She’s barely recognizable in the first photograph, a yellowing Polaroid from the late 1980s. Found it about an hour ago, near the bottom of a dusty old box. Although I love her like a twin, there’s no escaping the facts: my little sister Felicity was a weird kid, who talked to herself and dreamed out loud.
I remember thinking she might be crazy, long before I really knew what that might mean. Hard to believe this painfully shy girl, with tap shoes and a lazy eye, would one day be a rockstar, a valedictorian, and the life of every party. Far easier to see how this dreamy little girl, with stars in her eyes, and figure skates on her feet, would one day be an artist.
I remember thinking she might be an artist, long before I really knew what that might mean. She was still just a little kid, when she borrowed mom’s crappy camera, and took a picture of a dandelion behind our Galt Street apartment building. Barclay didn’t get it, but mom did, and so did I. It was a breathtakingly beautiful photograph. Still, took me thirty years to realize that it was a self-portrait.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here: A Love Letter to Montréal (2017)
Committing Sociology 