Sooey Says

I have male friends whose Dads have died in the past few years and they really miss them, their characters, their antics, the much maligned divorced dad living in a dump relationship they remember having with them growing up. Or they miss the patriarch presiding over a dying age of parties and bad parenting when men were men and women did all the real work so that men could tell everybody what to do.

But my father died when I was just little, my sister a baby, my other sister and my brother under ten years old, so I have no real memories of a relationship, just a few scenes like photographs of him sitting at the kitchen table in his housecoat and slippers, or in bed, when he would have known he was dying, that there was no way out of the cancer that was killing him. When he did die, I was young enough that it didn't matter to me, all the people coming and going from our house made it seem like something exciting had happened, that's all, although I remember my older sister sleeping with my mom and crying when the phone call had come from Princess Margaret, way down in Toronto, that he was dead. It was years later, when my kids were the age I was when he died, that it struck me how hard it must have been for him to leave us behind and I mourned his untimely death then.

Meanwhile, out in Saskatchewan, my mother's sister was going through her own difficulties and couldn't attend my father's funeral because her husband had just been killed helping another farmer (her husband was actually a vet) bring in the harvest during a storm. His tractor had rolled over on him and he'd been crushed. Like my mother, my Aunt had four little kids, three boys and a girl to my mother's three girls and a boy (which everyone thought was harder except we were into the '60s then and I doubt my mom would have agreed based on my older sister's coming of age years), but my father had been a lawyer in a small city, my aunt was stranded in a tiny house on the TransCanada in a town of a couple of hundred people - on the prairie. That part was definitely harder.

Luckily (thank Gawd for luck, eh?) both sisters had had it drilled into them by their own father, just before he slipped out on my grandmother to hook up with Bunny and produce eight more children to add to the six (or seven, if an "uncle" raised with my mom was actually his - which he probably was) in my mother's family - to get their teaching certificates because a woman without a profession was setting herself up for trouble. Men could not be relied upon for money, honey, so get the professional designation that will allow you to work in this sexist world of ours.

He truly was ahead of his time, my grandfather, who I met once at a cousin's wedding just long enough for him to comment on one a cute little trick I was and that I must of got all my looks from my mother, no offence to my father who everybody agreed, "was no Clark Gable". If there was one thing my mother's family had in spades it was looks, they agreed, although to my eye my grandfather looked like a potato in an ill-fitting suit. Still, when I met a couple of his offspring from his relationship with Bunny, they looked like movie stars.

The reason I'm writing this now, though, on Remembrance Day, is because both my father and my uncle were older when they married, as were my mother and my aunt, although still almost a decade younger than their husbands, so both had fought in the Second World War and lived, only to be struck down a mere dozen years after it was over. Neither were the type you'd associate with soldiering, both were tall and thin, destined for education and white collar professions. When I first saw a picture of my father wearing a tee-shirt and not one of those broad-shouldered suits, I was so shocked tears came to my eyes. His shoulders weren't much broader than mine, for heaven's sake. The idea of him overseas, fighting for King and Country, seemed as absurd to me as it probably had to him because, according to my mother, he never talked about the war, just took a lot of pictures during his down time to document the tedium and hung his uniform up in the basement cloakroom, with his helmet, guns and whatever other paraphernalia he thought he shouldn't throw out but didn't want to look at ever again.

I don't know if my uncle talked about the war, but my aunt was a member of the Legion. Both she and my mother had been out in Halifax for the war, my aunt having worked her way up to a ranking of some sort, my mother having enjoyed the parties and dances. It was a lifelong bone of contention between them, that my aunt persisted in playing cards and drinking at the Legion, while my mother had put the war so firmly behind her that the most she'd say about it was, "It's all nonsense, Remembrance Day. You went because you had to go. The war was harder on those men who couldn't." And certainly for her, it wasn't the war that was the defining time of my father's life, it was getting cancer and dying at age 45, only a few years into his career as a criminal lawyer, four young children left behind to be raised by a stay at home wife and mother who would have to go back to work because he simply hadn't been practicing law long enough for her to do anything but put that teaching certificate to good use.

Anyway, my point today is really about a dream I had last night, not the dead dads of our lives. I was living back in one of my old apartments but the kitchen was vaguely like the kitchen in the house I grew up in, that my father's father had built in the late '40s and that my mother had lived in until just a few years ago. My ex and my beau and my kids had snuck in while I was out and "decked the halls" of the kitchen with all sorts of Christmas decorations - lights, ornaments, a little ceramic glowing tree inconveniently placed on the counter beside a pile of dirty dishes. They'd dimmed the lights so it looked extra Christmassy, but also kind of dingy and in need of a good scrubbing. My first impulse was to pare it all down, I was calculating in my head what would have to go, what I could stand to let stay, when I realized - wait - why can't I just work around this for a while? Why do I have to strip it all down to what's aesthetically pleasing instead of just letting the season take over the kitchen for a while? And this real feeling of peace came over me and I thought, "I'll just let other people celebrate in the way that they want to celebrate instead of riding against their tide."

I'm in Ottawa and what sounded like a single Snowbird just flew overhead. I'm going to let this one go.