by Dan Robson
One of the realizations that hurt the most was that there was so much more to my father than I knew.
Half his life. That was it.
He told me once about being part of a gang of 1960s kids, riding their single-gear bikes as fast as they could to the edge of a cornfield forest. They charged right into the mystery of it, cutting through the stalks that reached up beyond them—chasing the laughter and shouts of the pack lost in the maze. There was a blue sky above. The grumble of a tractor and the holler of a farmer, shouting at the boys for disturbing his crop.
The boys all lived on the suburban streets that pushed up against the farmer’s field. Their lives were a product of the late-1950s urban sprawl, taking over the agricultural roots of the land beyond the city. The paved streets and cropped grass and rows of matching bungalows of Flowertown, the newest subdivision on the western edge of town, consuming that farmer’s history, acre by acre.
Eventually the boys would find the edge. The field would open up to a ditch and a dusty country road. They would catch their breath and calm their pumping hearts.
My father, I imagine—his blond hair neatly parted to the left, his collared shirt somehow still tucked in, an itch of eczema on his cheek—would look back at the tall stalks. And he’d have no idea where he stood in time and what the fields around him would become.
Soon the cornfield would be plowed over and the farmer’s house torn down. Soon you could see flat across the acres. The land would be sold and divided into new streets and plots. Giant holes excavated and foundations laid. Homes framed. Basements built, then family rooms, dining rooms, kitchens. Bedrooms and attics, all covered by shingled roofs and protected by bricks. Grass would be planted, fences put up, driveways paved, sidewalks hardened with messages drawn in wet cement. Soon the sounds of laughter would fill the blocks and kids would run through that same place, hopping fences and jumping in pools. They’d play road hockey for hours on courts, past dark under the glow of a single streetlight.
That wild, thrilling maze would cradle the stories of our lives. One day, somewhere in those stalks, our father would lay our foundation. And the crunching soil, the rumbling tractor, the shouting old man, the revelry of boyhood—would all become a faint memory, tucked deep in a grown man’s mind. A faint memory to share with his son.
* * *
—
I found Billy Plunket on Facebook. He wasn’t hard to find. It’s the kind of name that sticks out—and one of the few I remember Dad mentioning when I was a kid. We were driving down an old residential street in downtown Brampton, just a few minutes from our house. We passed a man with long hair, sitting on a lawn chair drinking a beer. Dad noticed him but kept driving.
“That was Billy Plunket,” he said.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“One of my old friends, from when I was young,” he said. “I haven’t seen him in years.”
They grew up in Flowertown together, he told me. They burned down a barn once and had to go to court.
What?
They went to junior high and high school together too. They were in a band.
Really?
Dad didn’t elaborate much further. He smiled and laughed to himself as though he was reliving a happy memory. Flipping through the old photographs in his mind.
And we drove on.
He could have pulled over. He could have reunited with his past. Could have caught up on the decades that separated them. But he kept going, moving forward and away.
I remember feeling sad that day. I can’t even recall how old I was at the time, but I clearly remember that conversation—or rather, the lack of it. I had my own neighbourhood friends then. Guys I played street hockey with every day after school on the cul-de-sac we lived on. Or tennis-baseball—a self-pitch game with a tennis racquet and tennis ball, sewer grates serving as bases and the two houses on the other side of the court as the home-run fence, our neighbours’ cars constituting a ground rule double. Or Manhunt—where one person sets out to catch the others, running through gardens and hopping fences, with each player caught joining him like a pack of zombies until the final one was left.
I couldn’t imagine a life without the kids who lived on my street. Back then, I couldn’t comprehend a world where the boys I set out on adventures with every day wouldn’t always be my closest friends.
But here was my dad, driving past a friend from his youth and not even stopping to say hello.
I don’t know why I remembered the name. I can only specifically recall Dad mentioning him that one time. Billy Plunket—the man with the long hair, drinking a beer on his lawn.
I felt a chill when I found him. Billy went by Bill now, but I knew it was the same Plunket. I typed a quick message on Facebook.
“Hi Bill. We’ve never met before—you were a friend of my father, Rick Robson, back in high school and Central Peel in Brampton,” I wrote.
I told him that I was trying to learn more about his past after his death.
“I was wondering if you have any memories of my dad, and if you’d be willing to chat about him.”
Bill replied within the hour.
“I’m so sorry to hear of Rick’s passing,” he wrote. “I was unaware and a bit taken aback by the news. Of course, I would be more than happy to chat.”
Bill Plunket answers the phone as if he’s greeting an old friend. He sounds like a boomer who’s permanently baked into his hippie days. But he’s excited to talk, brimming with memories. Learning about my father’s death has sent them flooding back.
“I was devastated to hear that news. My brother died when he was fifty-nine too, and he was a year and nine months younger than me…I end up going to more funerals than weddings now,” he says.
Bill lives in Fort Erie, he tells me. He moved out there a long time ago. But he was at my parents’ wedding, he says. It was probably the last time they really spoke. He tried to reconnect with my father years back, leaving a message on our phone, but never heard from him. He doesn’t know why.
