The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  The day of our final at-home visit with Dad, he was in the spare room, seated by a small, wooden TV tray. He had all of his hobby tools and craft supplies out and he was in the early stages of building a model of a miniature fighter jet from the Second World War.

  It lay unfinished from that day onward.

  When my mother and I were later gathering up and going through his personal possessions, I did not have the heart to toss out the partially finished wood creation. I have kept the shell of the aircraft and its box. Inside are the unused parts Dad was working with; they are a visual reminder that, like my father, I plan to keep working on my own creative projects until I no longer can.

  I include this anecdote as a gentle reminder to think about what you throw out before you decide it holds no value. The most inconsequential item today can hold a special meaning later.

  That also holds true for Dad’s books, which many family members gave to him as birthday and Christmas gifts. He kept many of them. My father only read the news and nonfiction. I never saw him pick up a book of fiction in my life – he found reality far more interesting and intriguing. He loved to read about golf, ships, the Titanic, the world wars, and other global conflicts, topics he religiously studied over many years.

  Two years before he died, in 2004, I gave him a collector’s edition book entitled Hurricane Juan: The Story of a Storm, published by The Chronicle Herald. Baz was a news junkie and read the paper every day, twice a day, from front to back, for as long as I can remember. Dad was the person who consistently reminded me at a young age how important it is to keep up with world news and current affairs, long before I became a journalist. Inside the Herald publication, I wrote: “Merry Christmas Dad, 2004, Love Janice and Rob.” Rob Dauphinee is my husband of twenty-one years. Dad loved Rob like the son he never had.

  The way people wrote notes inside the book covers, or autographed them, are crucial now. The signatures and messages serve as markers in time.

  Sometimes Baz wrote an additional passage himself inside, always in his expressive, cursive handwriting. He would explain who had given him each book and any pertinent details. Inside one he said: “To Baz, Christmas present from wife, Theresa, 1999.” That year was the first Christmas we all celebrated and shared with Laura, whose birthday is November 26, 1999. That holiday was joyous because Mom and Dad had just met their granddaughter only about a month before. Seeing Baz’s handwriting marking that year, in particular, still makes me smile.

  A simple date and note inside a book can and will take on deeper meaning when the person who owned it can no longer accept any more gifts from you.

  The book Mom gave Dad in 1999 is titled Return to Midway – The quest to find the Yorktown and the other lost ships from the pivotal battle of the Pacific War. My father spoke a lot about war. He actually lived feet from the Atlantic during the Second World War. The Landry homestead was located in the small seaside community of Purcell’s Cove, on the outskirts of Halifax. Dad witnessed countless war and supply ships coming in and out of Halifax Harbour, right from his own front yard.

  He described the vessels and wartime harbour traffic to me in detail. On several occasions, he said, food rations intended for the military serving overseas would fall off the ships’ decks in stormy weather. The food was sealed in tins, which would wash ashore near his home. Baz and his childhood friends would open the containers that were not punctured and were, therefore, free of saltwater contamination. Dad told me they were often able to eat the rations inside. As a boy, it was an exciting time, but it was also a frightening chapter of his life.

  Dad’s older brother was called to serve overseas. Baz described to me the emotional day Lawrence Landry returned home from his post after the war had ended. Without any warning whatsoever, because correspondence was extremely spotty, Lawrence simply just appeared one day, casually walking up the driveway, returning from the front lines in Europe. There he suddenly was – in the flesh. The Landry family had their reunion – a gift not granted to thousands of other Canadian military families due to mass casualties. Dad said that day was overwhelming. He never forgot it, seeing Lawrence return home, and my father revered his older brother for his time served. Service was in the Landry blood.

  Lawrence was the second oldest Landry sibling. He died January 21, 1997. Lawrence’s obituary states he served “during the Second World War in Canada, the United Kingdom and Continental Europe. In 1984, he retired after thirty years of service as a firefighter with the Department of National Defence.” Both Lawrence and Baz were firefighters in Halifax for three decades. Both died at the age of seventy-three.

