Ernest Hemingway once wrote a short story entitled ‘My Old Man.’ Mine won’t be nearly as well-written. Please bear with me.
A sense of humour and a work ethic have gotten me through life thus far.
Okay – some will question whether I possess the first of these attributes and many more will wonder if I have an even nodding acquaintanceship with the second one.
If James Joyce first coined the thought that ” I am a part of all that I’ve met” then it’s certainly easy for me to reason that I am certainly a mixture of all from whence I came.
Am I right or am I fucking right ?
My mother has been dead for 23 years, but she also shaped me greatly. I sometimes wonder if she is somewhere shaking her head in bewilderment at the present me. But that will be a story for another day.
I’ve always appreciated the gift of frank, honest opinions and while I was sometimes (often?!) the brunt of an honest appraisal I still cherish the earthy wisdom from a time that seems long past.
My father was an orphan from the downtown Montreal working class neighbourhood of St. Henri. His father died when he was three months old and his mother passed when he was six years old; he subsequently lived in an orphanage for a year before his grandmother assumed the parentage role. At the age of thirteen he was sent to an English-speaking boarding school in St. Jean, Quebec without knowing a word of the language. By the end of the year he stood at the top of his class. Not having the money to continue on to university and pursue his career choice of becoming a lawyer, he worked days and took night courses at Sir George Williams University (now a part of Concordia University). A year at McDonald College Teacher’s College launched his career in that profession. He was a principal at age 22, a Superintendent of the Lakeshore School Board in Montreal at 29, and finished his career as the Director of the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada, where he oversaw all of the provincial Ministers of Education from the ten provinces and the Territories.
I remember passing this information along to a fellow teacher in my adulthood and after looking me up and down my colleague commented, “He must be disappointed.”
So I was born in 1956. A different time, with values, customs and habits so different from today we all may as well be living on a different planet. The past is another country. They did things differently then.
Like any other of us mortals, he had characteristics, like being a smoker, of which he told me he wasn’t proud. He grew up in Montreal and started smoking at oh, 13 years old, he once grudgingly conceded. He never admitted it but he was a two pack a day man and that was easy to believe considering how much time we four kids would spend sitting in the car outside Perrette’s Convenience Store, the Quebec version of Mac’s Milk or Becker’s, when Dad went in to buy a carton of cigarettes. To pass the time we would count how many customers entered and exited the establishment while he was still in there. An average number would have been 25. . He probably spent his time in there talking to the store clerk and random customers. We didn’t know. We never asked him. Cigarettes seemed to be a subject off-limits. If any of us kids would open a car window when Dad was driving and in a mood I can always remember him saying, ” Give an Englishman a window and he’ll open it.” I suppose he meant it as a putdown.
Probably the best way I can begin to bring his personality to light is to quote the man. What he said to me is still so indelibly implanted in my memory 55-60 years later, whereas what I heard yesterday is usually gone with the wind.
The man had an incredible work ethic, and he expected nothing less from his spawn. Inevitably, I disappointed him. If I didn’t do something as basic as refilling the toilet paper in the bathroom or getting out in time to cut the grass, rake the leaves or shovel the driveway, the response would be a deep inhalation of his smoke, then the exhale and finally the phrase with which I was much too familiar, “Just pretend you live here.” I’ve tried using the same technique with my own kids, but to no avail. I guess I just don’t have the gravitas.
When once in my minor hockey career I was complaining to him that I would be more effective as a centreman than bouncing around between defence and the wing, my father expressed no sympathy. “David, you play centre no matter where they put you.”
And not only my hockey playing, my pride and joy, was put in its place. Politics was a constant point of interest in the household. Despite the fact that neither of my parents ever revealed what political party they supported, books such as ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ and ‘Soul On Ice’, written by Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panthers movement , were always around the house. I would weigh in with my own unfiltered, naive opinions. Dad would challenge me and there was no humouring me along. “David likes to think with the liberals and eat with the conservatives.”
But it was not only with his own progeny that Pops (as we later came to call him) revealed a withering wit. When he returned from a trip to China in the late 1970s with Canada’s Education Ministers, where they reached a first-time agreement to bring Chinese students to Canada, his father-in-law, my grandfather, who had probably never left his farm to even venture into Sherbrooke, the nearest town with more than 500 residents, for a good twenty years, spat out his wad of chewing tobacco and inquired, “Now none of those fellows can speak English at all, can they?”
“No,” was my dad’s retort to his father in-law. “They’re all ignorant.”
So I soon observed that it was not only with the younger set that my father showcased his realistic, some would say cynical, view of life. One other time my grandfather was describing a young man who had done very well in school and even gone away to Montreal where he had met with career success. Before too much time had passed, however, he returned to his mother’s house and as the story goes, seated himself in a rocking chair in his old bedroom, “chain-smoked until all the wallpaper was yellow and never talked but just sat in there and laughed.” Those were the days, of course, before mental illness and psychological breakdowns were given any attention.
“Maybe he knows something the rest of us don’t,” my father said with a sardonic smile, with which I was by this time very much familiar.
It was therefore sometimes good to see and hear that his own kids were not the only fools that Pops did not suffer silently. One time he had he had to wrangle on the phone with a particularly uncooperative, unhelpful and probably incompetent clerk. I could always sense the rising level of my father’s blood pressure and the imminent coming of the caustic comment. “You don’t know very much, do you?” he fumed. “Put me on with someone who knows something.” And that reminded me of what he had to say about another store employee who Dad saw as shirking his duty one day in a downtown Toronto retail centre. “Whenever he might experience a burst of ambition, he just lies down until he feels better.”
Sensitivity training had not yet been developed and I don’t know if it would have had much of an impact on those who came of age in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Difficulties did not break them, they made them. A lesson that has been lost in today’s culture of victimhood and lack of accountabilty.
But damn, I would love to hear what he would have to say about the goings-on in today’s Canada !
One Grumpy Old Man's Opinion 