Sunday, February 23, 2014
Fathers and daughters
I happened to be watching the Daytona 500, and the race got red-flagged early on, so I took the opportunity to drive into town for a sixpack, and had the immense pleasure of hearing an interview with the late Mavis Gallant on the car radio.
Canadian literature has always left me a little cold. I think it's that "Canadian" label. Why do we need to have labels for literature? Isn't it enough that it's in a language I can read? As long as you're writing in English should it matter whether you write from India or Ceylon or Nigeria or the US or England?
Or Canada?
It struck me as a way to get some spotlight for otherwise mediocre writers who would have drowned in the big pool but were able to become big fish in the segregated pool we call Canlit.
So Michael Ondaatje came to Canada and is now a great Canadian writer; Malcom Lowry did some of his best work here but was never a Canadian writer. Elizabeth Smart was a Canadian but didn't write here so is excluded from the Canlit canon... it all seems a little arbitrary to me.
Mavis was a Canadian writer who wrote elsewhere and was therefore a Canlit outsider of sorts; proudly embraced after the fact of her international success, which only underscores my point that these labels of national identity are irrelevant if not illegitimate.
Good writing is always universal. Love, death, peace, war...
The father-daughter bond is one of those universals, and it was poignant to hear the octogenarian Gallant reminisce about events in her life from over 80 years ago. The father-daughter relationship was evidently a crucial one in her formative years. It's remarkable that she can wistfully recollect memories even though he died when she was ten years old.
I've had the extreme good fortune of not dying when my daughter was ten. That's allowed me to be a coach and cheerleader as a shy but precocious little girl has negotiated the innumerable hazards that lie in wait for a girl growing up, and I do believe it's tougher for girls than for boys.
For well beyond the first year of her life I walked her to sleep every night to Sing it again, Rod. At some level that hour-long walk every night created bonds that have been strained at times, by divorce and adolescence and all the baggage that goes with that, but have never been seriously threatened.
It's a joy I can scarcely articulate, to drive to the big city and visit with her, an independent and successful young professional making her way in the world.
The last ten years have also gifted me a step-daughter. That relationship did not have the benefit of that crucial first year of being walked to sleep to Rod Stewart tunes. As a result, we had to fight through a lot of that adolescent baggage, a process that had both highs and lows. But we made it.
She too is a fiercely intelligent and independent young woman successfully making her way in the world.
I feel bad for Mavis' dad. He missed so much.
And I am the luckiest dad in the world.
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Not sure why it's easier for me to write about the girls than the boys. The father-son bond between me and my boys was always coloured by my relationship with my own father. They say your personality is largely shaped in the first five years of life by what your parents do.
My parents were dirt-poor immigrants fighting to make a go of it in their new country. For the first five years of my life Dad went to work in a factory every day. By the time I was six my life's ambition was to have the best job in the factory.
By the time I became father to a son, my own father had betrayed his factory beginnings and had reinvented himself as a real estate broker. At some level I was never able to forgive that betrayal.
Fortunately, the confusion and despair that betrayal engendered made it utterly impossible to dictate the dreams and aspirations of my own boys.
While that may sound generous, the fact of the matter was none of the lads were the slightest bit interested in my insights, ever! Where the girls are high-energy over-achievers, the dudes are all laid-back under-achievers. Between the three of them I've got two cooks and an ed assistant. None of them have been featured in the alumni magazines post-secondary institutions use to brag up their grads!
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