Dark side of the moon

It's called the dark side, not because it is never lit, but because we don't see it.  Did you know that it has fewer craters than the side we do see?  Scientists are theorizing that it is because the earth and the moon was one celestial body until it was struck by a Mars sized object resulting in the moon breaking off from the earth.  So the dark side of the moon is less vulnerable material than the side we see.

I am truly hopeful that the labour dispute between teachers and the government may be dealt with this weekend.  Certainly, that's what both sides are saying in the press.  In that case, I won't say, in the mournful voice of the little gremlin at the end of "Just for Laughs", "it's over".

In the meantime, we have a rainy weekend ahead of us, it seems.  Sunday is Fathers' Day.   My dad was an interesting person.  He was the youngest of ten children and his mother died shortly after he was born after which his father remarried and proceeded to have 15 more children!  This was in Saskatchewan in the early part of the 20th century.  My father detested his own father, who was a harsh, brutal man and for that reason, he left home when he was sixteen.  He embodied the young, directionless man of the 1930's riding freight trains around western Canada looking for work.  When the Second World War started, my father volunteered for the army and spent 1939 to 1946 as a soldier.  He had all sorts of stories about the war, but they were all funny -- he never talked about the horrors of what he had seen and done.  My uncle told us that when he came back from Europe after the war, he hardly spoke for a year and woke up every night screaming.  We'll never know what he was dealing with.

When we were growing up, my dad was not an affectionate person and was uncomfortable with emotional displays of any sort, unless it was about a Lassie movie or Tommy Douglas (who was named "the greatest Canadian" a few years ago).  When he got angry, he would stop speaking for days at a time.  We knew he loved us, but he never said so.  I guess he had learned his parenting techniques from his own father, even though he didn't admire him at all.

Later in life after my sister and I had become adults and moved away from Saskatchewan, my father had an epiphany.  I guess he realized all the things he had been missing by being so closed to an emotional life.  I remember when my sister and I first realized it.  We were quite a close family, thanks to my mom, and my sister was talking to my dad on the phone one evening and at the end of the conversation, after she'd said goodbye, he said "I love you".  It was the first time she had ever heard him say that.  She stammered out, "I love you, too".  Then they hung up.  She phoned me right away.

"Guess what?  Dad said 'I love you'!" she told me.

"What?"  I was flabbergasted.  "What did you say?"

"I didn't want to scare him or anything, so I tried to act like it was an everyday thing and I said, 'I love you, too',"  she said.

And from then on, he was quite different.  Hugging us and telling us how much he cared about us.  It was really an extraordinary change.  My sister said that she had carried a lot of resentment toward him before that (she wrote a novel called The Drum King which is partially based on her dysfunctional relationship with him - I don't know if it is still in print), but that she was really proud of him and how he had faced up to his shortcomings and managed to change so drastically.  It is a testament to the ability of people to learn and change and also to the wonderful willingness of children to forgive their parents for their mistakes. 

My dad never met his grandchildren and that is very sad, because I know he would have been able to enjoy showering them with the love and affection that he wasn't able to give to my sister and me when we were little.  Have a happy Fathers' Day, everyone.