Elizabeth: Browse The Strips

Monday, May 14, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Alan would often call my kids "short one," which I thought was charming. One day on a business trip, I got into an elevator with a woman and her young son. I looked down at him and said, "Hiya, short one!" His mom immediately berated me for saying cruel things to a child who had an illness and was abnormally small for his age. AAAUGH!

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Lynn's Comments: The comment "What you need is a wife," never used to bother me. I didn't think of it as sexist. For the most part, we are more organized; we like to keep things clean and tidy. Today, however, I'm more likely to take the side of the independent woman and say, "What you need is discipline, pride, and self control!" After his marriage, by the way, my brother became extremely tidy!

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Parents of young children can easily carry on two conversations at once. While showing a toddler that you are there and paying attention to them, you can also listen to and process adult communication. This is not something a non-parent can tolerate and now that I'm well past coddling a toddler, I can't stand it either!

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Lynn's Comments: I did have this conversation with my brother. He had been a musician for much of his life and was beginning to rethink the itinerant nature of his career. He wanted stability and a permanent home. It wasn't long after this that he went back to university and got a teaching degree. He was an excellent teacher.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Lynn's Comments: One of the many things I enjoy about my brother is his storytelling. When he was living in Hamilton, Ontario (I lived twenty minutes down the road in Dundas) his adventures with roommates, neighbours, and friends would liven up an evening. He could take amazingly uncomfortable situations and make them sound hilarious. It was stand up comedy at its best; one person's method of coping is another's entertainment.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Alan was a good catch--but a slippery one. I met a few of the girls he went out with; nice people, easy to have around. None scared him like Joan did, however, because she was "the one." I remember him talking about her with the kind of angst that comes when you are at a crossroads and have to make a serious decision. Did he really want to get married? Was he doing the right thing? In the end, they both made the right choice. Al and Joan have just celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Aaron and Katie were pretty good about eating whatever I made--but company cooking could pose a problem. I was often determined to make something I'd never made before, and sometimes, the results were less than great. This meant the kids ate Kraft Dinner while our guests ate the experiment. Only once, my husband said he wished he had taken that option as well.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Coincidentally, "Georgia" and Alan's future wife, Joan, looked a lot alike. I had even decided to call Georgia "Geo" for short!

Friday, June 8, 2012

Lynn's Comments: My folks were good badminton players. As soon as the spring rain subsided, they'd stretch out a net in the backyard and the games began. Alan and I would go through a couple of racquets each in a summer because Dad bought cheap ones. He knew we'd be using them to whack rocks, dirt, and each other. We even tried to make French fries by pushing a cooked spud through the mesh. We lost the shuttlecocks and made holes in the lawn. We pushed each other into the net and tried to swing from the posts. Badminton was an all-purpose sport, which we kids loved...and did eventually learn to play!

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Lynn's Comments: In reality, Rod and I had a very different kind of wedding. It was his first; my second, and we both wanted a small, private ceremony. Neither Rod's nor my parents could attend, so our friend, Marjorie Baskin, suggested we use the living room in her house--as her husband, Rabbi Baskin, was going to do the honours. She made us a cake. My brother and a few good friends were there. It was a beautiful service--a combination of Christian and Jewish ritual, which concluded with the breaking of a wine glass. It was a sunny afternoon and friends were looking after Aaron who, at the age of two, was not likely to sit still. After a celebratory drink and a piece of Marge's cake we went to pick him up. Aaron wasn't sure what had happened, but he knew our lives had changed. I picked him up and as he gave me a hug, he said, "I've now got a mom and a Rod!" This, as much as the ceremony, made us a family!

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Here, Michael decides to come clean about the money he's lost and Elly treats the whole situation like the lesson that it is. I got letters. Folks complained that I had made Gordon look like a thief, that he wasn't "that kind of kid!" They thought Elly should have gone to Gordon's parents and complained. They didn't know that Gordon's dad was at the pub and not likely to be home before dinnertime. They didn't know that his mom worked two jobs to make sure that the bills and the debts were paid on time. Behind every character was another story altogether--a story I had no time to tell!

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Lynn's Comments: It was hard to imagine my parents as children. To me, they had been born old and were just getting older. When they talked about days gone by, the photographs they turned to were black and white. Our world was in colour. What they talked about was hard to relate to. It was more like hearing a story than a real event.

