i don’t realize it, but my body is already feeling it, and i dream about being chased by wild dogs again. november is here with all it’s bitter cold, poppies on jackets for sale in the super market, and with the knowledge that soon, all too soon, it will be the two year anniversary of my father’s death. he was 71 and he died of influenza type A.
i remember shopping for a cat bed and going to a bakery for a croissant i would never eat, that would instead go stale and hard on my counter, because i got the phone call from a doctor who told me to come to the hospital because he needed to see me. i fumbled with my iphone app for parking at the hospital and i was sat down in a room and told my father was going to die. my mother asked in a small voice, “how long?” and i remember becoming so irrationally angry at her, thinking “how the fuck is he supposed to know?” but i didn’t say that.
the doctor met with us before telling my father the news and my father, in his way, said, “so, doc, i’m checkin’ out?” and like with many things in his life, he had a grim downturn to his mouth and he nodded slowly. it was in that moment that i saw the frailty of my father and his mortality, too.
my father did not live to see christmas 2023 and he left us in the early morning hours of december 18, 2023, lying in a hospital bed that became a death bed, in a room where everything became really big and really small at the same time. i stayed the night, sleeping head to toe in a single hospital cot, so i could watch my father die. i saw him take his last breath and i kissed his dead hand and said i loved him, and god, i really did. for all his failings and complexity, i loved my father still.
when i dream about the wild dogs and my bare ankles just out of their grasping jaws, i think about the legends of the black dog from England – a harbinger of death and of change. when i dream the dog dream, it means i’m thinking about death.
this summer, i was at a yard sale and i found a few copies of old fantasy magazines in a box, discarded and unwanted. i paid a couple dollars and took them home much to the confusion of my mother who couldn’t understand why i would want some old magazines.
when i was young, maybe 10 or so, my father would take me to this truck stop on the edge of town. like many canadian men of his generation, he liked to play the lottery. he was convinced this one truck stop had the most winning tickets and while i don’t know anything about that kind of stuff because i don’t gamble, my father must have been somewhat right, because it seemed like everytime we went there, he won something.
the truck stop was huge and had this shitty restaurant inside it and my dad would let me pick out a magazine of my choosing from the huge magazine selection and he’d send me off with enough money for an order of fries and gravy (poutine eh?) and a pop.
being an autistic kid with braces AND glasses AND hand-me down thrift store k-mart discount rack clothes, a bad haircut, and a little pot belly from the fries and pop, i had no friends, so like many kids who read at a college level when they couldn’t yet be left alone unsupervised, i drifted away in books and movies and other media i could mythologize and obsess over and catalog.
i loved fantasy – knights and unicorns, dragons that breathed fire, and girls in chainmail bikinis (bi-girls just know, right?). i was obsessed with this magazine called “realms of fantasy” and it had fantasy stories and ads for magic: the gathering right alongside weird mail order shops where nerds in the 1990s could order swords and skull bongs.
i remember being overcome with grief at that yard sale, feeling it hit like a sledgehammer to the chest, and i paid for the magazines with teary eyes and hands that felt like paws, huge and unwieldy as i counted out exact change to a nice lady with curly hair and a fat ass.
i think of my father and his lottery tickets and flannel jacket and beat up old van from the 1980s and me with my shitty mullet and “mystical” sea shell and crystal necklace i’d got from this lady on our block who said she was a witch and owned huskies and fed the crows and had wild hair and nice eyes and liked to chainsmoke with my mother on the front porch – we were such a pair sitting in that truck stop restaurant. we sat in a silence that happens sometimes between a father and a daughter, broken only when my father would greet someone he knew from something or another, “how the hell are ya?” he would chortle to someone. once, a trucker came over and my father hugged him hard, and i learned later on, that they had grown up on the same indian reservation, caught the same frogs in the same creek together, and later, had grown hard together.
no one told me that i would be middle aged, looking back on those evenings as precious memories of my father. in five years, i will be the age he was in those truck stop evenings.
god, what i would give, for just one more night in a truck stop with my father.
what i would give for a fantasy magazine clutched in a greasy hand on the ride back to my childhood home, back to my bedroom covered in unicorn posters and my old bed with a shitty cotton moon and stars printed bedspread my mother bought for me at zellers.
i drove past the old house the other week. a new family lives there now and i wonder if they love it as much as i did.
when i stopped to check, my handprints are still visible in the poured cement of the old driveway, with my clumsy handwriting “JuLy 1992”.
just a snapshot from another life, another time – fantasy magazines, truck stops, and the impermanence of life.
i’d give anything to go back.
hospital vespers 