When I get to the border
More comics about my long-ago travel adventures
Hello drawing book readers! This is the place I share comics from my old sketchbook journal series, usually once a week.
When I read some of the other newsletters in my mailbox these days, full of news about the troubled times we are living through, I sometimes wonder if it makes any sense to keep posting these silly little snippets of my long-ago life, my travel adventures and my trivial problems. But, posting these old comics often helps me get through the current times. I’m glad I documented those stories - they inspire me to think about how I might tell some new stories, one of these days!
So anyway, let’s get back to the drawing book.
A few months ago, I posted some stories about getting my heart broken by an American boyfriend, back in the spring of 2000. After that, I stopped writing in the drawing book. Instead, I wrote some more structured comics in a different book (I’ve been posting those over the past few weeks). But, as the summer of 2000 drew to a close… and as my heart started healing… I picked up my drawing book again.
(That page appeared in an earlier newsletter, when I wrote about that Bob Dylan concert.)
After that, I travelled from Ohio to Germany, where I wrote about how it felt to be feeling happy again, for the first time since my heartbreak!
I was listening to a bootleg CD of a 1992 live all-request show played by Richard Thompson in New York City. This is still one of my favourite live performances of anybody, anywhere, anytime (sorry, Dylan fans)… and I’ll be forever grateful to the record store owner in Saskatoon who packaged that recording up into a CD for sale. One of the tracks is the old ballad Willie o’ Winsbury, which I made into a comic strip. I published that comic in a previous newsletter, which also features a photo of that CD. I still love this show!
(Here’s a recording of “When I get to the Border.” I don’t love it as much as my live version, but it’s still uplifting and great!)
Another reason I was feeling happy, back on that train ride in 2000, was because I had just changed my last name, for a few reasons I wrote about in this 2024 newsletter. Here’s my name-changing page, which I drew on this same trip to Germany.
For once, I wasn’t in Germany working as a flight attendant. I was travelling just for fun, to see my friends and have some adventures on my own. On the next page, I drew my friend’s aunt, who was visiting from Hungary at the same time.
Soon enough, I was back in Calgary, and continuing to feel happy, thanks to newfound friends.
The friend in the drawing above was writing a story about a man who’d lived for hundreds of years - hence my question! That friend passed away in 2018, and I wrote a tribute to him (which includes all the comics he appeared in), here on my old blog.
But back to 2000. The next page of the drawing book is a sketch from the last day of the year.
My mom had just moved out of our old family house, into a new condo with salmon-coloured walls. And I was living on my own in my little turquoise-blue apartment. We were both figuring out that it was ok to be single! (And we were also both learning to make rice… that’s another story.) A year of upheaval was ending on a happy note.
Let’s hope 2025 ends on a happy note, too! But we’re only halfway through - keep going!
Here’s one more note. I usually post these comics once a week, but I have something else in store for the days ahead, so I wanted to give you a heads-up.
I’m a big fan of YA Fiction, and one of my favourite authors is the wonderful Diana Wynne Jones. Over the past few months, I’ve been listening with delight to a new podcast called Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, in which authors Emily Tesh and Rebecca Fraimow discuss DWJ’s incredible novels. Well, this weekend, they got to my favourite one: Archer’s Goon. It just happens that I wrote a… well, let’s call it a LEGO-inspired tribute to Archer’s Goon, a couple of years ago. It’s divided up in to about fourteen short posts. I never published it, because this Substack is about comics, not about an amazing-but-kind-of-obscure children’s book from the 1980s!
But I’ll never have a better opportunity. It’s time! So, over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting my Archer’s Goon pieces: one every day. (I hope!) I’m not sure if I’ll have time to publish another comic next Sunday - we’ll see how that goes. If you DON’T want daily Substack newsletters showing up over the next couple of weeks, feel free to mute, or sign off, or unsubscribe, or whatever works - but bear with me. Things will get back to normal soon!
