by Dan Robson
I feel another wave of anxiety hammer my core again, this time kicking the breath out from my stomach before settling in my throat. It throbs, expanding. It hurts like hell. In the past the anxiety would burst to my edges then recede, settle, and slowly fade—because everything, ultimately, was always okay. I was lucky that way. In the end, nothing bad ever actually happened. Dad would pull up in his truck, having been caught in traffic on his way from a worksite. I’d feel the tightness in my chest release and the tension in my shoulders relax, followed by a flash of embarrassment for having let myself get so worked up. I’d open the back door, toss my knapsack in next to his workboots and hard hat, then climb up into the front seat to his smile and his questions about how practice had gone and what we’d talked about in class that day. I longed to feel that release again. But this time the anxiety wasn’t going away. All those years of irrational fear had been realized. Dad wasn’t pulling up. There would be no common- sense answer to soothe it, no deep-breath moment to dispel the panic. His calm voice wouldn’t say “Hey, buddy, it’s okay.”
So the panic doesn’t fully subside. This is real and final.
* * *
—
I imagine the squeal of the garage door opening beside me and the scratch of our dog’s paws on the hardwood as she scampers to greet him. He wears jeans and a plaid shirt. He holds blueprints under his right arm and a white hard hat in his left hand. His steel-toe boots are caked in mud. He smells like sawdust. We have to leave quickly, he says, because he’d run late at the site and the game starts soon.
“You should have had your baseball uniform on by now,” he chides. “Hurry, buddy.”
And I charge up the stairs to get changed, excited, because it is Thursday in the summer and that means baseball at dusk.
We inhale some tortellini Mom had on the stove, and I spill a little tomato sauce on my bleach-white pants. But who cares, because soon I’ll be sliding through the dirt into second base…and from the dugout, Dad in his blue and white coach’s uniform will yell for me to run for third, because the catcher overthrows the bag…and, oh my god, the ball’s in the outfield! I’ll catch my breath on the corner—and he’ll smile and clap. On the next hit, I’ll run home.
But he didn’t open the door.
I did.
And I wasn’t ten years old. I was thirty-one.
I stare into the dark garage, fumbling for the light switch. The bulb casts a beam through the dust, across more tools piled on the workbench and the landscaping gear on the hooks he screwed to the walls. The lawn mower, the weed whacker, the Skilsaw, the compressor, the drills—so many different drills—everything old and new: jars of nails, jars of screws, scraps of wood left over from years of household projects, hard hats, a couple of levels, a pair of old workboots, a row of hockey sticks from every year of my minor hockey life, baseball bats, tennis rackets from the 1980s, a deflated basketball, a few old cans of outdated paint, one half-filled bucket of bromine for the pool. All these old pieces of junk scattered across the garage feel connected to him, like points of entry to distant memories. They tell the story of who he was and why that mattered—the essence of my father, which I can’t quite grasp.
His name is sketched on the wall in white chalk, the big, perfectly even letters unmistakably his: Rick. In all these years I’d never noticed it before. He could have written it a decade ago or last week. I have no idea why he thought to tag his own space. Maybe he just felt the need to make it known that he was here.
And I forget why I am.
Was it Perrier?
I open the fridge by the door and grab the bottle my mother asked for.
Rain patters on the roof and there’s another crack of thunder. It smells like damp spring. I flick off the light, head back to the laundry room. The garage door squeaks and thuds shut behind me, just as it always has. I can hear the scrape of my Goldendoodle puppy’s paws on the hardwood in the hallway as he leaps with glee on sombre guests.
The anxiety hasn’t left. It’s stuck in my throat, still expanding.
There is no way that this house, or this family, will survive without him. It feels like the biggest failure of my life.
I should have been ready. I should have been able.
He’s passed the responsibility on to me, and I’m not even close to being man enough for the job. He built it, he fixed it—he held it all together. I should have paid more attention, I should have asked more questions, I should have learned more skills. I should have learned to hammer, to saw, to measure twice and cut once.
I shouldn’t have relied on him as I did—and he shouldn’t have let me.
He should have been harder on me. He should have told me to rely on myself. He should have forced me to be the kind of man who knows how to build things well, and how to keep them standing.
But he didn’t. And I didn’t. So now I’m a grown man who doesn’t know how to build or fix a thing. I am an amateur.
I look down, again, and stare at my father’s tools, lost in the tangled maze of steel.
Everything he built is about to fall down.
“What are we going to do without you?”
3
The funeral is held in the large church where we went as children. It was where my father and mother were married, and where they brought us every Sunday—a Pentecostal congregation in the heart of Brampton, a sprawling suburb north of Toronto. Kennedy Road Tabernacle, built in the seventies, is a local landmark. Everyone knows it for the large cross atop a long, narrow tower that slopes down like an Olympic ski jump to a round sanctuary that looks like the Roman Colosseum; for years it was one of the highest structures around. We’d dress in our best each week and drive to the church, sitting in the same spot in the balcony in the second section from the doors. Always about fifteen minutes late, arriving in the middle of the pre-sermon worship fuelled by a lively Southern Baptist–style choir that rocked and danced as they sang and were always the best part.
