Most of us start out in life and our parents are just there, like the weather. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Maybe we fight it, during those awkward growing up years, but we’re like our parents, in more than a few ways. Mostly our parents are there as a weird mirror of life when they grew up. A way to see the end product of what the world wanted men and women to be like in those times. Face it, we’re all here because we are prisoners of our DNA and its imperative to continue into the next generation nomatter what. The times change, but the blocks of what we, and our parents, were made up of do not. We are just them filtered through different times. What I hope to avoid from now forward is taking that presence for granted. Like it will be there forever.
As those who know me are probably aware our family grew short of a father this year’s father’s day. So I’d like to say my piece on fathers while I may. The value of letting your dad know how much you appreciate him is, it seems, a limited time offer, for all of us.
I grew up the youngest of three kids and I have little doubt that owing to my personal brain wiring and changing times my father had little idea what to make of me. I grew up so far outside of his frame of reference he must have struggled harder with every passing birthday to connect with what was mostly an ungrateful kid who had no idea how to deal with what has, thankfully now, become mostly comedic episodes of rage and frustration from his dad. For much of my childhood my father worked like a beaver at jobs he mostly hated to provide for his family and, never a man to keep things inside, the frustration uncorked from time to time. That is, all the time. I remember one particularly vengeful confrontation between my father and the vacuum cleaner that taught me a few choicer epithets when I was about six. I ran for cover. The next time I saw the vacuum cleaner it was sporting a series of duct-tape bandages. But let’s look at the big picture here: my father was doing housework, at a time when men didn’t do that shit.
Which brings me to the first thing I learned from my father. He is a man who always put his kids first and all he asked in return was a little cooperation. Heaven help the child, or vacuum, that didn’t catch on fast enough. My siblings and I would come home from school for lunch each day with a mixed dread at what kind of strange concoction of Campbell's canned soup we would get. Ox-tail mixed with creamy tomato? Creamy mushroom mixed with vegetable? You could never be sure. And added to this I had a sensitive palate and lived in terror of that day we would run out of bologna and I would get some sort of salami lunchmeat that would make me gag. To avoid the inevitable outbust over a perceived slight to his skills as a chef I spent more than one lunch chipmunking my cheeks with sandwich, left for school right away, and spit masticated sandwich into the nearest storm drain. It wasn’t until years later when I was a father myself that I realized my dad had taken his own lunch hour to drive home and make a hot meal for us rotten ingrates. Now when I look on those lunches I picture how he took his responsibility for us seriously. Personally. Not just a ‘I work all day to put food on your table!' kindof parenting. He put the food on the table too.
It wasn’t too many years after this my father quit his soul-crushing job and started a new career as an apprentice putting together custom-made wooden furniture and cabinets. The first I heard about it was coming home from school and seeing my dad was already home and my parents told me he had quit his job. I was just a kid but I knew not having a job was a pretty bad thing. But my dad busted his ass even harder at his new job working for crazed, eight-fingered germans until he could start his own business and finally become the thing he really wanted: his own boss. They say people who work in jobs where they can physically hold the things they worked on at the end of the day have less stress and a better quality of life. Running his own business maybe wasn’t a great stress reliever but he was certainly a happier man making cabinets than he had been as an assistant manager in a chain store providing liquor to the public. Although the stories he told us about the underside of society that walked into his store looking for beer every night at dinner were embellished with the humour my dad adds to everything like ketchup to a meal, there was an underlying loathing of the world in them. That slowly receded as years went by until by the time I was a teenager he actually took anger management courses and the change became easily apparent.
So the second thing I learned was that anything worth doing in life meant hard work. That you didn’t shy away from doing the right thing because it was tough. That self-improvement was a reward for those you loved most, not for yourself. Years later, when I had to make some of the hardest decisions in my life I had my father’s example to fall back on. And while I struggled building the relationship I had with my own children while we were apart and quitting a job I loathed for 12 years but kept because I thought I needed the security, I was able to come out the other side. Come out as what I hope is a better man.
Like I’ve said, the DNA humans are made out of doesn’t change that much while the world around us changes pretty much daily in pretty terrible ways, or at least it has since the industrial revolution, anyway. For most of the 20th century young people have worked hard to prove that they are unlike the generation before them. That they talk like parents don’t even speak the same language as them. Today, standing astride the 21st century, we may have entered a time when that is literally true. My ongoing efforts with my teenager to continue to keep up with the L33T speak he uses in increasingly cryptic internet communications (“Email? Ugh. Might as well chisel a letter into a cave wall! Don’t you IM?”) prove this out. But look at the men from my father’s generation. His parents won the Second World War, for Ah Pook’s sweet sake. Can you imagine being born at a time when the supremacy of the white male from the western world crested its high-water mark in history? When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. In other words it was inevitably downhill from there.
My dad grew up into a young man as a folky, and while I could go on about having an appreciation for a while on how his music appreciation has vastly enriched my life, what I value most about my dad is that he has struggled to understand the world around him. Unable to stand the small-town mentality of northern Ontario he and my mother moved their family south to the big city and tried to instill in us kids a value for not just culture, but for what was right. Betrayed at every turn by changing demographic of population that values his place less and less since the heady days white guys brought down the Nazis, my dad has been noted by many as a paragon for stubbornness. This is the man who bought his first VCR when I was about eleven, and ever since the day I left home when I was nineteen there has been a little strip of paper taped over the flashing 12:00 because he can’t make himself learn how to change the clock on its face. A man who stopped voting years ago when he realized none of the politically parties available to him would ever make the clock go back to the world he grew up in. All this may be true but I think what I admire most about my dad is his ability to never cease being surprised by the world. Passion is one of those words you don’t hear applied too often anymore, with a straight face, but I think my father has never stopped being angered by injustice or become jaded to cruelty and suffering. That is a remarkable quality as we round the clock in the year 2010. Most people try to cultivate a ‘been-there-done-that’ coolness that ages bitterly but as my father ages I find more and more commonality with him through books and his writing and what is obviously still a mind eager to grow.
For most of us growing up is a contest of wills against our parents. We push hard to prove we’re different from them and its easy to pick apart their parenting. The truth is nomatter how bad they really were, with few exceptions they could have done a lot worse. We’re none of us perfect and while our parents tend to point out our shortcomings its really nothing compared to the scrutiny we apply to them. But the best part of us will always be from our parents, just focused through a lens of our experiences. And for every child who shudders at the thought that they may end up repeating the same mistakes of their parents, there is a father out there who is proud of how much his children have grown up beyond himself. I know that’s how I look at my kids every day, and I hope its how my dad thinks of me.
