7. Small Island

Small Island

This is the view from the opening of the Desjardins Canal between Cootes paradise wetlands and Hamilton inner bay on Lake Ontario. The small island is man made to help protect the nesting birds. This was as far as I could walk at this time and my wife and I would rest here before heading back to the car and home on our daily walks. 

The original painting is only 8 X 10 inch. So, much of the detail and beauty of this location is hidden but the memories of the time spent walking with my wife as we got adjusted to this new way of life, are priceless. 

Using only the primary colours I wasted more paint, trying to remember how to mix the colours after a thirty year absence form doing any art, than I used on this painting, but it was a good stepping stone and an enjoyable experience.

I actually painted a colour wheel after this for practice. I distinctly remember when I left high school art saying I would never ever paint another colour wheel again.

After all the things I have experienced, this is probably the first time I slowed down enough to really think about things.

I have spent way too much time working hard in my life and not enough time enjoying what I have.

Yes I did make time for my family by taking holidays, being my children’s Beavers leader, Cubs leader and soccer coach, playing games; all sorts of fatherly things; But, I never slowed down.

I worked 50-plus hours a week and spent as much time as possible doing something all the time. Now here we were, my wife and I walking slowly down a paved path, no rush, just time to talk quietly, share and adjust to this new way of life.  It was what we needed and I am so happy we had this time together.

It might just be a simple painting, of an insignificant stretch of water with a pile of rocks for an island, but it sure helped me. 

6. Caught a cold.

I've caught a cold. Should be okay right?

Ok, keep going to work, cold gets worse; Take a day off.  Start to feel better, return to work. Cold gets worse, take a few more days off, take a week off, and take 2 weeks off.

Finally get back to work for a few days and my knees hurt so bad I cannot stand up.  What's going on? They are hot and swelling and I have over an hour to drive home. 

Get home, pick up my wife and off to the hospital. Turns out I have torn the quad tendons in both legs and will need to be in a Zimmer splint on the right knee for 5 weeks. Can’t walk or bend my knee. 5 weeks of not teaching turns into 11 weeks. Seems the leg is not healing and now my wrists and hands are starting to have problems.

Ok, things are going downhill again. It's ok, I’ve been through this before, just keep calm. I worked at a private school, so 10 days of sick leave are gone, unemployment insurance will cover me for 15 weeks.

My son is studying at university; my daughter is in college, my wife hopefully will find a part time job to carry us and social assistance said they will help too.  Ok, we get to keep the house this time, just need to cut back on any extras and we’ll get through this. 

Off to see a Rheumatologist. She is newly starting out in her own practice, but just finished two years working with the best doctor I have ever seen and recommends an ANCA blood test to rule out Granulomatosis with polyangitis (Wegners), an extremely uncommon disorder that causes inflammation of the blood vessels in your nose, sinuses, throat, lungs and kidneys. It couldn't be that right?

Guess who has Wegner’s. My ANCA levels are off the charts and this very new Rheumatologist doctor has found it very early and is sending me to see Dr. Kalidi.  

http://fhs.mcmaster.ca/medicine/rheumatology/faculty_member_khalidi.htm 

This man is the person you want to know if you have Wegners in Canada. How blessed can I be to have such a great doctor and his team? 

People come from miles around to be treated in Hamilton and I am 15 minutes away. Now, you would think someone with this doctor’s credentials might be arrogant or have a terrible bed side manner. No, not this man, he is great!

Answers all my questions, supports me, and takes away most of my fears. He even calls me at home on weekends when he gets a bad report from one of my tests and sets up lung specialists on a Saturday.

Ended up in the hospital for a week, but I’m alive.    

More about Wegners http://www.celebritydiagnosis.com/2014/02/death-ghostbuster-harold-ramis-gone/ http://rheuminfo.com/

Ok, so I’m sick, it turns out very sick. But hey, I get Ontario Disability support; some Canada Pension money and my medical expenses are being covered.  My kids get to keep going to school and I get to buy a coffee every couple of weeks. Life is still good, I am alive, still got a place to live and I am getting great medical care.

Then I get my first real flair up from Wegners and the pain is incredible. Wow, back surgery without pain killers is nothing compared to every joint in your body hurting, all at the same time.  

