What Dad Taught Me

For years I have liked to go to the mall on Father's Day. People who have fond thoughts of their father see a little of him in me, and a lot of good will comes my way. I realized I was a fraud because I had no children, but that did not stop me from enjoying the experience, and I also had the joy of finding the odd sized 3XL shirt that some thoughtful person "accidentally" put in the sale bin at the department store.

Reflection pieces are not in my wheelhouse. Friends tell me that all of the stories I write are boy meets girl. I explain that is the only plot line that I know. I remember one day I was shopping with my wife in an outlet store. I saw 4 settings of dishes that I liked, $49.95. I grabbed them and started towards the cashier. "Are you sure you want those?" she asked, and I answered yes. "Reflect on that first. You must be sure," she said.

I stood there with my proposed purchase while she went off to check out other things. My friend found me standing there looking confused. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"I want to buy these dishes, but I'm supposed to reflect first. I don't know how to do that," I explained.

"I like your kind of reflection," he replied.

But here goes ...

It takes three generations to make a good man. That's what I was told at one of the Virginia Satir family reconstruction workshops I attended, and got a lot out of.

Where does that leave those of us who did not know either of our grandfathers? Usually we grow up with incomplete images. Satir's work (Peoplemaking is one of her books) was about completing images, not changing them, which brings us back to the three generations.

To understand the forces in my life, my reactions, my ways of coping with challenges, I needed to examine how my father and grandfather would have reacted, and in fact that workshop took me back one generation before that.

When I signed up for the Satir workshop I was blaming many of my issues on my parents. To my surprise, the first thing the facilitator said to the group was that we were all products of successful parenting, because we had all come to make our lives better. Something worth thinking about.

Today when I think of my father, the first things that come to mind are his patience and encouragement, also his kindness. He was not a famous man, but to me he was larger than life, and over the years I have learned how much he influences me.

Together we shopped for groceries every Saturday. Together we built a dog house, tried ice fishing, watched westerns and football games, and played ping pong. He taught me the mysteries and rules of life so that I would be ready for adulthood. He taught me to respect women.

He volunteered to help with cub scouts and he coached my softball team. He practiced his Toastmasters speeches with me. He drove us to New York City when I wanted to go there, manoeuvering our big yellow Ford Custom through a sea of taxi cabs in Times Square.

I kept track of his business trips on a small globe that I was given for Christmas. We lived in Hamilton, Ontario, not a big city by world standards, but it had an airport, and it was named on my globe, so when he travelled I could look from Hamilton to his destination and think of him there, saying a prayer to make sure that he was safe. I worried when he was sent to Detroit just days after 'Motor City Madness.'

The family farm where my father was born and raised was in Eastern Ontario. They were serious about staying there. The house was built with four layers of brick, cool in summer, warm in winter, very solid. My great aunt was hospitalized for anorexia and later died from suicide, a family secret I learned only as an adult. After that all family members were systematically over-fed, including me and my three cousins on my father's side. Problems with overweight followed.

Dad told me his parents wanted him to stay on the family farm with them and his brother, but that was not his idea. He saw a poster to study engineering at university and announced that was what he wanted to do. He proposed to pay for it by enlisting in the army (it was the time of World War II). My grandfather asked the town doctor, the best educated man nearby. The doctor advised him to pay for tuition and residence rather than use the army program, and that is what my grandfather did. He sold some livestock to pay for my father's studies.

My mother's older sister taught French and Latin at the local high school, and it was she who introduced my parents to each other. She said my father was the best Latin student she had taught. To this day I can't bring myself to believe that--after all I heard him speak what he called French--but who am I to doubt this family mythology?

My parents were married just days after his graduation. Just weeks later she learned that she had TB, and all of their plans for life were changed. It was before the use of pharmaceuticals. They collapsed my mother's lung and ordered bed rest in a sanatorium for most of a year. But she survived. I came along years later, when she was 32 and my father was 31. He described the medical efforts towards fertility; compared with those available today they were very primitive. As I grew up I realized how challenging their life together had been in those years.

You can take the boy out of the farm, but ... My father could grow anything, and he did, as long as it was big. I once tried to interest him in Bonzai, but that got no traction with him.

Dad loved animals, but, having grown up on a farm, he thought their place was outside, not in the house. My uncle gave me a kitten, and at one point we had to take it to the vet. The receptionist asked its name. My father, a large man, looked puzzled, and said, "It's just a barn cat."

The receptionist said, "It must have a name."

Dad said, quietly, "The wife and son call it 'Fluff'." She practically shouted the name as she wrote it down, so the whole waiting room could hear the name of the large man's pet. If the incident had ended there it would have been fine, but a few days later an envelope came in the mail with the bill. It was addressed to 'Fluff Merkley.' "There is no Fluff Merkley!" he repeated a few times, trying to feel better about the name.

