dad

last year my dad should have died in florida. to be fair though, in the past 5 or 6 years, there are several times he could have died, and i have to assume the same could be said about most of his 20s and late teen years. the difference being that in his early life the near deaths were more likely from making poor life choices, whereas now you can name an affliction and he probably has it. i've definitely stayed more unaware about all that is wrong with him than a good son should, but from what i've gathered he has... drum roll please... leukemia, milofibrosis, a very low platelet count in his blood, something with his heartbeat (it's irregular), rheumatoid arthritis in his hips (though one has been replaced and the other will be shortly), his large intestine sometimes just turns off, there was something with his spleen (it was way too big), he had little tumours on his spine that were pinching the nerves off to his legs (since removed), he's really clumsy and he has severe resting bitch face (undiagnosed). would you believe though, that it was none of these things that should have killed him in florida last year, no, that was pneumonia and sepsis. variety is, as you know, the spice of life...

anyway, my parents had rented a condo in panama city beach for the entire month of february and they were nice enough to let me tag along for the first week or so. we were going down in the car, which is something we'd never done before, as my brother was a little fidgety as a child. seeing as there is no such thing as the internet (there is) or gps (there is), my dad had gone to caa and had them tell him the best way to get to florida (drive south). my dad has never really been one to embrace technology. he cannot use a cellphone, he can barely use a cordless phone and i genuinely worry for him when he and my mom might decide on getting a new electronic of some kind. the only reason my dad ever used a computer in his life was to play solitaire, and he was only able to do that if my brother, my mom or i turned on the computer for him, opened the game for him and reassured him that if something happened he could call us and we would help. he would play for a bit and then eventually yell "i'm finished," which was our signal to go close the game and turn off the computer...

anyway, we left on our drive a day early as my dad had checked the newspaper and there was a storm coming the next day that we had to be ahead of. here is what i can tell you about a drive to florida; detroit, bad. toledo, bad. cincinnati, good. nashville, good. birmingham, bad. montgomery, real bad. as we had left early, we arrived early and checked into a hotel for the night. the following morning we had to kill about 7 hours before checking into the condo, as mom and dad gooding like to get an early start, and we had checked out of the hotel far earlier than necessary. we had breakfast and the waitress had a very southern accent. we drove up and down the main street many, many times. we went grocery shopping, which is so much better in the states (the cereals!) we played goofy golf, a gooding family vacation staple, and also where the line of logan and mom vs. connor and dad begins to be drawn. logan and mom are right handed, connor and dad are wrong. connor and dad like going to the bar to watch the sports, logan and mom like going to craft shows to look at crafts. there are many more. the one important to this goofy golf anecdote though is that connor and dad believe in "do-overs", logan and mom believe in "do it right the first time or learn from your mistakes, we don't care that you're 6 yrs old and a spaz, if you want to win you should have to earn it". my brother just wanted to cheat, my mom and i just wanted to win and my dad just wanted everyone to have a good time...

anyway, the condo was very nice and i was probably the third youngest person on the entire resort, which was enormous. i think that, outside the resort, i was actually the sixth youngest person in panama city beach. the first few days were filled with a lot of restaurants, more goofy golf, not much sunshine and a few board games (mostly dad and i). something you should know about my mom is that she does not do games, nor did she ever really do games. she wanted to be the fun parent... but she just was not. my dad though, was all about games, so long as there was no electricity involved beyond whatever was being used to light the room. there was always plenty of yahtzee, where dad always had to blow on the dice before rolling, a fair amount of chess and the occasional game of monopoly or guess who. our favourite though, was poker. i vaguely remember being surprised around age 9 that my friends didn't know how to gamble, as my brother and i had been learning to play various poker games from a very early age. every vacation we went on, dad always brought the margarine container full of pennies for us to make our bets with, playing 7 card stud, dime store and texas hold 'em. by the time i was 10 and connor was 7 our great aunt jenny had taught us how to play "one eyed jacks and whores" where queens and jacks were wild. in fairness to my mother she could occasionally be rooked into playing scrabble, where she would ultimately be destroyed by whoever was playing. when i was younger i could sometimes get away with making a fake compound word like "bedsweat" which is obviously when you sweat in bed (i know what you're thinking, this is kind of like a do-over, something i hate, and you are correct in thinking this). that particular time, my mom followed my turn by comically playing a word she pronounced as "she-arrrr", that i was quickly able to identify as her having actually played the correct spelling of the word "chair"...