It took two weeks for the Prednisone to reduce the swelling and ease the pain, and that put me at the limit of my ability to cope. For the first time in my life, I wished for death to ease the pain, but I’m still here and the pain passes, and knowing the pain will pass makes it easier to cope.

The next three flairs were worse still, but knowing you can get through, makes it easier. Over the last two and a half years my doctors, yep, now I have a team of 7+ specialists, have tried several different treatments, including 9 sessions of chemo and am now trying Rituximab. I have very high hope for this one, so I am sure I will get remission, to at least stop the flares, soon.    

Two years at home, can’t really go anywhere nor do much. I am stuck in a dark place looking out at the world.  I’ve watched almost every movie on Netflix already. We don’t have cable, it’s too expensive and I am bored out of my skull. My wife brings me a $3 dollar acrylic painting kit of an English country home.

The dollar store has two more kits, a bunch of roses and a cheery blossom tree; Ok painted them, now what? Middle of November 2016, buy blank canvas and a tube of red, yellow, blue and white quality paints and that’s how I started my journey of becoming the artist DAB. 

I am getting out of this box and moving on to something new! I hope you will accompany me along the way as I make these paintings and explain why and what I was thinking, or not thinking, at the time I made them.

See ya all next time!

5. Modern Joys

What happens to all of the modern "Joys of Life" after 2 years of not being able to work?

Yep, you guessed it. They all go away. Goodbye house, second car, camper trailer. So here I am 37 years old, a wife, two kids, a little bit of furniture and a small apartment.

What do I do now?  Well, you spend some time like learning to walk again at the pace of a caterpillar! Then you head to university to become a technology teacher, why waste all of those years of experience and training right?!

So after a successful year in university I go to a Job Fair and for a hoot I put my name into a school in England.

Wife says there is no way we are going to England...

Then I get a call from the school in England on Victoria Day, I thought it was a joke, I mean don’t they celebrate the Queen’s birthday there too? Turns out it’s a different day in England. Anyway, they want me and are willing to fly me and my family, as long as I commit to one year. I stayed for 7 years.

So, I get to England and start teaching and find out my qualifications are not good enough, so teach during the day and more part time university at night. And 3 years later, I get an honours degree, and I am a now fully qualified to teach in two countries, still love teaching. This is my calling, work my way up to second in charge of the Technology department when the head of department’s wife gets Cancer.  Two other teachers leave, the head of department and his wife are out for health reasons, two teachers are untrained and I have a whole new department of new teachers learning all these subjects... and the school is going through a yearlong Ofsted school inspection. Can it get any worse?

Yep, unfortunately one of my new teachers had died half-way through the year unexpectedly, and now I really work myself silly for the whole year; Writing lesson plans, writing reports,  providing training and keeping all the subjects running, let alone actually teaching students!

The department is still doing great, very high grade average, beyond target even. To celebrate? The school hires the husband of one of the Geography teachers in to be my new boss. Wait…  What’s going on? This can’t be right, this guy has no idea how to teach all of these subjects!

At this point my son is finished A-Levels, my daughter has completed her GCSE’s, and I can’t take anymore! I am done; we are going back to Canada!

Although my time teaching in England was over, I feel I was very successful. I had above 90% pass rate, most of my students not only enjoyed my subjects but did extremely well and all of my engineering students now either have a trade certification or engineering degree.

Got a message from one just last week, thanking me for giving him the love of engineering!  He now works for Warner Brothers, making sets and you may have even seen his work in the movies Harry Potter, Wonder Woman and the Justice League.

When I became a teacher, I searched out my old English teacher, who was now working for a brain injury charity organization, to thank him and explain how he changed my life. I remember a moment on the phone call where he choked up and I could tell I brought a tear to his eye and filled him with joy.

When student’s find you years later to thank you for what you helped them with, it is the greatest feeling in the world. I have received that call several times since I left England, and each time it has brought a tear to my eyes and great joy to my soul and this feeling never diminishes. 

Back in Canada, I take a year off teaching to work at a satellite internet company and recover my mental strength. Help my son buy a house, and move in with him to pay the bills while he goes off and studies at university to get his degree.