But he loved all animals. One day, we were at my maternal grandmother's farmhouse and I was sitting in the parlor listening to my father and my uncles talk. My grandmother was boarding a horse at her barn. It had the potential to be a fast cart-racing horse, but no one could get close enough to the animal to put equipment on it, not even the professional trainer.

My father left the room at this moment, I thought to go to the bathroom. My uncles kept talking about one thing and another. Suddenly one of them called from the window, "Will you look at that?"

We all ran to the window. Coming up the gravel road at top speed was the horse in question, with my father riding in the cart hitched to it. My father, a very large man, a sort of anti-jockey, was wearing goggles, and his right arm was stretched out so that he could touch the horse on the flank to urge it on (no whip). The sight was improbable and impressive at the same time.

A few minutes later my father, having put the horse and equipment away, came back inside. "How," one of my uncles asked incredulously, "did you hitch that horse up? The trainer can't get near it!"

My father replied easily, "We just had a little talk."

"You talked to the horse?" my uncle demanded. "Now you can't tell us that the horse talked back!"

"Of course he did," my father answered. "When you have a talk with someone, you hope they talk to you too." Much head shaking and muttering followed that statement. It is one the best memories I have of my father.

He did hope that I would follow in his footsteps professionally and become an engineer like him. He celebrated every good result I had on a math test, every concept in physics that I understood. He always said the same thing, "That will make you a good engineer." When I was old enough, he gave me his slide rules, a circular one and a straight one. And he gave me his old book of logarithm tables. When I took an interest in logarithms, his joy was almost complete.

I think it was more my mother's idea for me to have piano lessons, if, and only if, she insisted, I had an ear for music, if I wouldn't make mistakes. She noted that guitar lessons had been wasted on her. It meant paying for the lessons and buying a piano. My father was up for that--every farmhouse in Ontario I have ever visited had a piano, and my grandmothers' houses were no exception. The piano store was very modern, and the owner said he could give me the Seashore test to check my musical ear. My mother approved of that. I don't think people pay much attention to that test today. A recording played pairs of notes into the right and left headphones. I had to mark which ear had the higher note. The pitches became closer and closer as the test went on, finishing with a distinction that is probably physically impossible to make.

I marked the sheet and gave the answers to the store owner. In a couple of minutes he came out of the room, his tie flapping in the air, in a state of high excitement. "He only made one mistake!" he shouted.

My mother, true to her word, said, "I don't want him to have lessons if he makes mistakes ...."

Dad bought the piano and paid for lessons. In those days engineers moved frequently, changing jobs every few years. He went ahead to London, Ontario, where my cousins lived. I looked forward to the move for that reason. My piano lessons had become important enough that arrangements were made for a new teacher. I was referred to the Sisters of St. Joseph, who had a near monopoly on piano teaching in London. My father started his new job while my mother and I stayed behind to sell the house.

Dad went to hear my cousin's high school musical. He thought that the young man playing the piano was doing a credible job. If his son could do as well and play in a musical that would be all right, he thought. Dad didn't need an invitation. He asked the boy who his teacher was. As it happened she was a professor of piano performance at the university. Validation! And a phone call to the professor. She didn't have time to teach me, but she had a talented university student who would be good, and we were set.

My new high school wasn't nearly as interesting as my old one, especially the math courses. My new piano teacher was like an older brother who knew everything. I started to practice three hours a day, and I improved rapidly.

I suspect you know where this is headed. At 17, I announced that I wanted to study music, not engineering. I suspect you can imagine how well that went over.

There followed what I called 'the year of arguing'. Later I learned that most fathers and sons do this anyway. My father canvassed the neighbourhood for opinions that music was a wasteful pursuit, especially compared with engineering. The results were not what he had hoped. We went for a ride through the city. Dad pointed at every machine and building we passed and said, "Do you see that? An engineer designed that. An engineer put it up. An engineer signed for it. What will you do with the piano? What will you build? What will you be able to point to?"

Unlike many engineers I have met, Dad had a lively interest in psychics and fortune tellers, whom he consulted on all sorts of matters. He was very pleased to find that if he went to meetings at a nearby Spiritualist church, there was a medium at the end of every meeting and he could hope for some free advice from the beyond or the departed. He went to the meetings not out of any religious or spiritual conviction, but to save the price of a psychic reading (and he went for them too). This didn't surprise me. I had already let him down by not being able to see any psychic images in a glass of water, nor in the plastic crystal ball he bought through the mail.

He asked me ten or twenty times to go with him to the Spiritualist church. I said no, it was not my thing. Finally my mother took me aside. She said she was sick and tired of listening to us argue about engineering and she was desperate for relief. She said she would like one peaceful evening. Had I not thought that if I would go with him to the Spiritualist church meeting she would get that one evening off from listening to the two of us? And did I not think that I could make this small effort to get along with my father, who did so much for me, for one night?"

