I made lots of foolish choices, but learned some good things, too. I drew myself on a boat catching fish in a net… I wonder how those men would feel about having been depicted as fish?

A note about that last page: “Fearing not I’d become my enemy in the instant that I preach” is a quote from the great Bob Dylan song My Back Pages.

(And one more note: If you look at that 1987 performance of The Mikado about one minute before Katisha’s song (at 1:01) you can hear the song about the fish in the sea. Also, Eric Idle is in that performance - now that’s cool!!)

“I did another crazy thing”

Instead of settling down, I was out having adventures! The next pages feature sketches from a spontaneous trip I took to Paris…

That last page mentions “the stories of Pietro” - stories that my dad used to tell. I recently shared an essay I wrote about my dad after he passed away (ten years ago). The original, longer version of that essay (published on my old blog) mentions his Pietro stories, too.

Indications that I am healthy

Maybe one of the reasons I wasn’t thinking about getting married, back when I kept this sketchbook, was because I’d been dealing with some mental health challenges. As this page shows, I was starting to feel like things were getting better! But, of course, there were ups and downs…

Although I tried to write with humour in the old drawing book, making fun of my own foolish exploits, sometimes things still got me down. Maybe, deep inside, I was wishing for that steady, settled state all those marrying friends of mine had found. On this last page, I wrote about how I was finding solace sitting in my parents’ old house.

This page mentions the things that were “helping to heal me”:

Corbu, my dog (I wrote about her in this Drawing Book newsletter about a trip to the Arctic)

My mom (I have written lots of comics about her. There’s part of one, in this previous newsletter about my family)

And music. The music of Dar Williams, Jeff Black, and “Rhett’s live ‘96 recording of My Back Pages.” Shout out to Rhett, a Bob Dylan fan I met in Dayton, Ohio (as depicted in this comic), who sent me a bootleg CD with what is still my favourite version of that great Dylan song.

Where is that CD? I still have it… I listened to it, not too long ago! I was going to put a photo of it in here, but I’ve combed my house and it still eludes me. But I’m pretty sure the song I was listening to, back then, was this live version from a show in Atlanta, which luckily is also on the amazing Bobserve website.

That’s it for now. Whether you’re married, unmarried, catching men like fish in a net, or just sitting at your parents’ house trying to make sense of it all, I hope you have good people and good music to help get you through! Thanks for sharing the old drawing book with me this week!