My Father

In honour of my father's birth day, a few words about the man who contributed considerably to who I am today. He died fourteen years ago at the age of eighty-seven. He lived a good life and one filled with immense challenges. (being married to my mother was probably the biggest.)

He grew up in East Prussia, one of a family of nearly a dozen children - I honestly can't remember the exact number. Only one is still alive. Most died in the second world war - some of them brutally.

When my father was young he had polio and was told that he would never walk again. He said to the doctors, "Just watch me." And he got out of the hospital bed and fell over - and he got up and fell over - and he got up and fell over until one day he didn't fall. There were no physiotherapists in that day and that place. He taught himself to walk again.

Years later, as a craftsman in Ontario, he was applying gold leaf to the ceiling of the dome of the Ontario Legislature. The scaffold collapsed and he fell to the marble floor, hitting it feet first. I got the call in the middle of the night because I lived closest to the hospital. We rushed over and there he was in the emergency room, covered in blood, his first concern about me and that I should not be upset.

Every bone in his feet and legs was shattered - not broken - shattered. The couldn't set them. They told him he would never walk again. He said, "Just watch me."

And he did walk again, with a cane, for the next thirty years of his life. Every step he took during those years was painful. But he lawn bowled and took trips and drove and walked with his dog and never once complained. The only sign that there was pain, was his sigh of relief at the end of every day when he soaked his feet in epsom salts.

He was forty-two years old when he boarded a ship with his brother, to come to Canada. Like so many people after the war, he wanted a better life for his family. What courage it must have taken to sail to a new country, where he didn't speak the language and where he had no idea what awaited him. And he was sent to Sudbury of all places. He found work as a painter and sent for his family. He never complained, he just got down to the business at hand.

Willi was a master at seeing the silver lining in every cloud. No matter how dire the circumstances, he found a way. When his union went on strike, he drove a taxi to bring in the money we needed to survive. And the stories he came back with were always funny.

His favourite saying was, "No problems."

He stuck it out through a tough and tumultous marriage and continued to love my mother unconditionally until the day he died. Life got easier for him as the years went by - except for his constant pain. He was not the perfect father. He grew to adulthood in a time when men were more detached, when they didn't show their emotions like they do today - but he showed us how to have hope, how to assume the best of our fellow man and how to never, ever give up. And that, is a great legacy.