My father was troubled.There is no doubt in my mind about that.His troubles reveal much about him.It makes me hope that God will deal justly and mercifully with him,as we know he does with all of his children.
In looking over my notes of recollections for this entry,two incidents that my father described to me come to mind as being especially revealing in terms of how his life was,or at least how he perceived it to be.
When he came to Goose Bay,in what I take to be the years before my mother entered the picture,my father describes a meeting with a man he calls a "minister"-that is to say a clergyman,though I'm not sure of what faith.According to my father,he was in a military barracks of some sort and had gone to take a shower.He never really said what prompted his behavior.It may be that he slipped on a wet floor or because of some other misadventure or simply because that was the way he was accustomed to speaking in those days,but he found himself in the privacy of his shower"swearing and cursing and taking the Lords name in vain"There was another man in a nearby shower stall and as they both finished showering and began drying themselves,the other man introduced himself as a preacher and noted"you certainly know how to curse."In telling the story,my father notes that he found the incident"embarrassing"though he doesn't say exactly why.Was he embarrassed by the words he was using,or by the chance encounter with a preacher while using those words?When we were small,we were not permitted to swear,and my father kept a good example in that regard.But that seemed to fade as we grew older and I came to realize that there were few words that my father would not use.He contained his habit for the good of his children,but it was a habit nonetheless.It speaks to me of his life being quite troubled shortly after he left Springhill,for what person who uses profanity is not troubled?
The second of the two incidents that my father described being involved in,or,to be more precise,the second and third incidents,involved roadside encounters on his way either to or from work.Most of his working career he commuted eighty miles each way to work.Late one night he encountered a man on the side of the road that he described to me as an "Indian."He stopped and offered the man a ride only to eventually find himself at knife point for some reason that he never fully related,though I do not believe he was being robbed.He managed to get the person out of his car at some point and escaped harm.Of course he vowed never to put himself in that position again.Eventually the situation arose when he faced a similar choice and drove past a stranded motorist believing he was doing the right thing.In the morning,he said,he found out that the person he passed had been found dead on the side of the road and he took it very hard.I've no idea if the incidents really happened.There seemed to me to be a lot of missing details,such that the stories might have been allegorical,to be used as teaching tools.But they seemed to point to what may have been my fathers worldview.That he had very little power within himself to do the right thing no matter how hard he tried.That he would always be criticized,that any given action would somehow turn out wrong."Damned if I do,Damned if I don't"was a phrase I heard him use more than once.And these stories were given to me in the context of a conversation on learning to do the right thing.
My father would go out of his way to help people.At times he seemed the sort of man who would give you the shirt off his back.At times he seemed exactly the opposite.But what made him change from one view to the other I don't know.He seemed to think,at least some of the time that no one would ever lift a finger to help him and so no one was entitled to his help either.It may have simply been a response to something going on in his life at that particular time that he did not share with us.I think that is the likely truth.I also think he was positively influenced by his wife and our mother.Simply put,he seemed to be a better person when she was around.
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