I miss my Dad...

**David writing again...

Richard wrote this back in July.

It is unfinished, and I don't think it was intended to be a blog post, but it's exactly the sort of thing he'd share, when he was done with it.

It is somewhat fitting that he writes of missing his Dad, as we miss Richard.


"

I miss my Dad. I remember so much about him and often wonder what he would think of this or how he would handle that or what he would say about the next thing. He was my Dad. He was not perfect; he was deeply flawed, almost incapable of any emotional connection beyond anger. Yet he was my father, my Dad.

Richard Thomas McBride was born in East Kildonan, a part of Winnipeg, Manitoba, the center most province in Canada, equidistant from all three Canadian oceans. Perhaps that is why he was destined to join the Canadian Navy. Perversity was my Dad’s name just as often as the name he acquired in the navy, “Mac”.

His birthday was, and still is, October 3, 1930. He was born between the two great wars of the twentieth century, too late for World War One, where his father, uncle and grandfather all fought, and too late for World War Two, where is older brother Adam fought. I would like to say he was born in the sweet spot, at the perfect time, but that would be a betrayal of his service in the Korean War. There were plenty of wars to go round in the twentieth century and likely there will always be some place where men can kill other men in the service of something they don’t understand and will never reach.

My father spent his childhood years in Winnipeg, living at the end of the streetcar line where the bright yellow tram cars of the Winnipeg Electric Company turned around, taking the working class from this outer suburb into the Winnipeg city center each morning and returning them back each night. Like a great many cities in the depression era, the streetcars ran to the very edge of the city. In his case it stopped near the end of his street. At the other end of his street, off to the east, there was nothing but open prairie and the rail yards of the CPR. The other side of his childhood dominion was bounded by the sluggish and muddy Red River. He loved his childhood time; the prairie was his playground and the Red River was his personal Mississippi.

He was the second of four children. His older brother, Adam, was born in 1925. Then, five years later my Dad came along. Five years after that, in 1935, his sister Diane was born. Then, in the mid-1940’s his brother, born with Downs Syndrome, came into his life. For the whole of his life my Dad admired his older brother Adam in spite of his erratic and unkind, sometimes criminal, behaviour. For the whole of his life, my Dad doted on Ronnie, granting his every wish in spite of the damage to a man who, due to his incapacity to understand, would often ask for the very things that were worst for him; more food, more candy, more beer, staying up late. My Dad would not say “no” to Ronnie, and he could not say “no” to his older brother Adam.

The Great Depression hardly touched my father. He once said to me that if it weren’t for the neighbours and others around him, he would never have known there was a Depression. His father, my grandfather, worked for the railroad all through the 1930’s. While the pay was not great, there was always money for the family, albeit often subsumed with my grandfather’s prodigious ability to consume alcohol.

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