by Don White (Central Park, Burnaby)
My mother had remained calm in the wake of my father, her husband’s death. She later admitted missing him, an admission I found confusing at best since she so-often criticized him, and not until after his death listed the personality traits for that in her opinion had made him a good man.
Surprisingly these were the very aspects that made him a good father and caused me to, for a great while following the funeral, look for him to come walking through the door.
My father was slow and steady. He never arrived at functions on-time as my mother often protested, until the day they rolled his casket into the church. But you could always count on him to come.
As certified by my mother and others who value punctuality as she did, I have become like my father–never on time, but I always show. My mother first announced I had inherited this trait when my eldest, then seven, had asked me to set up a play date with a fellow school mate.
I had no problem arranging the date, rather choosing the day proved challenging.
I had been in graduate school with a second child four years younger than our elder, whose life I also managed. “We’ll see,” I had said, a response that while not declaring, ‘No,’ left me time to plan.
My elder daughter, seated beside me in my then SUV, an Isuzu Trooper, had sighed in frustration.
To this my mother said, “Don’t feel badly. That was her father’s answer to me for everything. ‘We’ll see,’” my mother mimicked him in joining forces with her elder granddaughter. I imagined her leaning her head from left to right emphasizing the consternation she had experienced, and was perhaps undergoing in that I had resurrected that aspect of my father’s spirit, a personality trait that had made him less perfect in her eyes.
My father always said, “It’s easy to enter into agreements, start down a path. The challenge lay in seeing your way through the journey.”
The journey through childhood, the experience of my mother to pass through had not been easy, neither before my father died, and certainly not after.
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