Glittery Eidetiker

One of the most extraordinary young women I know thoughtfully places a dot at the Infinity Mirrors exhibit at our local art gallery. Artistic and gifted, my youngest daughter is a rare bird and the genuine article.

A music critic once wrote of her: "The drummer completely owns their set through crisp, accented handiwork, backing everything else wonderfully.” A self-taught musician, she writes songs of protest, resistence, hope. One of her bands, Prom Nite, was described by Jonah Falco (of Fucked Up) as “punk with a glittery ambition”.

She often sits at the keyboard in our living room, teaching herself to play. The tinkling notes of Satie's Trois Gymnopedies float up to me as I peck on my non-musical keyboard, spiriting me out of writer's block.

How fitting she should choose Erik Satie. The composer was as unconventional as they come. Against the background of the Belle Epoque and beyond, his approach to composing was astoundingly original.

Those last two words could also describe my daughter. She's the very definition of "one of a kind" - but then, we all are; some of us have just forgotten. She has not. And her inspiring presence always reminds me to dig deeper if I find myself falling into cookie-cutter mode.

In her kid years, she drew oodles of cartoons: Attack of the Household Appliances; Toast Patrol; Abraham Skinkon (yes, the President reimagined as a lizard). She has not lost that sense of humour, although she now uses different mediums for its expression.

A prodigious reader, spending loads of time in our city's many neighbourhood libraries. In school she tested as gifted, to the surprise of no one, and her science teacher suspected her of being an eidetiker (possessing a photographic memory).

So, her brain is a marvel, to be sure. But her intuitive and emotional qualities are pure gold. She lives true to her heart & her heart beats true.

People sometimes make her wary but dogs always bring a smile and she befriends them wherever she goes. This compassion extends to creatures of all kinds, often including the human beings who scare her.

Her love of animals shows up in her artwork, her music, her writings and even her wardrobe. That little purse at the Infinity Mirrors show is a quilted bag in the shape of a dachshund. Sourced at a secondhand shop, she chose to bring it to the gallery to match artist Yayoi Kusama's colours, patterns, aesthetics.

She got a lot of compliments on the bag from gallery-goers, and that touches me deeply: for this purse stands for more than just her love of critters and art; it also speaks to her determination to be exactly who she is and the joy she takes from that. She's a walking, talking lesson in authenticity and she's my gauge for how truthful my own behaviour is - or isn't.

One day, when she was three, her big brother and I woke her up from a nap. As her eyes fluttered open, she proclaimed: “The king of rock n roll is dead.” We had no idea where that came from.

Sometimes I feel the same way about her: I have no idea where she came from. Sure she popped out me one fine summer's day twenty-five years ago, but how did I wind up with such a magical kid? It's like she was born in a flurry of stardust and topped with a dash of moon-glow: a sprite who'd arrived to teach me some valuable life lessons.

Of course, all our children can do this for us if we are open to it, but as this one grew to be an evermore wondrous being, I experienced a fine-tuned intelligence and an enduring resilience in her that I’d scarce seen before. These qualities got honed as she entered adolescence and embraced her true gender identity. Hit with more than her share of challenges (a mild word for what she sometimes encountered), she faced them with the might of the fire-breathing dragons she believed in as a child.

When someone told her eight-year-old self that dragons could not possibly exist, she cried. Then she rebounded: If no creature could breathe oxygen and fire at the same time, then perhaps dragons had different breathing apparatus with separate flame portals. Made sense to me.

When she went to bat for the dragons, she taught me that if someone says something cannot be, well, you don’t have to take that lying down. She was just a sprat when she defended the dragons; as she grew there would be other matches to meet. But, while dragons were for childhood fancies, she herself is the real deal, and any suggestion that she should somehow not exist is clearly a product of a grossly misinformed mind.

"Here I am" her bearing and countenance (and sometimes puppy purse) declare every time she steps out of the house, feet kissing the ground.

When she was four, she did a series of paintings on cardboard: a splatter of orange paint with a daub of brown got titled Trees in a Graveyard with a Symbol of Terror. I wrote it on the back for her. Each painting was similarly named - it was a series after all...and she was four, after all.

Her artwork has changed over the years. Not so long ago, she picked a bunch of posies while out for an afternoon walk -

She pressed them, then created zines:

She also makes ice cream with flowers. An artist to the core, she's a constant reminder that each day brings new fascinations. Here's her lavender ice cream, which she plated for me:

A solar eclipse occurred on her twenty-first birthday. Drinking pink champagne and watching the moon cast shade on the sun, her brother snapped a selfie with her and posted it to IG with the caption:

Goddess of the Solar Eclipse.

Dragon. Goddess. Drummer Girl. She’s been a constant inspiration to me since the day she arrived in a rush of stardust and glittery ambition.

She's my little eidetiker. And, of course, she’s her own woman.

Thank you for reading!