Happy Hundredth, Papa!
I know this is late, but yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of my grandfather's birth.
Papa Gord was born into the generation that changed the world in the 20th century. He was born in The Paz, Manitoba, while WWI was raging, lived throught the Depression without a lot of trouble (I mean, I *never* heard about it growing up!), and actually spent the first couple of war years working in the industrial side of things before thinking "You know, I really should go over there..." Wanting to do something with airplanes, he went to the Air Force recruiter, who put him through a battery of tests and came back to tell him that he had the choice of going one of two ways:
While he was up there, he went fishing one day. Didn't catch much, but after a while he felt a *bump* on the bottom of his boat. Looked over the side and saw, clear as day, a killer whale cutting through the water below him. It wanted to play "tag" with this thing on the surface! When it bumped him again, he looked at his rifle and realized that unless he hit it in the heart or the brain, all he'd do is piss it off, so he grabbed the oars instead! The whale kept bumping him, all the way to shore.
He met my grandmother in Vancouver, where she had come to work to support the war effort. When the war ended, they decided to get married, which they did in her hometown of Melville, SK. Then they had a decision to make: return to Vancouver, or head down to Windsor, where his brothers were finding jobs working for Chrysler's. His father and some cousins had also moved out to the far west of Windsor, actually out of the town proper, in Lasalle, and there was a plot there, ready for him to build on it.
The coin flipped.
Windsor it was.
My father had come along in 1946, but he remembered the move. He remembered that his parents had a "double plot" - if/when a road went through behind them, they would have to give it up, but for the time being, they had a double-deep plot of land to deal with as they wished. Papa poured a couple of concrete slabs - one for the garage, and one for a tent - and then mapped out "his house." He dug out the foundation with a horse and pull-shovel, had the pros bring in the utilities, then built around it. It took time. It was started in 1950, so I was told, but by October, it wasn't going to be ready, so my dad and Nana were put on a train back to Melville while Papa lived in the shell of the house or with his brother while working full-time and then coming home to do something more on the house. It was expensive, built to last. Aluminum siding? Screw that noise. Papa used steel siding, and a steel roof. The garage was wide enough for only one car, but had storage in it. Dad and Nana returned for the summer of 1951 and moved into the house itself before school started. I saw it recently; other than a coat of paint, it's the same house that's been there since 1951.
There was also a shed out back that, after he died, we discovered contained an old pot-bellied stove. He did 35 years at Chrysler's before retiring in about 1980 or so. Towards the end, he had two cars - the first one was his pride and joy, the 1976 Chrysler Cordoba with the 5.9l V-8 engine, bronze and beautiful, and the white Reliant K-car as his runabout. I inherited the K-car, but remember the Cordoba very well indeed! I remember it gliding down our street, engine a cross between a rumble and a purr, smooth as glass. Papa loved that car, and I loved riding with him in it the few times I had a chance to do so.
Papa had two passions that were very visible. The first, and coolest for a kid, were his planes. Papa didn't just build model airplanes; he flew them! His preference were high-winged monoplanes, and in my dad's old bedroom, he had covered the walls with fuselages and wings, all carefully carved out of balsa wood and then covered with a coloured laminate. Most of my rides in the Cordoba were with him over to the flight field, a couple of miles away, where he'd fuel it up, fix the wing in place with heavy-duty rubber bands, jump-start the motor with a special lug on a cordless drill, and then send it up, up and away. He never let me touch the controls, but I was okay with that. I was content to just watch his and other planes loop and spin and enjoy the bright sky above.
(Of course, his favourite story about his planes was "the one that got away, but not really!" Transmitters only had a certain range, you see, and his blue plane with the yellow wing got going in one direction and got beyond his control, much to his dismay. He watched it fly away, tried to chase it, but it ran out of fuel and crashed before he could spot it. A few days later, though, he got a call from a couple of kids who had been fishing on the River Canard and had seen his plane in the water! They pulled it up, drained it, found the sticker with his name on it (just in case something like this ever happened), and called him! He thanked them, rewarded them when he picked the plane up, took it home, cleaned the outside, then hung it back up on the wall. Two days after that, though, his den began to stink, and I mean stink, and he realized the smell was rotten fish. Long story short, when the plane had crashed into the river, a gap had opened between the wing and the fuselage and a small perch had gotten inside, couldn't get out, and died up there in the tail! We laughed about that one for years, and he even got the story published in the R/C plane magazine he read.)
