“GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”: Chasing my dad Part 3

Before Dad died, he and I got along very well while driving down country roads in my car, with coffees on board, following our noses we used to say, watching for birds, talking over day to day life.

The ‘Saturday rides’ began while he lived at Parkwood Hospital, London, just a few blocks from my house. They were only an hour or two long at first, time enough to drink a small- or medium-size coffee and explore 60 - 100 kilometers of less-travelled road looking for nothing in particular. We always found something. But after I retired our rides grew to become three or four hours long, time enough to talk over many topics and see upwards of 220 kilometers of beautiful countryside while drinking one or two large coffees. 

Together, during a country ride, we planned Mom’s funeral and picked out a headstone. Another time he told me he wanted to be buried beside her when his time came. We were just outside Embro, west of Woodstock, the day he told me cancer had returned and his time had come, and he wasn’t going to fight it. (“I can’t go through the cure again. It’s worse than the disease,” he said.) That day, in the close confines of my Civic, I told him I was very proud of him. He said he felt the same toward me.

Dad died early in the morning on February 6, 2003, not too many days after our last car ride together. He was soon thereafter cremated and half his remains were buried in the spring, once the ground had thawed, beside his wife, my mother. The other half of his remains I took to Crystal Beach and Pennant Point, outside of Halifax, in June, 2010. And now that I’ve been to Vancouver Island on the western coast of Canada, to walk on a few paths that bear his faint footsteps, the memories I have of my dad are richer than ever.

While chatting with Dorothy (Dot) Levett in Courtenay two weeks ago (Friday, April 27; see photo below), the 90-year old widow of Chuck Levett, a Navy man who worked with my dad in the nearby town of Comox in 1944 and ’45, I was told that as a young man (of 24 - 25) he had yellowish-red hair, and “he was one fellow who liked to liven things up.”

["Chuck Levett, second from left, met Dot over the phone": GH]

“Your dad used to pick us up in a Navy barge and take us to Tree Island for picnics,” Dot told me.

Then Dot and another widow told me a few other things that tickled me down to my toes. But I’m getting ahead of myself. My trip west started in Toronto on April 21st, and I have a few pictures of that part of the trip. Why, I may show them all because the train ride from London to Toronto, and then from Toronto to Vancouver, cost me a pretty penny and I want to get my money’s worth. Plus, I’m used to long rides in the country and have always found them rewarding.

Stay tuned.

[Photos by G.Harrison]

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Please click here to read “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”: Chasing my dad Part 2

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