My Father

Today is father's day. I'll call my dad after eight, when I have unlimited cellphone minutes.

My father, Paul Jacobs, is a native of the suburbs of New York City. He first came to Canada in 1970, at the age of eighteen. After a year as a student at McGill University, he moved west and has lived in Western Canada ever since. He doesn't talk about the circumstances under which he came to Canada very much. He says he came to go to university, but I know that, at the time, he was a strident opponent of the Vietnam War. As he returned to the US to work before he got Canadian citizenship and has never had any trouble getting across the border, I'm pretty sure he didn't dodge the draft.

Nonetheless, he seems to have mixed feelings about the country of his birth. There are times when I think he wished he had stayed. He is not a dual citizen; he gave up his US citizenship. He also married a Canadian woman.

For much of my childhood, dad was a grad student at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg. He recieved his Ph. D. in engineering when I was nine, but he has never worked as an engineer. He's never worked long at any one job. He dislikes institutions and bureaucracies, especially when he has to work in them. Dad can always be counted on for a snide comment about bureaucrats.

For most of my life with my parents, dad did his part to support us by running a small network support business, playing the stock market with considerable success, and investing every penny in interest-earning accounts. He has also managed to make a profit selling not one, but two houses. Indeed, had he chosen to pursue it as a career, he probably could have been a high-powered financial executive. But he didn't want that. He was never happy as someone's employee and in the almost six years he ran a business, he never hired anybody.

In elementary school, we are told to "be a leader, not a follower." Dad ignored both that advice and the default position. He doesn't lead, yet he refuses to follow. In an age where all seek to be individuals, dad is one of the few people who can truly claim to be one.

Unlike many parents, who attempt to be cool and fail miserably, dad didn't even try. He knew that, whatever he did, my sister and I would never think of him as cool. Dads aren't supposed to be cool. They aren't supposed to be their kids' buddies. Friends, especially for teenagers, come and go quite frequently. Fathers aren't supposed to, although all too often they do.

Some parents strict forbid any hint of sex or drugs in their children's lives. Others, realizing the futility of such prohibitions, refuse to take any stand on these things, but shield their children from the inevitable consequences of experimentation with sex and drugs. Dad did neither. When I was sixteen, I staggered home drunk after a party, when I had to work at seven the next morning at a summer job. Dad personally made sure I got up on time, even though it meant going to work with a massive hangover. One thing he always made clear was that choices always have consequences. You stay up late drinking before you have an early shift, you go to work hung over. End of story.

Here are a few of dad's more memorable quotes:

"If you have to ask why, the answer is probably money."

"Be good, and if you can't be good, don't get caught."

On government:
"If we're not careful, we may end up with incompetent and corrupt politicians in charge."

On his decidely unfashionable winter clothes:
"Warm beats fashion any day."

And finally:
"Even paranoids have enemies."

Happy father's day dad.