The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  For the next decade my father worked round the clock and lived in constant fear of losing not just the business, but also the family house on which he’d taken out a second mortgage.

  I remember him coming home with stacks of files and poring over them late into the night and on weekends, and I remember how little time and patience he seemed to have for us. I remember how every penny counted. And I remember, even though I wish I didn’t, how I moaned like a spoiled brat (guilty as charged) to my mother about having to wear clothes she sewed to save a little money.

  But of course none of us kids ever really knew what my dad and mom were going through. We never went hungry. They managed to scrape together enough to send us to summer camp at Big Cove, to send us for piano lessons and YMCA memberships that included a whole range of sports and activities. Somehow, they found money to drive us all the way to Montreal for Expo 67, even if we did wind up camping in snow outside the city. And through it all, Dad continued to give generously to charity, sometimes filling Christmas baskets and delivering them to poor households, volunteering his time on school and library boards, inviting visiting seamen home for dinners, offering math lessons to anyone in need – including many young friends of ours that he met when he and Mom visited us in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Ghana.

  It is inconceivable to me now that my father felt that he somehow let us down as a father because of the financial situation he found himself in with that company. But that is indeed how he felt. He wrote that the financial problems helped explain his “obvious deficiencies as a father” and why our “home atmosphere was often tense” as he kept “picturing our probable bankruptcy” with its likely effect on the family.

  Making Amends

  No, Dad. You may have been a tough, temperamental, and often impatient taskmaster. You were also a hard act to follow with your long list of skills, talents, and accomplishments. But you gave us all you could and the tension I recall in our home had much to do with the four of us kids squabbling and fighting with each other. Furthermore, your self-sacrifice, your smarts, and your twenty-three-hour-workdays eventually paid off and eventually you rescued the company, sold it, and even started another small company that provided you with some income until you finally retired.

  There is so much that still needs to be said, that you need to know. You need to know that it causes me to choke up, as it does your whole family, when we recall how stoic you were in your final years. How, after your first stroke in 1997, you defied all the doctors’ predictions and learned to walk again, even if we did tease you about being a “gimp.” How after the second stroke in 2009, you continued to struggle, lead the Dartmouth Stroke Club, raising funds and organizing outings and live music for exercise sessions, even when you could hardly raise yourself from your wheelchair. How, when you needed nursing care that Mom could not give you at home, you quietly submitted to the move to Oakwood Terrace and endured without complaint the indignities and loneliness that, despite all the wonderful staff efforts, were your reality there.

  Knowing how much it pained you ever to be a “burden” on anyone else, to be the one receiving care and attention rather than the one offering help and support, we know how much you must have suffered because of your inability to walk, look out for my mother and your home. But you suffered in silence, because to complain would have made you that burden you couldn’t stand to be.

  That was you.

  Taking His Leave Of Us

  Dad’s last Christmas and my parents’ sixty-fifth wedding anniversary was in 2013, when we celebrated in my brother and sister-in-law’s home in Balmoral Mills in northern Nova Scotia. My brother had gone to Herculean efforts to hire a van, equip it for a wheelchair, hire a hospital bed, and then take on all my father’s personal care for a few days, so that we could be together for the anniversary and spring my dad from the nursing home for a break. After a toast to their anniversary, my brother asked my dad what he was most proud of in his lifetime. He replied without hesitation, although speaking was an effort for him. “Convincing Beth to marry me,” he said, reaching for her hand.

  Six weeks later, with his family holding his hand, he took his final breath. Dad, we miss you. You were our world. We admired you so. And even if we didn’t say it enough, we sure as hell loved you – and still do.

  What’s it like finally being truly invisible?

  Memories Of My Father

  Anne Murray

  The earliest memories I have of my father were his comings and goings. He was always working – at the hospital, doing office hours, house calls, etc. The first memory that I recall was a spanking I got because I wasn’t obeying my mother. She had asked me to go upstairs and get some toothpaste and I refused to go. I was four or five years old and I refused because I think I was scared to go upstairs on my own. But she thought it was defiance and said, “Well, then, if you won’t do it, just wait until your father comes home.”

  I thought to myself, “Well, I don’t care.” I wasn’t concerned because he had never disciplined me before. Well, I learned my lesson.

  Often mothers put the punishment on to the father. That was his job. He put me over his knee and slapped me, maybe twice, on the bare butt. He never ever touched me again. That was it. He didn’t have to. From then on, all he had to do was look in my direction and I toed the mark.

  My father was from Tatamagouche, attended Pictou Academy, and went on to graduate from Dalhousie Medical School. He then took a year of residency in surgery in Cleveland, after which he found his way back to Tatamagouche where he practised for a year with his father, who was also a doctor.

  He was very quiet and shy and I think was just looking to practise medicine in a quiet way, not making any waves. When he found his way to Springhill, the Church of England nuns were running a nursing training school at All Saints Hospital. My mother was in training there and that is where my parents met. Dad was the new handsome doctor in town and many of the nurses were smitten. It was the 1930s and the town was booming. The coal mines were in full tilt and the town was prosperous.

