Today is the day on which we're expected to describe our fathers as friends, teachers, heroes, inspiring role models, etc. No doubt thats true for many people, or so they claim, but truth be told, Dad and I were never very close. He was somewhat detached, taciturn, introspective. I loved him, and I know he loved me. But I don’t remember doing all that many things with him as a kid. I guess in today’s parlance you’d say we never really bonded all that well.
My younger brother David acquired Dad's knack for all things mechanical, which gave them something in common. I seem to have misplaced that gene somewhere along the way, if I ever had it. Maybe that helps to explain our far-from-intimate relationship.
Yet I miss him terribly.
Perhaps it’s because there wasn’t a lot of father / son stuff going on between the two of us that I have such fond, precise memories of what I did get to share with my Dad.
Like the time -- I was about six years old -- when he took me by the hand one Sunday morning and we walked a mile or so to visit an old pal of his who owned a convenience store in our hometown. I don't recall him saying much, but I happily held his hand all the way out there, and all the way back.
Or the walks we occasionally took in the woods across the street from our house in Southbridge, Mass. My father had a drop or two of Indian blood. There were French explorers in his family tree, as well as French-Canadian woodsmen, the famed "coureurs de bois." That may be why we always felt at home on that forested hillside. In later years, I'd take the same route with book in hand, and prop myself against a huge boulder to read.
Dad and I would sit on the back porch after he got home from work, just hanging out while he quietly sipped a beer and read the afternoon paper. We'd set up shop on the larger, more sheltered, front porch during a cooling summer shower, which always seemed to brighten his spirits.
Near the end, I shaved him periodically with his electric razor. He was living in a nursing home by then and couldn’t shave himself anymore.
Leonide Daniel Carrier (it's "Carrière" on his birth certificate, which is the old Québécois spelling) died on Jan. 29, 2003, two months shy of his 91st birthday. I was planning to drive down from Maine to Massachusetts that morning for what I assumed would be our last visit, because we all knew the end was near. But as soon as I got up that day, word came that he was gone.
Sometimes, in a painful twist of fate, I feel closer to him now than I did when he was still with us. More's the pity.
No comments:
Post a Comment