anyway, towards the end of my stay, my dad started to not feel so good. he was having more trouble walking and felt more or less like he was getting a cold. you would think that due to the fact that he has (almost) everything, he would think it wise to go see a doctor, just to make sure... but no. my dad envisions himself as the toughest man on the planet, an island where sickness just does not go, a man who uses his clint eastwood grimace to scare illness away from him (it's not working dad!). coincidentally he also uses this face when he sees a squirrel somewhere in the yard and hobbles to the door to clap a couple of flip flops together and grit out a very gran torino "get off my lawn" in hopes of scaring them off and teaching them not to come back. he actually, at one point, had a squirrel trap in the backyard and would catch and then relocate squirrels to a woodsy area by the highway a few kilometers away from our house in case they were too stupid to get the hint made by the flip flops clapping together. in short, do not be a squirrel on my dads lawn. actually, if you can help it, don't be a person on my dads lawn. as kids, before we had a real pool, and just made due with those small plastic kiddy pools, we were only ever allowed to have them on the cement patio because the weight of the water would crush the grass. another "in short", don't cannonball into the 14 inches of water in the kiddy pool on the cement, it hurts the knees. you can imagine how he felt about crocodile mile...

anyway, it came down to my last night in florida. i was just getting to sleep, having edited my mothers and my soon to be unsuccessful (but hilarious) audition video for the amazing race canada until about 2am, when my mom got me out of bed because my dad had collapsed on the bathroom floor and she couldn't get him up. not ever having been serious people, neither my mom or i had any idea how to emotionally deal with this very real situation, both laughing and crying at the ridiculousness of it. we eventually hurled my dad back into bed, where he had been for a couple of days at this point, and he looked me, and i could tell he had no clue who i was. this was a nightmare. my mom and i decided that because we couldn't trust him to not try and get out of bed again, she had to drive me to the airport as early as possible the next morning. another very early gooding start to the day and my dad had a weird moment of clarity as we were leaving. he remembered when my flights were, tallahassee to miami then onto toronto. he told me to have a safe flight and that he loved me and i knew that that was the last time i was ever going to hear him say this (before you get too sad, remember i said he should have died in florida last year) and i was again faced with a very real situation, feeling as though i was truly saying goodbye, the goodbye, to my dad. i don't think it really hit me until i landed in miami and i tried getting a hold of my mom while waiting in line at starbucks. she didn't answer the phone and after the fourth attempt i left her a fairly hateful voicemail, sent her a string of even more hateful text messages, got a latte and went and ugly cried in a bathroom stall in a very full mensroom at the airport for 15 minutes...

anyway, he had finally been dragged to the hospital, where my mom spent valentine's day and her birthday, by herself, sleeping on a chair, hoping her husband wasn't going to die, all the while maintaining her sense of humour and posting a picture to facebook of a very pathetic birthday dinner from some sad fast food place. he was eventually airlifted home in a jet and somehow managed to stay alive, all the while talking some crazy shit to my mom and aunt shannon while he was still whacked out from the blood poisoning and the medication. my favourite one-liner he had was when he suddenly became very alert, looked right at my mom and said "dayle! hold in your stomach!"

losing my dad, even though i didn't, i just thought i was going to, was the worst thing that ever happened to me. this was my dad, he can't die. he's part of the reason i'm here and i am this way. i think i can attribute some of my more distinct character traits like being mean to the people i care about and worrying way too much to him. i also hoard elastic bands like he does for some reason. my dad likes to pretend that he doesn't love us as much as he does, but this man cares about his family 10 times more than i've ever cared about anything in my life. i wish i was as friendly as he is or that i was able to just not care at all what anyone thought about me like he's able to. i wish that if i were in the same boat as him that i would be as okay with it as he can be, but i know i would be the worst. i wish i was as nice and as selfless as he is. i wish i had his metabolism... but my brother got that.