  The day of Lawrence’s funeral, my father cried harder than at any other time in his life that I have personally witnessed. He did not cry publicly or in front of me, or anyone for that matter, very often. I can count on one hand how many times I saw my father break down. This was one of them. Baz loved and respected his older brother.

  Dad and Lawrence were two of seven Landry children: Margaret (Millie), Lawrence, Mabel, Vivian (Viv), Kenneth (Ken), Basil (Baz), and Stella, who died from meningitis when she was only two years old, in 1930. Their parents were William (Bill) and Edith Landry. They’re all gone now.

  Baz adored every one of them, especially Lawrence, because of his service to his country. Dad was a staunch supporter of all Canadian veterans, and, in particular, always lamented to me how the merchant mariners were not recognized appropriately. He instilled in me a profound appreciation for all who serve. My father also never missed attending Remembrance Day ceremonies going as far back as I can remember, unless he was on duty himself that day, as a firefighter.

  I have conscientiously kept all of Baz’s books, which are safely tucked away near my desk where I write, in an old-fashioned, narrow, brown wooden table with a shelf in it, the kind your grandmother might have kept her rotary telephone on in the hallway.

  Dad’s decoration from the Canadian government is an extraordinary possession, but, as I am discovering, the more mundane matters, too, and now more than ever. I love to look at little snippets of my father’s handwriting, like his notes in his books, or the statement that starts this story. His thoughts and anecdotes are now preserved on the yellowing sheets of paper.

  He never discussed his writing, yet he always asked about mine. He was still inquiring about my work until just a day or two before he died, as speech gradually became impossible.

  In 2006, I was the solo writer, producer, and director for all the patient video stories for the IWK Telethon, which raises millions of dollars for the largest women and children’s hospital in eastern Canada. I held that role for eight years before stepping down to pursue other creative projects. I loved telling those stories. It was an honour to meet the children, families, hospital staff, and medical personnel. The patients, especially the little children, were incredibly humbling to interview. Their fortitude, determination, and zest for life, despite facing often extreme illness, are inspiring.

  After Dad died, I took a week’s leave from my telethon role to attend to his private affairs and make funeral arrangements. I returned the following week to complete my IWK work and the patient stories, as Dad taught me to do – always finish what you have started to the best of your ability. So that is what I tried to do, to honour him.

  That very year, the many people involved in the IWK broadcast and fundraising efforts came together to break the $5-million mark, for the first time. The significant philanthropic milestone was reached only a few weeks after Dad’s death. I remember crying in the hospital hallway after the final tote board tally was revealed.

  I believe we had an extra angel on our side helping us to reach that goal in 2006.

  I was elated that day during a very difficult and dark time. The light is far brighter today than it was ten years ago.

  Special memories and unique keepsakes ensure the light stays bright – like Dad’s signature on the greeting cards I have kept, which are addressed to me from him. Each is now priceless. I no
longer receive any more handwritten anything from him. All-occasion cards are worth keeping, if only to see that person’s signature and to have some – any – form of personal connection later.

  Another special connection I treasure are the little cartoon faces and characters Dad drew over many years on notes for me, which I started collecting when I realized life is short and people die, including parents. One of these funny characters appears on the upper left-hand corner of a newspaper story about a blight affecting tomato crops, written by staff reporter Susan Leblanc for The Chronicle Herald, its publication year unknown. Staff photographer Peter Parsons took the accompanying picture; the tight shot depicts a handful of blackened tomatoes lying in the palms of someone’s hands.

  Leblanc’s story reads, in part: “So long salsa. Goodbye gazpacho. There are a lot of disappointed tomato growers this year. The late blight, the same fungus that caused the Irish potato famines of the 19th century, is killing backyard tomato plants at a good clip this season.”

