Dad                                                                                November 1, 2006

When I sat down to think of what to say about my – our – father, I drew this complete blank, a page upon which nothing was written. However, I had but to close my eyes to become flooded with images, ideas, stories that threatened to overwhelm me. And among those many images I then felt the burden of trying to find the quintessential Eric, at once as a man and a father, the two worlds often apart yet quite inseparable. So perhaps a good place to start is at the beginning.

Dad was born in Toronto, 1914, his mother Irene, his father George. Irene, as he was often proud of saying, was an elocutionist, his father a pharmacist. Along with his older sibling Wallace, the family settled in Toronto. When his parents separated, Dad lived with his father, his brother with their mother. Despite the rancor that evolved from that separation, Dad and his brother maintained a close relationship as they did with their mother. What so early defines a person is often lost to his children, and that was particularly true of Dad who was a private person. However, his many trips to Toronto, in which I became a participant around the age of 12, we children learned early that Dad was a Toronto man and that family was very important to him. (The “Christmas Trip” This was an annual affair either to deliver and receive Christmas cheer and/or pick up Gran to ferry back to Ottawa. Dad insisted, despite the December weather, that a car window be left partially open. He drove, seat moved to its forward position despite his height, in sports coat and gloves, Gran was offered a large blanket, while I was left to shiver in the back seat. Apparently, the car heater was an invention that had to be countermanded as was radio, a clock, or any other addition that may distract from the basic purpose of a vehicle.)

In 1939, another seminal event in Dad’s life, one of which we, as children, were reminded in many ways throughout our upbringing in Ottawa, not only moulded Dad’s character but ironically, put him on a path which I am sure he had not anticipated. WWII took Dad, and his brother, to Europe, Dad in the Signal Corps, Wallace in the Airforce. As fate decided, Dad was captured during the Raid of Dieppe and spent three years in a POW camp. Upon his release, he became re-united with his sweetheart, Evelyn, and they married within two weeks of his return. With a personal drive that I could only imagine and appreciate as an adult, Dad went from less than his Senior Matriculation – high school diploma for those of my generation – to his PHD in the seven years from 1945 to 1952. His chosen field – Geology - had been inspired through access to a library during his confinement. (Geology: To us, his children, Dad was a Geologist, complete with innumerable black and white pictures – boxes and boxes of slides - showing rock or soil faces decorated with a single rock hammer, which was to show scale, don’t you know. The odd picture placed him and his small group of colleagues in place of the hammer for which we were all grateful. Although he spared us the delight of looking at his collection, he would often inform us all about the formation of rock and soil features that were exposed along the 401, or some other rock cut, on our equally innumerable trips into the country, another of his enduring passions. Dad always took the “long way home” just to enjoy the scenery, or perhaps to go by a favourite slice of the earth.  That passion is one which has endured in me as I am sure as much in my siblings).  

Undoubtedly with the strength of Evelyn at his side, those years also saw the birth of Alastaire, 1947, myself, 1950, and Hildegarde, 1951. As if that was not enough, the family moved to Ottawa as Dad began his formal working life with the Civil Service in the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, and in 1955, the baby of the family, Mark, came along.  This was the Father era, as the six of us became a family in the house at 1392 Orillia Street. Dad, not only the “bread winner”, was the consummate exerciser: walker, bicyclist, 5BX aficionado (For those that have not heard of the 5BX programme, it was spawned by the military during the 50’s to keep us all fit in a limited space. I will tell you what it consisted of in our house: loud thumping, grunts, syncopated running on the spot, all in his bedroom. Usually with the door closed. What was he doing in there?) Dad was fit (Remember, he and Mom had to deal with four children growing up in the 60’s when Rock supplanted Big Band, hair and clothing went to the wild side and we won’t even discuss the sexual revolution!), and that fitness preoccupied and defined him as a father as did his work ethic, his reading, the driving of his cars until they were held together with nothing but cloth tape. (Cloth tape, the precursor to Duct tape, put Dad well over the top as the Red – Green of his generation).

And he recorded it all. From Christmas presents, to clothes, to his meticulous vehicle records (He delighted, once a vehicle had definitely reached its end by literally falling apart in the driveway, in calculating how much the vehicle had cost to run, per mile, over its life span. This required equally meticulous gas consumption records which he recorded on the ever present file card with the ever present pen in his ever available shirt pocket. The same white shirt pocket which often suffered the fate of ink ooze from the aforementioned pen much to my mother’s consternation.)

I could go on and on filling pages of memories, each one as powerful as the last, from the Charlie Brown Christmas trees – we would all troupe down to the nearest tree lot and Dad would pick out the scrawniest spruce despite our whining, rather the Scotch Pines everyone else got because it was traditional-, the annual puttying and painting of the storm windows – apart from mowing the lawn, killing dandelions and shoveling snow with just the right kind of shovel, this was the only yard work I remember him doing-, skating at the local rink and on the Rideau Canal  in his sheep-skin mitts – and his ancient, embarrassing skates - his refusal to have a TV in the house until I dragged one home in 1968 and to my delight his subsequent addiction to Batman and Perry Mason, and his annual “out in the field” work from May to September, the end of which was punctuated by his “hands off the car wheel” to check the alignment in which we all delighted, and on, and on, and on.

However, I will work towards a conclusion by mentioning his love of life, in particular, Astronomy which moved him to retire at age 60 in 1974 and become, over the next 20 years, along with our mother, a world traveler. As I was often moved to say to friends and colleagues, most proudly I might add, my father was an eclipse chaser, an exotic seeker of the unusual, a man concerned with the most fundamental truths of the earth upon which he knew we all depended. Yet, he was a man who never forgot those who were marginalized by our society’s mad consumerist rush, generous to a fault, enemy of no one, his own life a model of which most of us would do well to heed.

Yes, it is indeed difficult to capture the quintessential person, man and father, in such a short moment because he left behind far from a blank page. He has written much and although he is physically gone, what he did write will forever be locked within us.

Jay