The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers

  Edited by

  Lesley Choyce and Julia Swan

  Pottersfield Press, Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Copyright © Pottersfield Press 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used or stored in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying – or by any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems shall be directed in writing to the publisher or to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (www.AccessCopyright.ca). This also applies to classroom use.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  The Nova Scotia book of fathers/Lesley Choyce, Julia Swan, editors.

  ISBN 978-1-988286-00-6 (paperback)

  ISBN EPUB 978-1-98826-08-2

  1. Fathers--Anecdotes. 2. Fathers. 3. Father and child--Anecdotes. 4. Father and child. I. Choyce, Lesley, 1951-, editor II. Swan, Julia, 1955-, editor

  HQ756.N68 2017 306.874’2 C2016-906886-2

  Cover design: Gail LeBlanc

  Pottersfield Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.

  Pottersfield Press

  83 Leslie Road

  East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, Canada, B2Z 1P8

  Website: www.PottersfieldPress.com

  To order, phone 1-800-NIMBUS9 (1-800-646-2879) www.nimbus.ns.ca

  Printed in Canada

  Pottersfield Press is committed to preserving the environment and the appropriate harvesting of trees and has printed this book on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

  Contents

  Introduction: Father And Son

  Lesley Choyce

  Introduction: Father And Daughter

  Julia Swan

  Alexander MacLeod

  Housekeeping

  Carol Bruneau

  What Falls From The Tree

  Harry Thurston

  An Excerpt From Lost River, A Memoir

  Lorri Neilsen Glenn

  Real Men Drive Stick

  Frank Cameron

  Looking Up To Dad

  Jon Tattrie

  The Five Thousand Fathers Who Made You

  Joan Baxter

  Looking Out For Anyone But Himself

  Anne Murray

  Memories Of My Father

  Bruce Graham

  My Father’s Porch

  Lesley Choyce

  The Death Of A Father

  Lenore Zann

  Zann And The Art Of Tennis

  David Mossman

  Siol Na Fear Fearail (The Breed Of Manly Men)

  Janice Landry

  One Tiny Tomato: How Small Remembrances Become Significant

  Sheldon Currie

  A Holy Weight

  Lindsay Ruck

  The Incomparable Love Of A Father

  Ian Colford

  Always Teaching, Always Learning

  Julia Swan

  A Halifax Boy: A Driving Life

  Craig Flinn

  In Memory Of Dad

  Karen Forrest

  A Navy Man’s Daughter

  Daniel N. Paul

  The Mushaboomer

  Author Biographies

  Introduction: Father And Son

  Lesley Choyce

  A few weeks after my own father died in December of 2014, I decided to write a personal remembrance of him and meant to share it only with friends and family. But the writing of the piece stirred something deep within me. Putting my memories and his death into words made me suddenly realize that he was truly gone. My mom had died just about a year previous to that and here I was, a fully grown man who had been raised by two great parents, but had now become an orphan.

  I wrote about the loss, but also about the man my father was and the great gifts he had bestowed upon me – life lessons, stories, time shared together. He left this world after ninety-three years. He had been a boy during the Depression and seen hard times, he had worked as a farm labourer as a teenager, he had been a soldier in World War II, and he had come back home and worked hard physical labour as a truck mechanic until retirement. And he had settled into a wonderful retirement routine with his wife for several decades of travelling, gardening, and sharing life with his family.

  What I wrote about him was not a eulogy but a celebration. I realized that there was something universal about my story and my version of recounting his life. So I decided to share it beyond the scope of family and friends. It appeared in The Chronicle Herald on January 17, 2015, and was posted online. It triggered a surprising number of heartwarming responses from readers near and far.

  Obviously, our personalities, our beliefs, our decisions, and our moral codes are greatly shaped by our parents – often more so than we’d like to admit. My father had somehow imbedded in me a way of seeing the world that still shapes the way I go through my daily life. As a teenager and a young (angry and independent) man, I had rebelled against so much of the culture I had grown up in. But, oddly enough, I was never really rebelling against my parents.

  My mother and father were shaped by the times they had grown up in: years of poverty, war, recovery, and to a degree, conformity. They had strong but liberal religious beliefs. My own formative years were the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. If ever there was a time to rebel, those were the decades for it. My father was truly working class and not a highly educated man: he had not completed high school. His lessons to me were mostly non-verbal. He may have verbally instructed me as a child in the older beliefs he had grown up with, but by the time my rebellious teen years were upon me, he accepted my long hair, my hitchhiking, my rants against government, and doubts about religion. He remained accepting of the new me and his lessons continued as they always had since I was a tiny boy living in a trailer with two young (and in their own way) idealistic parents. The lessons were all about humility, fairness, kindness, compassion, self-reliance, honesty, generosity, and loyalty.