  Dad kept the article for me because I always grow tomatoes every year in a container on my back deck. I still plant them each spring and I fondly think of Baz and this final story when I harvest my yearly crop, which, for the record, has never had any blight.

  Above the tomato story its headline reads, “Tomato trauma strikes.” And, above that, Dad wrote a little note. He cut the story out and said, “There you have it. This is why my crop failed.” Beside the note he drew a quirky little cartoon character, a tiny man with an oversized head, shaped like a tomato. He has a small body with a neck, torso, legs, and hands. The figure also has a few sprigs of hair and a big, wide, devilish grin. The picture is drawn in ink and the character is looking left towards the picture of the rotten tomatoes.

  The devilish grin gets me every time. That’s Dad. He had a great sense of humour.

  Tomatoes were also the source of a legendary practical joke my father played on me. I have not lived it down. My family still teases me about what happened.

  Without my knowing, Dad snuck onto our back deck and used a twist-tie from a bread bag to fasten one bright red and plump cherry tomato onto my newly purchased tomato plant. It had not even sprouted any of its tiny yellow flowers yet, the precursor to the actual fruit growing and then later forming.

  It takes time to grow tomatoes. I know that, but I still was suckered.

  Dad quietly returned to my kitchen proclaiming, in a loud voice to everyone gathered, he had noticed my tomato plant had started to yield and there was a tomato growing. I had only placed it into its container about a week earlier. I knew better; I have been gardening for years. But I was drawn in by my father’s excited tone, apparent sincerity, and expert comedic timing. I rushed outside to proudly examine the tomato plant and discovered my yield was: one tiny tomato.

  When I saw it, for the first nanosecond, I was excited. The anticipation instantly faded when I reached in through the leaves to pluck it from the vine. Only then did I notice it was fastened to the stalk with the twist-tie.

  To this day I miss my Dad’s loud, from-the-gut, teary-eyed convulsive laughter. It was exceptionally hearty that day, at my expense. I can still picture him keeling over and chortling, with tears streaming down his face.

  This episode really underlines who Basil Landry was, with his attention to detail, creativity, wicked sense of humour, and credibility. I believed there was a tomato on that plant because my father told me there was – even when I should have known it was impossible.

  That was Baz. He could make even one tiny tomato matter.

  He could make the impossible somehow possible.

  Baz Landry made the nearly impossible possible in 1978 in that Halifax fire. He ran towards the chaos without the aid of his breathing apparatus. He told me there was simply not one second to waste, fearing for the life of the trapped baby. His peers later told me, as the seconds ticked by inside the smoke-filled bedroom, he would have been in excruciating pain as his lungs screamed for air and his head and ears were singed without his helmet.

  He gave the semi-conscious infant mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after somehow managing to get them both back to the window, without any visual references whatsoever. Firefighters explained he would have had to memorize his movements and the pattern of exactly how he entered and crawled to the crib, which he would have later reversed, while not panicking, as time ran out.

  At the child’s window, two firefighters, his loyal colleagues and friends, had placed a ladder, the only escape route for my father and the baby, who were miraculously both virtually unharmed.

  That heroic man is the same person who revered our military, who appreciated news, journalists, and lifelong learning, who loved his firefighting compatriots like family, and who sneakily tied one tiny tomato onto a fledgling plant, ensuring his only child had something unique to laugh about years after his passing – something quite small that later became a big gift.

  Basil (Baz) Landry, M.B., loved life and loved to laugh. He lived by his own words: “In our haste to plenty, one can easily overlook the things that will be important in the end.”

  In the end, my father did not overlook the little things. In fact, in 1978, he unhesitatingly risked his life to save a Halifax family’s littlest member.

  A Holy Weight

  Sheldon Currie

  FATHERS

  They burst like flares

  When they die, the people

  We merely know,

  In absence diminish

  Star by star

  Or sputter

  Like candles, ’til

  The wick Z’s out,

  A stub of wax

  Remains memorial

  In our grave imaginations.

