Your independence shall bring you bold adventure

I love my dad. It is beyond my current realm of understanding that I won't be getting phone calls from him anymore. He won't be there next time I go to Lasqueti. Every time I close my eyes there are a million memories and details emblazoned there. Sometimes I think that I can't get through this, and then sometimes I look at how much my dad lived his life and I know that that's what I have to do.

There are a lot of things I regret about our relationship and our history together, and there are going to be a lot of unknowns that I'm going to dwell on for the rest of my days, but I don't think that regrets or unknowns are the point. I know my dad loved me and I know that he knew I loved him. I think that probably, somewhere in the cosmos, in the atmosphere, in the air around me he's there and he's saying, "Hey girlie..." and willing me to stop crying. It's just hard, though. It's hard for my mom and my brother and I.

My family and I talked about my dad a lot today. I asked my brother if he could have imagined our father "old" or in a hospital bed and he said no way. My uncle said he had been thinking about all the adventures that he and my dad went on when they were young and shaking his head thinking about the zaniness and the riskiness of some of their exploits. My mom told the story about him running aground on some rocks near Sisters Lighthouse and having to swim to the lighthouse, stay the night with the lighthouse keeper and wait for the next high tide in order to free his barge from the rocks. I brought up the story about he and I racing to catch the ferry in his Cressida that had a propensity to overheat and how, to mitigate this problem, he carried with him an oven-mitt. When the car started to overheat he pulled into a mall parking lot, put on the oven mitt and took the cap of the radiator, allowing steam and boiling water to spew everywhere (mortified, I had walked over to some shoe shop and pretended to be interested in sandals) before refilling the radiator with fresh water kept in the car for just this purpose.

I have a lot of stories about my dad. The scorpion incident in Yelapa. Crossing the Strait of Georgia in a fishing boat with him, Jay and a couple of our friends in really bad winter weather. The way he loved Twiggy and Garfield and how they followed him around the yard, more like loyal dogs than cats. Having Jay and I pick cherries from the tree in the front yard from the bucket of the backhoe which he had extended up into the tree (and then shook just a little, making me and Jay scream in terror). The way he would rub the bottom of my feet on his beard when I was about four years old which would drive me insane because it tickled so much. Seeing him ski down the mountain as I was taking the chairlift up and being proud of his athleticism when I was in elementary school. His extraordinary green thumb. His contentedness at Lasqueti. Building the rental house on the property there with materials that he had scavenged and squirreled away over the years. The time he left a note on my car that said, "Who loves ya? Your daddy does" on the windshield of my car when I was at work and he had been in the neighbourhood (I never told him I kept it and that it's in my photo album). Moving a house from Marine Drive in Vancouver to Lasqueti Island. Accidentally almost burning down the Finnerties (event recreated on film for posterity further in the blog showing how I doused the flames). The parrot that bit his finger in Puerto Vallarta. His tugboat. Letting me drive the Sea Ray when I was a little kid. Kayaking with him when the water was filled with phosophorous so it lit up every time we put our paddle into it.

These are just things that are in my periphery. He had been around for a long time before I arrived on the scene. He had an amazing life. He travelled, he took risks, he lived a lot, he didn't like working 9 to 5 so he didn't. He did things his own way. I don't like cliches, but he really did: I was the only kid in my school that had a swing set that was about thirty feet high, made out of poles that my dad had driven into the ground somehow with his bulldozer and backhoe. Oh yeah, my dad had a bulldozer, backhoe, dump truck, boats, cars, trucks, solar panels, a peltin wheel and an electric golf cart.

Talking with my mom and Michael today it became apparent that my dad just did what he wanted to do in life. My mom said that he had had a lot of adventures. Rehashing some of the stories it became somewhat apparent that he sometimes lived life like some invincible twenty year old, not contemplating the risks: just doing.

In my June trip up to Lasqueti we did some pretty funny things. He had been waiting for someone to come up and help him clean the chimney. I thought this meant that I would literally help him clean the chimney in some fashion, but my job was to dial 911 when something went wrong. And so I watched my father in his early sixties climb the ladder that was tied to the chimney, and then watched as he dropped the weighted brush into it to try and get some of the creosote off the walls, peering in, dangling precariously into the chimney. After which, we almost lit the house on fire accidentally when things went horribly awry with one of those hand held torches. Then, my dad managed to reposition the wrought iron wood burning stove by lying on the ground and forcing it with his legs (you may remember that this was the stove that I had to "steady" while bashing around in the back of his truck while we hauled ass to catch the ferry off Lasqueti one day which is probably three or four hundred pounds and if it had decided to fly out of the back of the truck there would be relatively little that I could do to stop it). All of this was in the span of one day.

There's still a lot that I don't know about my dad which my mom said she would share with Jay and I went we go up to Lasqueti shortly. What I did learn to appreciate today is that he is the most non-conventional and adventurous person that I have ever known. He seemingly found alternative ways to do most things in life: proof that it can be done. He lived the life that he wanted to live. He took risks and chances and had enough adventures to last a lifetime (most of my adventurous stories involve him). I said to Michael over dinner tonight that I hoped my life, and that of my mom and brother don't become more mundane now. I hope that this is what rallies us to embrace life a little more, to take more chances, think outside the box and to be more adventurous.

When I opened my fortune cookie it said "Your independence shall bring you bold adventure".

I hope so. I've got the rest of my life to make my dad proud.

I love you, Dad.