His second passion was cribbage. He and my grandmother killed endless hours playing cribbage, hand after hand, game after game. My father taught me how to play; my Papa taught me how to peg! Even the in the depths of Alzheimer's, my Nana and Papa would play, and she'd just as likely peg his butt off as he'd hit a big hand. Four times, if I recall correctly, he was dealt three fives and the offsuit Jack; on three of those occasions, the remaining five was turned. He even got on the news for it one time (it was a slooow news day in Windsor!). He had "permissive" house rules - you could peg out, you could tap the top card for a cut, things like that - but I loved playing him.
A Christian Missionary Alliance congregation in the Lasalle area had seen my grandparents off and on over a number of years, but when my father began dating my mother, *she* was attending Paulin Memorial PC, four doors up from her house. Dad attended there, got married there, and continued to attend there even when we lived down by the bridge and after we moved out to Forest Glade. When we transferred to Forest Glade PC in 1977, that wasn't anything much. But when my father was made an elder in 1980, right around the time the building went up, things got interesting. The first minister that came after dad's ordination was a nice guy but not dynamic. The fellow who came after *him* arrived in 1985, just after Christmas, and Papa knew that this was a minister he wanted to listen to!
Now, most families in church sit together, in my experience. Unless they're just plain not talking to each other, you have grandparents, parents, and children (grandchlildren) sitting in the same pew or within a row of each other. My father liked the back corner, not the least reason being that the sound equipment was run from back there and he would pop up and make adjustments if needed. Nana and Papa sat in the third row, on the outside, and about ten minutes or so into the service, unless it was the dead of winter, Papa would get up and crank open the window. He'd close it when the service was done, but for most of the hour, the sheer beside him would be billowing in the breeze. When he died, Kees referenced that in his message, bringing a fresh round of tears of memory. Kees also talked about how he had visited my grandparents almost every week, as my grandmother descended into Alzheimer's and lost different abilities. Papa stood by her, all the way. When Kees would come, every visit, long or short, ended with a Bible reading and a prayer. When she couldn't cook, they went out. They became the classic "old couple at McDonald's" - every morning, and every afternoon, there they'd be.
Nana fell at "their" McDonald's, her last public outing. He went with her to the hospital. He stayed as long as he could, every day. When he went home at night, she would cry out his name until her throat gave out. Remember, Alzheimer's patients lose everything except their essence, what's right down at the very core of themselves. The classic story is of the husband who visits his wife in the nursing home every day because while she's forgotten him, he remembers her: Nana never forgot Papa. Emma was for Gord and Gord was for Emma and they were so entwined that he really was lost without her. When she died, we said it was a blessing, that she was out of pain, and that the suffering was over.
But Papa was left alone, in so many ways.
He bought a dog - a Black Lab he named Nipper - that was too much dog for him as an attempt to have company in the house; Nipper was just too high-strung for a lonely 70+ widow, and my dad and his brother actually had to decide to have him put down when Papa passed. He went out to the Legion and the seniors' centres in Windsor, also to find companionship of some kind, but as he hadn't fought, the Legion stories didn't include him, and while several senior ladies made it known that they would have loved to keep him company at night, they weren't his beloved Emma and it just wouldn't do. I stopped in from time to time after school - he was right down the road from the University, if you know Windsor at all - and I'd sit in the kitchen and eat a box of cold rosebuds that he kept in the fridge for any visiting grandchildren (to this day, I prefer my chocolate fridge-cold before I eat it) while we talked about this or that. I watched him age. I watched him get old.
When I was 17 or 18, though, I hit the "rebellious" stage, doing what so many kids do: growing out the hair, tearing the knees of the jeans, generally looking disreputable. Never a thief, a drinker or a user, I just wanted to look different. Church was starting to lose a bit of meaning for me, as I was getting into a phase of work at McDonald's where I did overnight maintenance and wasn't getting home until 730am on Sundays and was just too beat to be up for church at 11. He hit me between the eyes one day when he said, "Steven, you're going to be a minister, you know..." I respectfully (always respectfully) disagreed - no, Papa, no. I'm going to be a history teacher like my father. But he was unmoved. I heard about it a few times over the years, even when my hair touched my shoulders, my music was loud, and I had everything but denim underwear. "You're going to be a minister. I can see it!"
In August of 1992, I went off to a weekend away with this strange girl I'd met at a church retreat - we were at a Christian festival an hour across from Niagara Falls - and Papa was really starting to falter. He'd had heart issues for a while. Now the doctor was saying leukemia had cropped up, cancer in his blood. This was definitely not good, but he faced it with the same good humour and determination as ever, an attitude of "God will take me when he's ready."