i remember talking to my grandma once about him, her talking about how my brother and i are lucky to have him, how my mom is lucky to have him. she told me about a convesation she had with him when my brother and i were little, and who knows how accurate her re-telling was, but essentially my dad said he didn't know if he was going to be a good dad. he hadn't had a very present father, so how would he know what to do? she asked him if he loved us, he replied that of course he did, more than anything. she told him he would be a good dad.

he's a good dad.

mom

i remember the first time i called my mom a bitch. i was in grade six, which puts me at about eleven, maybe eleven and a half years old. it was 1997, the spice girls were on the radio, titanic was in theaters. a movie, i was for some reason allowed to see twice without any adult present, either time, and during which i realized that, deep down, kate winslet's breasts, albeit very nice, were never going to do it for me. i was heading back to school after having come home for lunch that day. the lunch, incidentally, would have consisted of way more food than the average eleven year old could possibly have eaten, which is a sentence that could describe most meals i ate between 1994 and 2003. by this age i was already hovering around the same height as my mom, which for most of my life, and her adult life, was believed to be 5'9'', though more recently we've learned is really about 5'7''. a fact that, she will tell you, is absolute bullshit. i also probably had about 10 to 15 pounds on her, 5 of which were probably the entire rotisserie chicken i had probably just eaten. it must have been just before christmas because, david maxwell, my elementary school, was doing some sort of fundraising drive, collecting used winter coats that were still in good condition to donate to some charity or another, and really, this type of thing only happens just before christmas...

anyway, as i was leaving there must have been some dispute by the front door about me not taking the coat i was going to donate into school that eventually resulted in my mom throwing it at me. the coat, which was to be eventually donated probably to some wonderful son who appreciated his mother, could not possibly have done and did not do any damage to my oversized frame. i'm pretty sure it was a coat of mine from a couple of years earlier that was some god awful, pullover mess made from black nylon on the bottom and a green fleece across the top and shoulders with a 1/4 zip mock neck. i guess really not that bad an item at the time, very practical... the kind of thing i wouldn't be caught dead in now. it hit me right in the face, and i immediately called her a bitch. i assume this would've had to have been surprising for her to hear since i don't really remember cursing being a thing in our house growing up. my parents never swore about anything in our house, or at the very least, not ever in front of connor or myself. i, however, have had the mouth of a sailor since october 1996 when i was 10. i had gotten a small part in a small windsor production of "the best christmas pageant ever" and was suddenly exposed to hanging out with kids that were in high school and who knew all the curse words. all of them. always having been pretty big for my age i easily got away with telling them i was 14 and in grade 8, which maybe made them more comfortable with having me around and cursing endlessly in front of me. more likely though i was actually getting away with nothing and they didn't believe my lie, but just thought it was funny to get a 10 year old to say "fuck" all the time. this is also how and when i started drinking coffee. having a small role in the play meant being sent out with another kid, who was actually 14, to occasionally grab coffee for the adults running the show. he got one for himself the first time and the second time and eventually asked me, in a really condescending tone, "do you not drink coffee man?". of course this brought me to the immediate realization that the older kids might be seeing through my charade and that, as the grown up 14 year old i was pretending to be, i was going to have to take action now, or forever be relegated to hanging out with the losers who were actually the same age as i was. i decided to order a large coffee and i drank it black, staring into the other kids face the whole time so he wouldn't see me flinch. that first time, i think i was bouncing off the walls at home until 3am on a school night, but from that moment onward i don't remember my parents ever saying i couldn't have a coffee if i ordered one when we went out for breakfast...