Maybe it's because they had too much to do to enjoy the kind of childhood we had--they both grew up during the depression and had to work in order to help their families survive. Neither of my parents had the luxury of going to college or university. They learned from books and through experience, and were intellectuals in their own right.

I hoped that my kids would relate to my stories, but life changes so much between generations that Aaron and Katie probably listened with an attitude much like mine had been: "If you really were a kid at one time...why don't you understand kids NOW?"

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Lynn's Comments: For three months one year, Rod and I worked on his sister and brother in-law's farm. They grew grain and raised pigs and I quickly went from being a city girl to driving the combine, chasing piglets, and building bins. It was an extraordinary experience, and the farm became one of my favourite places to take the Pattersons!

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Lynn's Comments: To be completely fair at all times is an impossible task! Even if you do manage to think of everyone, the kids themselves will invent an inequality and you're stumped again!

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Buying my own things gave me pride and independence. On the year of my twelfth birthday, I saved twelve dollars. During the fifties, this was enough to take my family to Vancouver on the bus for dinner and a movie. It was wonderful to be able to pay for everything with my own earnings. That twelve dollars made me feel like a million bucks!

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Sometimes a friend would tell me something that was so perfect for a comic strip that I couldn't wait to go home and draw it up. My friend, Loretta, was a wonderful cook. She often had friends over for dinner and was always well prepared ahead of time. In our small northern town, certain fruits and vegetables were hard to come by, so when a shipment of fresh food arrived, we all got into cooking mode.

Loretta had filled her fridge in preparation for a neighbourhood get-together but had forgotten to remind her family that the food was for company. By the time she discovered their scavenging, it was too late to replace the groceries. When she told me what had happened, I remember laughing so hard that I couldn't catch my breath. A few weeks later ... the same thing happened at MY place!

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Auntie Bev and Uncle Danny were closely based on my sister and brother in-law, Beth and Don Cruikshank. They are both such wonderful characters, I hardly had to make anything up!

Friday, June 29, 2012

Lynn's Comments: The real Farley never saw the insides of a kennel. He was always billeted with friends, and I, in turn, looked after their pets.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Lynn's Comments: The kennel you see here was based on the kennel we (much later) put our spaniel, Willy, in. Situations, which were based on reality, didn't appear in a chronological order. I relied on ideas and imagery, which came from the disorganized mess that is memory!

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Aaron wanted to take his transparent plastic space-gun with him to Winnipeg and did not want it to go out of his sight.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Lynn's Comments: This was long before the strict security measures of today. In Toronto, however, Aaron suddenly pointed the gun at a man in a uniform and we were immediately stopped, searched, and reprimanded for trying to bring a weapon onto the plane. It was funny, but we should have known better!

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Lynn's Comments: The toy gun was confiscated and Aaron hoped that some other kid would get to play with it. I'm sure this happened. Someone must take all of that "dangerous" stuff home!

Friday, July 6, 2012

Lynn's Comments: In the story, I had pity on the security guard and made him human. After all, it's a thankless job with guidelines that have to be met. The guard we encountered, however, took himself and his position a bit too seriously, and I wished I'd remembered what he looked like so I could draw a better likeness!

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Strips about littering were always well received. This one was made into a poster and was put up at a lake in Saskatchewan. It was also a limited edition print, which was given to volunteers who helped to clean up local beaches.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Lynn's Comments: This storyline came from a real life adventure, which I wanted to have fun with and share. I used photographs of my sister in law, Beth and her husband, Don in order to get a likeness and although it's not easy for me to do caricatures, I managed to draw "Uncle Danny" so well, he was once recognized on the street in Winnipeg!

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Two prominent features of the prairies are the endless flat spaces and long, straight roads. A city person might wonder why cars and trucks cruise these roads at a snail's pace, but it's all part of the job. Farmers like to drive slowly and do their "crop-watching," while searching the horizon for rain. It often seemed that crop watching was more important than getting to where you were actually planning to go!

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Lynn's Comments: I used photos of Beth and Don's house as reference, too. The older lady here is "Dan's" mother--she made few appearances after this.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Lynn's Comments: Laura was a combination of Beth and Don's three daughters: Lauren, Chrissy, and Arli. It was much easier writing about one cousin in the strip than three!