  I’m sure the list is longer than that but those were some of the big-ticket items my father gave to me.

  So, as I grew to accept the death of my parents, and continued on with what I do in the scenario that is my life as a parent, husband, writer, teacher, publisher, I decided that I wanted to do something a bit more for my father and his humble but brilliant legacy. If my small article had touched such a personal chord for so many people, I should ask others to share their stories of their fathers.

  I would keep it focused to the place where I live and invite the writers I admired to submit whatever version of a father story they wanted to. The anthology would span generations and not necessarily be about the loss of fathers – although it is that very loss that often triggers us to finally sit down and try to sum up the meaning of the man who raised you.

  And you may think it odd that this is The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers, whereas my own father was not from here. But he was in many ways the reason I immigrated here and remained here to raise my children and create a fulfilling life. The Nova Scotia I love embodies so many of the values that he represented and it is filled with many of the things he loved.

  My father was always a hard worker and a rural man at heart. And having shared my father’s story with the province, I wanted to hear back from others about their fathers. So I solicited stories from a r
ange of this province’s finest writers and many welcomed the opportunity. Some were daunted by the task for fear they may not do their parent justice. Others had been meaning to do just this, write down the personal story, but had found the task difficult, emotional, and challenging.

  But the end result is before you and many of the stories are probably not what you’d expect. Each one is different and each one adds another dimension to the great human story of fatherhood. These authors welcome you into their lives by sharing something that is at once the most private of literary offerings but also the most universal.

  Lesley Choyce

  Lawrencetown Beach

  Nova Scotia

  July 13, 2016

  Introduction: Father And Daughter

  Julia Swan

  When Lesley asked me to contribute to the anthology he was planning on Nova Scotia fathers, my dad was in failing health, although my family didn’t know just how little time was left to him. When I began editing the collection, my father had passed away and I was – am – still coming to grips with the reality of a world without him in it. I have cried a fair bit while reading these pieces about fathers from some of Nova Scotia’s best writers. I’ve been touched by the deep wells of emotion they have offered all of us in the stories they have related about their fathers.

  My own father was a great storyteller. One Christmas, I asked both him and my mother to write me something about their early lives. My father wrote about his love of driving: how he learned from his uncles by watching them, how much he loved being behind the wheel. He also regaled my mother and me with tales of his boyhood. After a while, I would come home from my visits with them and write down what he had told me.

  After Lesley’s invitation, I struggled a bit with the essay. But then I dug out the piece Dad had written for me and the recollections I had recorded. As he was hospitalized and the bad news came rolling over us like a tidal wave, I wrote my father’s life – or at least a small part of it. He read it, but he didn’t say whether he liked it or not. He corrected my errors of fact; getting things right was always important to him because he hated misrepresentation. I hope the piece pleased him. He didn’t tell me not to include it, so I took that as tacit approval.

  He passed on his love of driving to me. He taught me, but the lessons almost drove us to kill each other some days. He was a perfectionist and I was nervous. He operated a vehicle (manual transmissions, fire apparatus, the fire department aerial ladder) with such ease that I know my early bumbling efforts frustrated him no end. But then one winter night, after I had gotten my license, I drove my grandmother home on roads like sheets of ice, and he praised me for getting there and back safely. I still remember that on Chambers Hill, about halfway between our house and my grandmother’s place, a truck driver flashed his lights at me as a warning as to how bad it was. When I told Dad that, his eyes widened and he said he would never worry about me behind the wheel again. I had proven myself.

  Well, not quite. He was a compulsive worrier and we sometimes disagreed, probably because we were so alike in so many ways. But I learned from him and about him. Maybe one of the advantages of becoming an adult is that you are able to see your parents as people in their own right, not just as your parents.

  When your father dies, the world is never the same. My mother still lives in the house she and Dad occupied together for forty-three years, but it’s a different place now, without him there in his corner chair, reading out the news to us from the weekend paper, mug of tea by his side. He used to tap the spoon rhythmically against the side of the mug when he finished stirring in the sugar. He did a wicked British accent. He fussed over their little cat, and worried about all the strays they fed. We aren’t a demonstrative family, but he hugged me hard, tight and close. I remember his hands, broad-backed and freckled. He always listened. I asked my mother not to remove his recording from the answering machine, so I could go on hearing his voice. I know he’s gone, but somehow I keep thinking I’ll see him there in his chair when I visit, that he’ll be in the doorway when I drive away, as he always was.

  He was kind, loyal, stubborn, strong, meticulous in everything he did. He was funny. He was always there, but now he’s not. I miss him terribly.

  Fathers and daughters, fathers and sons. Here in this collection, you will meet all sorts of Nova Scotia dads, celebrated and memorialized evocatively by their children. They are the men who raised us, loved us, taught us, guided us. They epitomize this rugged, sea-swept province in all their gifts.