  Mom was raised Catholic, and her parents were devout. She was a hundred percent French Acadian and religion was very important. Both sets of parents were against the relationship because Dad was Presbyterian. Dad didn’t care one way or the other, I don’t think, but Mom did, and so they separated for a while. That didn’t last. They were married by a priest, but they couldn’t be married in the church and neither of their parents attended the wedding.

  I had five brothers and I was the only girl. I could never detect that there was any difference in the way he treated me, but maybe the boys would tell you differently. I think that Dad and I had a very special relationship. I think we were very close in an unspoken kind of way. And, of course, I idolized him. I thought that the sun rose and set on him. He was a real hero to me because he helped sick people and saved lives. He never talked about where he worked or what he did there. He might say that he was going to the hospital or the clinic, but he never ever talked about anyone or anything he did.

  My parents’ relationship was unique. They were very much in love and that was evident throughout their forty-one years of marriage. They were both good people and great role models and I have always felt very fortunate to have been a part of their lives.

  Dad worked all the time. He operated on people practically every morning, had office hours both afternoon and evening, made house calls, and did rounds at the hospital. I don’t know how he got it all in in twenty-four hours.

  He loved the outdoors and he was a hunter. He hunted deer, rabbits, and partridge. I remember eating deer steak, Mom making rabbit stew, and the partridge was a real delicacy. I couldn’t get enough of it because there were too many of us!

  He took me hunting twice. It didn’t go very well; I wasn’t much of a hunter. First of all, he kept telling me to be quiet. He would turn around and would put his finger up to his lips and go, “Sshh” a lot. I didn’t think I was making much noise, but I guess I was.

/>   We had gone the whole day without seeing a deer and I was exhausted. As we were coming out of the woods, we saw a deer in the ditch beside the road and I thought he should shoot it. And, of course, he said, “No, no, you can’t shoot a deer in the ditch near the road. That’s not fair. You have to be in the woods to shoot a deer.”

  On the other hunting trip, Dad taught me how to shoot and I did shoot a rabbit. I was so upset. I didn’t know it was a rabbit. He just said, “Well, you see that, under that tree? Shoot at that.” I just about had a fit that I had shot a rabbit, and I wasn’t happy. I never went hunting again. Some of my brothers were hunters so he always had company.

  And then there was fishing, but that was a bit of a joke because I don’t remember ever catching any fish. Dad would line us up along the brook and then he would go pick mayflowers while our lines all got caught up in each other’s lines. The mayflower, or trailing arbutus, is the provincial flower of Nova Scotia. Finding it was a challenge, but Dad always knew right where to go. He would find them in what was left of the snow in the spring. I enjoyed picking the mayflowers a lot more than fishing and I don’t remember a Mother’s Day ever that Mom did not have mayflowers. She loved them!

  Dad always hummed when he shaved, but I don’t recall ever hearing him sing. He hummed in tune and he certainly had a good ear because he would point out to me when singers were hitting flat or sharp notes. He apparently played the clarinet growing up, but I never heard him play. He would plunk out “Silent Night” or some other old tunes on the piano with one finger, so he could read music to some degree.

  We often read poetry together and he loved the Romantic poets: Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron – all of them. He loved “The Lady of the Lake” by Sir Walter Scott and he quoted poetry all the time.

  As I get older, I think about my parents a lot. Dad taught us things by example, not necessarily verbally. And I still remember as a kid, when someone walked in the room, Dad always stood up out of respect. Man or woman, it didn’t matter who it was. So I’ve always tried to do that.

  We lived in a town where most of the people were white Anglo-Saxons, but we had black families and we had a couple of Jewish families. What I learned from Dad was that everyone was the same. There was no racism in our home. There was nothing like that in my house, although there was apparently a lot of it going on around us. For two years in the First World War, Dad’s father served overseas as a medic for the Black Battalion, which was a construction battalion from Nova Scotia. At that time, it was the only way blacks could get overseas to fight for their country. My grandfather was the only doctor who would treat the men. So Dad had a great role model in his own father.

  During the Springhill mining disasters in the 1950s, he looked after the men who were rescued and did what he had to do. He would have to either operate on them himself and look after them or, depending on how badly they were injured, send them off to Halifax. But he did a lot of the work himself and there was a makeshift hospital set up elsewhere, too. There were so many men who were injured. And so I didn’t see him or Mom for weeks while they worked, trying to administer to these men. Prince Philip came to visit the miners who survived in the 1958 “Bump.” Everyone believed it was a miracle that they were still alive. There was a lot of press coverage and TV cameras and Dad, being the Chief of Staff at the hospital, was the obvious choice to take Prince Philip around. But he had other ideas. He was definitely not a limelight type of a guy.

  He was there to save lives and that’s what he did. It’s hard to know how it affected him. I would never have heard. He kept everything really close to the chest. If he talked to anybody, he perhaps would’ve talked to my mother about it. I don’t really know. I do know that he operated a lot and he operated on everything – backs, necks, everything. I found that out much later in life.

  I remember one time there was a girl in a car accident and she reminded Dad of me. And that really hit him hard because he lost her. But that’s the only story from the hospital that I ever heard and Mom told me that one. The rest came from people in the town who used to tell me stories.