The Friday night that we were gone, my father had gone over for a visit. Just as he was preparing to leave, Papa hit him with a strange request. "Ralph, show me my house." Dad was taken slightly aback, but when Papa pressed him, he "showed" him the house. They talked about the room Dad and my uncle had shared while growing up. They talked about the single bathroom, which I had managed to lock one day while on the wrong side of the door (I was five; gimme a break!), causing Nana to use tools to break in while wearing her slip and growling that I was making her late to play bridge. They remembered the time lightning had struck the tree out back, the jolt whipping through the clothesline and setting the curtains on fire in the den; luckily, they had been home, and Papa had grabbed them and was able to throw them into the tub! They went down to the basement, with the floor joists only 5'9" off the concrete floor, meaning that if you were taller than that (Papa was 6' even), you either ducked or stuck your head between them; he did a lot of that, as all of his tools were down there, as well as the laundry tubs and the old wringer that he'd never quite gotten rid of. They went up to the attic, with plywood down on the trusses to allow for storage, but not enough space to live in (despite my father wanting to for years as a teenager). They looked at the porches and the outside stairways, with the gaudy yellow corrugated fiberglass sheets to act as shields for the wind. And then, Dad put his father to bed, and locked up on his way out.
The next morning, Papa called his brother, who lived next door, and asked him and his wife to come over, as he had something he wanted to give them. It was in his bedroom, on his dresser, and he walked them down the short hallway and into the room. He pointed to whatever it was (my great-aunt to this day doesn't remember what it was), and while they looked at it, he sat on the bed and swung his legs up to lay back for a minute. And when they turned around to speak to him about the object, mere moments later, he wasn't breathing. Heart attack, the doctor concluded. They called my father, who was in the middle of a yard sale, and my mother says he just kind of stopped, went a bit gray, then closed up to head over across town. I was informed on Sunday (this was before cell phones, remember). Kathy wasn't my girlfriend yet, but it was coming (four weeks away) and this ended up being her introduction to most of my family.
Twenty-four years have passed. He had just turned seventy-six.
Papa Gord, I still miss you, almost as much as I miss my Dad sometimes. I miss your wisdom. I miss your peace. I miss your smile. Happy hundredth, Papa.
Papa Gord was born into the generation that changed the world in the 20th century. He was born in The Paz, Manitoba, while WWI was raging, lived throught the Depression without a lot of trouble (I mean, I *never* heard about it growing up!), and actually spent the first couple of war years working in the industrial side of things before thinking "You know, I really should go over there..." Wanting to do something with airplanes, he went to the Air Force recruiter, who put him through a battery of tests and came back to tell him that he had the choice of going one of two ways:
- become a tail gunner in a Lancaster bomber (they had need for these, as turnover was somewhat rapid)
- learn how to use a peculiar surveying tool in the lumber woods of BC to figure out how many board-feet of plywood could be gotten out of particular trees in order to make Mosquito fighter-bombers.
While he was up there, he went fishing one day. Didn't catch much, but after a while he felt a *bump* on the bottom of his boat. Looked over the side and saw, clear as day, a killer whale cutting through the water below him. It wanted to play "tag" with this thing on the surface! When it bumped him again, he looked at his rifle and realized that unless he hit it in the heart or the brain, all he'd do is piss it off, so he grabbed the oars instead! The whale kept bumping him, all the way to shore.
He met my grandmother in Vancouver, where she had come to work to support the war effort. When the war ended, they decided to get married, which they did in her hometown of Melville, SK. Then they had a decision to make: return to Vancouver, or head down to Windsor, where his brothers were finding jobs working for Chrysler's. His father and some cousins had also moved out to the far west of Windsor, actually out of the town proper, in Lasalle, and there was a plot there, ready for him to build on it.
The coin flipped.
Windsor it was.
My father had come along in 1946, but he remembered the move. He remembered that his parents had a "double plot" - if/when a road went through behind them, they would have to give it up, but for the time being, they had a double-deep plot of land to deal with as they wished. Papa poured a couple of concrete slabs - one for the garage, and one for a tent - and then mapped out "his house." He dug out the foundation with a horse and pull-shovel, had the pros bring in the utilities, then built around it. It took time. It was started in 1950, so I was told, but by October, it wasn't going to be ready, so my dad and Nana were put on a train back to Melville while Papa lived in the shell of the house or with his brother while working full-time and then coming home to do something more on the house. It was expensive, built to last. Aluminum siding? Screw that noise. Papa used steel siding, and a steel roof. The garage was wide enough for only one car, but had storage in it. Dad and Nana returned for the summer of 1951 and moved into the house itself before school started. I saw it recently; other than a coat of paint, it's the same house that's been there since 1951.
