When I was in grade eleven there was the it-guy in grade twelve—handsome, athletic, surrounded by it-girls and other it-guys. I didn’t know him and he never gave me as much as a glance. One day, in a semi empty hall he walked up to me and stopped, “Are you Sylvia?” I don’t remember his name or even exactly what he looked like, but I can still hear “Sylvia”. I’m surprised that I heard anything over the buzz in my ears. Maybe I didn’t hear it as much as I felt it in my knees and the pit of my stomach.
I’m sure I mumbled some sort of acknowledgement although I don’t remember.
“I met your dad last night. He picked me up at Elk Lake and drove me all the way home to Lands End.”
He smiled with a look that I’d seen before in other people who had encountered my father.
“What a great guy. He went so far out of his way to give me a ride,” pause, “he’s,” pause, “interesting.”
What could I say? The buzz turned to numb.
The it-guy was right. We lived only minutes from Elk Lake and the trip to Lands End gave my father at least half an hour with his captive audience.
It’s true my Father was a great guy. He had a handsome, loving, charming smile. He genuinely liked people. He was generous and gregarious. He was unpretentious and kind. He thought he was funny and told all the same eye-rolling, dad jokes that other dads told in those days. And my father believed in his daughters. He told us that we could do anything his sons could do and probably better. That was a gift most girls did not receive from their fathers in the 1950s and 60s.
But I knew that the it-guy didn’t mean my father was interesting. He thought he was interesting and that was different.
When he walked away I was mortified (a word my mother used when referring to my father’s behaviour).
My father was a zealot. He was an uncompromising believer, a preacher, a prophet and perhaps the most enthusiastic evangelist you could ever encounter. The Bible was his book, the promises to Abraham, Issac and Jacob were his mission statement and the return of Jesus to rule over a 1000-year earthly kingdom was his vision and his endgame.
I knew father could fill the it-guy in on that part in about 15 minutes. He had another 15 minutes to cover the evils of ‘the world’, to convince him that we were living in the ‘time of the end’ and persuade him to start reading the Bible soon so he didn’t miss out on the opportunity to be saved.
I’m sure the it-guy has told this story as well—the night a guy picked him up and gave him a ride all the way home so that he could preach to him. He might say that the guy was crazy. But I doubt it. He probably says the same thing he said to me “What a great guy.”
Because my father was a great guy. When he died, in his late 80s, hundreds of people attended his funeral. Kids he had hired in our greenhouses. Paper boys who were now fathers themselves. Store clerks. Customers. Neighbours. Our school friends. His mechanic, nurses and anyone he had encountered. And most of them would have had a similar story to the it-guy.
There are many things about being the zealot’s daughter that don’t go away. It’s okay to be different. I mean really different and not the cool sort of different. It’s okay to believe weird things that other people don’t believe in. It’s okay to trust people and let them into your life without living in fear. It’s okay to truly dance to your own drummer and to sing like nobody is listening. Father was not even like the others in his very, very conservative church…he was as different from them as he was from the people he met in ‘the world’. And that’s okay.
And it’s better than okay to really love, to really be generous, to really not be burdened by popular opinion, to really smile and to really like people. Thanks dad for it all.
