Legacies Along a Continuum
My father never finished high school. There were wars, famine and revolution as intervening factors, a different world. He didn’t seem to need a formal education or even miss it. It was never part of his reality. I do believe he wanted more for his own children, yet something in him, or lacking in him, prevented him from telling us so. I knew my father cared, that he loved me. He played on occasion with me in the backyard on our Vine Street home hitting a ball with my little kid sized bat. He built, with care and diligence, like an artisan, wooden toys in his basement shop. Was that to escape the world, or to show he cared, maybe a bit of both.
I can’t say that I understood my father’s attitude in regard to education. I do know he never directly encouraged or discouraged me from doing one thing or the other. It was an emotional equilibrium, a void with no direction and one that I just happened to tumble from in the right direction. I think. He never went to my school teacher meetings, rarely even glanced at my report cards seemed indifferent to whether I went to university or even if it was in or out of town. It didn’t seem to matter. He just seemed to think that I knew what I was doing and that I would get it right. I had no direction.
Likely, my father observed me from an emotional distance having been hobbled through his own childhood experiences with his own father and surrounded my death. As a child he told me stories of playing in battle fields near his village, of smashing artillery shells with a hammer to see what would happen and keeping a cache of battle found weapons hidden from his Mennonite pacifist parents. It was a wonder I was even born.
One way or another I do know that the man that I eventually became is simply part of a continuum, a legacy from the men before me, for better and for worse. I have no control over what happened before. I have control now and I have made mistakes. I know that and my children know that too.
My father was at best a lonely man even when he was with his family. His diary from the Depression era reveals an unspeakable emptiness and an immeasurable loneliness. The diary fell into my hands after his death. It took me years before I could bring myself to read it. I regret I ever did. It is now destroyed, but not the indelible images etched in my brain. His marriage to my mother filled part of his emotional abyss that was his soul, but it was never enough to ease his personal demons, whatever they were. My mother suffered and I think she was relieved on many levels when my dad passed before she did. she did not have an easy life either.
In his retirement years, long before we had grown and left home, my dad would, without notice board a greyhound bus and travel wherever it took him. Aimlessly. We, as kids, would get a postcard from exotic California with a coloured picture of an endlessly white beach with beautiful full surf. In cryptic script he would tell us in three phrases about his trip as if it were a normal event. Next, weeks later, a card from equally exotic Florida, now on the opposite coast, a picture of an orange grove. Another brief message. One morning, eight or nine days later, without comment he would be at the breakfast table slurping his coffee from his favourite Coffee Hound mug and saucer as if nothing had happen. Nothing had changed.
Even then, as a child, I thought my father’s travel plans, if that is what you could call them, were nothing short of bizarre. I have no idea what my mother thought of all of this. Her husband abandons her for a month or more at a time. My guess is she may have been relieved. My father’s generation was a chauvinistic one, also made possible through engrained socially induced female complacency and some biblical references stating that the man was the head of the household. Perhaps, slavery was justified in the same way.
My father, and I loved the man dearly, was ever an enigma. He was a product of his times and of the men who came before him. I am simply part of that continuum. Hopefully, I have made some improvements along the way. But I am not the judge in this matter.