There was also a shed out back that, after he died, we discovered contained an old pot-bellied stove. He did 35 years at Chrysler's before retiring in about 1980 or so. Towards the end, he had two cars - the first one was his pride and joy, the 1976 Chrysler Cordoba with the 5.9l V-8 engine, bronze and beautiful, and the white Reliant K-car as his runabout. I inherited the K-car, but remember the Cordoba very well indeed! I remember it gliding down our street, engine a cross between a rumble and a purr, smooth as glass. Papa loved that car, and I loved riding with him in it the few times I had a chance to do so.
Papa had two passions that were very visible. The first, and coolest for a kid, were his planes. Papa didn't just build model airplanes; he flew them! His preference were high-winged monoplanes, and in my dad's old bedroom, he had covered the walls with fuselages and wings, all carefully carved out of balsa wood and then covered with a coloured laminate. Most of my rides in the Cordoba were with him over to the flight field, a couple of miles away, where he'd fuel it up, fix the wing in place with heavy-duty rubber bands, jump-start the motor with a special lug on a cordless drill, and then send it up, up and away. He never let me touch the controls, but I was okay with that. I was content to just watch his and other planes loop and spin and enjoy the bright sky above.
(Of course, his favourite story about his planes was "the one that got away, but not really!" Transmitters only had a certain range, you see, and his blue plane with the yellow wing got going in one direction and got beyond his control, much to his dismay. He watched it fly away, tried to chase it, but it ran out of fuel and crashed before he could spot it. A few days later, though, he got a call from a couple of kids who had been fishing on the River Canard and had seen his plane in the water! They pulled it up, drained it, found the sticker with his name on it (just in case something like this ever happened), and called him! He thanked them, rewarded them when he picked the plane up, took it home, cleaned the outside, then hung it back up on the wall. Two days after that, though, his den began to stink, and I mean stink, and he realized the smell was rotten fish. Long story short, when the plane had crashed into the river, a gap had opened between the wing and the fuselage and a small perch had gotten inside, couldn't get out, and died up there in the tail! We laughed about that one for years, and he even got the story published in the R/C plane magazine he read.)
His second passion was cribbage. He and my grandmother killed endless hours playing cribbage, hand after hand, game after game. My father taught me how to play; my Papa taught me how to peg! Even the in the depths of Alzheimer's, my Nana and Papa would play, and she'd just as likely peg his butt off as he'd hit a big hand. Four times, if I recall correctly, he was dealt three fives and the offsuit Jack; on three of those occasions, the remaining five was turned. He even got on the news for it one time (it was a slooow news day in Windsor!). He had "permissive" house rules - you could peg out, you could tap the top card for a cut, things like that - but I loved playing him.
A Christian Missionary Alliance congregation in the Lasalle area had seen my grandparents off and on over a number of years, but when my father began dating my mother, *she* was attending Paulin Memorial PC, four doors up from her house. Dad attended there, got married there, and continued to attend there even when we lived down by the bridge and after we moved out to Forest Glade. When we transferred to Forest Glade PC in 1977, that wasn't anything much. But when my father was made an elder in 1980, right around the time the building went up, things got interesting. The first minister that came after dad's ordination was a nice guy but not dynamic. The fellow who came after *him* arrived in 1985, just after Christmas, and Papa knew that this was a minister he wanted to listen to!
Now, most families in church sit together, in my experience. Unless they're just plain not talking to each other, you have grandparents, parents, and children (grandchlildren) sitting in the same pew or within a row of each other. My father liked the back corner, not the least reason being that the sound equipment was run from back there and he would pop up and make adjustments if needed. Nana and Papa sat in the third row, on the outside, and about ten minutes or so into the service, unless it was the dead of winter, Papa would get up and crank open the window. He'd close it when the service was done, but for most of the hour, the sheer beside him would be billowing in the breeze. When he died, Kees referenced that in his message, bringing a fresh round of tears of memory. Kees also talked about how he had visited my grandparents almost every week, as my grandmother descended into Alzheimer's and lost different abilities. Papa stood by her, all the way. When Kees would come, every visit, long or short, ended with a Bible reading and a prayer. When she couldn't cook, they went out. They became the classic "old couple at McDonald's" - every morning, and every afternoon, there they'd be.