But this time we’re early. We’ve been waiting downstairs as people filled the seats, first the bottom, then the second level. Then we’re given our signal to make our grand entrance, walking slowly to the front row as everyone watches us. It’s been a while since I was last here, a place that once felt as familiar as our home. I show up only once a year for Christmas Eve services now, but my parents were still regulars. Dad was a member of the church board, a role my mother had before him.
Today, the place is packed. There are so many people, many I’ve never seen or met before. When I was much younger, I remember thinking that my dad didn’t seem to have very many friends. It wasn’t that he wasn’t likable; it was more that he was just so busy with our life that he didn’t have time to go out and be a regular guy. As far as I knew, he wasn’t in touch with any of his old boyhood pals. He didn’t have a group of guys he’d gather with every once in a while to play softball, catch a game, grab a drink. We had become both the centre and the edges of his life.
But I was wrong. Very wrong. Sitting next to my mother in the front row, I look around the rotunda and scan the crowd as they sing along to Christian worship songs. It’s remarkable, seeing the people who’ve come to mourn and remember my father.
He was never the centre of attention. He’d hate this, I tell myself.
We’re holding the funeral on the Saturday that was supposed to be his sixtieth birthday party. Initially we’d planned something grand to mark the milestone, but he’d shut us down. Forcefully. All he wanted, he said, was a barbecue in the backyard with a few friends and family. Then he went and died—and now hundreds of people have come to say goodbye. I picture his frustrated grin as I jab him with the irony, and as another Christian song that sounds like every other Christian song begins, I manage to smile.
Several people take turns speaking on the purple-carpeted stage where we used to listen to weekly sermons. One of them is a former pastor of the church,
Jamie Stewart, a close friend of my father’s in recent years. They’d cried together when Jamie lost his fifteen-year-old daughter, Emma Grace, a couple of years earlier after a terrible battle with cancer. If this hurt, I couldn’t imagine what Jamie and his family were still enduring. He’d since left to lead a different congregation, but he’s come back to lead the service to honour my father and say goodbye. It would have meant a lot to Dad, so it means a lot to me.
One of the other speakers is our family friend Jerry Agyemang. An enormous, hulking man, Jerry has recently gained local fame as the security guard and assistant to embattled Toronto mayor Rob Ford, whom he supported vehemently. Jayme, my partner, is an investigative reporter at the Toronto Star and was on the team that exposed a tape of the mayor smoking crack and his association with an illicit gang. It was a bizarre collision of my worlds. But Jerry was one of many friends from the church who’d spent summer days and weekends at our house growing up, playing basketball on the driveway and swimming in the pool. He was the eldest in a family of six kids and modest means. When he was a teenager his dad returned to Ghana, and Jerry was left to be, as he told me, the “man of the house.”
His voice quavers as he speaks about the father figure mine had been to him, and to many other young men in our community who didn’t have the same kind of family structure we had. Several came to the hospital that night as news spread through our friends that Dad would soon die.
At Jerry’s wedding my father hugged him hard, with eyes full of happy tears, and told him how proud he was of the man he’d become.
A slide show, the standard funeral staple, follows Jerry. It’s accompanied by a soundtrack of songs we’ve selected that Dad always used to sing: “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog”…“Who’ll Stop the Rain”…“House at Pooh Corner.” In the middle of the photographs we dug up from old stacks in our basement—between pictures of his childhood and then as our father—there’s a section from a part of his life I don’t recognize. There’s this young guy in short white shorts and gold aviators, standing in a group that looks like the cast of Dazed and Confused at some cottage I’ve never seen before. I’ve heard some stories of those past days—of the late seventies and early eighties—when my parents were regular young people who had much different lives. All these years together, and there was still so much about him that I didn’t know.
I clutch the memorial program. It carries a photo of Dad as a child with blond curly hair, smiling wide and bright, using his entire face. Next to it is a photo of him with the same grin, but this time as a young man with long mid-1970s hair down to his shoulders. It’s almost the exact same smile he wears in the photograph of him in his mid-fifties, the one that appears at the top of the obituary we’ve had printed in the Star and then reprinted on the back page of the program.
I wrote it while sitting in his chair at the head of the dining room table at our house at three a.m.. I couldn’t recall whether I’d ever sat in that chair before. It felt like an unnatural place to be, looking out at the room from his vantage point—this place where we’d shared birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas dinners.
As the chorus of another worship song rises, I read over the story of his life as I knew it.
RICK ROBSON
June 8, 1955–May 30, 2015
Rick Robson, a builder and a fixer, spent his life making things work for other people.
He grew up in Brampton and became a carpenter. He fell madly in love with a beautiful nurse from Tavistock, married her, and started a family. He built houses and high-rises, just as he built their lives. Firm foundations, every brick and beam placed with care. He had two daughters and a son, and showed them how to love and dream. He taught them to have faith that this life was part of a grand blueprint. He followed it passionately. Rick showed love and grace to everyone he met. He mastered those tools. He used them to build others up and to fix whatever they needed.
