Father's Day

A somewhat dark look back in memory

I’ve recently be re-reading “Meditations,” by Marcus Aurelius… not with any real specific intention but just trying, once again to struggle my way through the somewhat dense archaic language (and no, I’m not trying to read it in the original Greek that it was written in... English is difficult enough)

Somehow, while I was being a typical 21^st Century official senior citizen, lazily lounging around our tiny condominium on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I decided it would be a good activity to pursue some quiet reading after spending part of the day putting up new blinds in the windows of our condo.

According to the introduction of the version of his story that I’ve been wrestling with, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was born on April 26, 121 A.D. and after losing both his parents when he was still a young child, he was then adopted by his grandfather, a highly placed noble, who raised him well and he later became Emperor of Rome. It is, supposedly, written by Marcus Aurelius himself and presents as entries in his own personal journal.

I don’t have any illusions of, for whatever reason, being raised to a high royal position any time soon but, what with Father’s Day coming up, it made me start ruminating about my own father and how I lost him when I was fourteen years-old. It was not an easy time for me or anyone else in the family.

I want to express to any who read this, and specifically if any of my remaining siblings might read it, I don’t bring these events up to shame anyone. I have settled any differences I had with the memory of my father years ago. I have experienced, to a degree, the work of controlling my own use of alcohol and know it is not always an easy battle. I also have such doubts about the veracity of my memory now that I couldn’t swear to the complete accuracy of anything. It is just a collection of things that still rise up to the surface of my thoughts at times.

But, at the time I have been recalling, I was struggling through adolescence, trying to figure out what growing up really means... what is someone supposed to act like if they aren’t so much a child anymore? My Mum and Dad hadn’t had the easiest of times, I imagine, raising eight children on a single income throughout the majority of the time we were in the home.

At the point when there were few of us enough still at home that it wasn’t necessarily a full-time job just cooking and cleaning house, my Mum actually went out and got a job working in a local senior citizen’s home (a facility she would later move into.) One night after getting home from work, my Dad noticed that my Mum had gone out and independently bought an automatic dishwasher and he confronted her at the dining room table. In one of the few instances where I ever saw her actually lose her temper with him, she stood up and shouted back that she had bought it with her “Own money from her own paycheque!” and thought she finally should get bit of a break from some of the housework. Her uncharacteristic reaction shocked everyone present, including my Dad. That was enough to settle the matter in that instance with nothing else to be said by anyone for the entire meal.

Over the years, our five-bedroom, two-bathroom house had gradually emptied out of my seven other siblings and, I believe, it was just my father, my mother, and myself left in the house for the first time. I could well be mistaking the timing and the real sequence of events and various memories (as can happen when one lives with Alzheimer’s Disease) but I do recall these things. Sometimes in flashes when something triggers them out of nowhere, or I just see a scene that somehow brings them to mind. But there was a time, around this period, when I complained about something when both parents were present... I don’t recall if it was me not having a favoured article of clothing ready for me to wear to school or some similar pissy snark on my part... but my Dad suddenly grabbed me by the front of my shirt and slammed me against the wall in the hallway and shouted straight into my face something about not talking to my Mum like that.

It shocked me. He had never been that outright physically aggressive with me before. He had smacked my ass a few times when I was little but I was in my early teens at that point and this was something entirely different. Here I was thinking like I was getting all grown up and he just handled me like a rag doll. Woke me up right quickly.

When I was quite young, Dad spent his weekends and vacation time over a summer or so with my brothers and some of their friends digging out the rest of the basement under our house by hand and poured concrete floors and walls and created a “rumpus room” and a couple of other walled spaces. It wasn’t necessarily up to building code but it worked well enough to open up the basement for additional storage and even throw a couple of old beds down there for when my older brothers came home for visits. But at that time, when most of my siblings had moved out on their own, Dad had taken to spending more time downstairs on his own, watching TV and drinking by himself.

He drank quite heavily throughout much of my youth, frequently spending time at the local Royal Canadian Legion Hall, or having neighbours or other couples of a similar age over to sit around the dinner table and “get sloshed,” as they put it. I would hover in the living room, watching TV until being sent to bed and then listening to them telling war stories and getting progressively hammered. My mum didn’t drink at all so she just acted the polite hostess. Her father had been a hard drinker and had been violent when drunk. I don’t think she wanted anything to do with getting inebriated.

I only remember one instance when she had totally reached her limit with my Dad’s behaviour and reacted in a manner I had never seen before or saw again afterwards. My sisters were in the high school music program when I was young and they both, in turn, played with the concert band. They would go on band trips to play in other community’s schools and different events and, the concert bands from other communities would sometimes come through our town and, being in the music program, we’d, occasionally, have visiting students billeted out to stay at our house.

