For My Dad

September 7 is a very special day for me: my dad was born on this day in 1924.  Were he still with us, he would turn 101 years old today. That’s a lot of birthday candles.

       My dad was born in the little Francophone town of Casselman, Ontario, just across from the Quebec border, one of twelve children.  He never spoke a word of English until he was fourteen and continued to speak English with a slight accent all his life.  His family lived on a farm of which they lost possession.  Dad left school early (school was not his favourite thing anyway) and began working in a laundry when he was fourteen.  His main job was to care for the boiler.

       He was good with machines and soon got his fourth-class engineering ticket, eventually working his way up to a first-class ticket. When the war broke out he enlisted in the air force and was sent north to Armstrong, Ontario in the middle of nowhere.  With a few other men, his job was to fix the airplanes that landed there so the planes could return to action.  This was safe work; he once shot a bear which trespassed dangerously on the grounds and later told me “That bear was the only thing I shot during the whole war” (see inset above).  After the war he held a series of jobs and finally moved to Toronto.

       Toronto in the 1950s was not the cosmopolitan inclusive city it is today.  It was “Orange Toronto”—i.e. very Protestant Toronto and French Canadians were not exactly welcomed there with joy.  He therefore changed his name from “Rheal” to “Robert” and introduced himself as “Bob”.  It was a smart move if you were looking for employment.

       He met my mother in Toronto and they were married in the Protestant United Church (mom refused to become Catholic). Dad worked at two jobs to pay off the mortgage, moving up from engineering job to engineering job, finally becoming Chief Engineer at North York Hospital where he worked until he retired.

       Dad liked reading history, though he was never “bookish”.  I remember one time when I was visiting him at his home, tacking on the visit to one of my regular trips “back east” for my stint on Archdiocesan Council.  For some reason I happened to have a copy of my Philippians commentary with me in manuscript.  He found it on the kitchen table after I had gone to bed and stayed up late reading it.  When I got up for breakfast the next morning he told me that he had read it in its entirety, commenting, “You sure can write.”  I nearly fell off my breakfast chair:  my dad, reading a whole Bible commentary in one sitting?

Dad voted Liberal all his life.  Well, almost all his life.  When he was expressing his views about some topic he would often end on a self-deprecating note and declare, “But what do I know? I voted for Kim Campbell.”  Kim Campbell, for the information of my American friends, was the Tory Prime Minister who in 1993 led the Tory party to a crushing defeat, going from a majority in Parliament to being wiped out with only two seats left there.

       Dad’s favourite (ironic) toast was “Here’s to us! Damn few like us!” by which he meant that we were so wonderful that there were damn few people as wonderful as we were.  My youngest daughter recently shared that for all her time growing up she thought the toast meant that damn few people liked us.  Dad would have been much amused by the mix up.

       Why I am sharing all this with you?

       When I would visit my dad during the last years of his life when he lived in a hospital nursing home, I would wheel him down the corridor to the dining hall at lunch time.  As we passed other residents there, he would point back to me and simply say, “My son!”  Now that I am looking down the long gun-barrel of mortality I would like to return the compliment and say to those I pass, “My dad!”

       I still miss him.  I wish he were still here.  This video is for him.  But there will be no more birthday candles for him.  Perhaps you might light a different sort of candle for him the next time you are in church.