WE HAVE BEEN OVERWHELMED BY KIND MESSAGES FOR TED SR.
Since the middle of December, when my father Ted Sr., suffered a stroke, we have been overwhelmed by the support of friends, his former lumber trade customers, and family, who visited him while in the hospital, and thought enough to send us cards with best wishes. As his health deteriorated over the next month, leading to his eventual passing on the 20th of January, we couldn’t travel very far in our region, without bumping into someone, so many kindly souls, who asked about his health.....and when he’d be coming home. Following his passing, we had many calls and cards from people we didn’t know, many who had been Ted’s customers at Shier’s Lumber, Building Trades Centre, of Bracebridge, and Northland Building Centre, of Parry Sound. I had a pleasant visit just the other day, while shopping here in Gravenhurst, with his former barber, who expressed his condolences. My dad loved a barber shop chat, and so did the barber apparently.
It has been a particularly difficult time because we were forced to close-out his apartment in Bracebridge, and haul, for the time being, all my parent’s curios and furniture to our already crowded Gravenhurst bungalow. We had been forced to do this shortly after he was admitted to hospital, as it was apparent he would not ever live unassisted, even if he had recovered his ability to walk. It was a painful time because we knew it would break his heart, to be forced to leave the little apartment, he had shared with Merle, near the scenic rapids near the Muskoka River’s Bass Rock. The only advantage we had in this case, was that Ed was suffering from a cognitive disorder, and never knew what we had been forced to contend with at his apartment. On our last day in that apartment, there wasn’t a dry eye, as we stood a few moments after the final skirl of the vacuum, to look at what had, only a short while before, been a modest but comfortable paradise on earth for those final years. I had planned to bring our dog Bosko one last time.....Ed just adored our dog, and always had biscuits and water ready for our coffee time visits.....but I just couldn’t do that in conscience......he might be a silly old mutt but one with a pretty good memory, and it would have been sad to watch him look for his buddy Ed......and the chair that he faithfully slept by, so Ed could warm his toes.
Putting that key on the kitchen counter, was harder than holding Ed’s hand for those last moments of a long life. He was so sick, I wanted the suffering to cease. When he let go, I let go, and peace filled the hospital room. The key to the apartment, as silly as this might read, represented a severance to a safe haven, a caring place I’d retreat to weekly, just to rekindle and restore family values; and with my wife and sons, enjoy holiday feasts. I remember standing there and not wanting to take my hand away.....as if this key was the last symbolic tie to decades of my family’s history. This was closure on both Merle, who died in 2008, and Ed, and the simple retirement they enjoyed feeding the hummingbirds, raising some balcony tomato plants, having good food that Ed so enthusiastically prepared, a good size television and stereo for entertainment, and did I mention, a car in the driveway for their daily trips around the region. In this one action, of leaving these keys behind, it was the closing words of a chapter I never thought would end. I turned and bid both of them a fond farewell......our family was never big on emotional beginnings or sobbing conclusions, but in that last little illumination of a winter afternoon, so bright and cheerful coming through the patio door, I felt at ease with the memory of two fine people, who had been married over 60 years, and who had stuck by each other through so many trials and misfortunes;....... to finish here in this spiritual aura of goodwill and contentment. I confess that it was impossible to look back after this, because it’s always on that occasion for those in mourning, when we ask why this had to happen.....and illogically judge reality, the truth of this cycle of life, to be ruthless and unfair. Instead we all left with a sad but resolved comfort that they had crossed to some place even more interesting, more inspiring and restorative. And that we should cease to mourn, and carry on with fond memories till we meet again.
Thank you all so much for sending messages of sympathy and for sharing many wonderful anecdotes about time spent with Ted Sr., whether having an after-work ale, a counterside discussion about two by fours and kitchen cabinets, or having a sports debate at a local coffee shop......where he loved to critique the Leafs. Even though he grew up in Cabbagetown, only a few blocks from Maple Leaf Gardens, he was a lifelong Montreal fan.......Merle and I never, ever gave up on the Leafs. It always made for an interesting Hockey Night in Canada when the Leafs and the Habs were playing.
Good times.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
A Peculiar Child up on Alice Street
Following the recent passing of my father Ed Sr., I must confess that writing has certainly been a therapeutic outlet. As a career writer I’ve never really felt my craft to be in any way a therapy for anything. When I write it’s always been serious business and my therapy, believe it or not, has been found miles away on the other side of the task.....when I can sit back and listen to music and rest my eyes and hands. In fact, my wife can attest to the determination and intensity by which I write.....such that I destroyed countless manual typewriters and electronic keyboards during my newspaper years. This is the longest serving keyboard now but then I’ve cut down on my writing work over the past two years its been in active service. When I was writing long-hand, which I still do on occasion, my wife showed me one day how my pen has actually dug down onto multiple pages.....you can feel it. When I seemed amazed at that, she told me to rub my hand over the pine table I used to work at years ago, and true enough there was an imprint there as well. Thus, not knowing it, my writing work has been much more a transference of aggression I suppose, than a therapeutic release of pent-up emotion. My family members might suggest that I often needed therapy after a long writing jag. Typically however, I was writing then about politics, local government foibles and environmental desecration here in Muskoka. No, I didn’t write to feel better.....I wrote to get even!