  The ones we love

  Go soft

  Like covered lights

  But soon return, absent

  Shadows, haunting the halls of

  Our heads: forever,

  Never in the library

  Forever,

  Never in the kitchen chair

  Their cars forever,

  Never printing ruts in our wet yards.

  Not gone, not gone, not gone

  Holy weights in our knapsacks

  Hitching a ride up our mountain.

  I wrote the poem “Fathers” and published it in The Antigonish Review, a memorial double edition in honour of R.J. MacSween, a professor of English, a father by virtue of his primary vocation, a priest, who was the founder and long-time editor of the literary review. The poem was then entitled “Our Fathers Who Art,” a memorial in honour of several fathers related to me in various roles. One of them was my very own father, who died at the age of seventy-six of pneumonia, his lungs deteriorated by the rigours of a career working in coal mines for nearly half a century.

  While I write, I look up from my laptop at his photo pinned against the opposite wall of my study, a group photograph of twelve coal miners, a team, five kneeling or sitting in front, seven standing behind them, and behind the seven, the newest advance in mechanized mining called “the continuous miner.” They are all dressed in their work clothes but not uniformly, some in coveralls, one in a waist-length coat, a couple in windbreakers. All five men in the front plus one standing in the rear wear regular miner’s hats. Erik MacNeil, a neighbour and brother of a friend of mine, and Charlie Currie, my father, the two tall men, the youngest and the oldest, wear metal helmets to protect their heads from the roof of their tunnel, or worse, from the ends of the bars screwed into the roof to keep it from falling, a device that worked, most of the time. Except for Eric and my father, all the men are smiling. Eric’s face is non-committal. My father’s face wears an attitude. It’s the face I often saw when I watched him watching politicians on television during Question Period. Leslie Shedden of Shedden Studio of Glace Bay took the photo. It was later enlarged to poster size by the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design in Halifax. It was taken on behalf of the coal company to honour the team, and by implication itself, for achieving the record f
or coal production at a time when the coal business was faltering, threatened by the emergence of cheap oil, and indeed King Coal would soon be replaced by King Oil.

  My father never spoke of the “honour” or what he thought of it, but his face says it all. Not long after this moment of presumed glory, the mine roof fell in and killed two men, one of them my cousin’s young husband, and broke the legs of another man and nearly killed my father. His life was spared because he was crouched down beside the machine which pinned him down and a fellow miner went back down and managed to pull him free and drag him to the surface. By the time I rushed home from a neighbour’s house, where we got the phone call with the alarming news, and I found a cousin to drive me to the wash house, my uncle Frankie told me my father and the miner with the broken legs were gone in an ambulance to the hospital. There I found him badly injured but conscious, talking, and a nurse, a St. Martha nun, assured me he would survive.

  He did survive and after a long and incomplete recovery went back to work. That accident was the worst but not the only one of several he was involved in. And it was on one of his shifts that his nephew was killed and it was his painful task to go to his sister-in-law’s home and break the news to her that her oldest son was dead.

  Pinned to the wall next to my father and his coworkers is a photo of Neil Currie, known as Da, another father, standing by his wife Catherine, known as Ma. He, like my grandmother Ma, is dressed in his best for the picture: black suit, colourful necktie on a white shirt, black polished dress shoes. Of the related fathers I knew, he is the one I knew least although I spent my summer, winter, and spring holidays in his house as well as weekends and some weekdays after school. When I was not gone from their house playing hockey or baseball with my multiple cousins, I was in the house with Ma listening to radio soap operas and other radio dramas: Ma Perkins, John and Judy, and the House on the Hill, Boston Blackie, The Green Hornet, Lux Radio Theatre. I loved being there. I loved my grandmother and she loved me, although a more complete example of tough love would be hard to imagine. Like my grandfather, she was a no-nonsense tyrant. Love was never allowed to trump discipline.