At 15, I was starting to feel the front edge of becoming a young man. I was mostly quiet and didnt want to be seen by others that much, but by god I was also dying to be noticed by someone – the contradiction of my introversion.

In my self-centred young mind, I felt like Dad didn’t know me very well at all, didn’t understand me as a person. He wasn’t really a conversationalist; he was a storyteller, a monologist, and most of all, he was a giver of orders.

I was a dutiful kid, doing whatever my Dad asked of me. There was no saying no to my Dad, and I rarely ever made a fuss about anything. I did all my daily and weekly chores, making our bag lunches each night, taking out the garbage, helping with the weekend grocery shopping, and starting the car and scraping the windshield off on cold winter mornings. Dad knew how depended on his work, and he worked hard and saved his money. He trained a good work ethic and sense of duty into me, but he acted as if love came from respect, as if I were more dutiful, more compliant, he’d love me more. I felt that respect came out of love, that he’d love me more once he understood me. It was a big difference in our outlooks.

My mother was a different story altogether. For the past four years, my Mum had been in hospitals (most recently Riverview) because of brain damage from her alcohol overdose suicide attempt. I missed her and regretted that she’d never get better or come back to have a parental role in my life. There was no way for her to know me now, so I dealt with my reality by just keeping my head down, being dutiful, and not expecting much from my life, which sucked to a depressing degree. A lot of the time I retreated into my comfortable worlds of comics, music, or movies. Escapism helped me a lot.

In 1981, I bought the Police album “Ghost in the Machine”. It had many great tracks, but the song “Invisible Sun” got right under my skin. It wasn’t about a girl, or partying, or money, or fame. The lyrics were intelligent, about values, deciding what kind of person you wanted to be, and about looking for intangible warmth and hope in the middle of a tumultuous world. I didn’t know anything about philosophy or religion, but that song had a thoughtful, positive message for me.

“There has to be an invisible sun,

It gives its heat to everyone.

There has to be an invisible sun,

That gives us hope when the whole day’s done.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=invisible+sun+lyrics