My dad turned 79 years old yesterday, which is pretty remarkable. There's not much more that can go wrong with his body; at this point in his life, he's all bones and gristle. He's had multiple bypasses, half a lung gone from cigarettes, a couple fused vertebrae, stomach surgery, hiatus hernia surgery, rotator cuff surgery and a stroke, but he keeps on going.
He's still living in the my maternal grandparent's farmhouse on 10 acres south of Moose Jaw and he's planting his usual 1/2 acre vegetable garden this year. (He doesn't eat vegetables other than potatoes but loves to grow them all.) His only compromise to age is the rows get a little further apart, so he can better see the plants from the weeds. The stroke messed his eyesight up a bit.
My buddy Giacomo and I went out to see dad last week. Giacomo bought an old Chevy camper van last year for his cross Canada adventure this summer and stored it in dad's Quonset for the winter. He and his partner Martina, who are immigrating to Canada from Italy, are selling everything they own and driving coast to coast this summer. They want to see as much of their new country as possible before deciding where to settle down. With the weather warming up he's excited to get the van packed and hit the road right after Easter.
So we drove out to Moose Jaw and I did my best to give Jack a minor history lesson about all the times Saskatchewan got settled and what the Hudson Bay Company was all about and why he should check out Batoche and learn about the Riel Rebellion and what's Treaty 4 and why we talk about it now when we never did when I was a kid. Lest he think Saskatchewan wasn't as interesting as Tofino or Cape Breton.
When we got to the farm, dad showed Jack his arrowhead collection before we went out and started up the van. Dad was complaining about his shoulder though (the one with the rotator cuff surgery,) which hasn't been the same since his neighbour's cow yanked on it a couple of years back. It was causing him a lot of pain from mounting the birdhouse on Sunday.
The birdhouse, I asked? Yeah, the one on the 14 foot pole by the house. Dad built a new birdhouse with eight little entrances out of an old wooden crate after the old one blew down last year. It's very fashionable, with the same flat roof that seems to be all the rage in Regina infills.
Well Johnny (the neighbour) came over with his front end loader and, since Johnny (who's young, like 60) doesn't like heights, dad climbed into the steel bucket and Johnny raised dad and the birdhouse up to the top of the pole. And it was hard driving four screws up from the plywood platform into the bottom of the house with his messed up arm. And, well, Johnny couldn't level the bucket worth a damn so his legs were all buckled funny and they're pretty sore too, what with dad forgetting to put his knee pads on.
Needless to say, with a dad like that, I feel a little awkward complaining about my sore shoulder from 30 minutes of woodchopping, or my sore knee from Sunday morning's yoga class. I'm doing just fine, thank you. All day, every day.
Happy Birthday, Dad. I love you. I hope I inherited some of your resilience genes.