What could I say? She was right. I asked to go along with him to the next meeting. There were about twenty people at the service. I was by far the youngest. The words of the hymns seemed on the surreal side, but okay. As soon as the service ended, the medium was introduced. The whole congregation minus me leaned forward excitedly. Maybe this would be the evening that they would get their communication from the other side.

The medium took his time warming up. I kept a straight face. I'd made the effort to go. I wasn't going to give away these diplomatic brownie points by smirking. "The spirits are excited tonight," the man began. Of course they would be, I thought. If possible, the congregation leaned even farther forward. "I've never heard them so anxious to communicate, or so unified in what they have to say," he continued, working his audience almost to a frenzy. My father was worked up along with the others.

What poor innocent will get the message? I wondered. Some of them must have been coming week after week hoping for some words from loved ones beyond. I started to feel sorry for them.

"Oh this is a very important message," the medium continued, stretching people's patience almost to the breaking point. Then he surveyed us, and said, triumphantly, "The message is for you, young man!"

Was it too late to make a run for the door? Not practical, I needed a ride home. I decided to sit still and take it. Disappointment in the congregation. After all, who was I, a first-timer, to get the grace of a message?

Of course he drew it out more. "The message is, the message is ..."

I prayed to God he would get on with it.

"The message is, you must listen to your father."

Really? That was the message from the afterlife? I couldn't believe my ears. My father was instantly transported to seventh heaven. On the way home, he repeated, "You are so lucky you came tonight. The message was for you! Think if you had missed it!" What I thought was that he must have slipped the medium a twenty.

Of course I didn't listen, not about engineering anyway. Desperate to make his case, my father turned to our family doctor. Perhaps you are sensing a pattern in the family coping. Perhaps you are seeing the sense in Virginia Satir's model. On the farm the doctor had been on my father's side--"send your son to study engineering at university." In my time the doctor was on my side--"think of all the pleasure your son will give to people who need it."

Dad said, "if I thought this would happen, I would never have paid for those piano lessons." But I went to university to study music. And here I acknowledge the role of both doctors in pivotal decisions.

I met the love of my life in university. We were married, and went to Ivy-league grad schools. I got a permanent job teaching in a music department. Pandora's box opened for my wife. She was mistreated and shafted in part-time teaching, she suffered a set of menacing and limiting physical health problems, and she remembered the horror of childhood trauma and fell into a depression. I did not know what to do. We worked through the workplace problem with a lawyer, with mixed results. She got help for the physical health problems also with mixed results, the depression did not improve--at the low point she swallowed enough pills to go into a coma while I was away at work. Mercifully she was still conscious when I got home. That got my full attention, especially since my great aunt had died that way.

I became anxious. I sweated almost non-stop. We attended couple's counselling, which led to the Satir workshop. I had my Satir family reconstruction, understood patterns, and the sweating stopped. I learned to be a better husband. I understood what it had been like for my father. My grandfather and great grandfather would not have had the tools or resources to help my great aunt, but I could find what I needed to help my wife.

Out of the blue I had a disturbing dream. In it I recognized my father in a pre-historic lifetime. He was with my mother and his brother. I was their small child, knee high. We lived around bogs near the coast. I was standing near my mother. I realized that she had made an agreement with my uncle to drown my father in the pit where they drowned animals. I flashed on the scene, and realized with horror that I had not warned my father. I awoke with a start. Would I expect a child of two years to understand what was happening and warn his father? No, but I was certain that I had understood and failed in not warning him.

I wrote the dream down and tried to forget it. My father retired, and almost immediately his cognitive abilities declined. It was especially evident with numbers. He went from doing complex calculations in his head to being unable to remember the lottery number in the recording on the telephone. There was swelling in his abdomen. Although he drank no alcohol and never had, his doctors said he might have cirrhosis of the liver. I asked my doctor.

My doctor said the possible diagnosis was unacceptable. If he had that disease he would need treatment. Why didn't he get a referral to the doctor in Toronto who was world renowned for her treatment of liver disease? I conveyed this to my father and he got the referral. Going to Toronto meant a trip of a little less than an hour.

And here things turned a bit strange. My mother phoned to say she had decided it was too much trouble to go to the Toronto appointment. This was very uncharacteristic for her, and her voice was cold, also not usual for her. And too much trouble? The thing was that when one of us was sick, nothing was too much trouble.

The only explanation I could think of was my dream, that she was unconsciously replaying what had happened a long time ago. But what good was that insider knowledge to me? I couldn't say anything like "You had him killed once, now you're going to sentence him to death again in another way..." No, so I thought quickly. I said, "If you do not go to the appointment and he has cirrhosis, we won't have to have this conversation many more times." Was it too pushy? Too high handed? I know of no manual on how to manage such situations. She said she would think about it.

