My father died. It wasn't sudden, he's been failing for over a year now, but it's finally happened.
I was in Fruitvale today and I saw a cougar, the first I've ever seen. I don't think there's a connection between the two events, but I will always remember this day, and the two things will always be related in my experience.
On the First I played a few songs in Gyro Park here in Grand Forks as part of the Canada Day celebrations. The last couple of weeks had been a kind of mystery tour for me. We had Dad's memorial service in Mission on Saturday June 14th, and I cried.
I inherited, among other things, my dad's motorhome. I also ended up with half a carton of cigarettes and two bottles of whisky, since no-one else in the family indulges is these vices. So for the last ten days or so I'd been travelling around southern BC selling rugs and stuff, and at night I'd been sitting there in my dad's motorhome, smoking my dad's cigarettes and drinking my dad's whisky, trying to, I don't know, trying. Something. Anyway, one night I realized that, as much of a son of a bitch as he was, this is a better world for my father having lived.
I guess none of this will mean much to you. I grew up with him. He was a mean drunk who raised us all under the constant threat of physical pain and punishment, and now and then he would carry out that threat, and sometimes he went a little too far.
People who only got to know him in the last 15 years or so all say he was a gruff old man, but a real pussycat on the inside. Really, a nice old guy, a lotta fun, all bark and no bite...even I have greatly enjoyed his company since I got back from LA in 1987. But I couldn't get up and speak at the memorial service, because I was afraid that if I started really speaking my mind, I might say some things that would be inappropriate to the situation. He was a mean son of a bitch all the years I was growing up, and there were times I went to sleep at night wishing my father dead.
But the difference between a guy like him and a truly bad man is that my father, all his life, was the best man he knew how to be. There are men you couldn't say that of.
Somerset Maughm said an author has the right to be judged by his best work. I take a similar view regarding people and I say each of us has the right to be remembered for the times we shone. I think that when a person shines, that's when you're really seeing the person. All the other stuff, the blackness, the meanness, that's not them. That's just the shadow they're standing under.
I remember my dad shining. With a fishing pole in his hand, sitting in a boat on Loon Lake up in Alberta. Showing me how to break up dirt clumps in the garden with a steel rake. Showing me how to drive a nail, how to put paint on a brush and apply it to a wall of the house in Chilliwack. My dad, teaching me stuff. Showing me highways in Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada that I'd never seen. My dad shone when he showed patience on those occaisions when I demonstrated my unbelieveable stupidity. I sat in the motorhome by the Sands in Reno and watched my dad, from two blocks away, come walking around the corner of Fitzgerald's, coming from the Cal-Neva. His baggy khakis, yellow short-sleeved shirt, walking with a cane, but still with that straight-ahead, purposeful stride that was so familiar to me. His last trip to Reno. His last day in Reno. Two years left to live. You'll say it was the heat rising off the sidewalk. I won't argue, but I'm saying he shimmered. The son of a bitch shimmered.
