My father, my lighthouse....

celebrating how he made me the storypuller I am

When he died it was the silence of him, the wordlessness that stung me more than his utter stillness. He was lifeless, yes, but for my father, that meant wordless. My heart willed him to speak, even though I knew that meant commanding exhausted, broken organs to function, a fatally wounded heart to mend itself. I stared down intently into his face, voicelessly begging him to make one of his smart remarks, the quip or the comeback like, I’m not dead--you can’t keep a good man down.

When I leaned in to whisper to him on the days before he died, he gave me only the multi-tonal Hmph’s, hearing me, responding without words. I wanted him to tell me something about how to survive the loss of him, how to be me without him, but that was no longer his job. As he lay dying, it became my time to do the talking, in his words or my own.

In the months since his death my father’s influence on the writer and mother I am has become clearer. I was raised by the kind of father who surely would not have called himself a progressive of any kind, but as my parent he was. I knew from his less-than-politically-correct attitude toward, let’s just say others, that he was not always a man of the future, but as a father to me, there were neither expectations nor limitations. My career choices, and life choices received nothing but interest from him. When considering career or education options, as is my way, I presented a “but…” to which he inevitably asked, “Why not?” It was not really a question, rather a sensitive rebuttal to my self-doubt. I offered the standard response about my lack of ability (I was weak at science, but considered medicine) or scarcity of funds (an American school was too expensive but I wanted into one), and he said, you don’t know how it’ll grow ‘til the crop’s in the ground. Stay with the dream. I was born when there were still attitudes about us gals being assistants rather than directors, being nurses rather than doctors, but he told me: keep your eyes on the lane you’re in the same advice when still an unpermitted and quite novice driver he took me on the 16-lane 401 through central Toronto driving a bus-length station wagon. His advice came in one-liners and his lessons in story, in the sound of the vernacular that was entirely Dad’s own, never in lecture or stern discipline. 

My father was the wordsmith before me and his mother before him, the story goes. His language could inspire a conversation, stop a discussion cold and proffer an overly (dear god, help me, in front of my childhood friends) graphic understanding of a complex idea. He was master of a dialect that only his siblings spoke, common in a close family, and more so in rural life. People who knew him inevitably remark on the way he spoke, some believing he had an accent, most remembering the well-placed soft expletives and all recollecting his ever-present grin. His speech was both a product of growing up on the farm and of being born in the 1930’s. When it was particularly cold outside, it could freeze the nuts off a bridge and it was colder than a penguin’s beak or something less tasteful in “mixed”  company, whatever that meant back then.

He always had time to slow down and talk, even if it meant being late for dinner or explaining yet again to my mother that he bumped into someone. He had the gift of the gab. His stories drew people into his life and listening to theirs sustained his insatiable desire for lifelong learning. People’s tales were the coursework of his life. He learned by listening and taught by retelling. He would meet a potential new customer for his printing business and through chit chat glean he or she had spent some childhood years, when they were knee-high to a grasshopper, one concession road over and two lots north from his family farm in the township. Dad counted them as a friend to the end of his life. He could chat about Fred K’s grandparents who failed at farming buckwheat, a fifth cousin twice-removed that he went to school with or some woman’s first husband who flew his own plane into a big smokin’ hole in the ground. He recognized the make and model of every car built from his birth year to mine (small minds are amused by small things, Patti) and used a good guess as a conversation starter in parking lots and at car shows. Dad would spot a tractor, combine, or plough in a field while driving by, and remember to mention it when he saw the owner the next time. Running errands with Dad meant accepting I could be waiting a long in the front seat of his truck, or swinging from his hand at the barber or the post office. He might have been a politician, relating personally, bringing an easy smile to every person’s face. Because he listened as well as he spoke, he put people at ease. Don’t shit on the ladder on the way up ‘cause you may have to wipe it off on the way down. Treat everyone well. He explained he was havin’ a good old chinwag, speaking to so many people because he never knew who might become a customer, but I was too keen an observer to buy that. The kindness of patient conversation was his investment in people.

I know folks who edit their colloquialisms to upscale themselves in place, education or success level. I erroneously thought for a time, almost critically, that he was incapable of losing the country expressions. Not only did my father not cut his unpretentious patter, rather he delighted in keeping the earthiness in the man. You can take the boy off the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the boy. Be who you are.

Dad never seemed to be passionate about anything. But I was missing the point. I wondered as a youngish girl if he was unsatisfied with his life, his small business in an unremarkable little town. I caught glimpses of subjects he was as much about as he was interested in – wartime aircraft, steam tractors, printing equipment, but ultimately I know now that his passion was his story-filled life journey.

One might presume I learned this lesson very early, given my life’s work and writing focus are biography and memoir now and that remembering moments on the way to writing their meaning is my signature teaching method. But until he was gone I did not see Dad in my ubiquitous belief that there is a story in all of us that the world is waiting to hear. In his death I learned the more powerful truth…we never die so long as our stories, and others retelling of them, persist.

He had some one-line standards, that at any given moment a member of my immediate family will use, in homage to Dad and to simply remember him. Here was his greeting:

“How’s it going, Dad?”

“Like a wheelbarrow, Kid. I could use a little push.”

Family times, rare as they are, are speckled with quotes like that. We each silently notice the empty chair at our table and collectively respond by bringing his one-liners and oft-told tales into the room. One of my sons might start with, “what would Poppa say to that?” and offer an echo of his grandfather. In conversation with my sister, I will remind, “you know what Dad would say…” His expressions are how we temporarily staunch the tide of our grief, by bringing him back just a little, as often as we need to. His subtle wisdom is still dribbling into our lives as we unwillingly forget what it sounded like to have him in the room, at the game, or in the car.

As a child, my daily life was dotted with frequent and regular reminders of how I was a child of my fathers. “You look so much like your Dad,” they would say, and “there is no doubting whose kid you are.” Comments were accompanied by tousles of my curly blond hair, that is “the spitting image of your Dad’s”. It wasn’t the looks I shared with him, but the connection with people and their tales that he offered to me as the guideposts of my life—in true show, don’t tell, fashion.

With every retelling, every sometimes annoying and exhaustive repeat that we would never interrupt and remind we had heard before, his excited, energetic  stories were how he celebrated his life with each word, phrase, cliché and farm tale.  There was Ned the farting horse, a barncat with no hair on its tail because a cow licked it off and…

As every whole is the sum of its parts, so my father’s life was a compilation of his stories. So, mine will be. We are all the sum of our stories, a list of our experiences dappled with the humour and sorrow that is the reality of our persistent effort to exist in this world. We are a composite of our words. 

Whether working at laying custom cut hardwood in my sister’s home or creating a hope chest for my niece in his retirement, his work was a story-laden effort even then. Old Frank Hedren told me that the trick to getting the wood to bend around that corner is in the clamps you use and taking three days to bend it.  Speaking of his own father, Dad always said the only way to lay hardwood was cutting each piece as you went.

And in my own repeating, remembering, retelling and rekindling he is infinite, triggered again and again for those who hear me. So, I must write, coach, coax, and talk. The legacy of my father is not just in my looks, or my mannerisms, it is in my words, which were his mark on the world, his invitation to friendship and his method of compassion. When I speak, and when I write, he lives forever. We never die because our words will not; a story once told lives in the hearts and minds of the listeners, and most gratefully, in this daughter.

Celebrating the stories that made us the celebrants of stories that we are, today and always. Thanks, Dad.