Ten Years Ago Today

1966

Ten years ago today, my father died. It's hard to believe it's already been ten years. I wanted to write something profound and eloquent about these years, what I've learned, what I've been thinking about but to be honest: It's far too long for a simple blog post. It's mostly about guilt and regret, and that makes it mostly about me. 
Yet what is truly meaningful for me is that, looking back on the last decade, what stands out for me most is what I learned about him after he died. Here is just one story, and it goes with the above photo. The italicized opening is the story my mother has always told about how they got their two cats:

I don’t know why we went to PetSmart. We went on a Saturday and your sister later said, ‘Mother, you never go to PetSmart on a Saturday because that’s when they have all the adoptable animals on display.’ We walked along and looked at the animals. There were two cats in the same cage, a grey and white cat and an orange cat. The sign said they were brothers and had to be adopted together. Reg looked at them and he wondered if we should adopt them. I didn’t think we needed cats so he wandered off. I stood and looked at the cats; they were handsome. When I found him, he looked at me like he was a six-year-old boy who really wanted something. ‘Couldn’t we get them?’ he said to me. ‘We have to get them both. Otherwise, they’ll be put down.’ We went back and adopted them. We didn’t like their names so we agreed to change them. Reg named them Pickens and Percy. 

Pickens was his mother’s family name and the family lived in Percy Township. 

In the fall of 2014, my husband went through a partridge shooting phase. As we sat down to our first meal, and my first-ever taste, of partridge, along with potatoes, acorn squash, carrots and parsnips, I said, “Dad should be here for this.”

When Dwayne and Mum looked at me, I said, “There’s a photo of Dad as a young man and he’s holding a live partridge in his hands.”

Mum laughed at the memory. “He brought it into the house! I said, ‘What are you doing?’ What if it had gotten loose...” She was still smiling as she began eating.

A thought hit me: If my father hadn’t moved to the city to become a funeral director or at least, if he hadn’t lived above his funeral homes in town, if he had lived in the country with lots of land, a pond, a barn, I think he would have collected animals. He would have kept them as pets. He wouldn’t have turned any away.

“Call Reg,” I said. “He’ll take it.”

Mum laughed again, knowing exactly what my non sequitor meant.

This was a nice thought to have, this alternate life for my father, a different way of envisioning his love of animals. 

Dad on the front porch of the Pugwash house, 2002