Then I take a job in a private school as a teacher and technology integrator. I turn a chalkboard school into a high tech interactive white board school with multimedia in each classroom. Love this job; Love the school and the staff. Everything is going great and then I get a cold... but that's for another time.

4. Work

Where was I? Oh yeah. 

Hand on the door to the college; My dad is with me, telling me he will pay for my first year and… my mouth opens and out comes "Dad, I don’t think I can take another 4 years of school right now, I need a break!"

Dad said "If you don’t go to school, you’ve got to get a job."

Yep, I’ll just work for a year maybe two then go to school. Yeah, right! Off to work I go.  1 year a butcher, 2 years a plastics extruder operator, 2 years food processing line worker, 1 year grounds and marina caretaker, 1 year computer software sales rep.

Then walking into the employment office looking for something new and out comes a man who asks if I can weld, if am I looking for work, and finally "When can you start?"

 

I said it will take about an hour to get my boots! 

After 3 days of bending over a band saw doing the most boring job I have ever done, he hired me full-time and started to teach me to be a tool and die maker.
   

15 years later I was still working as a tool and die maker. Studying die theory, metallurgy, blue prints and working on everything. Cars parts, ice-cream making machines, and even parts for nuclear power plants.

Work my way up from apprentice, to department head of a small shop, to foreman of a seven person jobbing shop where I spend most of my time troubleshooting and telling others how to fix various tooling problems.
 

Things are going great, I met the love of my life, have two great kids, became the leader of our local cub scouts group, bought a house, a camper trailer. All the joys of modern life.

 

July 13^th 1991 I met this beautiful lady. One week later, I told her “she was the women I was going to marry”. She said ….

“Your right” and we got married 3 months later.  This October 2016 will be 25 very fast years together. She is still a beautiful lady and my best friend.

One day, I am putting up a swing set in the back yard for my kids and wham. Out goes my back. I can’t walk; I see chiropractors, massage therapist and doctors, no relief.

There is a reason they don’t do all those surgeries to fix club foot anymore, apparently it wrecks your back. After two years of suffering, I finally get to see a back surgeon, one of the best in Ontario and possibly North America, and he says "I can fuse your back but you will never be a tool and die maker again but the pain will be much better and you will be able to walk."

 So I get the surgery May 1, 2002, 5 days before my 37^th birthday.  As I am waking up they find out this guy is also extremely allergic to morphine and cannot have anymore or it will kill him.  At the time I thought this was the most pain I would ever experience.

It hurt so bad I could not even open my hand to release the morphine pump, and legally the medical staff couldn't do it for me either! They did try some Percodan on me instead, but that's for another time.

3. Moving on

Chained

If you can’t break the chain, rip out the post and drag it with you.  

Stuff happens. I figure you have two choices; you can sit down and quit, or get up and move on. 

While working in the metal shop at school, I hear the teacher yelling out to me, I look up and see all the other students and the teacher in the doorway pointing at a flame above the acetylene tank I am using. Yep. Big tank of highly explosive gas with a little flame burning nicely on top of the shutoff valve, I’m in trouble again. So I calmly lean over, cup the flame and blow it out. Teacher said I could have blown the flame into the tank.

  

Well, I figure if I run for the door it could blow up before I got there and kill us all anyway, so better off to try and put it out. Moral: Keep calm, don’t get blown up, and you might even get a great reputation around school of being the bravest kid around.   

Taken Hostage: grade 11 technical Drawing class. Student sitting behind me is requested to the office. He doesn’t want to go so grabs a utility knife (the one with the very long and sharp extendable blade). Puts it to my throat and says he wants to leave and I am coming with him.

The poor student teacher is in shock. The knife leaves a little cut  on my throat and we are standing there for what seems like forever.  There was nothing I could do, so I stand there nice and calm and accept my fate.  Seconds later he puts the knife down and runs out of the room, we heard the police drag him out of the school moments later and then never heard from him or about the incident again. No big news story, no councillors, no "bring everyone together to talk and cry", just move on past it and survive. The poor student teacher did take a few days of to recover.

Sometimes bad things happen to get us ready to handle things that are much worse. Later that year I was attacked with a knife again, and if not for the two previous experiences I may not have kept calm and walked away alive. The pain of this experience is still chained to me but it will not stop me from moving forward. I ripped the pole out and dragged it with me.

