Fighting Multiple Sclerosis in 2013
Team Sharon: From left to right – Ashley, Mandy, Melanie, Kim, Olivia and Trish.
Okay, so it’s been quite a while since I’ve made a post on this art blog due to the house moving that Kim and I have been knee-deep in. I’m actually taking some time to compose this post, and I have to say that it too isn’t much about art. I need to make this post seeing that May is Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month, and that May 29, 2013 will be World MS Day. Please continue to bear with me . . .
Anyway, life is full of unexpected outcomes. Yeah, everybody knows that, I hope. Here’s one:
Decades ago when I was a kid in grade 2, here in Ontario, the MS Society of Canada worked with provincial public schools to raise awareness about Multiple Sclerosis (MS). I can remember that a leading drive was the “MS Sleuthing” campaign in which we cute, small elementary school kids were deployed en masse each year to canvass neighbourhoods for donations toward MS research.
I don’t know if this is still done in schools; I don’t think so, but the campaign featured a cartoon bloodhound dressed like Sherlock Holmes, and carrying a large magnifying glass as he looked for clues to solve the MS mystery. We too were “MS Sleuths”.
I canvassed but the effort really didn’t have an impact on my young brain. I never knew anyone with MS, and never gave it any thought that I might someday, or even that I may have the disease myself.
Today, I can happily say in my forties that I have never had MS; knock on wood. I have; however, become linked to a number of people who have contracted it.
Posing with Cash-A-Roo
When I returned to Ontario in ‘89, after living in British Columbia for nine years, I got a small apartment and my cousin Tony and I would play chess there for hours. Me in my late teens, him in his early tewnties; between checkmates and sarcasms, we’d talk about girls, sports and athletics, future careers, politics, family, music, his incessant bragging about having an IQ of 130 and the gradual progression of his symptoms. Tony is the first person I’ve ever known to have MS. He died when he was 28.
My Shirt
Linda is a beautiful girl in BC that went to the same high school that I did, and associated with my small circle of friends. Unfortunately, I never knew her in high school. The first time I met her was in ’99 when Kim and I went out to BC to see my best friend Gaston get married to Charlene. We met Linda’s family and we, especially Kim, have had sporadic correspondence with Linda ever since. I think it was shortly after meeting Linda back then that she was diagnosed. She’s still fighting the fight.
Ti-Cat Cheerleaders lead everyone in warm up exercises.
Laurie has been a very close friend of mine and Kim since the late 90’s but we didn’t meet Laurie’s parents until several years ago. By that time, her mother Renata was mainly getting around by electric scooter. Laurie took great, great care of Renata until she died a few years ago. She misses her mum so very much.
Getting All Warmed Up
Last year, a man came to a Flying Low art sale and bought one of my prints. The art collector asked if we were collecting for MS research. We explained that we were only accepting donations for a local food bank N2N but we did consider raising money for the MS Society of Canada in Tony’s honour. That got the collector talking to us a bit more because his wife had passed away from MS the year before.
Drumming Up Support
We know Trish and Mandy through Kim’s brother Marty. Trish and Marty have been together for I don’t know how many years now. They have two beautiful daughters, Ashley and Olivia. Trish and Mandy are sisters. I guess it was in 1975 that their mother Sharon was diagnosed. Sharon lived with MS for thirty years until her fight ended in 2005.
Statistics on how many people in a specific population have MS are important but I’d rather skip the stats here, especially seeing that the stats vary from country-to-country. I will say again; nonetheless, that I had no idea that I would be connected in some way to five people who have had to directly or indirectly deal with this disease.
Group Effort
It was Mandy who organized a group effort in her mother’s name (Team Sharon) to participate in the May 5, 2013 MS Walk at Confederation Park in Hamilton. Fighting MS is one of those circumstances of which “tears are not enough”. It requires action, and it was high time I did something realistic about the real problem. With Kim, I joined Team Sharon. Thanks Mandy!
This was our first walk to raise money for the MS Society of Canada. Team Sharon’s goal was $600. We managed to rake up $707. Kim and I raised $220 of that on our own; not too shabby for this old “MS Sleuth”.
There must have been a few thousand participants in the 22-year old event from hundreds of other teams. When the afternoon was done, a grand total of $175,000 was accomplished. Thank you to everyone who supported the cause. If we are to use that figure as an average for every other city around the world that holds an MS Walk this year, imagine the amount of money that will be gained for researching a cure, providing treatments, caregivers, scooters, elevators and a wide range of other necessities for patients who need them.
Only For Now
For more information on Multiple Sclerosis, what you can do to help fight this disease, how to help a patient cope with it and even what your donations are used for get in touch with the MS Society in your part of the atlas. Here are some websites:
- MS Society of Canada
- MS Walks (Canada)
- MS Society UK
- National MS Society (US)
- MS Association of America
- Union Roska Czech Multiple Sclerosis Society
- MS Australia
- Nouvelle Association Française des Sclérosés en Plaques
You’ll also find direct links to just about all MS organizations around the planet if you just click HERE!