Over the past several years I have turned to writing more and more as a means of resolving issues that bothered me, and to engage readers who felt the same....or who at least were willing to offer a counter-point I hadn’t thought about previously. The blog has been my dearest friend, in fact, because I don’t have to battle an editor or publisher for space in their publication(s). And considering that I don’t have a particularly good relationship with any of the local publications or the folks who run them, the blog outlet has been amazingly contenting for many different reasons of expression.
When my father died on January 20th, after a short but painful illness, my first writing assignment was to pen a memorial tribute for the press and this Muskoka blog. It was something quite interesting because each submission was different. Firstly the public obit for the local media had to be shorter, and more to the point than obviously the blog submission. Writing for the press, I could feel the tips of my fingers starting to sting from the heavy handedness. It was even more aggressive after the first submission was ruled "too wordy" by editorial staff, and I was forced to revise. No, this wasn’t therapy but the blog copy was. I just explored everything I recalled about my dad that seemed relevant to a memorial......and then some. It wasn’t a tidy little piece of measured words but rather a rambling recollection, an editorial mosaic, depicting a man who had a difficult life at many points....yet was the kind of scrapper who didn’t give up because of set-backs. He provided for his brothers when abandoned as a youth, and despite losing his job numerous times, he always provided for us, and gave me a wonderful opportunity to travel, play sports, a chance to live in Muskoka, and he and my mother helped finance a university education from which I great benefitted. When I began writing the obit I felt there wasn’t too much more to add onto the skeleton of the newspaper copy. I just dropped my writing protocol for a few moments, and soon enough one fond memory fed another, and another until I was pleasantly exhausted but feeling complete about a story I’d hoped wouldn’t need to be written......especially by me.
While it’s true that I have habitually sat down to a keyboard with a mission at hand, I seldom have sat at my desk and doodled with words...... because I’ve always been project focused. I know pretty much what I’m going to write when I sit down, and my fingers assume the position. It has been rather refreshing, you might say, to have reached this mid life crazy, and feel right at home writing because it’s fun and unfettering for the soul. Even my work on other blog and web sites, in the past two months, has been less aggressive this way......, and possibly I’ve come upon a new way of expressing life and times in good old Muskoka without rage and thunder. It’s not likely I’ve stopped grinding axes or anything, and my critics won’t offer the opinion that I’ve suddenly become soft on local issues.....but I think this therapy writing might have some advantages. For one thing, I might not kill this keyboard with my blunt force intensity.
I haven’t had fun writing for some years. I’m sorry that it took my father’s death to realize something about my craft was missing. And it’s okay to write while pissed-off, just to do so happily and with the resolve that by the concluding comments.....well, I’m feeling much better that a point has been made, without even a trace of smoke coming from beneath my fingernails. Alas, after one editorial I’m eager to start another. Any journalist reading this would suggest that Currie’s had a burn-out and is on his way to poetry. Actually, I began as a poet so if I ended this way it wouldn’t be so bad.
I think a lot of writers are the same. While it’s of course necessary to be serious at one’s craft, being too consumed sucks the art out of writing. How many home decorators wish to hang an angry work of art in their family room? How many of you wish to read an angry editorial after having an anger-generating work day? I won’t surrender entirely to this therapy concept but I will admit being less pent-up and vengeful is nice for a change. Will I live longer because of it? No, I think my other vices will catch-up the pace but an improvement at my age is okay regardless. In my own obituary I’d include something relevant about this change of attitude and mission. "Like Dickens Scrooge, after the visits of three spirits, Ted found peace in being able to write with candor and resolve, nastily yet gently, spiritually but realistically, and painted with words such that we never knew if he was being condescending or approving by intent. He was a true Jackson Pollock of a writer, as abstract as life itself."
But by golly he had fun expressing himself!
