My sense of what it means to be a man is tied directly to my father

My sense of what it means to be a man is tied directly to my father
David Morris
Kingston Whig-Standard
16 Jun 2012

It felt odd in mid-May to turn the same age – to the day – that my father was when he dropped dead. It felt even odder the next day to realize that I will now grow evermore older that the “old man.”

I was 23 when he keeled over, unceremoniously and unquestionably dispatched. His parting parental lesson was life’s toughest: how to go through the motions without drowning in the gaping hole that’s appeared in the universe.

Youth is second only to sex on the list of things we don’t associate with our parents. Despite that, I had no trouble grasping, rationally, that 53 is too young an age at which to die. Surpassing his longevity, while continuing to wrestle with what I want to be when I grow up, drives the point home, freshly and viscerally.

In the lead-up to this Father’s Day, I’ve been pondering the curious, if not surrealistic, circumstance of my being my father’s age and my boys, at 25 and 23, being essentially the age I was when he died.

I’m too much of a fatalist to lose sleep dwelling on the odds of history repeating itself, but this faux time warp has me contemplating the relationship of fathers and sons and, more particularly, how we men inherit and bequeath our sense of what it is to be a male.

My father once suggested that, by the time a child reaches puberty, parents have imparted all that will be imparted. If this is true, and I suspect it is, at least partially, then he had taught me all he could long before he died. This would seem to be borne out by my siblings who have been known to comment, usually impatiently, “You’re just like Dad.”

I’m not sure it’s what they intend, but “just like Dad” calls to mind a remarkably self-reliant, consummate jack-of-all-trades.

Over time, without a mortgage, he and my mother stick-built the rambling, two-storey house in which I grew up near Chelsea, Quebec, filling it with five children as they went.

Per the times, he was the family’s sole bread-winner. We never thought of ourselves as poor, there was just never any money. And so, what he didn’t know how to do for himself, he figured out – always masterfully.

When the transmission went on the family car, for instance, he carefully dismantled it, covering the basement floor with rows of impeccably sequenced parts. As he anticipated, he found a stripped gear, which he was able to replace for a couple of dollars, and the reassembled transmission was put back into service.

He worked as a copy editor at The Ottawa Citizen throughout his abbreviated adult life, coming entirely into his element in his last two years as a researcher and writer for the paper’s consumer help column. As his obituary in that column noted, he could speak planetary gears with mechanics as comfortably as he could speak law with lawyers.

At a more profound level, “just like Dad” calls to mind one of the most unflinchingly principled men I’ve known. For a taste: when my oldest sister started elementary school in the early 1960’s in pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec, my father succeeded in having unqualified teachers removed from the classroom – nuns.

Directed at my brother and me, he told parables from his childhood. The most oft-repeated recounted the day he waited for my Uncle Howard to finish cutting the lawn before smugly asking my grandfather for a quarter for the movies. Sensing a flaw in his son’s character, my grandfather gave him the quarter, but not until he had pushed the hand-mower back across every last inch of the freshly-cut lawn.

The point of the story, as I’ve come to realize, wasn’t about money or work ethic, but about the value of a man’s character and integrity.

“You’ll be punished if you do something wrong,” he would admonish my brother and me, “but not nearly as much as if you lie about it.” Nothing more clearly signalled our jig being up than his dismissing us to “go outside, get your stories straight, and we’ll start again.”

I’ve been catching myself staring into the bathroom mirror these last few weeks, searching for signs of the face that I haven’t seen in 30 years.

Is the greying around the fringe the way I remember it? The receding hair line? The laugh lines in the corners of the eyes?

Without question, my sense of what it means to be a man is tied directly to my father and, by extension, to his father. To this juncture, so has my sense of what it means to be a father. But from here on, my boys and I are in uncharted waters.