The best word I can use to describe my Dad is mentor. I looked up to my Dad and looked for his guidance on a lot of things growing up. As with my Mom, there always seemed to be an emotional distance between my Dad and I that I can’t explain but I really do miss him, especially when I’m among his tools in the shop.

My earliest memories of Dad are about how he loved his cattle. Even when the bills were piling up and he had to run multiple full time construction crews to make ends meet, he still got up crazy early to feed his herd of a few dozen cows before making a 45 minute drive to one of his job sites. He was happiest among his cattle.

Farming was my Dad’s passion for much of my growing up years and he was very capable of running multiple successful business that paid for his farming operation. When I was quite young, his business venture was a custom haying business and as I got into late elementary years he returned to his roots in construction. It started by taking a contract to build a hog barn for an acquaintance. It didn’t take long and word got out. Soon he was building farm structures all over south west Manitoba. When the opportunity came up he would sometimes take the supervisor role for a commercial construction job like building a sewage treatment plant, school or hospital.

When I was almost a teenager he started taking me to job sites so I could earn some spending money. At first the jobs were mostly make work projects like cleaning up the job site and shoveling gravel but it didn’t take long and he had me doing any of the work that he trusted to his crew members. Through high school and university I had the privilege of working as many hours as I wanted to and he trusted me to take on almost any task at a job site, unsupervised.

Those were mostly happy memories. I have always had a desire to do entrepreneurial business ventures and many of those seeds were planted on the job sites of my Dad’s business. In spite of that entrepreneurial desire, my Dad often reminded me how happy he was that I chose a more stable path. He appreciated that I worked for large companies, without the pain and stress that comes with starting and running businesses.

In spite of the happy memories, I know that my Dad’s life held a lot of pain. Life was full of stress and hard work until he reached his mid 40’s. Maybe it was the result of his hard work and stress or maybe it was just a random health condition that no one could explain. His body started shutting down. He couldn’t work full days in construction anymore and he was constantly fatigued and in pain. By his 60’s he felt fortunate to get 4 hours of activity from his body on any given day. The rest of his day was spent researching family history, doing puzzles and sleeping. The doctors couldn’t tell him what was going on and he had a growing collection of medication to treat his symptoms through the last 20 years of his life.

I remember many situations where the pain got buried and he put on a smile so he could engage in an activity with me or one of the grandkids. It wasn’t until the last few years of his life that I learned to ask about his pain. Conversations with him often consisted of projects that he was working on or was dreaming about. I’m not sure if I ever really heard his heart and yet I saw a lot of vulnerability that never got talked about. The things I know about his heart came from watching him and stories that came to me through others.

Today, if you walk into my shop at the acreage you can see the evidence of my Dad’s creativity all around. Train tracks that he built from wood hang on the wall and gadgets that he built on a sudden inspiration have found a prominent home in our shop. That’s how I want to remember him. His mind contained the most amazing creations. He built a 1/10 scale model of a locomotive and coal car from oak firewood over the course of 10 years, one or two hours at a time. He cut, glued, turned, sanded, planed and painted every piece. In many ways it was these projects that got him out of bed and kept him moving.

May I have the patience and determination of my Dad and may I learn to talk to the people I love, about the heavy stuff of life that my Dad and I struggled to connect on.