The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  A “career”-ending injury eventually sidelined me from the game I love so much. And while it was heartbreaking and somewhat terrifying to no longer identify as a soccer player, my biggest fear was what would happen to the relationship with my father. There would be no more early morning drives to Exhibition Park where we sat in silence as I tried to wake myself up before hitting the turf. No weekends away for a tournament in New Glasgow or Montreal. We always had that excuse to be together and I felt like that was being taken away from me. When we weren’t forced to talk about sports, what was left to talk about?

  The uncertainty and fear I felt didn’t last long, however. And if I’m honest, the end of my soccer career was the beginning of my real, adult relationship with my father. We were all of a sudden forced to find other things to talk about and other reasons for quality time.

  The summer leading into my first year of high school, my father was appointed to a position with the federal government in Ottawa. I was devastated to leave my friends and the familiar city of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, which I loved so much. My grandparents, Calvin and Joyce Ruck, left their home in the Westphal community of Dartmouth to join us in Ottawa. As my grandfather was legally blind and diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, we knew my grandmother could not care for him by herself. Living under the same roof in Ottawa, I watched my father take on the role of caregiver. Despite his busy schedule, he was there to ensure my grandfather lived as comfortably as possible. To see a man care for his father the way he cared for my grandfather was something special and unforgettable. Watching the interactions between two great men who’ve done such great things – one more vulnerable now due to decreased vision and memory loss and the other showing the utmost compassion and gentleness to a man he respected like no other – was beautiful, and it made me so proud to call him Dad.

  My relationship with my father would evolve again when I began writing early drafts of my first book – a biography of my grandfather. We had many conversations about my grandfather’s life and my father’s childhood. He shared how my grandfather moved his family into a predominantly white neighbourhood in Dartmouth despite a petition signed by neighbours to stop this black family they knew absolutely nothing about. He recounted how his father taught him how to box at a very young age because he knew it would be a necessary skill to master while attending a predominantly white school. While I was aware of the racism and discrimination he experienced based on the colour of his skin, the details he shared went straight to my heart.

  We also talked about his sister, Rochelle, who passed away far too soon after battling a lung disease called sarcoidosis. He lovingly opened up about their relationship as brother and sister. These conversations were filled with emotion and truth-telling, and while I didn’t think it was possible, I grew even closer to my father during these casual interviews.

  If I allow myself to dwell on the prejudice and pain that someone I love so much experienced, it would quickly bring me to tears. I know the battles he fought as a young boy will never be my battles. And while he has every right to feel bitter, to point fingers, and to share the great injustices he incurred with anger and rage, he does no such thing. My father has this unbelievable ability to always be the bigger person. He’s taught me to rise above and to not worry about others around me. To enter and leave every room with dignity and respect and to never compromise who I am for the sake of pleasing others. He taught me all of this not by telling, but by doing.

  I know I am truly blessed to be able to see my father regularly and it saddens me to think that not everyone can say that a hug from their father feels like the ultimate form of comfort and safety. His warm embrace immediately turns me into that little girl playing soccer who would always look to the sidelines to see if Dad saw her make that pass or take that shot. I will never take those blessings for granted.

  As I grew older, I eventually took on the sport my father loves so much – the sometimes relaxing and always aggravating game of golf. While living in Ottawa, he arranged for me and my sister, Jacqueline, to take private lessons to improve our game. A nice thought, but not the best outcome. I think it’s safe to say our game did not improve following those lessons, but we did come out with some great stories to tell about an instructor who found zero comedy in our ridiculousness and awfulness.

  But no matter how many times I swing and miss that small, white ball, I still love every minute on the green with Dad. Sure, it’s another sport to bond over, but it’s also at least two hours of talking about anything and everything and the only interruption is a possible ball flailing towards us from the next fairway. And just like soccer, I can send that ball far into the woods and Dad will still find the positive: “You got some great height on it that time.” “It certainly sounded like a good hit.” I know he’s just being nice, but if it weren’t for those encouraging words, there’s a good chance my clubs would be resting at the bottom of a lake somewhere.

  My father and I have a lot to look forward to in the next few years. I can’t wait for the moment when I’ll take his hand and he and my mother will walk me down the aisle on my wedding day. I know there will be tears when I watch him hold his first grandchild in his arms. And it will be a proud day when we celebrate my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary. There will certainly be a lot more to talk about than just soccer.

  I know everyone says they have the best dad in the world, but mine truly is like no other.

  Always Teaching, Always Learning

  Ian Colford

  My father was seven at the time of the Halifax Explosion. He lived in East Chezzetcook, about twenty-five miles outside the city, on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore. Horace Bernard Colford was the second of three children. In 1917, in addition to him, the family would have consisted of his mother and father, his brother Reginald, and baby sister Vivian.

