Sir Frederick Banting - Scientist, artist and a scratch on a wall

Let me share this with you. I lived as a child in Alliston, Ontario.
There was a small wooden house near the footbridge that we used to pass over on our walk to school. This is said to have been the house that Frederick Banting, co-discover of Insulin, lived in as a boy.

I was a solitary kid, and I used to read the many names, which boys had scratched into the red bricks on the wall of the school. One brick had the small name, Fred Banting, scratched into it. I would imagine Banting as a boy, also being a little shy and quietly etching his name into the brick I looked at. I would take my finger and run my finger over his name, and wonder what mystical union brought us together at this place along the school wall.

I recently learned that I shared another magical wonder with this remarkable man.
He was also an artistic spirit. Was this our point of contact? Were we each observers of life. Did he too marvel at life's mysteries? Was he solitary and imaginative?

Fred Banting used his life gifts, along with Dr. Best, to create insulin which was a God send to diabetics. I used my life gifts to work with the poor and the insane and those who were incarcerated.

While these were interesting points of comparison...that's where it began and ended. I was a klutz in mathematics and have no scientific bent whatsoever.

So...whatever kinship I felt with the writer of the name Fred Banting on the brick on the wall, existed solely in the dreamy imagination of a child.

Please click here to read about Sir Frederick Banting, the artist.