Daddy

Daddy. That's what we always called him. Only adolescent embarrassment caused me to change it to Dad. But in my heart, he's still Daddy. He's the Daddy that I heard while lying in bed in the morning and listening to him in the kitchen, whistling while he made "flapjacks" and home-made syrup out of burnt sugar. In those days, we didn't have mortgages and credit cards and bank borrowing. You either had money or didn't, and if you didn't, you made do with what you had. My Daddy worked and he worked hard. He did the sweating kind of work with lunch hour, period. There were no coffee breaks. Unions and Workers Compensation and Unemployment Insurance were still in their babyhood. If your boss didn't see you labouring at your best or he or she didn't like you, you were gone. No argument. On the other hand, if you were loyal, you were rewarded. There was a turkey at Christmas and an annual picnic with races for the kids. And best of all, the weekly paycheck, so you could pay off the grocer. In those days, your Daddy couldn't afford university education. He wanted to, but he didn't have that kind of money. You worked your way through then. Today, no youth can afford university unless parents can or you take on a gigantic loan you have to pay for in the first squandering days of employment, if you can find any. There was no credit coddling. But Daddy didn't care. He had his nice, hard old kitchen chair beside the basement sawdust furnace and his daily newspaper that actually had full articles with full information and facts, not ads galore and brief glitzy photos in colour and unreal headlines. Daddy loved his hobby. It was tracking down The Mother Lode. He and his buddy went on guy adventures with their old maps and horses, maybe a scout to plod through the wilds in the north in search of mines. When Daddy returned and showered off his trip that smelled of camp smoke and horse flesh, he would sit down on the couch and show us his pill bottle full of tiny gold nuggets. He told us how he panned for them in mountain streams and how they used tin cans to cook their food and about the bears and deer. When they camped, apparently, they slept under the stars and he showed us the constellations and how we could tell where North was, and what greens and berries were safe to eat and told us never to drink water without boiling it and how to stay put, if you got lost. We were fascinated, and even though we never had the courage to do it, dreamed about "real" camping and hunting for gold. Daddy was kind beyond words and let Mom do the disciplining which was threats but no punishment, He was the one who had many friends and with whom he met and told stories, some of them ghost tales. He read endlessly when he wasn't working. He taught me how to read using the headlines of the daily newspaper. He took my hand, his big one I still remember, and with his pick, told me the names of rocks and minerals and how to treat wildlife and plants with respect and how to walk softly in the woods he called by one name: "the bush". He like plain food, never took an interest in gardening or house maintenance unless it was an emergency, but he was the dearest, most loving Daddy. He left us suddenly in five months at age sixty-four before I had a chance to talk to him, adult to adult. But I remember and not just on Father's Day, his morning whistles and mouthorgan playing and the flapjacks and the sound of his voice telling stories.