My father, on a trike, on the Midland Road, Drumheller, around 1929. His dog is watching something or someone leave or approach. In the house you can just see a corner of, 11 people lived. They had no running water or plumbing. They had a cow, some chickens. My grandmother made butter and cheese to sell. She made noodles to sell. My father told me these things but not much more. In the photograph, so much is left unsaid. (Who is arriving or leaving?)
I didn’t have a good relationship with my father. He was moody, impatient, and opinionated. He didn’t want to know my opinions. He didn’t want anything asked of him. Tender moments were few and far between. But he did his best, I think. He taught me to fish. He made my children a wheelbarrow because he found a little wheel lying around. He told them stories.
Some nights I dream about him. He is rowing the little dinghy he made across St. Mary’s Lake on Salt Spring Island to catch fish for breakfast. I hear the creak of the oars from where I am standing by our old blue tent, my brothers, my mother, and the family dog still asleep inside.
When my father died, I was in Venice. I walked back to our pensione from the phone booth in the Campo San Pantalon after calling my mother, walked back along the canal, and everything was grey. My face was damp but it could have been the mist. Some nights I dream about him. I have his sturdy body, his fatalism. He made my children a wheelbarrow. He told them stories.
...Theresa Kishkan 
So much emotion beneath the surface here, Theresa.
I’ve changed my browser from Chrome to Safari on the advice of my computer people, and now I’m anonymous. Sigh.
It’s such a mystery to me how the browsers decide who is anonymous and who isn’t! But thank you for commenting! (Beth) And yes, it was a fraught relationship and I have regrets but also gratitude. I think my children had a closer relationship to him in some ways. He was more mellow with them.
You raise the interesting question of what one should expect of one’s parents. As a child, I presumed I had a normal relationship with my parents. Only in retrospect, do I realise the relationship could or should have been different. And of course it evolved through time and my expectations and those of my parents changed, especially as they lived in England and I came to Canada.
The more I learn about my parents, through archival research and by making DNA connections, the more I realize how complicated a family ecology can be–the dependencies, the difficult nourishments, and so much more. And I do believe mine did their best, with fairly meagre resources, both emotionally and otherwise. Sometimes I wish it had been different but then who would I be?
You can imagine the bond between boy and bike, even between boy and dog, but it’s much harder to imagine, from the photo, the bonds between him and the other ten people who called that building home.
I was just thinking about this the other day, about how it’s often the hardest situations that have provoked the qualities that we come to most value in ourselves (e.g. resilience, which doesn’t come about in an “easy” family).
He was the youngest, by decades), and I think he was treated like a little prince by his half-sisters. (I wonder if any of the older siblings had toys.) I’ve often wondered about the household itself, how it worked, what it looked like. This house burned in 1931. There was a second, but I’m not sure if it was built in the same place. (The stories never told…)