Nana fell at "their" McDonald's, her last public outing. He went with her to the hospital. He stayed as long as he could, every day. When he went home at night, she would cry out his name until her throat gave out. Remember, Alzheimer's patients lose everything except their essence, what's right down at the very core of themselves. The classic story is of the husband who visits his wife in the nursing home every day because while she's forgotten him, he remembers her: Nana never forgot Papa. Emma was for Gord and Gord was for Emma and they were so entwined that he really was lost without her. When she died, we said it was a blessing, that she was out of pain, and that the suffering was over.
But Papa was left alone, in so many ways.
He bought a dog - a Black Lab he named Nipper - that was too much dog for him as an attempt to have company in the house; Nipper was just too high-strung for a lonely 70+ widow, and my dad and his brother actually had to decide to have him put down when Papa passed. He went out to the Legion and the seniors' centres in Windsor, also to find companionship of some kind, but as he hadn't fought, the Legion stories didn't include him, and while several senior ladies made it known that they would have loved to keep him company at night, they weren't his beloved Emma and it just wouldn't do. I stopped in from time to time after school - he was right down the road from the University, if you know Windsor at all - and I'd sit in the kitchen and eat a box of cold rosebuds that he kept in the fridge for any visiting grandchildren (to this day, I prefer my chocolate fridge-cold before I eat it) while we talked about this or that. I watched him age. I watched him get old.
When I was 17 or 18, though, I hit the "rebellious" stage, doing what so many kids do: growing out the hair, tearing the knees of the jeans, generally looking disreputable. Never a thief, a drinker or a user, I just wanted to look different. Church was starting to lose a bit of meaning for me, as I was getting into a phase of work at McDonald's where I did overnight maintenance and wasn't getting home until 730am on Sundays and was just too beat to be up for church at 11. He hit me between the eyes one day when he said, "Steven, you're going to be a minister, you know..." I respectfully (always respectfully) disagreed - no, Papa, no. I'm going to be a history teacher like my father. But he was unmoved. I heard about it a few times over the years, even when my hair touched my shoulders, my music was loud, and I had everything but denim underwear. "You're going to be a minister. I can see it!"
In August of 1992, I went off to a weekend away with this strange girl I'd met at a church retreat - we were at a Christian festival an hour across from Niagara Falls - and Papa was really starting to falter. He'd had heart issues for a while. Now the doctor was saying leukemia had cropped up, cancer in his blood. This was definitely not good, but he faced it with the same good humour and determination as ever, an attitude of "God will take me when he's ready."
The Friday night that we were gone, my father had gone over for a visit. Just as he was preparing to leave, Papa hit him with a strange request. "Ralph, show me my house." Dad was taken slightly aback, but when Papa pressed him, he "showed" him the house. They talked about the room Dad and my uncle had shared while growing up. They talked about the single bathroom, which I had managed to lock one day while on the wrong side of the door (I was five; gimme a break!), causing Nana to use tools to break in while wearing her slip and growling that I was making her late to play bridge. They remembered the time lightning had struck the tree out back, the jolt whipping through the clothesline and setting the curtains on fire in the den; luckily, they had been home, and Papa had grabbed them and was able to throw them into the tub! They went down to the basement, with the floor joists only 5'9" off the concrete floor, meaning that if you were taller than that (Papa was 6' even), you either ducked or stuck your head between them; he did a lot of that, as all of his tools were down there, as well as the laundry tubs and the old wringer that he'd never quite gotten rid of. They went up to the attic, with plywood down on the trusses to allow for storage, but not enough space to live in (despite my father wanting to for years as a teenager). They looked at the porches and the outside stairways, with the gaudy yellow corrugated fiberglass sheets to act as shields for the wind. And then, Dad put his father to bed, and locked up on his way out.
The next morning, Papa called his brother, who lived next door, and asked him and his wife to come over, as he had something he wanted to give them. It was in his bedroom, on his dresser, and he walked them down the short hallway and into the room. He pointed to whatever it was (my great-aunt to this day doesn't remember what it was), and while they looked at it, he sat on the bed and swung his legs up to lay back for a minute. And when they turned around to speak to him about the object, mere moments later, he wasn't breathing. Heart attack, the doctor concluded. They called my father, who was in the middle of a yard sale, and my mother says he just kind of stopped, went a bit gray, then closed up to head over across town. I was informed on Sunday (this was before cell phones, remember). Kathy wasn't my girlfriend yet, but it was coming (four weeks away) and this ended up being her introduction to most of my family.
Twenty-four years have passed. He had just turned seventy-six.
Papa Gord, I still miss you, almost as much as I miss my Dad sometimes. I miss your wisdom. I miss your peace. I miss your smile. Happy hundredth, Papa.