It’s weirding me out a bit, not necessarily in a bad way, because these things happen to me often, have happened for decades…

It’s odd(?) that I was just thinking the other day, yesterday, actually, of how important you, the book ‘Toller’ (which I dog-eared and re-read almost to destruction), the Great Strawberry Queen, were to me in my tortured youth. That book, the glossy full page photo of her in that book, kept me alive more than once.

You wrote in that book about having swallowed a large amount of some kind of OTC medication in the hopes of going to sleep forever, but waking up disgruntled the next day, disgruntled, surprised, about having woken up feeling slightly better than you normally did… made me smile then, makes me smile now, the thought of your surprise and disgruntled-ness! And the irony of it, of course…

And when I thought about you, yesterday, I wondered what ever happened to my well-loved copy of that book, and realized that I would need to get a new one… I did that, today…

RIP Toller Cranston, but in living colour! You, your brazenly beautiful artistry on ice, on canvas, in life and love of it, my experience of you, your life, is one of the things that shaped me. One of the very important things.

I got you, I always felt that if you could stay alive and practice your art in all ways, speak your mind the way you did, speak to me without knowing I existed, then maybe, just maybe, I could too.

All my love and wistful tears, for the early loss of a soul I felt such a kindred attachment to.

~Marcela: Unfiltered. Living in Audaciously Vivid Colour, and out loud(er). Always, louder, always going higher.

(Photos sourced from: Amazon.ca, http://www.skatepsa.com/In-The-Loop-Issue-2.html, https://www.facebook.com/TollerCranston, and http://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/20973064_signed-serigraph-toller-cranston)