Remembering my father (1)
I am closing in on an anniversary. It arrives this coming Saturday.
On that day twenty years ago, I lost my father to a 2 ½ year battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was 59 years old.
Born in Nova Scotia on January 4, 1931, my father had the calamity of being named by an illiterate mother, and so ended up with unfortunate initials: his full name was Paul Innis Gallant.
An illegitimate child raised in a cold environment, Dad was raised by a grandfather who was (to use the technical term) a tough old S.O.B. On his first day of school, my Dad got beat up and came home crying; his guardian’s response was that he better not do that again unless he wanted to face a worse whupping at home. Not surprisingly, the little guy (who topped out at 5′ 5 ½”) got toughened up pretty quickly.
As an aside concerning the character of my great grandfather: One day some half dozen 12 year old boys got it into their heads they were going to beat up the old man. (You see, this sort of shocking behaviour is neither new nor limited to urban settings.) An easy target, since he couldn’t see. But they made a small miscalculation: he discerned light and shadow plenty well, and laid a sound licking on the bunch of them with his cane.
So Dad was not raised in the lap of tender mercies. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, although he really was intelligent, he did not excel in school. His teachers preferred to send him out to buy them cigarettes than put up with him in the classroom. (He started smoking himself when he was eight.) He finally left school and home at age 14… with a grade three “education.” (Despite his size, with his upbringing he looked old enough to be getting into bars at that age. I suppose he figured that was all the education he needed, or at any rate, was likely to receive.)
He was a runaway, although I doubt anyone went looking for him. He essentially became a hobo for about thirteen years, hitchhiking all over North America. In between his rootless wanderings, he would work a few months here and there, and get himself fired so he could get immediately paid and move on again.
Trouble managed to follow him. One of his more amusing stories was going to a dance in Ontario and dancing with a young lady, only to step outside and discover her boyfriend and four others awaiting him. Let’s just say there was a scrap… which a week later eventuated in a phone call from the boyfriend, asking him to play hockey with them. (Go figure.) “But I can’t even skate!” he responded. “Don’t worry about it – just hit people!”
Yes, hockey is Canada’s game.
Nominally, Dad was raised Roman Catholic, but didn’t see much of the inside of churches. Still, when he ran away, he carried a King James Version Bible in his pocket. I don’t think he could say why; as he liked to say, he “could make more sense of a Donald Duck book.”
One winter in 1958, he was down in the deep South (illegally, come to mention it, as he had kind of been in trouble for fighting), keeping away from the cold, and ventured into a religious meeting. He heard some sort of presentation of the gospel, but went on his way.
On the next day, however, hitching rides on a South Carolina highway, he felt his hand reach into his pocket involuntarily and pull out that old Bible. It fell open to Romans 10, and for the first time my father heard the Scripture with his heart; even the antiquated “thees and thous” became invisible, and what he heard was something like this: You cannot pull Him up, you cannot pull Him down, but if you believe with your heart the Lord Jesus, and confess with your mouth that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.
Dad considered it a miracle, the first of many: he could read the Bible.