It hangs on my otherwise bare wall—an unlikely piece of art. It's a story I will never tire of telling.

One late September afternoon, I took my bike down to Christie Pitts park. It was a busy Saturday, as people wanted to catch the last fleeting wisps of summer; I saw a few final attempts at barbecues, a child’s birthday party, and even a man at the piano playing scales.

I walked behind the piano to observe him and he observed me observing him. I was embarrassed to be caught in the act of people watching in broad daylight.

“Thanks for the music,” I said, in an effort to save face.

“Do you play?”

I told him the story of how I tried to teach myself the piano in the ninth grade and would play the same song over and over, much to the agony of my family.

After a few more pleasantries, I said goodbye and rested my bike against a tree nearby, planting myself under it, to complete the novel I had been dragging my feet through. As I sat there reading, his music wafted over me. There was something enchanting about it; I remember feeling like I could listen to it all day. I would later learn it was because it was the music of a world famous musician.

As he walked his bike past me to leave the park, he stopped to chat.

“Thanks for the music. I enjoyed it,” I said as I put my book aside.

He set his bike down on the grass and sat beside me; he told me that his mother loved the sound of the piano. He visited her five times a week to play for her. She loved to read, but he’d often find her furiously focusing on a book she was holding upside down. She suffered from dementia.

“It’s just a different phase of life,” he said, “and no lesser in my eyes.”

She sometimes spent long afternoons in his studio where he filled notebook after notebook with her likeness.

“I probably have at least a thousand sketches of her.”

He flipped open his drawing pad to show me—stacks of fine pencil sketches of his mother sitting across from him at the dining table. I had been learning to draw for a few years by then, and was excited to meet a fellow artist. I couldn’t understand how he created such strong, life-like portraits with just a few carefully placed lines and shapes. I didn’t know then that I would be getting an art lesson from a world famous painter.

“What would you say the style looks like?” he put the question back to me, as a masterful teacher would.

“It looks kind of… abstract.”

“That’s it,” he said, as he elaborated on his process. He made very broad strokes to capture the essence of the subject, not concerning himself with copying what was in front of him, but capturing a feeling. To demonstrate, he drew the scene in front of us, putting it in the context of its surroundings—trees, the path winding around it, and a few people dotting its periphery.

“Nothing ever exists by itself, it’s all about relationships, whether in art or in music. To evoke the right feeling, you need to create and balance tension between these relationships.”

We sat there—two strangers in a park, sharing stories. Music was his first love; he started playing when he was nine. He traveled the world and was in a band, Theatre of Hate, famous in the 80s rock scene in England. Music led him to art: one day, when visiting an art gallery in England with his girlfriend at the time, he thought to himself ‘I could be a painter’, and then he did just that.

“You can check out more of my work at the Roberts Gallery.”

It hit me. He was an artist of repute, sitting there in the park with a novice, sharing the joy of the craft. I learned that he was John Lennard.

As he stood up to leave, he tore a page from his drawing pad and gave it to me–a drawing of his aging mother. I was speechless.

“It’s a gift,” he said, “just don’t show it to the guys down at the Roberts Gallery. I need to run now. I’m off to coach the Varsity Squash Team at the University of Toronto.”

It turns out that he was also a world class squash player.

“My squash coach in high school called my mom and told her I had potential. I thought, hey, that’s probably more fun than sitting on the couch and watching TV.“

And there he went: John Lennard—world famous athlete, musician, and artist, who had just spent an hour in the park teaching a stranger the craft of abstract drawing. What struck me the most about him was his curiosity: he seemed to have more questions about me than I did of him. When I told him about the writing course I’d be doing later that fall, he was more excited than anyone I’ve ever told.

“Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone’s story is valid. What will you write about?”

I wasn’t sure at the time, but I had a feeling it would be about him.

He gave me many gifts that afternoon: an expert art lesson, a live musical performance, a piece of art for my apartment, inspiration to improve my craft, but, most of all, a story to tell. It adorns my wall as my sole piece of art—a pencil sketch of John Lennard’s aging mother, a summer trinket.