I’m reading the book “An Anthropologist on Mars” by neurologist Oliver Sacks. He presents seven unusual cases, including the “Memory Artist”, Franco Magnani.
Franco has the unusual combination of an almost eidetic memory, an artistic talent, and an obsession with the town of Pontito, Italy. He spent most of his childhood there, until his father died and the Nazis came. He left the town soon afterward.
Eventually he was inspired to paint his memories of Pontito. What’s unusual is his exceptionally precise memories and depictions of an idealized, deserted Pontito from his youth. It became his obsession for decades. Read the book – it’s fascinating.
Anyway, his story inspired me to sketch a scene from my own childhood… a very specific scene from July 1, 1982.
We were living in Shearwater, Nova Scotia, just outside what was Dartmouth and is now the Halifax Regional Municipality. My dad worked at CFB Shearwater. We were about to move to New Brunswick, and on this last Dominion Day* I and three friends were sitting on a hill, waiting for the fireworks to start.
* July 1 is now known as Canada Day, and July 1, 1983 was the first official Canada Day.
I won’t get into details about the evening, except to indicate that there were two boys and two girls on that hill, and you can use your imagination after that. I was 14 at the time.
As Franco has visited Pontito several times since he started painting it, I have returned to Shearwater a few times since we moved away. It is smaller than my memories of it.
Much has changed – my school isn’t a school now (the building is a heritage structure) and the base has downsized – but much remains the same.
A house is still at 3 Barracuda Drive, our home for three years. It looks different than when we lived there. I don’t know if it has been refurbished or just replaced. The main entrance used to be by the driveway, and we didn’t have a deck.
The streets are still named for Canadian naval planes. “The hill” is still there on Corsair Drive. You can see it here on Google Streetview and it matches my memory pretty well.
I have no photographs of our time in Shearwater, so my memories will have to suffice.
