Seven Treasures, Part 8: guest post by Rick Brazeau

Read the Introduction, where you’ll also find links to previous posts in this series.

RICK BRAZEAU is a long-time photographer and a short-time writer currently living in Milton, Ontario, with his dog, Georgia. You can see some of his work on Facebook here.

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These are my seven treasures:

 1.

Once I had a little dog that I lost in a messy divorce. I know how silly that sounds, but it’s true.

I’d promised my buddy that I would look after him always, and in the end I wasn’t able to. So a few years later I went out and found another dog, same breed, that needed help. She was on drugs and was going to be put down. I brought her home from the state of Georgia and weaned her off the meds. It took her about a year or so to develop her personality.

Today Georgia’s funny and mischievous, loyal and lovable.

And I take care of her, and always will.

2.

Recently I got a tattoo on my arm of a quill and ink well. I think it’s pretty cool — blue and red feather, grey and dark blue ink. I got it because of an unexpected connection that I developed with a beautiful, talented young woman who managed to move me deeply and truly.

So today I have an adopted daughter who lives two thousand miles away but yet still lives within me. She already had that tattoo and I asked if I could copy it — although I have to say, mine is cooler. (Just kidding.)

I wear the tattoo as a reminder of my friend and of all my connections, all of the people who move me. They are why I try to create. Why I take pictures. Why I am learning to write.

3.

I bought my first camera — a Miranda Fv — 40 years ago and discovered that when I can’t focus (pardon the pun) on what is happening around me, I can pick up my photo gear and suddenly I’m in the moment, the now. Worries of the past melt away and concerns about tomorrow disappear. All that matters is what’s happening in front of me — within view of my lens.

I no longer have that old camera. When you’re an addict it’s hard to hang onto things, and even people, that are important to you. But through it I found photography, which became my first voice, a way for me to express myself without worry of being silenced.

4.

There’s a Cajun dude, a zydeco musician, Zachary Richard. He plays guitar and squeeze box and has a beautiful voice. Zydeco is Acadian music that got mixed up with Louisiana blues and a little East Texas country and is often sung in French, and when I listen to Zach I can’t help but think of my uncle Teles. He was a real lumberjack outside of North Bay — black piercing eyes, hawk nose, and hair combed straight back.

We’d visit the camp once in a while. You could only get there by horse-drawn sleigh. After everyone trudged back in from a long cold day we’d eat a quiet dinner, then gather around the wood stove and Teles would pick up his fiddle. He’d lost a couple of fingers on his bow hand and when he’d really get playing, a lock of his hair would flop down and he’d brush it back with that hand, but some would always be left hanging where the gap was from his missing digits. Someone would start banging out a beat with two spoons and maybe, just maybe, others would sing.

I never got a recording of those backwoods jam sessions and the world is a little poorer for that, but I’ve got Zach and zydeco to bring me back to that lonely lumber camp in the middle of a Northern Ontario winter.

5.

My mom wrote to my dad while he was in Italy during the Second World War, and one of her letters is among my treasured belongings.

The letter is lovely and full of hope and promise, written on a single sheet of very thin paper that when folded becomes its own envelope. The page is filled, on both sides, with my mom’s neat writing, all in English except the last line: “Je t’aime de tout mon coeur mon cheri.”

What’s extraordinary is that the airplane that was carrying the letter was shot down. Yet the letter survived the crash with four burn holes through it the size of Loonies. Dad received it in that condition a few weeks later. I like to think of the comfort that he got as he read and reread those words from home.

The letter was in his pocket when a grenade landed in the L-shaped foxhole where he was posted. He lay for three days in the Italian August heat and rain with a broken vertebrae in his neck, unable to move, a dead man across his chest.

And he survived.

I can’t help but think that the letter and what it represented may have kept him from giving up.

 6.

I moved recently, downsized a little, but I must have a garden. What I’ll plant I’m not sure, but I need to have space for a lilac bush, my baby rhododendron, some flox, and a few other bright and beautiful growing things.

The flox I first got about twelve years ago during my last marriage. When we split up, I transplanted a few stems to a friend’s place while I regrouped in an ugly apartment. When I eventually bought a little townhouse, the flox took centre stage — and will again at my new place very soon.

Have you ever saw a hellebore poke a pink or greenish yellow flower through a blanket of snow? As the snow melts, the flower dies, followed by the old leaves, only to be replaced after the next long, grey winter by new growth that’s twice as big and with twice as much promise of colour.

What magic.

And the most magical part of my garden is that I can take it with me.

7.

The photograph is a goofy one of a little red-haired girl in a mauve fairy-princess dress. She has a beautiful smile on her face and her arms around a guy wearing white slacks and sweater and a pink nose and bunny ears.

It was Easter. None of the adults in that room could believe that I would do it, but I hopped down the basement stairs and into the rec room and in my best silly voice kept saying, “Here comes the Easter Bunny, yup, yup, yup. Hippity-hop, hooray!”

I love that little girl. I held her when she was only a couple of hours old and I looked into her eyes, taking in every detail for the very first time. She looked right into me, right into my soul, and I couldn’t stop looking back, and suddenly I was falling. I can’t explain it but if you ever saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, the scene where Dave is hurled from one universe to the next … that is how I felt.

That moment gave me the conviction to stand up for an injustice that had occurred to another child many years before.

My fear didn’t disappear, but the love that was forged in the hospital room on her birth day gave me the strength to stand up to the Church, to stare it down.

It was hard and scary, but they blinked first.

How could I not dress up silly for her?

Your turn. What are your seven treasures?