Before I leave off on my trip across the continent and down the West coast, (before I leave off entirely) I would like to recount a memory of my grandfather still vivid in my mind after all these decades. I was six years old. My father and mother decided to drive up from Niagara Falls and visit my grandparents at their house in a quiet suburb of Toronto (Etobicoke). It was the house they'd inhabited for decades, a modest, almost Victorian home with a fixed up attic that served as a single bedroom with a cot for me where we'd often pass the night.
That Saturday morning, shortly after we arrived, my grandfather took me by the hand to the basement where he had a small wood shop. He began crafting a toy for me, a tugboat about a foot long. With a jig saw he cut out the shape of the hull, while I watched intently. Then he cut the same shape an inch smaller and nailed it to the bottom of the first with finishing nails to give it bulk. These pieces he sanded with his electric sander to make them seem like one and give the hull a partially rounded shape. A block of wood formed the main cabin and a smaller block on top of that the captain's deck. He added a piece of dowel for a smokestack and finished it off with some trim along the edges of the hull to make a deck, everything glued and nailed quite solid. But he didn't stop there, even though this took over an hour. With his chisels he carved the outlines of a door and windows for the cabin and added a small tiny hook at the prow where I could tie a string. Then he began to paint the creation, blue for the hull, red for the cabins, black for the windows and door and two white stripes at the top of the black smokestack. We had it propped on a stand on his workbench for this operation and I was told I couldn't touch it till the next day when the oil paints would be dry. It was lunchtime by then and the rest of the day I was beside myself with the excitement and pride of owning such a beautiful wooden boat. Now that was love.
To this day I can still smell the paint.
What is this life?
Not the best picture so I'll include a better one from a few years later (1967) of my grandfather, father and my older sister holding her firstborn.
One more story about that boat:
My father built a twenty seven foot sailboat called a 'shark' which we took out on lake Ontario. I would often bring my toy boat along and tie it to the back of our sailboat and watch it follow behind when the water was calm. One time my mother's younger brother came to visit us from Oshawa and we took him out for a sail. I must have been about ten. On that occasion, cruising along, the string to my prize possession broke and set it adrift. I cried out and my father swung the tiller sharp and my uncle Jack leaned way out from the cockpit and retrieved the thing. But in this rescue operation the cigarette lighter from his shirt pocket fell into the lake and sank to the bottom. Now uncle Jack had seen very heavy fighting with the Canadian forces after the Normandy invasion until the end of the war. He never talked about his experiences, not to my mother or anyone, being a very quiet man. But on this occasion he did mention one thing. He said he was very sorry to lose that lighter because he'd had it with him all through the war and he considered it his lucky charm and that it got him through the battle of the bulge where he was in the very front lines and the thickest enemy fire. But then he shrugged it off with a smile and an "oh well. I can buy another."
Uncle Jack
Here's a poem I wrote about my grandfather the night I heard of his passing away with a telephone call in the winter of 1980:
On his Grandfather's Death
He breathes no more who lately was a man,
One little germ has brought an empire down,
The cord is cut. The ship drifts from the land
And we are left, bereft, to stare and stand.
He sees no more who lately saw so much
Nor does he sleep. His eyes are closed forever
And our eyes too in one sight are diminished
The joy we had in seeing him is finished.
Gone is a man of many years,
The sum of hopes and cares and tears
And yet more tears shall flow for him,
Though he is but a thought, which too, must dim.
Keep him a place in memory, alive!
How many memories with him have died?
What old acquaintance treasured in his head
Is now by all forgot and doubly dead?
Time ruins all and everything goes rotten
As one by one we're buried and forgotten.
