Not this blogboy

I was reading Hal Niedzviecki's account of his entry into blogspace, and how he got no comments, or only negative ones about how uninteresting his posts were. So he began to get more personal, to let out about things in his private life--like a fight he was having with his brother. And he got popular.

So I guess I should be writing about my long, problematic relationship with my father, a relationship that has not ended being problematic just because he died about  a year ago, just after his 89th birthday, leaving me with a lot of  unasked and unanswered questions about why he was the way he was.

I recall writing the night I heard from my uncle that Dad had died that "for two hours now, I have been the oldest surviving member of the family of Max and Berna Perkins." There's part of the problem--it was always about me, even when he died. But all of us, his kids he kept talking of wanting to get back nearer to from England (to which he had moved in his early seventies) waited for years for some word of encouragement or acknowledgment of our successes or even an "I'm proud of you." That just wasn't part of his vocabulary. I think it was because he was pretty dissatisfied with the way his own life went, after he was about 23.

Before that, he'd enlisted in the RCAF at 17, been called up before he finished grade 12, was trained and on active duty as a fighter pilot by the time he was 19, and lived to tell us about it. And not to tell us about big chunks of it. In his time, after WWII, no big system for PTSD counselling--a thanks from the government and "get back to normal." The older he got, the tougher that normal got to get back to and stay back at.

We were actually proud of his service record, though embarrassed when he would do things like say to some kid on the C-Train in Calgary, too young to know what he was talking about, "Why don't you stand up and give an old Spitfire pilot a seat?"  But why not? The kid should have been embarrassed, not us.

Oh, there are stories I could indulge in, of slights and slug-fests, and whines and wobbles I could emote. Snide comments about how, by his mid-seventies, he finally could give a shy grin and a shrug and say, "They tell me I should hug my kids more," and give us the hugs we had craved decades earlier. Not that we couldn't be grateful in our late forties and early fifties, as I was at the time, but still... The old dog could learn new tricks. Or the old bull, as he used to consider himself. And maybe it was sincere, and he was just unpractised. And maybe it was just  my conditioning that made me look for the trick in it.

Yeah--I could write about all that. It was reading a "Happy Birthday" greeting in last Sunday's Edmonton Journal, to someone turning 90, and being jarred by the fact we could have been planning such a celebration for Dad, for next month, if undetected, untreated (and at his age probably untreatable) metastatic prostate cancer hadn't interfered with that possibility. But I don't want to write about such things. Too personal. Too much not for public consumption. Too likely to make me look bad, which is not the looked-for in all this. Sorry.