Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day, Dad.
And Happy Birthday.

Click on Zoom's website (knitnut.net) on my side bar. She wrote about the same topic today. Being way more computer literate than I am she was able to display this photo taken at her christening nearly fifty years ago when Dad was about her age. I grabbed hers.

My father would have been 100 years old today.


If he were still alive we'd have had a big party, grand enough to celebrate his passing the century mark. And big enough to wish him a Happy Father's Day. His 85th birthday was impressive, but this one would have merited fireworks.

The 85th was the false moustache and horn rimmed glasses birthday.

We lured him to the Knowlton Pub by asking him to do a favour for Orley. He was to meet a stamp dealer at 1 p.m., and would recognize the man by his appearance. The dealer would be wearing black horn rims and a moustache.

When Dad arrived at the pub, we (Deb, Zoom, Bob, Orley and I) were sitting at the bar facing the mirror, all of us wearing false moustaches, and horn rims. He sat down. We turned around in unison.

Dad didn't laugh. He looked confused. He gave a small smile, but it wasn't one of recognition.

Finally one of us (I think it was Zoom) went up to him, and the rest of us followed. One by one he realized who we were. But he turned to Debbie and said, "I know everyone else, but not you, dear. Who are you?" I can still hear the gentleness of his voice.

And then he relaxed and joined us at the bar. We had one extra set of glasses and facial hair and he donned his. That evening we went to his favourite place on the American side ... a gourmet restaurant called Hermann Schmidt's. The restaurant and B&B were situated in the original frame farmhouse on a strawberry farm. Dad hardly ever got to go there any more because his pension had dwindled in value. It was the treat we always managed when we visited him.

I think that was the last time we were all together until we gathered in Hollywood Beach, Florida when he was dying. Then he was too sick to party with us, but we remembered all the other family parties, and he was there in spirit the whole time.

Last night I watched Rosenstrasse and was taken back to my teen years when Oma came to Canada. It was the language that did it for me. The German voices ... just beyond my personal recall for using the language, but hovering closer to the edges of auditory recognition.

I think before I die I would like to go to Germany to see where my father was a child and a very young man. I would like to see rural Saxony. I have often wished I hadn't been as busy with my own life and career while he was alive. If only he had lived to see me retire ... perhaps there would have been more opportunities to talk. Maybe he'd have shared those earliest memories ... and the ones of his first years in Canada ... of struggling during the Depression ... of his short-lived marriage ... perhaps he'd have told me why he put me into a foster home. But maybe he wouldn't have been able to explain.

Seeing Saxony is unlikely to help me understand either. I am sure that Germany has changed radically in the past century, and will not give up my father's secrets easily.

But I would like to walk in fields where he had played as a boy. I would like to follow forest paths where he flirted with young girls. I would like to sit and watch for a train on a railroad line and, after it passed, remember my grandmother's stories of gathering coal to survive the winter.

I guess I'd just like to breathe in the air they breathed once long ago ... and imagine them when they were young.