Remembering Jimmy

How wonderful to be able to walk in the sun after five days of the Tramatane wind (picture a high speed train screeching through a tunnel and that was the sound in my flat, although yesterday it had been reduced to a periodic choo choo). Walks besides revelling in the moment, are for pre writing and thinking.

My thoughts turned to the emails I had exchanged yesterday with a Canadian client who was discussing snow. At that moment I would have changed wind for the Blizzard of ’78.

My father hated snow, probably because of his Nova Scotia origins. I only half kid when I say his first words probably were “When are we moving to Florida,” which he finally did at 62.

Jimmy, for I called him that (after many years of separation due to my parents enmity, and a relationship he sought to restore when I was at university), would never have understood my move to Europe nor my taking Swiss nationality, although his move from Canada to the US was based on the same desires for a higher quality of life and opportunities.

At the same time even though he died when I was in my forties, he would have been so proud of my writing. He never said he was proud, but I knew it. When I arrived at the hospital after one of his heart attacks, the nurses, knew that I was the daughter whose company flew her from place to place in helicopter. He didn’t add that they did it for all their employees. And he and my uncle, both hated shopping, actually went from store to store to find me exactly the right brief case.

But those are details and on this walk my imagination saw him being born, one of ten children, in a tiny house provided the lighthouse keeper, which my grandfather was. My grandmother would have made Edith Piaf look big, and even today when I see old, skinny, tiny French women with their hair in a bun, dressed head to in black, I see her and my ancestors.

An internet search revealed the whole family history going back to Michel Boudrot who sailed from La Rochelle sometime around 1625 and ended up in Nova Scotia, but my father would never have known that, although I wish I could have shared the information with him.

I have not seen photos of him as a boy, but I do have his Raytheon badge where he worked during WWII. I have lots of photos after our reunion, his taking me to New York to sail to join my new husband in Germany, the surprise grandfather party we gave him when I was pregnant…this was done to give my aunts and uncles, whom he teased mercilessly about how old they were because they were grandparents, a chance to get back at him. The one I treasure most was taken the night before he died. He is looking at a birthday cake, unusual, because being born right after Christmas, most of his birthdays were lost in the holiday rush. He had just shot his best round of golf.

My thoughts were thinking of how he ran a whole life, from tiny infant to ashes. I only knew part of that life, less because my teenage years were wasted, which probably did have some advantages because I am not sure he would have had the patience that he had dealing with an adult daughter and instead of orders, repeated the famous words “Have you thought of…” usually when I came up with some harebrained scheme, some worked out, most which did not. I often wonder how he resisted saying “I told you so.”

I remember introducing him to his son, then 27 whom he had not seen since he was five, a rather bizarre feeling and how the three of us talked almost all the night and I learned about why he made certain decisions and things, how he adored my step mom, things that had scared him, thrilled him. It was a peek into his soul.

His ashes are buried in Florida, far from the snow he detested.

And mostly as I walked, I felt my love for him and his for me until tears blurred the mountains against the blue sky.