There was a particular time when we had a student or two scheduled to stay with us and my Dad came home later than usual after work and was noticeably drunk when he sat down at the kitchen table. I have to admit, this is something where I doubt my own memories... it was such an unusual event for our family. I don’t actually remember who was present other than my Mum and Dad and myself but there must have been at least one of my sisters still at home.

In what was the only time I remember seeing my Mother totally lose her temper with my Dad. She stood up and pushed her chair back and shouted at him, “Where is it?”

He was apparently taken aback at her rage as she confronted him because he just drunkenly mumbled, “Where’s what?” She shouted straight into his face, “The bottle! Where is it?!”

I had never seen her ever raise her voice to him like that before... it was relatively rare to hear her raise her voice to anyone.

My Dad just quietly mumbled, “There isn’t one,” as he looked at the table in front of him.

My Mum stood there, I think she was actually shaking with anger, and she shouted, “there better not be, because if I find one, I’ll smash it over your head!”

If I remember correctly, this left the entire table silenced and looking down at their plates.

But it was at period, years later, when there was just myself, my Mum and Dad left at home when he had actually stopped drinking for a significant period of time for the first time in my life.

He had a little Datsun 1200 that he had bought (used of course) so he had his own commuting car and my Mum would still be able to drive to her job and buy groceries or whatever other tasks she needed to accomplish. It was his commuter car to get back and forth to work, and whatever else he required. He was a personnel manager at the local smelting and refining plant and, in the past, had frequently gone on business trips for the company as well but hadn’t for a number of years. I don’t know if the Company had, essentially, grounded him for a time because he had been unreliable or if it was just coincidence. But he hadn’t been on any trips for long time.

One day he came home, quite animated, and announced that he had a business trip and wanted me to clean up his little commuter car for him to take on a work trip to the East Kootenays. I was getting to the pouty teen stage at that point, maybe fourteen years old, but I just went ahead and took on the job hoping for a couple of dollars in payment.

After I had washed the car and had vacuumed the interior and was wiping it down, I opened the glove compartment and a mickey bottle of whiskey slid out onto the floor of the car. I wasn’t a child anymore but my heart dropped. He had been sober for quite a while and I had gotten accustomed to a fairly level atmosphere around the house. Mind you, by that point I had already started smoking cigarettes and drinking and using cannabis myself.

After I had finished the job and went into the house to get cleaned up, we crossed paths. I couldn’t help myself and said, “I saw your bottle.”

Amazingly, he didn’t blow up at me this time. He just snarled, “What’s it to you?” I had no response to this and just replied, “Nothing.”

It was the last time I saw him alive.

A few days later, before his expected return, our family doctor, Doc Simonetta, came to the house to talk to my Mum. I can’t remember if I was actually in the room but I heard the conversation. The doctor said that the police had seen his car pulled over at the side of the road, just outside of town. When they stopped to investigate, they found him slumped over the steering wheel.

I remember him saying, “I’m sorry Joan, there was nothing anyone could do. He was gone.”

Time stopped for me. I don’t remember much else from that day. Later my mother on the phone... my siblings who were in town showing up. Not much else.

In the days after, my Mum taking me to buy a brown wool suit to wear to the funeral, my siblings coming home, relatives, and family friends stopping by to offer their condolences... me, going out to meet a couple of my friends at our meeting place by the shift worker’s transport buses to smoke cigarettes and try to process it. Then the funeral and the houseful of siblings and relatives afterwards.

After everything had settled, my mother said to me, “Well, you’re too old for me to control now. You’re going to have to learn to take care of yourself.”

He wasn’t an Ogre. He was raised the youngest child in a strict, religious, old fashioned, British, Salvation Army family in a small coal mining town in the mountains of British Columbia where it was so cold in the winter, they had to wrap themselves in old newspapers under their sweaters to stay warm. He lived through the Great Depression. He was a man who experienced war in the bottom of an unheated, four-engine plane, dropping bombs on people and cities and towns that he would never see. He went to university on a veteran’s-education benefit, and managed to raise a family of eight children on a single income.

I’m laughing at myself now for having sat here and written out such a morose piece of claptrap but what are you gonna do? It’s what came to me. And at least I have had the opportunity to think about my father again... as imperfect as he was... as imperfect as I am....

I apologize to anyone who was hoping for a cheerful bit but this is what came to me. I haven’t thought about my Dad for a long time but the fact that, even with my dementia and recent cancer concern, I’m older than he was when he passed away.

I do have some good memories of him. One from when I was very young. People have told me that this, and others like it aren’t possible because I was too young but I swear I hold this...

I am lying on my father’s chest as he sits on the old sectional couch we had in our living room watching TV. He is patting me on the back and I am crying a bit and slobbering on his shoulder.