  I can remember him describing the experience of that Thursday morning: hearing the muffled boom and feeling the earth tremble, being jolted by a concussion of air that swept across the province breaking windows and knocking people to the ground. A short time later he and his friends would have watched in amazement as the smoke cloud billowed above the horizon, and then kept rising, finally growing to monstrous, frightening proportions. What happened next? What I imagine is a community in shock, the little schoolhouse emptying, people gathering outside on a cold day, wondering what was going on but having no easy way to find out. How long would it have taken word of the devastation in Halifax to reach East Chezzetcook? Minutes? Hours? A day? And in the meantime, what kind of stories would have spread?

  It was wartime, after all. They had every reason to fear the worst.

  But my father was a private person and spoke with reluctance of his own experiences. The story he told of December 6, 1917, was brief and ended almost before it began. He would have chosen not to dwell on the details: the disfiguring injuries that people sustained, the destruction, the death toll. His final comment on the subject was that the winter storm that descended on the city almost immediately after the explosion made the situation a hundred times worse. After that he would talk about other things.

  It was for this reason that it took me so long to appreciate my father for the extraordinary person he was. He did not like to talk about himself. He hid his feelings well. And at the same time he kept hidden who he was and what he had accomplished.

  His mother died young of tuberculosis, a disease that in the early twentieth century was present in many rural communities and especially rampant among the rural poor. Treatments were available, but because of the risk of infection, those afflicted were isolated. There was a stigma attached to the disease that I’m not sure my father ever completely left behind, one that, unfairly or not and because the disease was more prevalent among the poor than those who were well off, implied unhygienic living conditions and ignorance. As a young man Horace was curious about most things and of above-average intelligence. He could have followed any number of career paths. But the experience of watching
his mother die while still a young woman undoubtedly influenced the course his life was to take.

  He finished school and entered the workforce just in time for the Great Depression. Details of this period of my father’s life are sparse. In my presence he spoke little of what he went through in the 1930s. He did tell me that right out of school, probably no more than twenty years old, he became a teacher (his Teacher’s License is dated 1934). He taught all subjects in a one-room schoolhouse somewhere near his home. He would have enjoyed this because he excelled at memorization and retaining facts. I also think it was during these years – while still living in rural Nova Scotia with no extra money to spend on amusements – that he indulged his curiosity and read the books that he would quote from memory in later life.

  In September 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, my father was twenty-eight, significantly older than the men who were enlisting and being shipped overseas, but young enough to serve in some capacity. In youth my father was tall and reed thin. The figure he would have cut as a soldier would not have been particularly daunting, with the uniform hanging off his bony frame. He was not athletic. He did not play sports or engage in competitive activities that I’m aware of – or not willingly, of that I can be fairly certain. I don’t know what was behind his decision, but he did enlist and he served in the RCAF from 1939 to 1944.

  When I was growing up, my mother had lots of friends and relatives who had served in World War II, and I heard a lot of stories. They had been overseas, fighting or serving as support or in hospitals. For most of them it was a defining moment in their life, and for some it was the defining moment. After a big dinner when the tea and coffee was being prepared, a gap might open up in the conversation and someone would say something like, “Remember the time when …” And on most of those occasions it was a war story that followed.

  My father was an exception to this rule. I never heard him mention what he did or where he went during World War II. I never encountered anyone who was described to me as a wartime friend of my father’s. To my knowledge, he saved nothing from those years, no relics, no memorabilia. Whatever he experienced while in uniform he kept to himself. I cannot recall asking him about that time, because it probably never would have occurred to me to do so. Even my mother, after my father’s death, could tell me only that he had been stationed in Newfoundland as part of the Canadian war effort. But how he spent his days, who he met, what he saw – none of that has been passed on.

  After the war my father continued his education. Already armed with a firm grounding in languages (Latin, Greek, French) and literature, maths, and basic sciences, at some point in the 1940s, at or around the age of thirty-five, he began to actively pursue a medical degree. Medical studies require tenacity, faith, and commitment. You don’t take up that challenge without some notion of where you will be a few years down the road. He must have ruled out other fields of study, but in our conversations later on, when I was pondering a career path for myself, there seems to have been no question in his mind that the only career he saw for himself was in medicine.

  He graduated from Dalhousie Medical School in 1950 and from Harvard University with a degree in Public Health in 1953.

  My father never practised medicine in the conventional sense of seeing patients and prescribing treatments. Instead, he took a position with the Nova Scotia Department of Public Health as Director of Child and Maternal Health and Communicable Disease Control.

