Not having wool hair is irritating. I got so used to having a permanent cascade of comfortable warmth attached to my head that now my movements are weightless, the mannerisms of someone who has two feet of hair to brush out of the way, my shoulders feel naked, and my face feels unframed, as if I were a dissolved painting. Someone’s stolen me, is trying to clean the canvas to put something more interesting there. Phaugh.
This was another day of strangers talking. This time I collected an invitation to a St. Patrick’s Party at the Gabriola Mansion, hurriedly written on the back of an 8 X 10 vintage photograph of the now mostly abandoned lunatic asylum. It’s rather awesome, actually. I’m quite impressed. The picture is of the building where, back in the day, when they needed stones for a BBQ patio, they dug up the gravestones and used them to pave a yard, not caring which way up they faced.
In the upper right hand corner of the back, in between the scrawled invitation information, it says ASYLUMS with a blue stamp underneath:
PHOTOGRAPH No. ..1261….
NEW WESTMINSTER PUBLIC LIBRARY
Negative.
In the middle, in very precise hand written printing, it says in pencil:
Date: c. 1906
Source. VPL
Photograph: P. Timms
Info: B.C. Provincial Asylum.
and at the bottom there’s another stamp:
PLEASE CREDIT
VANCOUVER PUBLIC LIBRARY
NEGATIVE No. ___6419___