More Questions Than Answers

I write about my dad because I can't talk to him anymore.

I remember when he turned the age that I am now and it seemed, looking back, that he had a lot more worked out then, then I do now.  I want to ask him about that, but I can't.

I want to ask him about fear and see what he has to say. 

The more time I spend in the mental health arena, the more I recognize the paralytic that fear has been in my life.  And, perhaps I flatter myself, but I think it played a part in his as well.  I know he forced himself through it and I would love to know his secret.

In the two decades since his passing, I have been carefully crafting this myth about my dad that is informed equally by "Death of a Salesman" and the Jimmy Stewart role in "The Greatest Show on Earth." 

I believe that he was a great salesman because he had some significant accounts with some of the largest employers in Canada.  I know he was a great salesman because he had a genuine interest in people.  I saw flashes of this growing up, but I really understood this when there were many more people that I did not know at his memorial service.

I believe that he had a very deliberate mind.  He seemed to find great comfort in the logic of mechanical systems and would spend hours in quiet solitude taking things apart, examining their components, cleaning them and putting them back together.  He would look forward each year to the last two weeks of August and his annual vacation.  He did not spend this time trekking around from one tourist destination to another, nor did he want to lay on a beach somewhere.  His ideal vacation was to trade in his suit for his work clothes and do things like take trees down, fix plumbing problems, or move large rocks.

Central to many of these projects was the practical application of physics.  My dad looked for every opportunity to explain the importance of the lever, the inclined plane, the wedge and the pulley.  It didn't seem to matter what the job was or even how many times we might have done similar tasks in the past, he would introduce each of these basic machines with such proprietary pride that it seemed he must have invented them all.

I can recall, with what feels like painful precision, the many trips I would have to make from wherever the job site happened to be to his workshop to get a piece of pipe.  There was always a stubborn bolt somewhere that would not yield to the crescent or pipe wrench until its handle had been extended and mechanical advantage applied.

I tell people to this day that my dad invented leverage.  Who says he didn't?

My dad was quite skilled when it came to felling trees.  He seemed to like the geometry of each instance.  He would scrutinize the location with great care and determine where he wanted the tree to fall.  Sometimes it was a simple job with a chainsaw, but the ones he took greatest pleasure in were the ones that involved redirecting the tree's natural fall.  So, for example, the tree was on the side of a hill and would, logically be expected to fall in the direction of the bottom of the hill, my dad would excel at rigging the tree to fall in the opposite direction.  Not only would these efforts involve his beloved leverage, but he could also bring out the block and tackle and lots and lots of chains.

I watch "Ax Men"--the reality show about commercial loggers--because it reminds me of those times I spent with my dad.

I would like to ask my dad about this, because I never really understood why he had such an affinity for this kind of work. 

I just sort of accepted that he would have been happier running a garage in a rural community because he had that sort of a personality.  People would come to him with their problems--not personal problems, although I think he might have dabbled in that to a certain extent--but primarily their mechanical problems.  If he couldn't fix it, he would certainly know where it could be fixed and by whom.

Despite having grown up in an urban environment and spending his entire professional life in a white collar job, he just always seemed more content gossiping at the local hardware or meeting the Guay brothers who owned a lumber mill.  I would like to know more about this aspect of his personality.

I write about my dad because I am trying to understand myself, trying to work out the answers I can no longer find out just by asking.

As I get older, I think that my dad and I are more alike than I would have been comfortable acknowledging when he was alive.  Now, I think I could talk to him about that.

I think that between my older brother and my younger sister and me, we received a pretty even distribution of his personality traits; each balanced by my mother's compassion.

My brother is the mechanic.  Trained as an artist, he has painstakingly built a business from a thousand and one moving parts, each of which has to be disassembled, cleaned and put back together.  In order to meet the needs of his clients, he will chase the solutions to problems with a ferocious tenacity. 

Like my father, my brother is always thinking, always analyzing, always working out ways to have the tree fall right where he wants it.  And, like with my father, it is profoundly frustrating to recognize that all of his hard work has not provided him the kinds of objective measures of success that he has earned and deserves.

My sister has the greatest portion of my father's interest in people.  She was a past master of social networking long before the term became part of our idiolect.  When she smiles, it is as though you have been picked out of the darkness by the beam of a lighthouse.  It is positively transformational in its effect causing, with only slight exaggeration, flowers to bloom and trees to bear fruit.

I joke that she is the son my father never had because, whereas my brother and I gravitated toward the arts, she ended up following my father into the investment business and, like my father, was able to build for herself a pretty respectable portfolio of clients.  My sister also is the only one of us three to have had children, which, I am certain, would have pleased my father very much.  (Both that she had them and that my brother and I did not.)

The three of us share my dad's temper, although I think we manage it each in our own way.

The myth of my father is that he experienced depression which can be defined as an anger turned inward.  When I was growing up, my brother turned his anger outward and expressed it physically.  As he has gotten older, he has learned other ways to work through his frustrations.  As I get older, it is getting harder for me to hide mine.  I was never big on any kind of physical expression, but I am capable of saying some pretty hurtful things. 

Here is where I should make some comments about my sister's temper, but I don't have a real understanding of that.  I have seen less of it because for too many years we have lived too far apart.  I do know that she has a temper which means that she has let it out at least once.

It is one of those eternal ironies that, as children, we seek to differentiate ourselves from our parents and emphasize those aspects that we think make us unique and individual.  As we age, however, we learn that, in the words of the great Buckaroo Banzai, "No matter where you go, there you are."

I write about my dad, not because I want to upset my mom, but because I see him more and more each day I look in the mirror.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director