visiting dave and lisa

We don't have many friends. Real friends, the not online kind. Touch them, hug them friends. We have many virtual friends. People we've never met. Some are archived in our Microsoft Outlook backup files. Conversation fossilized in binary code. Posts, chats, transcripts, flirtations crys for help. Most long ago deleted forever. Gone and never were. I always wanted a pen pal when I was a boy. Someone from Africa. Someone who could help relieve my perpetual loneliness. Today I have too many writing mates. They are from everywhere. The responsibilities that go with this kind of connectivity piles up fast. Mountain of posts unreplied to. For me, an aspiring children’s book writer/illustrator, it's wonderful having communities of peers to consult and commiserate with. My kidlit critique group plus my other mailing lists and message boards, for illustrators, writers, designers, and on, they're a help. I' share personal things with online friends, characters, tippy-tapped out on keyboard. But Dave and Lisa are real. We hung out with them last week during Nuit Blanche, the all night art festival, imported from a Paris event, held for the first time in Toronto. Which was spectacular.


We've known the Dave and Lisa since Paula and Lisa met at YTV's daycare where Liam and Jacob were stored during the day. We all worked. It was a good daycare. The boys love each other, they're sympathetic soul brothers. Rarely argue. We visit Dave and Lisa often. Often for us. We visit only my mother more. They don't realize how much they mean to us. They have many visitors. They're life is full of transiting friends and family. Their home is homey. They make friends everywhere. Their tenants are their friends. They realize how much they mean to us. Sometimes it hurts, but we also know it can be tough to be around us. We're tough in our heads on them. Not in words, but in our thoughts we're hard on the way they relate to each other and to their child. We talk about them on our way home after visiting them. The whole way home. We're critical. As much as we love them. We're not liking some of their interpersonal stuff. We invite them to our place regularly but they don't come. They always throw out the red carpet for us when we visit their beautiful downtown home . They cook for us and treat us with welcoming kindness and respect. I spend lots of my time drawing when I'm there. They don't mind. They love art.

David is a great sculptor but he has a troubled artistic persona. I believe it's basically a self-worth issue. He suffered deep and damaging emotional wounds as a child. It's sad seeing him struggle year after year to surface creatively. It's painful. He's working hard to unravel the mess in is psyche. We all love him. He's a kind and gentle man. He's lost career momentum, it frustrates and upsets him profoundly, and he's trying to reinvent his purpose along personally meaningful and sustainable lines. I'd love to see his plethora of wax models cast in metal. But he's down on the return on invest aspect of the process, and faithless about his prospects for critical acceptance. Lisa is not in his corner in this area. Not at all. We wish she was. I also wish we were closer friends. Paula and I wish we had more friends. But we don't . We have each other in it's working really good.