Tell ‘em TheMOFMan sent you!
Now this is an art blog after all, so here’s a link to the MS Society of Canada where they showcase the artwork of some artists who are patients and/or supporters of the cause. I hope the society does more of this.
Keep hope and fight a good fight! All the best to you!
Weekly Post Challenge: “Up”
Uplifted
For more on this shot, see Hammer Home.
Weekly Post Challenge: “Change”
Key to the Future
WordPress couldn’t have posed a timelier theme for this week’s photo challenge.
What you see above is the result of months of serious, arduous planning between my wife and me. We had been contemplating it for the past two years, began more meticulously strategizing for it in the spring of 2012 and set to work pulling it off right from the beginning of 2013. It has consumed us almost entirely. It’s almost a miracle that I was able to pull of a wedding photography contract in the process.
Our efforts to obtain this very key is even the leading reason why I have not blogged as much or as informatively as I did last year. It is the overall plan that I deliberately did not mention with any specificity in my 2013 resolution but is the basis for all of the other goals I listed.
This is the key, acquired 16 hours before this post hit the Internet, to our new place. This place will not just be our new home but the new headquarters of Modes of Flight.
It’s a bigger place with better style in another great location. Although we’re already moving in slowly, we don’t officially move in until a couple weeks time. I want to; nevertheless, thank all of those who have supported MOF in the last year in any way possible as you have helped us reach this milestone.
Weekly Post Challenge: “Colour”
Finishing a Day at the Beach
I was doing street photography in Port Dover one summer, and this was one of the last shots I made there that day.
The situation was so colourful, family oriented and reminiscent of a moment captured in a Norman Rockwell painting, especially with that big Coca Cola vending machine, that I was inspired to apply a painterly digital filter to the picture in post production. It’s not something I do a lot with photographs. When I want an image to look like it’s painted, I usually prefer to get out my oils and hand paint it. I, nevertheless, thought it was worth it to go digital here.
I think the effect may be too strong. I might try it again with the filter settings reduced to bring out a little more realism.
Illustrated City Part 15
Here Lies the Thane of Goblin Hall
For me, walking into a place where a street artist has left his or her mark is like stepping into an artist’s canvas. Entering the secret spaces used specifically by graffiti writers can sometimes be like entering a fantasy realm.
It’s exciting. My heart does indeed thump harder in my chest. I get strange sensations on my skin.
I’m a lover of speculative fiction and spaces like these fuel my imagination.
Although I don’t make the sort of art they do I arrive with my camera to admire the work from among them that I think is best, and record the places that have been used as open air studios. This is my playground.
If only more others could see the beauty that I see.
Landscape Photography
Grounded
I photographed these ice-fogged trees only a minute after the one used in Steadfast in Dormancy. Both scenes and pictures inspired me to write free verse poems on having strength of character. Trees tend to do that quite frequently with me.
What I started off writing for this image didn’t end up as a poem. Instead, it transformed into a short introspective list of how to develop and sustain strength of character. Not anything that I would consider genius just some fundamental rules for living that I was raised with that, although I’ve lived by them for most of my life, I’ve never written them down before. Rules that I know work from a lifetime of experience.
“Firmly Rooted and Growing with Strength” was a name I thought to give to the image and treatise because I thought “Grounded” would be too common. In the end; nevertheless, I settled on the less long-winded title.
- Rule No. 1: Never repeat your mistakes; this applies just as much to your relationships with acquaintances, friends and family members as well as everything else, and of course requires being able to recognize and admit to your errors.
- Rule No. 2: Strive to forgive yourself and others; if this is truly difficult and not in any way due to your own stubbornness, see rule number one.
- Rule No. 3: Avoid allowing yourself and others to compromise your virtues and ambitions; denying your oppressors the freedom to put you down and hold you back is not an act of betrayal but an act of standing up for yourself.
- Rule No. 4: Strive to live with good purpose and let this way of life shape your goals; of course this requires knowing the real difference between right and wrong.
- Rule No. 5: Dream; others will try to steer you away from this practice but do it obstinately for dreaming is the mother of ambition.
- Rule No. 6: Strive to eliminate all addictions and suppress compulsions; you are your own worst enemy and are doomed to failure without self-control.
- Rule No. 7: If anything you think of doing is not firmly rooted in simple logic, don’t do it; why complicate your existence with things that don’t make sense?
Illustrated City Part 14
Call to Action
Some of the most impressive street art affirm life, and inspire quality of life.
TheMOFMan
2D visual artist specializing in illustration, photography and graphic design.
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