He excelled professionally, starting his own successful business, creating a reputation for skill and integrity, before becoming a leader in a national engineering and construction firm. His work is everywhere—rows of houses, tall buildings, service stations. It is in the school he constructed, where his children grew up. And in the church where he praised and prayed, humbly, thanking God for this beautiful life.
Rick Robson was a pancake maker, a barbecuer, a photographer, an astronomer, a storyteller, a fan, a friend, a rock. He was a husband, strong and steady. A loving father to his own kids—and many more. He was a laugher. A singer. A crier. A dreamer. He was a pillar that held everything up, and nothing seems secure without him.
Ever efficient, Rick built and fixed all he could in just six decades. There were no regrets. No words left unsaid when he fell asleep, and with his family beside him, he slipped quietly away.
He leaves behind his resilient wife Sharon. And his ever-grateful kids, Jaime, Dan, and Jenna. His mother, Peggy, sister, Debbie, and younger brother, Larry (Tracey) and nephews Noah and Jacob. He leaves them and countless friends with broken hearts.
But he’ll be sure to fix those too, in time.
LUM.
* * *
—
LUM. It means “Love you much.” I’m not sure where it came from or why, exactly. But it was one of those family things, something our parents would say whenever we were heading away somewhere. We’d write it in cards, and later in e-mails. It was a family signature.
After the service I shake hands in a fog of people, familiar faces blending together. They’ll all be lost in the haze of memory, except for one man I’ve never seen before. He is young—probably in his late twenties—with warm eyes and a soft, apologetic smile.
“Excuse me,” he says, pulling me aside. “You don’t know me, but I’ve heard all about you. My name is Ajith.”
He was the store manager at the Starbucks my father would stop at on his way to work, he tells me. Every morning he’d watch Dad’s dark-blue Ford F-150 park in front of the store, in an old police station on Queen Street in downtown Brampton, and he’d get started on the grande non-fat, no-sugar latte he always ordered. And every morning my father would greet him with a smile.
“It was an unforgettable smile,” Ajith says.
He tells me they developed a friendship through the daily ritual. My father knew all about Ajith’s family, how they’d moved to Canada from Dubai, where he’d managed a five-star hotel. Dad had told him everything about me and my two sisters. He’d told Ajith about my book. He knew all about it.
But last week Ajith noticed that the blue F-150 hadn’t pulled up in front of the store for several mornings in a row. Then he recognized a smile while flipping through the Toronto Star.
“My heart sank,” he says.
He felt he needed to come to the memorial to say goodbye. I’m not sure how he knew where or when it was. I don’t recall putting those details in the obituary, but to be honest I don’t recall many specifics. Regardless, Ajith found it and showed up.
I smile. I don’t know why I’m so moved. It was unexpected. The idea that Dad had connected so simply, so briefly—but so deeply—with someone who could have so easily remained a stranger. It was a small, astounding thing. I thank Ajith for coming, because really what a lovely thing to do. I ask him if we can speak again and he pulls his Starbucks manager card out from his wallet. I tell him I’ll call, and I mean it. It’s the only conversation I’ll remember having that day.
* * *
—
After the memorial, we hold a celebration up at the church’s high school, on the edge of the city, where new subdivisions now push up against farmers’ fields. My sisters and I went to that evangelical school, right from kindergarten through secondary.
Dad managed the construction of its high school wing in the mid-nineties. He had a temporary trailer office in the parking lot, where he laid out the project’s blueprints. I’d visit him during lunch brea
ks from my grade six class. Sometimes we’d eat our sandwiches together and he’d try to explain what all the blue ink on the large white sheets that rolled up like treasure maps meant. That fall, during recess in the afternoons, my friends and I in the schoolyard watched as the wooden frame of the new two-storey building rose up beyond the original one-level school. It looked like Noah’s ark being built in one of the Christian cartoons we were sometimes shown in class. I bragged about how my dad was building it, about how I’d seen the blueprints.
At the memorial celebration, I sneak away from the gym, filled with giant balloons and dozens of faces I don’t recognize lining up to offer condolences to my mother, and walk through the dimly lit hallway of the wing I’d watched my father build. It now holds the school’s junior high, with artwork and announcements from the ending of another semester decorating the walls between the same grey lockers into which my classmates and I had once stuffed our gym bags, assignments, and notes to crushes.
It all feels familiar to me, reaching back through the years I spent there as a student to the day Dad first took me through it—still unfinished, but with red bricks lining the exterior and the spaces between the frames filled in with drywall. It was a masterpiece, I’d thought, as we walked with our hard hats on, inspecting the first floor and the second floor, looking inside each classroom. The giant hole in the grass had grown into this entirely new, permanent thing. My father had followed the course laid out on those blue-inked pages that would give shape and meaning to an empty space.
Dad could build anything. I remembered that feeling as I stood in the small lobby between the two floors, looking out the window to where his portable office once sat. And I was a boy again, knocking carefully on the brown door to make sure he wasn’t in the middle of one of his essential, top-secret construction meetings. He’d open the door and greet me with his big smile, and we’d sit there looking over the sketches as he let me in on the amazing plans that would turn nothing into something.