Martha remembers life with father

Before there was an Energizer bunny, there was Dad.

One summer morning, we stopped in to visit Mom and Dad at 5 King Street. While we were chatting and having coffee at the kitchen table, Dad jumped up in the middle of the conversation and announced: “Time to cut the lawn.” Behind the mower, he didn’t walk, he sprinted. When it snowed, he buckled on his skis and bushwhacked around the backyard. Sometimes he got it in his head to do odd projects like paint the basement floor yellow, or sand and finish an old door and make it into a table. He lived full throttle. 

He could sit still, too. Usually it was in a straight-back chair at the kitchen table, absent-mindedly tapping a cigarette on the rim of an ashtray, scanning the newspaper or absorbed in the pages of a book. If we drifted into his orbit, he’d pelt us with “you should read this!” 

He kick started every day with a coffee and the Toronto Star, his daily dose of caffeine and moral outrage. As a devoted NDPer, he was chronically offended by the world’s injustices. If he had an audience (poor Mom), he’d say: “Listen to this” and read the paper out loud. 

The NDP loomed large in Dad’s life and therefore in ours. You couldn’t separate the teacher from his politics. In Paris, a couple of farm boys reported their rookie history teacher to the principal for being a communist. At election time, he pressed us into putting up signs and canvassing. For 64 years, he fought the good fight with an unwavering optimism that the world could be a better place. Tommy Douglas was his hero. He came to dinner at our house once. 

The phone was Dad’s lifeline. At the drop of a hat, he would call a friend or relative to find out how they were. If we complained about being lonely or bored, he offered this little bit of wisdom: “The way to forget your own problems is to take an interest in others.” If we complained about having trouble meeting the opposite sex: “Join the NDP.” 

As a teacher, he aimed to broaden students’ perspectives and teach them critical thinking. He tried to do so with us, too, with mixed results. Once I told him I agreed with something Barbara Amiel wrote in Maclean’s and got a lecture on enlightened self-interest. He couldn’t let a statement pass without demanding: “How do you know that? Where did you read that?” After a while, I would retort: “I read it in the New Yorker last week, page 56.” He fancied himself a journalist who had the right to know. He would interrupt Mom, who was known to embellish. “That’s not true, Babs!”  He could ruin a good story. 

Interrupting was just one of many skills Dad taught me. Arguing was another. Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners could be raucous affairs especially when we were all well lubricated. He enjoyed nothing better than verbal combat and urged us to fight back, to stand up for ourselves. Sometimes when I grew exasperated with him, I’d look him in the eye and say, “fuck off.” He’d grin, “that’s my girl.” 

He showed me how to tie a reef knot, paddle the jay stroke, swim the butterfly, drive a standard, fry an egg, serve a tennis ball, whistle. He was a jogger ahead of the craze, concerned with his waistline and keeping in shape. He helped me move at least four times, once in a blizzard. I used to get teased for laughing like a hyena, because I guffaw like him. I also smoked like him. Some of us punned like him, loved dogs as much as he did. None of us ate shredded wheat with milk and brown sugar for breakfast, dessert and bedtime snacks. I did, however, share his need for stewed prunes. 

From the bowels of the basement where he usually had his desk, we would hear rolling thunder belches, bursts of song and full-throated ho ho hums when he was marking papers, something he hated doing. 

For all his intellectual fire power and encyclopedic knowledge, Dad could be quite emotional, especially when listening to music. When we moved to Scarborough Road in 1960, he bought a Braun stereo and built a cabinet in the dining room to house it. He couldn’t play a musical instrument but, boy, could he play that stereo. He started buying albums – folk, pop, musicals, French Canadian chansons, Newfoundland sea shanties, union anthems, Paul Robeson spirituals – and playing them over and over and over. Chris once asked Mom why Dad did that. “He wants to learn the words.” Well, we certainly did, by osmosis. I have been known to wake the neighbourhood belting out “Hold the fort for we are coming, union men be strong” on my way home late on a Saturday night. To this day, I can sing along to every song from every album he ever subjected us to. When Dad lived with Jim and me in Peterborough for a year, he discovered YouTube and became so fixated on Puff the Magic Dragon, I had to close his bedroom door. 

We had a lot of adventures with Dad, usually history themed. Not one to sun on the beach, he packed us into the car and took us to Fort Henry, Upper Canada Village, Ste. Marie Among the Hurons, down to the new city hall to see the Henry Moore. We sailed across the Atlantic to England on the Empress of Canada for his sabbatical year and came home with East Ender accents. Dad was intoxicated by Canada’s centennial and took us to Expo 67 one weekend. He turned me into a Canadian nationalist keen to learn French and travel this fair land. 

Dad was an avid photographer like his mother Lillian. Her photos – taken with a little Brownie – of her six children fill the memoir he wrote of growing up in Burlington. Likewise, he took thousands of photos of us growing up, leaving us a precious record of our lives. I, too, caught the bug after Nana bought me a box Brownie when I was 10 and my parents, a Canon camera when I was 21. After we left the nest, Dad focused his lens on poppies, snowfalls and Saskatchewan dirt roads and turned the images into stunning Christmas cards.  

After Babs died, Dad didn’t go hungry. He shopped for groceries, taught himself to make beef stew and onion soup, and derived immense satisfaction serving guests cheese melts over heirloom tomatoes. He confessed to licking his bowl. “No one can see me,” he protested. He liked a good laugh. I just had to say “fart” and he cracked up. Mom called it “your father’s sense of humour.” He loved sipping a scotch with friends on the back porch, if not commanding the podium, vying to get a word in edgewise. 

Dad was never bored. When he could no longer hop in his car and explore the back roads of Ontario, reading offered him an endless road into other worlds. “Reading has saved my life.” 

When his short-term memory began to falter, Nurse Angel (yes) would grill him with simple questions to see how sharp he was. 

How old are you, Ken? Who wants to know?

What’s your address? Why do you ask?

When’s your birthday? None of your business.

What year is it? Don’t you know?

 A PSW who helped him eat his meals asked: 

Ken, are you a beer man or do you like wine? Maybe you’re a whiskey drinker, or prefer gin? Yes

His caregivers adored him. They called him a gentleman and enjoyed his sly humour. 

Dad did admit “life is an ass” when he didn’t have the strength to dress himself. But he rarely complained. Growing old was his stage in life. He was grateful. 

At Ed’s Hospice, he said a few things that were clearly drug induced but fitting from a departing man. “I can’t find my wings.” “I can’t do up my laces.” “I am a blue star.” A friend noticed a blue light low in the night sky recently. I like to imagine that blue star watching over us and wishing us to fare well.