Reading my Dad/Reading my Dad's notebook

I started to write this one before my dad died on December 12th but didn’t feel I wanted to post it until now…

On November 18th, my dad asked me to get him a notebook. He said he had some questions and he kept forgetting things so he thought he needed to start writing things down. I thought it was a good idea in part because it would give him something to do other than watch TV. Plus he always liked to write and is a very good writer.

He actually hasn’t been able to write anything in the notebook. We’ve used the notebook instead to report on our visits to him, to document his condition from day to day, to pass messages back and forth between Bruce and me, to record the phone numbers of visitors who’ve shown up while he is sleeping…Even the hospital staff started to use the notebook – mostly the Social Worker, just to let us know she’d been there…

I’ve been reading the notebook. There’s not a lot in it as his health has really deterioriated over the past two weeks. At first, when he was in the hospital, we would get him to tell us stories partly because our lives didn’t change very much from day to day and we actually didn’t have a lot of exciting news to tell him. So he rambled about his childhood to us – some stuff we had heard before but some new & some forgotten stuff. It was especially nice for “Riss” (my dad’s pet name for her) as she had never heard these stories and found them interesting.

I went through a brief identity crisis when my dad told us that my grandfather was adopted. But then the next day he told us that my grandfather was adopted by a relative and had the same surname before and after his adoption. I was surprised at how much this story affected me. I knew my grandfather had left Aberdeen as a teenager and had “gone to sea”. I didn’t know that he almost settled in Chicago. I knew he had worked on the docks but I didn’t know he’d been a stonemason or maybe I did…I started to remember things I hadn't thought about for a long time - perhaps a parallel to what my dad was experiencing. I started to write down the stories in the notebook as my dad told them but this was just before he couldn’t tell stories anymore. I only actually ended up writing down one story but it’s a good one about people who they met and adventures they had at a cottage at Boundary Bay. Part of the story was about border-crossing and the store that was half in Canada and half in the states. I thought again about how the story parallelled his precarious state of health. Reading the story in the notebook, scrawled and point-form as it is…I get a pretty vivid picture of good times…before.