Following the recent passing of my father Ed Sr., I must confess that writing has certainly been a therapeutic outlet. As a career writer I’ve never really felt my craft to be in any way a therapy for anything. When I write it’s always been serious business and my therapy, believe it or not, has been found miles away on the other side of the task.....when I can sit back and listen to music and rest my eyes and hands. In fact, my wife can attest to the determination and intensity by which I write.....such that I destroyed countless manual typewriters and electronic keyboards during my newspaper years. This is the longest serving keyboard now but then I’ve cut down on my writing work over the past two years its been in active service. When I was writing long-hand, which I still do on occasion, my wife showed me one day how my pen has actually dug down onto multiple pages.....you can feel it. When I seemed amazed at that, she told me to rub my hand over the pine table I used to work at years ago, and true enough there was an imprint there as well. Thus, not knowing it, my writing work has been much more a transference of aggression I suppose, than a therapeutic release of pent-up emotion. My family members might suggest that I often needed therapy after a long writing jag. Typically however, I was writing then about politics, local government foibles and environmental desecration here in Muskoka. No, I didn’t write to feel better.....I wrote to get even!
Over the past several years I have turned to writing more and more as a means of resolving issues that bothered me, and to engage readers who felt the same....or who at least were willing to offer a counter-point I hadn’t thought about previously. The blog has been my dearest friend, in fact, because I don’t have to battle an editor or publisher for space in their publication(s). And considering that I don’t have a particularly good relationship with any of the local publications or the folks who run them, the blog outlet has been amazingly contenting for many different reasons of expression.
When my father died on January 20th, after a short but painful illness, my first writing assignment was to pen a memorial tribute for the press and this Muskoka blog. It was something quite interesting because each submission was different. Firstly the public obit for the local media had to be shorter, and more to the point than obviously the blog submission. Writing for the press, I could feel the tips of my fingers starting to sting from the heavy handedness. It was even more aggressive after the first submission was ruled "too wordy" by editorial staff, and I was forced to revise. No, this wasn’t therapy but the blog copy was. I just explored everything I recalled about my dad that seemed relevant to a memorial......and then some. It wasn’t a tidy little piece of measured words but rather a rambling recollection, an editorial mosaic, depicting a man who had a difficult life at many points....yet was the kind of scrapper who didn’t give up because of set-backs. He provided for his brothers when abandoned as a youth, and despite losing his job numerous times, he always provided for us, and gave me a wonderful opportunity to travel, play sports, a chance to live in Muskoka, and he and my mother helped finance a university education from which I great benefitted. When I began writing the obit I felt there wasn’t too much more to add onto the skeleton of the newspaper copy. I just dropped my writing protocol for a few moments, and soon enough one fond memory fed another, and another until I was pleasantly exhausted but feeling complete about a story I’d hoped wouldn’t need to be written......especially by me.
While it’s true that I have habitually sat down to a keyboard with a mission at hand, I seldom have sat at my desk and doodled with words...... because I’ve always been project focused. I know pretty much what I’m going to write when I sit down, and my fingers assume the position. It has been rather refreshing, you might say, to have reached this mid life crazy, and feel right at home writing because it’s fun and unfettering for the soul. Even my work on other blog and web sites, in the past two months, has been less aggressive this way......, and possibly I’ve come upon a new way of expressing life and times in good old Muskoka without rage and thunder. It’s not likely I’ve stopped grinding axes or anything, and my critics won’t offer the opinion that I’ve suddenly become soft on local issues.....but I think this therapy writing might have some advantages. For one thing, I might not kill this keyboard with my blunt force intensity.
I haven’t had fun writing for some years. I’m sorry that it took my father’s death to realize something about my craft was missing. And it’s okay to write while pissed-off, just to do so happily and with the resolve that by the concluding comments.....well, I’m feeling much better that a point has been made, without even a trace of smoke coming from beneath my fingernails. Alas, after one editorial I’m eager to start another. Any journalist reading this would suggest that Currie’s had a burn-out and is on his way to poetry. Actually, I began as a poet so if I ended this way it wouldn’t be so bad.
I think a lot of writers are the same. While it’s of course necessary to be serious at one’s craft, being too consumed sucks the art out of writing. How many home decorators wish to hang an angry work of art in their family room? How many of you wish to read an angry editorial after having an anger-generating work day? I won’t surrender entirely to this therapy concept but I will admit being less pent-up and vengeful is nice for a change. Will I live longer because of it? No, I think my other vices will catch-up the pace but an improvement at my age is okay regardless. In my own obituary I’d include something relevant about this change of attitude and mission. "Like Dickens Scrooge, after the visits of three spirits, Ted found peace in being able to write with candor and resolve, nastily yet gently, spiritually but realistically, and painted with words such that we never knew if he was being condescending or approving by intent. He was a true Jackson Pollock of a writer, as abstract as life itself."
But by golly he had fun expressing himself!
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
A Calm on the Winterscape
It was a most beautiful commencement of the day. There was a small amount of snow having fallen during the night, and there were a few flurries lingering at daybreak, enough to dust over this well trodden path down the lane......but not enough to warrant a shoveling detail.