anyway, i knew i had done something wrong, calling her a bitch, a fact that was swiftly reinforced by my mom taking a few steps towards me and slapping me hard across the face. it was, at that moment, my turn to be surprised because much like the swear words,  i also don't really remember spankings being a thing in my house growing up. i remember being aggressively "shoved" by my dad twice, and i remember the 2 times my mom slapped me across the face. that's right, this wasn't even the first time she had done it, having given it to me once before when i had acted up in some way a few years earlier that led to me biting her and her giving me something to think about. that time though had ended with me running off crying and, i think, her eventually crying through an apology to me. a decisive victory in my favour. this time though was different, we had both aged a few years and we were both, and still are, quite stubborn. she held her ground, i held mine, both of us, potentially 5'9'', but apparently 5'7'', glaring into each others eyes. it wasn't turning out as i would have hoped. she wasn't turning into a crumbling mess about what a terrible parent she had suddenly become by trying to strike down her poor, innocent, giant, foul-mouthed son. part of me doesn't know why this would have surprised her though, as this technically wasn't even the first time i had cursed at her. i had once given her the middle finger in 1993 at age 7 after seeing robin williams do it to pierce brosnan in the cross-dressing classic, mrs. doubtfire, a movie during which i realized, deep down, i appreciated seeing a man dress up like a woman and dance. not that i knew what it actually meant, giving someone the finger, but i must have just sensed that it meant you didn't like that person. i don't know why i didn't like her at that moment and she wasn't even supposed to see me do it, as i did it directed at the closed bathroom door while she was on the other side. needless to say she opened the door and found me there, giving her the finger. my suspicions were confirmed, it was in fact something you did to someone you didn't like...

anyway, after standing there staring at one another for what seemed like an eternity but was probably 4 seconds i dramatically yelled, "well that proves it!" and "i hope i still have your hand print on my face when i get back to school" as i stormed out the front door. i made it past about 2 houses when i started crying, blaming my puffy, watery eyes on the wind when i eventually got back to school so as to not be made fun of by the other terrible children who i assume i had taught a lot of swear words to throughout the second half of grade 5. you grow up fast in windsor...

anyway, i don't remember what the aftermath would have been at home. i would guess that she wouldn't have told my dad right away, because i can assure you he would not have been okay with it at the time and i would have remembered him telling me so. we probably iced each other out for a few days, as was our way, me always trying to hold out longer than her before giving in and talking to her again. i always "won" because she was a grown up who probably thought it was pretty funny to watch her son try and out-stubborn her and teach her a lesson about how she was an unfit mother by denying her the pleasure of my company around the house.

fast forward a little over 17 years and i honestly can't count how many times i've called her a bitch. the beyond casual relationship i have with my mom is something some of my friends think is pretty odd, that as a grown man i can get away with joking around with her about how i think she was a whore in the late 70's (who wasn't), and her joking around with me about how she thinks i was a whore 5 weeks ago (she's not joking), or when i text her during a walk of shame home at 6am on some random weekday (this most recently did not happen only 5 weeks ago, but i'm pretty sure within the last year). this relationship i have with her, where we can lovingly slut-shame one another, didn't come over night. i slowly had to work in the occasional curse word during a phone conversation, talk about some small detail about some creepy date i had gone on, progressing my way slowly up the curse word ladder from hell to bitch to shit to fuck, to eventually being able to use the word blowjob. something that was definitely a more difficult adjustment for her than when i came out to her at 18. back then, if she had to have made a choice, i know she would have picked gay over foul-mouthed 10 times out of 10.

i know i'm lucky to have a cool mom, not a regular mom. a mom that i can call at 2am when i've had maybe one drink too many and i'm upset about something, and she'll make me feel better just by talking to me, and then make me feel like an idiot for being upset about the same thing once again and she'll tell me to get my shit together, and i'll agree with her. a mom that i can overshare with, even though she pretends she wishes my brother and i didn't, when deep down she knows it's one of the main reasons she is a cool mom. a mom i can bring over to my friends place to hangout and they're more excited to see her than they are me, and that's fair because she's nicer than i am. a mom who, when i was 16, passed out drunk on the tv room floor in the middle of the afternoon while making a sad attempt to play mariokart with me after 2 "glasses" (bottles) of wine. mostly though, my mom is a cool mom because she let's me be the foul-mouthed, crude, gay, judgmental, tired, lazy, sarcastic, snobby, funny, cynical, cranky son of a bitch that i am and because she loves me unconditionally for it. 

and she gives the best hugs.