An extraordinary model, Renee was featured in two photographs in the Erotic art show.
Much gratitude to her.
Title: Jesse's Knees
They are shaped like stereoscopic images of Hudson’s Bay A child’s drawing of a leg and knee: Alder saplings with bulging burls half way up. I took a photo of Jesse’s knees to help remember the early history of Band-Aids all askew like toy cars in a pile-up.
Jesse likes to summarize from time-to-time the incidents, as his tender skin gathers the accretions of boyhood. Some pale scars will be visible when he is a man my age looking in the mirror for the boy he was: This one I got when I fell off my scooter going down the walk behind the school-it was epic!
This one was tumbling from my fort on the picnic table. Substitute roller blades, skate board, wheelie on my bike, running full speed tripping on a root climbing the boulders at Mt. Maxwell slipping on moss at ninja camp, the tire swing, chopping wood, carving a weapon.
Jesse’s knees are a tangible record of summer’s freedom unleashed by a spirit of go, of adventurous days that begin with a rapid patter to the foot of our bed and a whispered “can I come up.” Since he first monkeyed out of the crib, so the day begins his knees ready for anything.
Jesse is fascinated by the marks on his skin, how cuts bleed, scab over and heal- a scab is both a badge and a project. A boy ferrets to a bunk bed hideaway to worry at the crust upon his knees profound for him as growing bigger every day. The ritual growth chart now reads fifty seven pounds and forty three inches.
I look at Jesse’s knees and try to conjure the boy standing on a wooden swing a half century ago.
Peter Allan: A Self-Portait
This self portrait was taken on our lower deck with some help from my son Jesse. Lynda and I were married on this deck as the tide came in. After the ceremony our nephew Travis paddled out to the harbour light with a bouquet for my late mother. He laid the flowers a kayak length south of the light, where some of my mother's ashes lie and those of Lynda's dad Doug. He poured a cold beer into the sea, we still do. For many years I kayaked into the view represented in my tattoo, guiding as the co-owner of SaltSpring Kayaking. The view of Mount Maxwell rounding from Menhenick Beach gives me a frisson to this day. My flashing red light is Jay Gatsby's green light, “the orgiastic future that recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further.... And then we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Lynda and I, our ashes will lie full fathom five by the light, of our bones will be coral made. Those are pearls that were our eyes: nothing of us that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. Sea nymphs hourly ring our knell as does Sunday 8 bells from St. Paul's Church.