Even when the sky was grey, sad and miserable, dripping snowflakes and covering everything in white fluffy tears, we made merry. We slid down hills on toboggans and cackled at the fun that careening down a pillowy snow covered slope can ignite, in ages from grand-baby through to granny. Snow is best consumed fresh and frivolously.

 

 

We visited indoor excitements, found cozy and warm places to rest and eat, and have adult beverages while the small humans played with new friends. The week flew by but we filled it to the max, and made sure to visit and experience things that infused their tiny eyeballs and made them implode with glee. The new aquarium in the city is quite remarkable and very well done, while essentially being an oversized fish tank, it does offer an intimate visual proximity with creatures that fluidly baffle our land locked senses. Fish are overwhelming weird and cool. Jellyfish, at best, are a gateway to the afterworld of fantasy dreamscapes. I could have stared at their squiggly weirdness for hours.

 

During the visit I had grand, scheming intentions of getting the little lads to draw me pictures that I could intersperse throughout the illustrations I am creating for the children’s story books I plan to write. All about The Adventures of Gramps Jim. I asked Jonah, my eldest – and most likely to win a nobel prize for fixing global warming or to become the inventor of the worlds first Ninja-Robot – nephew, to help me draw some pictures, he was very keen. We laid out a selection of pens and rolled a huge scroll of paper out across the table. A palette of endless opportunity lay waiting.

We were all set, and had momentarily distracted Callum – my most likely to wrangle snakes or invent a combustion engine made out of recycled bottle caps that could potentially solve world famine, except he probably would first manage to blow it up before he could patent it – nephew, long enough to get the drawing started without him ninja jump-kicking across the table like a flaming-man-child-creature.

“I want you to draw a picture of a sailboat.”

“Ok, Aunty Tracy!…Hey, Aunty Goat Foot, look at this boat I am drawing.”

(Several years ago I taught the boys to call Claudine, ‘Aunty Goat Foot’. I am not sure exactly how it came up, but it has certainly stuck, and I am not sure the youngest child even knows what her real name is. I consider it to be one of my greatest achievements, second only to the time I learned to play the beginning part of Phill Collin’s Groovy Kind of Love on the saxophone. It’s really all downhill from there for me.)

Sketching enthusiastically and angelically, the scene was placidly delightful, and we were onto what I thought to be quite a successful track. But perhaps all of the weeks activities had overexcited and saturated their imaginations. Perhaps seeing, up-close, so many grinning, nibbling mouths of sting rays and sharks with jagged dentist taunting teeth, makes you think of underwater life in more science fiction induced capacities. And with the soon attracted input and attention of Callum – the sail boat scene rapidly fell victim to the ill’s of a swarm of radioactive seagulls, and a bevy of massive sharks, carrying lasers and rocket grenades, launching and exploding into unsuspecting sea creatures. Little Nemo’s minding their own business, then BOOM. Mermaids and crocodile-sharks were aplenty (yes they exist, I saw them in the drawing, duh) and I learned that some of them have propellors for tails.

It all really went downhill quite fast and while it ended up being a fascinating, overall depiction of the darker side of sea creatures, sword wielding wales, and a lesson on how many gills sharks have (he actually knows this, I don’t know why) I soon realized that perhaps I would have to rethink that plan of amalgamating some of the boys sweet, happy drawings to include in the books. But the fun, limitless expansion of imagination and laughter had made up for that ten fold.

This was one of the salvaged, useable elements, one of the sharks – before a whale shot it with a flamethrower, i.e. scribbles galore. Gramps Jim did encounter the odd shark or two on his voyage, but I haven’t see any reference in his sailing log about them having had handguns or rocket launchers. Perhaps I have not read far enough into the journey just yet. Mum has bestowed on me the unspeakable delight of bringing me dad’s sailing log, to review and read. It is a handwritten, daily report of his adventures across the deep, rough, unwelcoming Atlantic ocean, more years ago than I ever existed. Alone and filled with a lust for adventure that I envy and marvel at daily. I hold it, and feel like gold dust is in my nervous fingers, more sneak peaks into his past.

I can’t wait to delve into it and unlock some more insights and secrets, hiding in the curve of a letter and dot of an ‘i’, about someone that I was a part of before I was even a creation. About adventures that shaped his life, long before he embarked on the collaborative journey of helping to shape mine. I hope one day, when I am gone – to wherever it is that we all go – that my kids will think about me like this, and wonder who I was and why we were all even here to make the differences that we are supposed to make. Our lives and timelines might be all different, but really, the truth is that we are all so very, very connected.