Life with Father

Some of the stories my dad told on himself are so funny and yet they explain not only his personality but just how close his children have fallen off the old apple tree.

My dad was raised as a city kid so it was quite a treat for him to go out “to the country” which he did occasionally with his father. One time they were visiting a particular farmer friend of his father’s and the farmer said that my father could go and pick as many peas as he liked. My father adored peas and he took the farmer at his word. He picked as many as he liked, which was pretty much all the peas in the garden. My grandfather was happily unaware of the depredation to the garden until they got home and my father proceeded to take peas out of his plus-fours. You know plus-fours? They are those baggy pants that buckle around the calf. They are so baggy that you can apparently put a whole farmer’s field of peas in the legs! My grandfather was so humiliated at having such a greedy son that he was never able to bring himself to go back to visit that farm!

My dad really had what was later described as an excessive personality. He always seemed to do things in a big way. That was just the way he was. As kids we just loved to go to Sunset Villa where we could play in this huge natural park. There was this gigantic tube slide at one end of the park with like 50 steps up the ladder (or so it seemed when we were little). The tube was quite large, a 10 year old kid could stand right up in it so it was massive. Down we would go, twisting in the turns and just telling at the top of our lungs, having a blast. Guess who the biggest kid was who could yell louder than King Kong? Yep, they could hear him all over the 160 acre park when he got up there helping the youngest of the kids go down the slide. My mother, picnicking with her friends at the other end of the park was red with embarrassment because of course all her Danish friends knew who was making all that noise! She would scold him all the way home but he was incorrigible. He’d do the same thing the next time we went there.

Another time I remember very well was not so much fun. I don’t know what my father’s big brain wave was but he heard about this place way up north where he could get some antique telephones. We are talking about the old wooden boxed phones with the little handle that you would wind up and make the call. My father, being the lousy navigator that he was, got lost and it was really dark before we got to this place (it felt like we went right up to Churchill. He bought every single one of those telephones and I believe we had about 36 or so of these phones in the trunk. It was midnight before we got home. And we hauled those phones from one end of the country to the other as he got transferred from Toronto, to Winnipeg, to Montreal, to Winnipeg, to Kitchener and then to Calgary. I believe my brother still has several of them in his basement! One wasn’t good enough for my dad. He had to corner the market.

AS much as he liked to get stuff for himself, he was also very generous with other people. But I will leave those stories for the next installment of Life with Father.

Yes, I’ve purloined the title from Clarence Day! It could be worse, it could be “I Never Sang for my Father.”!