They went to the appointment. They got the diagnosis. The only thing the doctor could think of was that he had contracted hepatitis from one bad meal of pork he, my grandfather, and my uncle had eaten fifty years earlier. He remembered the jaundice. My uncle had already died by this time, of cirrhosis-like symptoms.

My father got his treatment, and he had five years of a good quality of life before he died. Near the end he had blackouts. His doctor told me to take away the keys to my father's car, which I did. He was angry for a couple of weeks, but then let it go. Under certain circumstances it is a son's responsibility to take away his father's car keys.

What is karma to you? Payment of past debts? Repetition of patterns? Whatever the case, I think the three of us stepped out of that destructive pattern. Soon after his diagnosis I had a dream about library fines. They used to come on pink slips. In the dream I had a fair stack of pink slips. Reluctantly, I went to the desk to pay the fines. It would cut into my budget I knew. Instead, the person at the desk tore up all the slips. Then my father appeared at my elbow. A wise person I knew showed up and asked to take him aside to have a little talk.

My wife got little relief. Soon she had severe mobility issues. I transported her in a wheel chair. At the earliest opportunity I took early retirement and we moved from the city that had held so much pain for her to the house my parents had left me. On our third night after moving she had a severe gall bladder attack. The emergency room doctors said the organ had to come out. She had presented herself to have it removed years earlier, but that surgeon had said that her symptoms could have been caused by one of the other conditions she was dealing with. So she was left with it.

After the surgery we were called in. The gall bladder contained a malignant tumor, almost protruding outside the organ. My wife was referred to an oncologist before prophylactic surgery. It was too late. The aggressive cancer had spread. She lived only three and a half months. Before she died she said to me, "I wish I had given you a child."

I begged her not to think that way, not to regret that. It was a decision we had made together, and given all of the health difficulties of various kinds, the only reasonable decision, though we had visited a fertility clinic (that branch of medicine made a lot of progress since my parents' day--again the family pattern) and I had deposited sperm to keep the possibility of a child open. I told her it was in no way a lack that I felt. I hope I persuaded her of that.

I went to grief counselling and joined a bereavement walking group. Widows and widowers understand one another. I was struck by the facilitator, a young lady who had memorized the anniversaries of the death dates the walkers were grieving and mentioned it to some of them. She also knew instinctively who was in trouble. She glanced at my intake form and asked me to walk with William (not his real name), who had been walking with the group for three months and had yet to say a word to anyone, the whole idea behind the walking group. I stood beside him on the walk and he talked a blue streak. I glanced behind me at the facilitator, Anne (not her real name), and saw her beaming.

As the weeks went by, and we all had coffee after the walk, she and I became friends. At length, she told me she wanted to separate from her husband. All the people she knew who had divorced had needed in some way the emotional support of their parents. It was not a question of finance, and certainly in no way of romance, but rather of being there. Her parents were dead.

I did not hesitate. I explained I had no children. I already knew her two daughters, both of them young musicians. I said that if she would be my daughter I would be her father. She did not hesitate. I don't need you to agree, but I believe that from beyond the grave my wife gave me an adult child when I was in my early 60s.

Like many widowers I wondered whether I had done everything I could to keep my wife well, or at least alive. My daughter is a thanatologist, specialized in death and dying, as well as other losses. She sat me down and showed me research she had read on survivors of the trauma my wife had suffered at age 3. Every disease and condition my wife had was detailed as a result of that trauma in the article. There was nothing I could have done other than support her as best I could. I stopped my second-guessing.

COVID came soon and my youngest granddaughter's high school courses were not adequate to my mind. There were assigned readings and tests, but not, in my opinion, enough teaching. I filled the gap for this extraordinary young person. And over this time the two of us have talked about just about everything. She calls me Grandpa. I imagine you can guess what that feels like. This week I attended her high school graduation. She won a prize and she will go to university in the fall. I did well. I only cried a little.

At the outset I said that it takes three generations to make a good man. I never met my maternal grandfather. I have one memory only of my father's father, just a glimpse of his face and the feel of the linen sheets in his sick bed. I think I have some understanding of what their lives were like, and how they adapted to the big challenges they faced. I think I have a good understanding of my father.

As I think of him, I remember the first line of a poem by E.E. Cummings, "My father walked through dooms of love." My father did, and so do I. I know where I will be this Father's Day, and with whom.

I know that I am very fortunate. I know that I have made many mistakes, one of them really big. Do my positive actions make up for these? I'm not sure it works that way. Am I a good man? A good father? A good grandfather? I hope all three, but it is not for me to say. I love my deceased wife, my daughter, and her daughters, and I give thanks for them every day, and for my friends. I honor my parents, and I wish you a Happy Father's Day.