Expression
Memory book aims to touch community heart
WATERLOO — In the Creamsicle-coloured catacombs of Robert Motum’s heart, a sweet memory swirls. Was it four years ago? Maybe it was five. Down the University of Waterloo’s spiral-painted Clockwork-Orange underground passages — that’s what Motum calls the subterranean stroll-spaces between arts buildings — he walked with his best friend.
The two students had just finished rehearsing for a little drama to be performed on board a city bus. She was acting. He was directing. She was poised and beautiful, all red hair and Ray-Bans atop a black faux-leather jacket. He was anxious and fumbling for words. Motum had something important to tell her on their way to lunch. Something wonderful and worrying.
He had a crush on her. He simply had to say it. So, he did.
“I was so awkward,” recalled Motum, the 25-year-old freelance writer/artist/director with a master’s degree in site-specific theatre.
“She said she used to have a crush on me and was equally-awkward about it. When we went to Subway, we talked about everything but what we had just said. A month or so later, we were dating.”
There it is. That’s Memory No. 16.
You can find it in a book assembled by Motum and illustrated by his fellow Waterloo grad Madeline Samms. “Kitchener Waterloo: A Guidebook From Memory” contains 50 such, short, personal memories from mostly anonymous sources, tied to special locations.
Each entry — be it about Syrian refugees noting the place they first felt at home, running into actor Donald Sutherland in St. Jacobs, or waking up in Grand River Hospital after a failed suicide attempt — has a faded memory-style sketch from Samms.
It’s a community art project more than a simple book, built with a $4,850 grant from the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund. Between 60 and 70 submissions came in online. Fifty were settled on. Last weekend, Motum and Samms signed about 40 copies at Chapters in Waterloo. It’s available at more than 10 stores (www.guidebooksfrommemory.com).
Motum, raised in an “Oshawa bubble” by a piano-teaching mom and a chemistry-teacher dad, fell in love with Waterloo Region during his university days in Waterloo.
Samms, who grew up in Kitchener, delivered Memory No. 13.
It’s all about the pond behind an old farmhouse on Tilt Drive, where her father Walter would clear an ice rink for his children to play hockey on. A beaver lived on the pond, where the family also ice-fished.
As the volume was being assembled last September, Walter died of cancer. His spirit, and many others, inhabit the 50 brief tales of past time and places.
“My dad meant the world to me,” Samms said. “He supported me and was so proud I was illustrating a book. In the hospital, he told all the nurses about it. He and my mom raised a family in K-W and gave me a great childhood and life. The least I could do was dedicate the book to him. I know he’s reading it somewhere.”
Motum hopes the memory book will lead its readers on a virtual and literal tour of the region, to make their own connections with the places depicted inside.
It might even take them into the tunnels at the University of Waterloo where he once bravely told his best friend he had a crush on her.
How did that work out? Well, they dated for three years. Then, the magical fizz went out of the relationship. But Memory No. 16 remains sweet and dreamy. “We keep in touch, still,” said Motum. “A lot of memories in the book, there are a lot of instances that could have been or ‘I wish I had.’ That’s one that worked out for three years.”