BUSTER KEATON first entered my life in October 1964, when I was nine months old – nine months out after the nine months in. He arrived by train in the town of White Rock, BC, a few miles inland from the fishing town of Ladner, where I lay, all my senses on fire, my capacity for memory unknown. That autumn, Keaton was sixty-nine years removed from his mother’s womb and a half-century removed from the vaudeville stage. After several decades of neglect, he was finally enjoying a small resurgence of fame. An international superstar in the 1920s, who directed and starred in a series of silent comedic feature films that made him both famous and wealthy, he was derailed by the advent of sound and its accompanying studio system in the 1930s and became a lost, forgotten, often-intoxicated figure th
