by Catherine M. Harris

Created on: October 03, 2009

Weirdness is truly in the eye of the beholder. I can say that because, for the most part, I'm somebody who could be considered weird. Never mind that those who would call me that are ultra conservative, never swear, follow the law to the letter and measure the length of their grass in millimetres. If we are defined by our friends, well then yup, I'm pretty weird. I love originality and creativity and there we have it.

My life has been blessed by weirdness and love it. My father was my first taste of weird. One of his favorite bedtime stories with me was to read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven". A child of the depression, he lived up north for a while and he loved to tell stories of drunken walks back to his place from the bar, flashlight in hand, the northern lights crackling overhead, polar bears hunting for garbage by the side of the road. You left them alone, no problem, he said, just don't stop. He told me stories of being a young guy in the 1950s, enamored of jazz and the music of Frank Sinatra and Doris Day, when he worked in Washington DC. Never one to listen to what anyone told him, he went to places not frequented by skinny white Canadian Irish boys - except this one.

One of his favorite stories was feeling blue about a girl, he got drunk and proceeded to repeatedly play a song on the jukebox until one patron took him aside and showed him his hat - the brim was lined with razor blades. Lesson learned, he didn't do that again, but my dad being the wonderful creature he was he was still welcome because he would sing and he didn't care if you were white, black, green, purple, English, French, polar bear or Russian. You are who you are, and it's who you are that mattered. Yes he was different, but you know to this day, for all of his faults I so very much miss him. And that was another odd thing - he wasn't the greatest of fathers and was quick to admit that, but for all of the people who turned their back on him, I never did. I told him: be my friend. And he did, and his friendship meant everything to me, so much so that there are relatives who still think I lost a screw or two mentally because when he was dying he asked me one thing: please be yourself, I am so tired of long faces. I did everything I could to make him laugh and I will never regret what I did.

One more story on my dad that needs to be told was his final operation. He came to Toronto where I lived at the time, and he was being checked into the hospital, a very old and scary looking place.

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