And then he gets a message one day, out of nowhere, to tell him it’s too late.
“You’ve got memories that you want to remember. You’ve tapped me into remembering the old days,” Bill says. “My mother died of Alzheimer’s. Well developed. So did my grandfather. There are so many questions I would have asked both of them.”
Bill and my father, and their crew of friends, all met at Beatty-Fleming Public School, in a subdivision that was known as Northwood Park at the time. It’s the same neighbourhood my grandmother still lives in, just a few minutes from us. She and my grandfather were the first and only owners of the house.
“You’re kidding. She still lives in that house?” Bill says. “Holy shit, man. They probably paid around fifteen thousand for it.”
That was six decades ago now. They moved there when my father was four and my aunt was eight. There were no fences or trees there at the time. The farmer’s field reached right to the edge of their street, but year by year it was swallowed by more bungalows with large lots. My dad’s brother was born when he was twelve—which meant he had to move from the main floor of the bungalow down to a tiny room in the basement. Years later, when my father moved out, my grandfather turned it into his workshop. For my entire life there was a Farah Fawcett poster on the wall, and I was never sure if it had belonged to my dad or my grandfather.
Bill tells me that he remembers my grandparents. He remembers how sweet my grandmother always was and that my grandfather had a bulbous red nose.
“He always seemed to have a drink in his hand,” he says.
This lined up with what I remembered of him. We called him Pa.
“My dad didn’t drink a lot,” I say.
“No,” says Bill. “He didn’t.”
All my life I’d only ever seen Dad have a glass of wine, and only if friends came over. He never told me why
he didn’t drink, probably because I never asked. It was just normal to me. The only time he and I ever shared a beer was in Vancouver, when our jobs brought us there at the same time and we met up for lunch before his flight out. It felt weird when he ordered one after I had.
“It’s about time I had a beer with my son,” he said.
That was two months before he died.
Dad hadn’t told me much about Pa. I was too young to really know him. He was kind to me, but sort of grumpy at the same time. He used to pick up my sisters and me at our bus stop in his white Buick with maroon seats so plush you could write your name on them. He always had hard candies in the console. And when our parents would drop us off at the house we’d watch golf and I Love Lucy reruns together. He’d let me roll his cigarettes, putting the filter and paper in place and stuffing the tobacco into the slider. And he’d let me get him a Coors Light from the fridge, or would give me whatever was left over in the can after he poured a rye and Coke. Sometimes we went to the driving range together, where he’d let me play mini golf. For my birthday one year he gave me a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jam because I kept eating all of his.
He was a loving grandfather in a Walter Matthau kind of way.
Dad didn’t elaborate on his relationship with Pa, other than saying he always wanted me to know he loved me because it was something he and his father never did.
I knew Pa’s father had passed away when he was a boy and that he spent his teenage years helping to take care of his mother and sister. His name was Emmanuel, but he hated that so he changed it to Robert—and everyone called him Bob. He grew up on Pape Avenue in Toronto’s east end, but met my grandmother at a dance in Hamilton. He looked like Marlon Brando then, olive skin, handsome eyes, and strong arms. My grandmother, Peggy, had a Bette Davis thing going on. They fell in love and moved to St. Thomas, where they lived for a few years until their house burned down. Then they moved back, closer to Toronto, where he landed his job and bought a house in a brand-new Brampton subdivision.
Pa was an old-school guy who for decades had been a salesman for Consumers Gas. He was a blue-collar man, and proud of it. He worked hard to enjoy a few pints and a game of darts at the Flowertown Pub a few blocks away. Or a rye and Coke at the bar in the basement. Pa was the kind of man who could fix any problem in the house, and spent most of his weekends doing it. With his son right behind him he sealed the leaky shingles, replaced pipes, mended fences, and repaired all mechanical failures—home or auto—that would otherwise leave his family at the mercy of “professional” repairmen. Through Pa’s instruction, my dad learned how to do all those things too. By the time he was old enough to swing a hammer, he was expected to use it. The work he did was seldom fun. It wasn’t a labour of love; it was duty.
“I was around when Rick’s dad died,” says Bill. “Your grandpa.”
Having heard about the funeral, he stopped in. I was about to turn eleven then. It was June. Grandma and Pa had been on vacation in Hawaii when he fell and broke his hip. In the hospital they discovered that he had cancer in his lungs. Two weeks later he was on a ventilator at the house, sitting in the same reclining chair he always sat in to watch the Blue Jays or the PGA. My parents brought us over to see him. We didn’t really know what to say or do. It was hard to see him struggle to breathe. The next morning, when we woke, Mom and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table in our house. They looked tired.
“Pa died last night,” Dad said.
My sisters and I cried. We didn’t really know what that meant—we just knew he was gone.
But Dad didn’t. He seemed sad, but not upset. I remember that he hugged us, and that later that afternoon we went to Costco where he bought me a red, blue, and black soccer ball I’d seen and decided I needed. I didn’t even like soccer, so I never really used it—but it would remain in our garage for years, and whenever I saw it I’d always think, That’s the ball we got when Pa died.