  In North America in the 1950s, communicable disease was a common and widespread concern. Sixty years ago diseases that we rarely think about today, or which we regard as exotic rarities or minor inconveniences whenever the names come up, were a real and persistent threat to human life. Every jurisdiction had a department or office responsible for monitoring and controlling the spread of infectious diseases like smallpox, polio, tetanus, influenza, dysentery, and tuberculosis and establishing immunization and prevention programs. Rural areas were especially vulnerable, though outbreaks in urban areas were not unknown. My father’s job entailed regular travel throughout Nova Scotia and the composition of occasional “surveillance reports” on noteworthy outbreaks and isolated incidents (such as the one he submitted in July 1958 on a case of typhoid fever in north Queen’s County). He was a spokesperson for the Department who was frequently called upon to issue statements to the press and on the radio. He was also responsible for ensuring that the Department’s programs were implemented efficiently and effectively.

  But over the years my father grew disillusioned with his job and I think the source of his frustration was twofold. First, he loved science but he was not a scientist. His ambitions were practical rather than theoretical. He wanted to help people. Mixing solutions in test tubes and embarking on studies that would take years to complete were not activities that interested him. Second, he was not a bureaucrat. He worked for the government, but regarded politics, inflexible regulations, and rigid reporting structures as obstacles to the important tasks that needed to be done. He had no patience for inflated egos. The terms he used to describe some of the people he reported to were not ones of endearment. If someone was an asshole, he said so. Over a twenty-two-year career in government he saw Ministers and Deputy Ministers of Health come and go, but his influence was limited and he did not rise up in the departmental power structure. In the late 1960s, the infectious disease scare began to dissipate and the need for someone with his expertise became less urgent. I don’t know for sure, but I believe at some point he was marginalized. When he retired, punctually at sixty-five, he was not particularly sorry to leave that chapter of his life behind.

  My father’s interest in science was exceeded only by his interest in the arts. During the 1960s and 1970s, he took up the violin and painting. After retiring he became proficient at both, playing in an amateur orchestra, forming a painting group, and selling landscape and still-life paintings on a regular basis in local galleries and markets. He enjoyed gardening, an activity to which he brought his scientific training, experimenting with varieties and seeking out unusual and exotic examples of flowering plants. He was an avid music lover, in particular of opera. He had a deep appreciation of literature, often quoting Shakespeare, Tennyson, and others, from memory. His favourite works were the novels of George Eliot.

  Throughout his life my father maintained a connection with the community he left behind. His loyalty to the people he knew growing up was boundless, and he helped where he could, mostly with advice but also financially. Most lives are rich with contradiction. My father was an intelligent man with sophisticated tastes (in some respects an intellectual, though he would have cringed at that characterization). But he enjoyed few things more than a banter session with his Chezzetcook cronies about who was drilling a well or where was the cheapest place to buy a can of beans or how many rabbits Gussie took out of the woods last year. He was generous almost to a fault, but to the end he retained a Depression-era attitude of thrift when it came to spending money. He resented waste (I remember once I was daydreaming while making tea. The kettle had been boiling for about a minute when he walked into the kitchen, looked at the kettle, and muttered, “That’s an expensive way to make steam.”).

  After he retired, he would spend Thursday mornings studying grocery flyers seeking out deals on canned foods and household items and then, to save gas, plot the most efficient route to all the stores on the list. He was passionate about learning and encouraged my brother and me (without being obnoxious about it) to study and absorb what we could while we had the chance. Rather than insist that I listen to music he liked, or read books that he thought were great, he left the record albums and books where I would find them and pick them up, if that’s what I chose to do. Always teaching, always learning.

  When he was seventy-five my father suffered a stroke. This was early in 1986. By then I was married and working as a librarian at the Technical University of Nova Scotia and entertaining the fanciful notion that I could be a writer, a notion that he had encouraged. The
stroke affected his mobility and left him with serious deficits. Speaking was difficult. He told me that he could not concentrate to read for more than a few minutes at a time. He underwent physiotherapy and improved somewhat, but was never able to resume gardening or painting or making music. There were periodic complications, and over the following months he was in and out of hospital. He passed the days sleeping, listening to the radio, and watching TV. His condition forced inactivity upon him, but those of us who knew and loved him understood that he was not happy with anything less than full engagement. He began to decline that autumn and died in November.

  What kind of father was Horace Colford? Almost fifty when I was born, he was well along in life and probably settled in his ways. He wanted my brother and me to grow into the best people we could, but having come from nothing and taken so long to find his own path, it’s possible he lacked the confidence or felt he had no right to impose any kind of world view on us. It’s also possible that he was somewhat bewildered at that age to find himself a father. Whatever the case, he left us to form our own opinions and instead tried to guide us gently toward a moral understanding of how the world operates.

  I can say for sure that he was much more interested in our intellectual growth than our physical. He was indifferent to sports. Exercise was a waste of time. Where he came from, you stayed in shape doing physical labour: building or repairing things, wrangling animals, hunting, clearing land, planting, harvesting. He was not a disciplinarian. If we behaved badly, he quietly made us realize that we had been a disappointment, and with a subtle forcefulness instilled in us a desire to never again be the cause of such disappointment.