“I must let my senses wander as my thought,
My eyes see without looking….
Go not to the object; let it come to you.”
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
The Journal of Henry David Thoreau
Bennett, Jane Vibrant Matter Duke University Press, 2010.
I was born in Niagara Falls in the early years of the baby boom, and I stayed there until I was twenty‑one. Mine was not a happy childhood, though I was fed and clothed and never went hungry. What lingered were the quieter wounds—the anxiety bred by a narrow‑minded church, the physical discipline that passed for parenting, and the absence of affection or validation. In those days, such things went largely unnoticed, tucked beneath the veneer of respectability. My refuge was my grandmother’s house, where I could lose myself at her piano and feel, for a moment, unburdened.
In the fifties and sixties, there were few places to speak openly about mental or emotional strain. The church and its young people’s group offered a kind of sheltered social world, but it was a world with limits. By the time I graduated, I sensed that staying in Niagara would cost me more than I could bear. Leaving home in 1966—moving to Toronto—was not just a change of scenery. It was an act of survival.
Toronto was overwhelming at first. I worked odd jobs, spent a year at George Brown College, and eventually found my way into the sign‑painting trade. I made a few friends, the kind who leave a mark even when life scatters everyone in different directions. After eighteen years of trying to make Toronto work, I returned to Niagara in 1986 and started my own business. Niagara College helped sharpen my writing, but as hand lettering faded into obsolescence, I reinvented myself—this time as a pianist in retirement homes, a role I held for sixteen years.
Then a friend mentioned that I could earn a bachelor’s degree at Brock University. It was an unexpected invitation to begin yet another chapter, one rooted not in escape or necessity, but in possibility. James Kershaw, BA (Hons), Studio Art