Five Years a Writer

my downstairs collage table area Way back in the late 1970s when I lived in a studio apartment, I plastered the walls with posters bought from the twice-yearly Imaginus art sale on campus. I loved wandering through the displays, choosing the pieces I wanted to have in my tiny home. Because I had discovered the Impressionists when I lived in Paris for a few months between high school and university, many of the posters I bought were reproductions of paintings by Degas, Monet, Manet, Pissaro, and others. I didn’t care that they were posters, ‘mere’ reproductions and unframed, I simply enjoyed their colour and beauty. Fast forward several decades and I now have original art hanging on the walls of my home, though not one piece is by an Impressionist. Instead, they are by my partner Val (acrylic paintings), by my paternal grand-mother (watercolours), or by friends (various media). Upstairs, the art is hung with intent. Downstairs, where I have my writing desk and my collage table, I have

my older sister Katy, my father Colin, me Always, but India only ever as metaphor “I wish I were dead.” My father and I lived far apart, so we talked on the phone, and almost every day of every week for the last few months before Dad did, mercifully, die, that is what he said to me before we hung up. I agreed with him that he had lived a good life, a long life, but now, he said, it was not good. I agreed with that, too. Confined in a body in which the heart kept beating but in which there was little heart left for living, Dad wanted out. He was done. I understood this. He was no longer the man for whom my mother would drop everything and run off to India with. He was now the man for whom my mother could no longer do anything, so debilitated was he from the stroke that had felled him and from which he had bounced back well, but for which he had been taking medications for so many years that his body was now succumbing to the side-effects of the medicines keeping it functional to the ext