“Fifteen—that was about the time when everyone went their own ways,” Bill is saying over the phone. He lists off the members of their neighbourhood crew. “There was me, Rick, Dale, Stewart, Charlie, and Arthur…”
The boys used to rip around the streets, he says, until they’d hear a parent holler from a porch or the streetlights went on. They used to camp in each other’s backyards. They had dance parties in the basements of girls they liked. In the middle of the night they’d go hopping from one neighbour’s pool to the next. They spent hours riding their bikes and hiking through the fields and forests around the subdivision. They’d go fishing in Fletcher’s Creek and then float down the river, riding the current all the way to the edge of the new highway south of town. Sometimes they’d hike along the side of the rail tracks that ran just north of their houses, heading towards Toronto. One day, Bill says, they found a yellow packet on the side of the track. They couldn’t open it, so Bill used a railway spike they found to smash it. It exploded in their faces on the first strike. They all stumbled backwards and ran. Bill’s face was singed, but he was all right in the end. He found out later that it was a signal used to alert train conductors that a sharp curve lay ahead.
“I was always the person that if there was an injury going to happen it would be me,” Bill says. “Boom! That’s all we heard.”
The boys would journey for miles. One spring, when they were about thirteen, the group visited an old tin barn several miles north in an empty field. There was no farmhouse on the property; they could see only the train bridge running over the street that led to the house in the distance. So they turned the barn into their own clubhouse, hiking out to it each day. There, sitting between the hay bales and the steel machinery, they’d do the kinds of things boys do in places they think are exclusively theirs. They’d smoke cigarettes and talk about women, as men do. They’d dare each other to walk across the rafters. They’d tie up ropes so that they could swing between the landings.
The father of one of the boys was a policeman and a hobby marksman who kept his bullets in the garage. One day the boys stole a packet of bullets and brought it out to the barn, where they built a small fire out of twigs and hay. Then, when the flames were high enough, they threw the packet of bullets into the burning pile—and ran for cover behind the hay bales and machinery.
The ammo exploded in a flurry of flames as the boys hid, imagining bullets whizzing past their heads.
The fire was still simmering on the barn floor when they left later that day, though they thought it’d been put out. Someone was supposed to pee on it to make sure. But no one looked back until they reached the fence by the train tracks. It was only when they climbed up over it and spun to drop down that they saw smoke and flames rising from the roof of the barn. They sat on the edge of the fence, frozen in fear, watching it burn. Then the roof caved and they ran like hell.
They vowed silence together, but it lasted only a couple of days. Someone in the group had buckled under the heat and given them all up. The police showed up at each of their houses, lights blaring, and brought them to the police station downtown. (It’s a Starbucks now, the place where Dad would stop in to get his grande non-fat, no-sugar latte every morning on his way to work.)
The boys ended up in the local courthouse sitting next to their mortified parents as the judge reamed them out for the damage they’d caused and the danger they’d put themselves in. It turned out that the old barn was supposed to be ripped down soon anyway. They were each given a fine. But what they’d remember would be the smacks and the grounding they received from their parents when they got home.
It was one of those stories that had clearly morphed with time but had held a place in their memories. Dad had mentioned it once when he drove past the field where the barn had stood, although he’d omitted the part about the police and the court.
Bill’s stories keep rolling out. Now he’s jumped past middle school to their freshman year.
“Did your dad ever tell you
about Janice Marks?” he asks.
“No,” I say apprehensively.
“Oh man. You know what your dad was like.”
I truly have no idea what Dad was like.
“He always had the shoulder-length hair and stuff like that,” Bill says. “But your dad always had the eczema outbreak on the corner of his lips or on his elbows or whatever. Somehow, some way he must have been really sort of dashing because he was going out with probably the best-looking girl in high school.”
“Really?”
“I think she was a grade older than us,” he says. “That’s what sort of blew me away. Probably about grade ten.”
Dad was terrible at telling me about women. We never really talked about love or lust—about the thrill and agony of being a teenager in either state. We never spoke about sex. It was a minefield I walked alone. I’d always been painfully shy and dreadfully awkward when it came to girls, so if Dad had actually known what he was doing, I’m furious with him now.
“How was my dad with girls?” I ask. “Was he talkative? Was he shy? Was he some sort of player?”
“He wasn’t,” Bill says. “That’s why we couldn’t figure out how he could go out with Janice. Because he wasn’t a particularly suave guy. We were all basically young and naive. Kept it all to himself.”
I have no idea how much of this to believe, but I want to believe it all. Janice Marks, from grade ten! Dating someone a year older than you in high school is an enormous deal. And the best-looking girl in school at that? Impressive, Dad.
“Yeah. Nobody could figure out how. I don’t know what it was, but he was always very guarded with her,” Bill says. “He didn’t want to answer any questions. And if he was around today, I’d be asking him about it.”
“Me too.”
I ask Bill if he knew what my father wanted to become back then; if he had any sense of what his dreams for life were.
“I never would have figured your dad for being a construction guy,” Bill says. “He never really built anything when we were growing up…I thought he might have continued on in music.”