15-April-2007: A Letter to My Father (Chapter One)
I dreamed about you again last night. Funny, you frequent my dreams often, but I cannot recall a single dream about you that I had before your death more than twenty years ago.
In the first dream about you that I recall you were visiting me in my last apartment in Montreal at the eastern edge of the McGill ghetto; a ground floor one bedroom with two more
apartments stacked on top with the standard Montreal spiral staircase leading to the second and third floors. Families on welfare, immigrants, and the elderly poor were my neighbours.
Yes, you could call it a slum, but I've seen worse--much worse.
And what about you? What were you doing in Montreal? You hardly strayed from south-western Ontario where anti-Quebec sentiment was so strong that you could almost feel it
in the air. I had more than my share of raised middle fingers and incoherent shouts about frogs whenever I entered that region, Quebec plates on my car. Would they have been
embarrassed to learn that I hailed from the same place they did and that I was an anglophone?
I didn't know why you were visiting, but I was touched that you were there and proud that I could show you something of the city I loved. It was very dark and raining as you
stood on my porch. You had mellowed considerably since your fiery anger when I was your child. You had come humbly to a place where I lived, wanting to make amends with me,
your gentle nature emerging. I saw that nature a few times when I was young, the side of you that I loved. The man giggling and twitching his feet as his two-year-old son tickled his feet.
The man who took me shopping to purchase a toy gun that would be the envy of the neighbourhood boys.
Yes, you did have that nature within you. Why did you not succumb to it and let that personality guide you? It was rare, but I can recall the times you spoke to me adult to adult,
even though I was eight years old. If only that could have been our “normal” mode of communicating. I would have flourished throughout my life instead of hesitating and retreating at the edge
of becoming, as I did so often.
Was it really your belief that children had to be beaten in order to grow? I overheard you a few times talking to neighbours about how hard it was to raise children. I never understood
what was so hard. A little respect of their innate individualities and personalities and the “problems” that you saw would have disappeared. Today I cringe when I hear a mother begging
her child to be “good” with offers of chocolate bars or a trip to McDonald’s as a reward. I cannot imagine what a “bad” child is, but I did believe that I was not worthy when I was under
your care. I was a problem to be managed with shouts and backhands to the side of the head. Sort of as if we were cattle being stung with electric prods to keep us on the path the farmer
had envisioned. (You often told others of your plans for my future, though you had never consulted me, not once.)
But in that first dream of you that I recall, there was none of that. You were a human reaching out to another human with whom you had a deep tie and a deeper regret. I was not living
in Montreal when I had that dream and you had already been dead for a few years.
Amazing how often now that you appear in my dreams as a mature man instead of the angry petulant that you were so often. But, last night was different.
I don’t know what triggered it, but I dreamed I was a young teenager trying to shield his younger brother and sister from you. I shouted at you to get out of the house and told you
that we could take care of ourselves, we didn’t need you anymore. And you were a cowering and beaten beast, whining apologies, just like a drunk or a thief who I have confronted.
My anger was righteous and pure. You were reluctant to leave, promising to be better behaved, but I stood my ground, no longer afraid of you.
I awoke from that dream, the bed sheets soaked through with my sweat. It was still dark and still in the house. I wanted to sleep, so I tried to stuff my comforter under my body so that I
would not have to lie in the stink. This morning my wife told me I had had another bad night.
Another bad night, like so many other bad nights. She should tell me when I have a good night and I’ll assume that if she says nothing that means I was fighting to save my life in my sleep.
Like so many other bad nights.