
*Being alone with Dad (Georgetown Ontario, 1955-1964, and beyond)
The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated… – a popular misquote of Mark Twain
A family is a tyranny ruled over by its sickest member… – a paraphrase of George Bernard Shaw
**In the photo, my father is third from the left. This is a picture of the Georgetown, Ontario Glee Club of which he was a part.
On tenterhooks
Growing up in my family, any purported pursuit of pleasure soon turned into torture, especially exercises in bonding with Dad.
As an employee of the Canadian National Railway, my father, Jim McBryde, was the proud possessor of an unlimited-travel train pass, the benefits of which extended to all members of our nuclear family. So it was that we crisscrossed Canada and the United States on family holidays that generated even more anxiety than everyday life.
Dad was obsessed with fishing, and from a very early age I would be bundled onto a night train at the Georgetown station and dragged into remote corners of northern Ontario, places with names like Gogama, Longlac, and Hornepayne, on father-and-son fishing trips, usually in the company of at least one of his office cronies, including the rather aptly named Mr. Mel Hunter. The train pass didn’t cover sleeping car accommodations, so we would sit up all night on 14-hour chugs into the muskeg of the far north, Dad and Mr. Hunter smoking and gossiping about work while I sat lumpishly, dreading the snags and castigations to come.
Once we arrived, bleary eyed, in the latest god-forsaken outpost of angling, Dad would bait the hook and cast my line into the shoals, where it would immediately become snagged. The celebrated author and iconic angling enthusiast Ernest Hemingway would have disowned a son like me. And although my father was in fact a city slicker and himself hardly adept with hook, line, and sinker, he would be so crabby about my snags that I would actually sit still, snarled for hours, the rocks piercing my tender behind, so as to avoid reopening the can of entanglement worms with Dad.
Meanwhile my father and Mr. Hunter would down prodigious quantities of the fiery beverages that lubricated their expeditions and served to compensate for the dearth of pike and pickerel that inevitably undermined these adventures in the wild.
Inevitably Dad would lumber over to my solitary perch as the interminable angling afternoon wore on, exhaling fumes as toxic as those of the steam locomotive that dumped us on these dismal shores, and would confide that he was soon going to die.
Just as inevitably, I would cry. I cried and cried. I didn’t want to lose my dad, even though he was often so mean and corrosive that, lashed by his words, I felt flayed, excoriated, gasping for life itself like the goggle-eyed fish that floundered in a more fortunate angler’s basket.
On the road to find out
As I transmogrified into a particularly miserable and inept adolescent, the excruciating fishing expeditions gave way to road trips, purportedly for bonding, just me and good ol’ Jim. Around the time I turned 12, Jim was promoted from a Toronto office clerk to the august post of “traffic supervisor.” The job description entailed his sallying forth into the hidden reaches of rural Ontario to check up on the CN express outlets, during an era when every town and village had at least a tiny train station, and his work mainly involved a string of visits to desolate ports of call, whereupon Dad would bellow something resembling “Attaboy! Attaboy!” to the fidgety fellows running the local CN office and “Hubba! Hubba!” to any female employee who happened to pop out of a hidden cubicle, like a crocus at the end of winter. The key attraction of the job for Dad was his expense account, which he called the “swindle sheet,” and he sold these excursions during my school vacations as opportunities to devour pancakes with whipped cream – or at least dream whip – for breakfast and steak or spareribs for dinner, all on the CN dime.
So we would pile into his 1961 Pontiac, a company car, and head for towns like Arthur or Port Credit, which seemed light years away from our Georgetown, Ontario, home.
In the car, Dad’s moods would oscillate between sheer terror – he hated driving and was a frightful menace to himself and others – and frenzied delight. During manic bouts, he would whistle or sing, doing his best Dean Martin imitations: “Strangers in the Night;” “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime;” “Volare”… Oh! Oh! But at the end of the Attaboy Attaboy working day, after the last greasy rib was ingested in a forlorn, near-empty restaurant called The Shorthorn or Baron of Beef, Dad would become maudlin or vicious. “Lie still,” he would hiss, in our shared motel-room bed. “Stop snivelling your snout.”
Each road-trip evening involved a number of rituals before any attempt at sleep. Dad would first apply Ozonol ointment and cloth bandages to the raw wounds on his calves, which he scratched incessantly, a self-destructive iteration of his perpetual anguish and anxiety. And even though I was a teen, he would then intone the nightly prayer, his face plastered against mine:
Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me;
Bless Thy little lamb tonight;
Through the darkness be Thou near him;
Watch his sleep till morning light.
I will never forget his smell, a smoky, sour odour of misery and fear, born of suffocating work pressures – the traffic supervisor assignment was tantamount to his being shelved – and terror at what he believed was his own imminent demise.
Postscript
My father, J. W. McBryde, died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 85.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Your friend,
Robert
*A reworking of a story from My Time With You Has Been Short But Very Funny/Le temps passé avec vous fut bref mais tordant