It has now been two weeks since my father’s passing, and this is the first morning since that I’ve recognized immediately life is truly different. Seeing as I met with Ed Sr., through the week for morning coffee, and during his month-plus stay in hospital I visited on most afternoons, it was a wee challenge, on those first days after, convincing myself he was no longer part of this great mortal coil of life. On several occasions I got this urge to phone him just to pass on some new tidbit of information, realizing at the last minute that the call would only ring in my wife Suzanne’s purse, because she kept the cell phone after he had collapsed, at his apartment, on the 15th of December. Today was both a refreshing, bright morning staring out over the snow-laden woodland and it was the first day I didn’t feel the weight of this family loss.
Our family has been overwhelmed by the many acts of kindness received from his neighbors and friends, work colleagues and associates since, his passing on the 20th of January, at South Muskoka Memorial Hospital. We are thankful he was amongst so many friends for those final few years he spent at the Bass Rock apartments in Bracebridge........a most tranquil place in a beautiful river-front setting that my mother Merle adored. It was friendships like this that kept him happily at Bass Rock, after my mother died in the spring of 2008, and kept him looking forward to every day, and every encounter with neighbors and family.
I had planned to bring our dog Bosko to the apartment, on that last day, Jan. 31st., as he truly loved visiting Ed and getting her morning cookies.....and then curling into a ball at Ed’s feet for a wee nap while we visited. We used to let him run to the apartment from down the hall, and Ed knew to keep the door open.....and if not, Bosko might crash through regardless. Bosko put on quite a show for her friend, rolling on her back, chasing her tail, as if it was the requirement for that eventual handful of treats. Ed always seemed to enjoy the canine company. We thought about it, and decided it would be terrible to put Bosko in this situation, coming into an empty apartment, with no Ed to perform for.......even if we supplied the cookies it just wouldn’t be the same. She whines every time we head out the door in the morning, pretty sure she’s missing out on a visit to Bass Rock. Deep down I think she knows, and if there’s truly life after death, I’m confident Bosko would have received a heavenly pat on the top of the head from an old friend in transition.
Thanks to everyone who has contacted us, sent cards of condolence and given us so many hugs along our journey. It has made it all so much more calming and gentle to our family during this time of loss.
It was a most beautiful commencement of the day. There was a small amount of snow having fallen during the night, and there were a few flurries lingering at daybreak, enough to dust over this well trodden path down the lane......but not enough to warrant a shoveling detail.
It has now been two weeks since my father’s passing, and this is the first morning since that I’ve recognized immediately life is truly different. Seeing as I met with Ed Sr., through the week for morning coffee, and during his month-plus stay in hospital I visited on most afternoons, it was a wee challenge, on those first days after, convincing myself he was no longer part of this great mortal coil of life. On several occasions I got this urge to phone him just to pass on some new tidbit of information, realizing at the last minute that the call would only ring in my wife Suzanne’s purse, because she kept the cell phone after he had collapsed, at his apartment, on the 15th of December. Today was both a refreshing, bright morning staring out over the snow-laden woodland and it was the first day I didn’t feel the weight of this family loss.
Our family has been overwhelmed by the many acts of kindness received from his neighbors and friends, work colleagues and associates since, his passing on the 20th of January, at South Muskoka Memorial Hospital. We are thankful he was amongst so many friends for those final few years he spent at the Bass Rock apartments in Bracebridge........a most tranquil place in a beautiful river-front setting that my mother Merle adored. It was friendships like this that kept him happily at Bass Rock, after my mother died in the spring of 2008, and kept him looking forward to every day, and every encounter with neighbors and family.
I had planned to bring our dog Bosko to the apartment, on that last day, Jan. 31st., as he truly loved visiting Ed and getting her morning cookies.....and then curling into a ball at Ed’s feet for a wee nap while we visited. We used to let him run to the apartment from down the hall, and Ed knew to keep the door open.....and if not, Bosko might crash through regardless. Bosko put on quite a show for her friend, rolling on her back, chasing her tail, as if it was the requirement for that eventual handful of treats. Ed always seemed to enjoy the canine company. We thought about it, and decided it would be terrible to put Bosko in this situation, coming into an empty apartment, with no Ed to perform for.......even if we supplied the cookies it just wouldn’t be the same. She whines every time we head out the door in the morning, pretty sure she’s missing out on a visit to Bass Rock. Deep down I think she knows, and if there’s truly life after death, I’m confident Bosko would have received a heavenly pat on the top of the head from an old friend in transition.
Thanks to everyone who has contacted us, sent cards of condolence and given us so many hugs along our journey. It has made it all so much more calming and gentle to our family during this time of loss.
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