Innsbruck
Watercolour and oil pastel
©2018 Charlene Brown
This painting
may be used as an illustration in Chapter 3 in the 6-generation auto-fictional journal I am
writing. This chapter features a composite character (mostly me) called
Mary-Jean. Here’s an excerpt from the draft.
In November
1963, after hitch-hiking through a ridiculous number of countries, Mary-Jean started
looking for a job near Innsbruck, so she would have a place to stay during the
upcoming Winter Olympics. She got a job washing
floors in a Krankenhaus on a mountain-side south of the city. One week after
she started she was told that ‘her’ President had been shot. As she hadn’t yet
acquired the 50-word German vocabulary one needs to wash floors in Austria,
they practically had to act out Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas to get the
message across. Even though Kennedy wasn’t her President at all, like many Canadians
she thought he was terrific. It was a
very lonely time until a joyous Tyrolean Christmas – despite the trauma of
being her first Christmas away from home – worked its miracle a few weeks
later.
