It's that time of year when everything on TV, the radio, especially the advertisements that blanket every surface within sight, are all about Christmas. And family.
This year Christmas is hard. It's the first one I'll have without my father. My father is not dead. But we don't speak, we haven't spoken in almost a year. I know this isn't uncommon, it's actually frighteningly common, but it's uncommon to me.
My father was my world when I was a little girl. He was a superhero. Before arthritis made running too painful he would don these electric blue spandex running pants every morning. He never jogged, my dad RAN. He wore a black fisherman's hat, with a peaked brim and I thought it was the coolest hat in the world. My father is also the greatest story-teller I've ever met. At bedtime he would tell me stories about his boyhood in Port Angeles, catching fish of mammoth proportion and running down backwood trails to escape marauding cougars (okay, well he never SAW the cougar but he claims that he heard it growling from the undergrowth), or he told me stories of teenage shenannigans he partook in during his salad days at the all-boys Catholic boarding school he attended. A friend once told me that my father could read the phone book and have everyone who listened hanging on his every word.
My father was the kind of guy who, if he was a stranger, you would meet and you would immediately take a liking to him. His purity of heart shone through every part of him.
Outwardly he was the image of respectability; steely grey hair, a moderate paunch that betrayed his love of good wine and good cheese (oh, and OYSTERS!), a slightly florid but kindly face and a movie star smile.
It's true that at times he drank excessively, his moves on the dance-floor can charitably be called "enthusiastic" and his love of the written word never translated into any finesse with interpersonal communication but my father....
He is the best man I have ever known.
A conspiracy of circumstances has made it impossible for us to speak but there is not a day that goes by when I don't ache to be swallowed up in his arms.
My father also gave the world's best bear hugs.
Maybe it's the season, the xMas cheer, the incessant carols, or the sentimental Tim Horton's ads that dominate every bus shelter, but I feel his absence so strongly.
Maybe I'm hoping for one of those hackneyed Christmas miracles. The kind where long lost family is reunited in a beautiful street side scene with plump snowflakes, dewey-skinned female protagonists and a script that gives the characters all the right lines to say.
It won't happen. This I know.
But every day from now until the 25th, I can imagine, I can believe, that I might get a Christmas miracle of my own.
Love you Dad.
