This is my dad — he looks to be around 4 years old — at his family home on the north side of the Red Deer River, near Michichi Creek. The house to the right burned some years later and I believe my grandparents rebuilt, though that house no longer exists. My dad was born in 1926. He would have been 100 years old this year. His childhood was so long ago, in the Badlands, his parents both recent immigrants to Canada, his mother from what’s now the Czech Republic, his father from western Ukraine. Who does the dog see, is someone arriving or leaving? My grandmother originally lived in the squatter settlement on the south bank of the river, with her first husband and their 9 children. His childhood was so long ago, in a time and place I can only imagine. And I do, I try to imagine what it was like to grow up with parents who barely spoke English, who were illiterate, or at least his father was; his mother went to school with my dad for a few years to learn to read and write. The children from her first marriage were grown, apart from Myrtle, who died as an infant, and the first child she had with my grandfather, Julia, was dead as well. If not then, when? The letters she wrote to my dad when he was a young sailor were simple and full of pleas for him to remember his prayers.
This is my dad, with the sister who died 3 years before his birth. It appears that Julia is somehow propped on the arm of the chair but I have the photographer’s notes for this image which I’m guessing my grandmother “commissioned”; he or she has clipped Julia from an earlier photograph and somehow superimposed her on a photo of my dad standing alone on the chair.
I think it’s not dramatic to say I’m haunted by my father’s childhood, full of burning houses and dead sisters and the scent of incense — my father was an altar boy in the church he was named for, St. Anthony’s in Drumheller. I am haunted by a childhood lived almost a hundred years ago, in a place so different from where he ended up, Victoria, B.C., estranged from one son, yet yearning for him when he died. I’ve written about him many times and he still a mystery to me. My own childhood was so long ago, more than 65 years since I was the age my father was in the photograph of him on his tricycle. In the wonderful album, “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere”, Utah Phillips tells stories while Ani DiFranco provides musical background, and I listened to it obsessively for about a year after it came out in 1996. There’s a lot of wisdom in the stories Phillips tells; there’s history and reminders of responsibility and our debt to our ancestors. My debt to my father is huge. In physical terms, I am built like him, stocky and strong, and I have his curiosity about books, about fish, and I think it was from him that my own restless need to know about history and story originated. We disagreed about a lot of things but on a day like today, Father’s Day, I’d love to sit him down on our deck, pour him a good measure of Lagavulin, and ask him questions. The past is still here, in my hands (his hands), my thinking (sometimes echoing his), and the rocks I have arranged on my windowsills, some with fossils, some from favourite rivers, older than the oldest songs I know, some of them songs my father also loved. Shenandoah, Old Man River, Amazing Grace.
I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can’t live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that’s older than the oldest song you know,
and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn’t go anywhere, did it? It’s right here, right now.
Note: the lines are from “Bridges”, by Utah Phillips.