  Julia Swan

  Halifax

  Nova Scotia

  July 14, 2016

  Housekeeping

  Alexander MacLeod

  Although my dad, Alistair MacLeod, was one of the greatest fiction writers Canada ever produced, he was not what you’d call an “artsy” person, at least not in the way people normally use that term today. Don’t get me wrong. My father certainly believed in the power of the imagination and he cared deeply about the individual’s right to be creative – these were basic, fundamental values for him – but he just wasn’t all that interested in the outside trappings of the culture business, its surface appearances, its jealousies, and its day-to-day fluctuations. A hipster or a champion of the avant garde, he was not, and the most experimental heights of high art, just like the lowest common denominator depths of pop culture, rarely appealed to him. A whole decade’s worth of mass market trends could come and go, sweeping over the entire planet, but they would leave him almost completely untouched. Almost. Once in a while there’d be a strange moment of breakthrough, a surprising connection. For example, not many people know how much my dad appreciated the wit and cleverness of a good Weird Al Yankovic parody or the way he sincerely loved Boy George’s voice, especially on “Karma Chameleon.”

  Between these extremes, my father moved down the middle of the road along the comfortable, well-worn paths that he preferred. He knew what he liked and these things rarely changed. His fashion sense was so steady that whenever he opened his presents at Christmas or on his birthday, the giver would know they’d done well if the new tweed cap, the new blue/black/grey dress pants, the new collared shirt, or the new sport coat looked exactly, or pretty much exactly, like the clothes he was actually wearing at the time. “This will work fine,” he’d say, holding up the most recent acquisition and comparing it with its slightly older clone. “Thank you very much.” In fact, his clothing choices were so reliable and consistent that once, when Dad took off his hat to get his picture taken by an Italian photographer, the guy, in broken English, told him to please put it back on because he couldn’t sell a picture of the Alistair MacLeod if it didn’t include the hat. “Maybe I’m in a bit of a rut,” he acknowledged.

  Obviously, I am recounting all of this with a deep sense of admiration. I love the way my dad loved the things he loved. A bowl of blueberries and a cup of instant coffee in the morning. Newspapers to read through the day. Sports on TV at night. Keith’s or Blue in the fridge and “normal people’s Scotch” – not the fancy single malts – waiting in the cupboard. His favourite thing in the world was good company and he was fully connected to the people he cared about: our family, our relatives, our friends, and our neighbours. His memory was astounding and it was almost scary to watch him recall small, significant details about people he hadn’t seen in twenty years. He could give you not just the names, the grades and the paper topics of hundreds of his former students, but he might also throw in some insanely specific tidbit about their quirky handwriting on a final exam he’d read in the 1990s: “She’s the one who used to dot all her lower case i’s with hearts. I wonder if she still does.” That kind of stuff.

  Alistair MacLeod was the most deeply satisfied person I ever met and every day I miss his quiet presence in my life, his unhurried walk, his slow breathing, his certainty. When the tributes poured in after his death, people sometimes described him, in purely complimentary terms, as a “simple” man with “humble” tastes, but I could never fully a
gree with those observations. I know what his admirers were trying to say and I respect it. They thought Dad was a good person and that he was never too flashy. This is true enough, but if it were actually “simple” to love your life exactly the way you had it, then far more people would be content. No, from the outside looking in, I think my dad’s choices were complex and deliberate, rock-solid instead of simple, and profound, especially where they appeared to be humble.

  Because he got most of his big decisions right, my dad hardly ever had to sweat the small stuff and he did not fret very often. He could be a little stubborn, this is also true, and occasionally he was a little too set in his ways, but he was never rude towards anybody else, even if he did not agree with their point of view. It’s safe to say that no outside opinion, no new development, was going to come in and shake his core values. He was completely committed to my mom in all ways and I think the unfashionably large family of six children they raised together provided them both with an endless supply of chaotic drama, fun, and love.

  Dad sincerely appreciated his job at the sometimes underrated University of Windsor and he was comfortable in his home, no matter what anybody thought of the neighbourhood. Even his regular lineup of slightly rusty and at least ten-year-old used cars served him well. When No Great Mischief won the Dublin IMPAC literary award – the world’s richest prize for a single work of fiction – journalists asked him what he was going to do with all this new money in his life. He said, “I don’t know, maybe I will finally be able to get a fancier car.” That never happened.

  All this consistent steadiness, this blend of regular everyday values, came together to make my dad seem, at least on the outside, like the least original person you might ever encounter. “I just try to appear as boring as possible.” This was the line he used to explain his strategy for dealing with border guards or customs officers, but it applied in other areas of his life.