That’s it, enough sad stuff right? Just finished making the sign for the teacher’s end of year party “We made it!”. Heading to my last art class in high school and … My Art teachers dies. Massive asthma attack. He died outside his brother’s house the night before.

That’s it, I am done with high school and headed off  to college! But of course “We don’t accept applications from your school”, so I had to go to a main stream school for at least one year to get in.

So OK, spent one more year at another high school, completed grade 11 and 12 accounting, computer programming and system analyst.  Bored out of my tree, seems main stream schools teach at their pace only, not the pace I can learn?

OK, I’m finally ready for college and certain that I am going to be a computer programmer; I have my hand on the door... but that's for another time.

2. Turned around

Window Pain

Ok, so I can walk again, and it’s off to school and like every first grade student, I want to do my best. But, sometimes things get in the way, like when my daughter wanted to ride her bike on a rainy day but instead sat bored at the window pane.

I failed grade one. Seems they didn’t pass students who couldn’t read back then just because they got older.   Half-way through my second year in grade one, they found out I could read perfectly in a mirror. Yep, that’s me again, backwards and right to left.  I have dyslexia real bad and once I was old enough ( 2 years later ) I was sent off  for special education  to work with very special teachers who turned my words ( and world ) around. Wasn’t easy, I hated it, and spent hours each day for 3 years in a room by myself with a projector flashing letters on the wall. Would I do it again? You bet! I can read.

So here we go, off to high school with kids my own age, yep they got me all caught up.  I was great at math, poor at reading, and able to spell in my own strange language. I hated school like everyone else and then, met some of the best teachers I ever knew. I finished high school with a 92% average grade and was named valedictorian.

My math teacher introduced me to programming on the IBM Pet computer, had to take two different math courses to get into that program but getting my CCNA instructors qualification many years later had started with this one great teacher.

My art teacher introduced me to commercial art and colour theory.  And I loved it so much that I created great cityscapes, paintings, and produced lots of calligraphy for 3 years.  I was going to be a great artist, then I saw a kid, who after finally being forced to draw a picture like it was the worst moment of their life, produce something so much better than my work I had quit doing art (Last and only time I ever quit something  ... well except when I quit smoking).

My English teacher gave be a different type of book every day and took it back the next day, all he asked of me was to read some of it.  He never asked me anything else about the book that I could remember.   After several weeks of this he gave me Z for Zachariah, I wouldn't let him take that one back. Then he got me more books like that. Soon I was skipping school to finish reading books (don’t tell my teachers, because I said I was sick).  This is the teacher that turned my life around, and because of him I eventually became a technology teacher with a full degree... but that's for another time.

1. Introduction

Hello and Welcome to Becoming the Artist DAB.

As I like the number 5,  I thought it would be good to start this with 5 questions to begin our journey.

1 Where to start ?

2. Who is DAB ?

4. What brought him here ?  

3. When does one change ?

5.Why does he paint?

Old Shed
Where does this story begin? Look in the window, no not the reflection in the window, look in closely at the broken window in the lower right corner,  back in that dark corner. See that couple? That's my mom and dad...Not really, but it is a great old shed.

This is kind of how I think of myself, a little broken around the edges but still trying to be useful and reflect on good thoughts.

So DAB,  David Allen Bigelow  Yep that's it, some guy born in the 60's.  No not partying in the 60's, born then. Just old enough to know I missed the party. 

The second son of Lynn and Fred Bigelow, who were too young to be recognized as married by the Canadian Army to get the married soldiers' bonuses, but extremely dedicated to their two sons and facing a spectacular challenge raising a son, crippled by club feet. They worked hard to find a solution and got some help for their second son’s needs.  

Yep, that was me, six months old and starting 10 years of procedures of repeated breaking, straightening, and bracing my legs; 27 times each I am told.  This kid learned to walk, run, ride, and eventually getting  those great straight legs to conquer the unicycle and ride it all around the city I was born in.  Yep it hurt, it hurt a lot; but would I do it again? You bet! I had a blast running on them legs and only broke one once after that... but that's for another time.