  By the time he was in his sixties he wasn’t very well. He was suffering from what appeared to be a form of leukemia, believed to be brought on by overexposure to the X-ray machine. At that time, the doctors did everything, including the X-rays, and they were never properly covered up and protected. So we always suspected, and he, I think, suspected, that it might’ve been from that: radiation. He died shortly after his seventy-second birthday in 1980.

  I still get people writing to me all the time about how my father saved their lives. It would be amazing to actually try and tally up the number of people he helped and the number of lives he saved. I do know that he delivered 4,500 babies!

  He was a very unique man. He was unassuming, dedicated, moral, and true.

  My Father’s Porch

  Bruce Graham

  The furniture in our sun porch was certainly not new; it had history and a hint of mystery, too. My grandmother, Myra Mosetta Spicer, had brought most of it up from Connecticut and there was always mystery about her. The details of her death were withheld from me until I had learned to swim for fear the gruesomeness would make me afraid of the water. Learning the truth made the porch even more mysterious.

  She had drowned in the great storm of 1938, a wild rampage of nature that claimed hundreds of victims all along the New England coast. My grandmother was a member of a little clique of lifelong friends who called themselves The Honeybunch. They were staying in a cottage on Rhode Island where the great hurricane swept their building off its foundation, scattering their bodies along the shoreline. My grandmother’s was found far down the beach. Another was discovered a mile away.

  My grandmother was gone, but a small part of her still seemed to be with us, particularly on our porch where her old wicker chairs and the big cane-backed rocker had a distinctive New England character.

  Our porch was enclosed, part of the house, nice and dry when the summer rains kept me indoors. When I was very small, I loved to put the big rocking chair in motion and then jump up on it, watching raindrops through the windows that ran along the front of the porch, overlooking our yard and my mother’s flower gardens. There were smaller chairs, too, and a bright yellow table with spooled legs. A combined table and magazine stand stood against the wall. Of all the rooms in our two-storey home in Parrs-boro, it is the porch I remember most.

  My parents always put the porch furniture away in the autumn. The table and chairs were taken to the attic and when everything reappeared, it signalled that summer was coming. Some years the furniture was suddenly there when I came home from school and I hadn’t expected it. I’d sit in every chair to experience the first sensation of summer holidays. If you had a special place somewhere in your youth, a hideout or a tree house or camp or cottage, you’ll know those memories remain vivid.

  We all spent a lot of time on our porch, but it was my father who did business there. In the 1950s, George Graham was the town’s mayor as well as a judge. His work brought a cast of characters to our porch: supplicants, miscreants, businessmen, lumbermen, and sea captains. They were mostly earnest, salt-of-the-earth people, a cast of characters that had escaped from the pages of a Dickens novel.

  My father collected fines and gave advice to those who asked for it and cash advances to his men. He promised wood to the needy and well wishes to those leaving for other parts. My father’s porch was the town hall, the courtroom, and the counselling centre. Problems were solved, issues discussed, and stories exchanged. Lawbreakers who had pleaded guilty the previous Saturday night came with money in their hand to pay their thirteen-dollar fine. There were plenty of eccentrics; some complained bitterly that thirteen dollars could buy six bottles of wine. There were far greater grievances. Poverty was prevalent and as the town’s mayor, he heard stories of hardship that would break your heart.

  My father had a keen interest in politics and had broken with his family’s Liberal traditi
on to join the Progressive Conservatives. He was a Diefenbaker man and a Stanfield man and an unsuccessful run at provincial politics earned him a patronage appointment as a magistrate. In the legal system it was strictly small-town stuff: illegal possession of liquor, public intoxication, various minor driving infractions.

  Judging and being mayor were just part-time gigs. His real job was owner and operator of a lumber mill where he employed twenty-five to thirty men. In some years there were few other jobs.

  Payday for the mill workers was Friday, supposedly. But it was a precarious affair, as many of his men needed cash advances throughout the week. To my youthful eyes, this arrangement always seemed very much a hit-and-miss affair. While my father was extremely diligent about the fines he collected in his judgeship for the Attorney General so that every single cent was accounted for and every report filed with precision, he appeared much more relaxed with his own business. I never remember him writing down how much he handed out in advances to his men: who received what or when. Critical information if you’re running a business, especially when there was hardly a day when there weren’t men at the door.

  “George here?” they’d ask when I answered the doorbell. Specks of sawdust still clung to their plaid shirts and home-rolled cigarettes were stuck to the corner of their mouths. My mother complained about them coming at suppertime. My father never did. He handed out advances based on what he knew of his men and their habits. The smell of alcohol limited or curtailed any advance.

  My father’s relationship with his men was unusual because he had known them all their lives and to say their business dealings were informal almost misses the point. When either party didn’t like something they spoke their minds. There was none of today’s business etiquette, no rules of arbitration or union regulation between employer and employee. Men would quit without notice, sometimes in a huff because the lumber was coming too fast, or sometimes because it was deer season and they wanted to go hunting. My father didn’t hold grudges. I remember one guy who quit in the morning and was hired back in the afternoon. Don’t try that today.