As I write this, I’m fifty-six years old. My dad turned fifty-six back in 1977, when I was just eleven. Today is Nov 4th, 2022. It’s the thirty-third anniversary of his death. I still can’t believe that my Dad was born over a century ago. A lot of time has passed.
Dad was 45 when I was born, so we already had more than a generation separating us. Growing up, it was always weird having an older Dad. In my teens, all my friend’s dads were still in their late thirties to mid-forties, while mine was pushing sixty. He seemed to regard my friends’ dads like younger men too, saying things like “That Fred Axam, he’s a nice young guy”. (Fred, the father of my buddy Mark, would’ve been about forty at that time.)
It probably affected me as a teen and young adult. It wasn’t just an age difference – it was also a difference in attitudes. My Dad grew up in Prince Rupert during the great depression. He was a conservative with his money, and even more conservative with his values.
As a young man, world war two was the major crisis of his generation, and he and his brothers served or supported the military in their own way. Patriotism was a big deal back then. In 1945, my Dad and his older brother Bruce each got their names printed in the Prince Rupert Daily News when they enlisted, which no doubt pleased his parents.
Hearing his stories from my Dad’s young adult life was like hearing stories of some heroic person from a novel. It was a different generation with older values. My father seemed to have skipped over the sixties cultural revolution altogether, going from a world war two army career to a post-war air force career, and by the mid-fifties starting his technical career in broadcasting. To me, he had not changed much past that point. He acted, lived, and looked like a product of the forties and fifties. He lived in, but seemed to only tolerate, the seventies and eighties. Our worlds were extremely different.
Maybe that was what affected me and made me feel older than my friends. Maybe I felt separated by distances and differences that I couldn’t quite understand.
In 1984, my Dad and I lived near the west-end of Vancouver, in a one bedroom apartment. One typical saturday, Dad drove us down the hill towards Denman Street, heading to Safeway for the week’s groceries. The sun was bright and it had become a very pretty day.
On the radio, the Everly Brothers were singing “dream, dream, dream”. I heard Dad singing along quietly to himself. I wondered if he was missing Mum or Kim. It had been just us two guys for the past year or so. For a bunch of reasons, our family had ended up being cleaved right down the middle: Mum was living in Riverview Hospital, and my sister Kim was living with her abusive boyfriend (although Dad didn’t know where she was, only that he had lost her).
I listened to him quietly singing along, revealing a rare gentleness of soft, melodic tones, sad and wistful.
I need you so that I could dieI love you so and that is whyWhenever I want you, all I have to do isDream, dream, dream, dreamDream, dream, dream, dream
I wanted to join him in that moment, and sang along, hoping that he might notice. He might have heard me, but Dad wasn’t one to acknowledge feelings or gentle moments; the moments just happened and then went past. It was up to you to make them mean something, to fill in whatever need you had.
For all our differences and all the events that had come between us, having a little moment of connection like that reminded me that we still came from the same line.
