A Toast to Dad

My dad would have been 78 this week, so he's been on my mind a lot. This is from the toast I gave at his celebration of life in 2015. I still miss him every day.

I’m going to start in the middle, with a story.

It’s 2009. My parents, Kadri and Fred Campbell, are sound asleep in their home on Riverbend Drive in Ottawa. They are 65 years-old, well into retirement as civil servants. Dad is, as he always is when in bed, somewhat scantily clad. Very scantily.

Somewhere outside a dog is barking, but this happens a lot, and they sleep through anything. It’s a warm summer evening, the air conditioner gently humming, visions of hostas and Asiatic lilies from their gardens dancing in their heads. They are happily dozing when the doorbell rings. It’s 2:47 a.m. (I don’t know if it’s actually 2:47 a.m., but for purposes of the story, it sounds good.)

At first they shrug it off as part of a dream, or some kids playing pranks, or an electrical short. But the ringer is insistent. They ring and ring and ring again, and finally Dad leaps out of bed.

“Jesus Christ!” he says.

And you thought this was going to be a non-religious affair.

He storms to the foyer, flicking light switches as he goes. He reaches the front door, unlocks it, and throws it open. He stands there irate, feet askance and buck naked, glaring at the police officer on the other side of the screen.

“Sir,” she says, keeping her wide eyes trained on his, “We’re having some complaints about your dog.”

He exhales hard – huffs, maybe – through his nostrils and says, “We don’t HAVE a goddamn dog!”

Then he slams the door, locks it, and goes back to bed.

That was the middle. Now I’ll go back to the beginning.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, this affair, this celebration of life. Dad didn’t want one. “Buy a case of beer,” he said, “And invite a few people over.” Which means that he didn’t want these speeches, or toasts, or euologies. But I am all about words, and so I have to say something. I will try (in case you hadn’t noticed) to make this as little like a euology as I possibly can.

I’ve been thinking of what he might want instead. You are here, and so you loved him, and so you also know as well as anyone that a whole lot of sap wouldn’t be high on his list. Also, he might tell me that I should cut the crap. The bullshit. Anything that would have made him sigh and roooooll his eyeballs. Cut to the chase.

So here’s to Fred, Dad, Grandpa, Geezer, Soup. Dr. Campbell. A man of invention, innovation, and – I thought long and hard about this last one, and there’s only one word – beauty. Woodwork, photographs, creative answers...spray paint art. To do him true justice, this toast should be set to music or carved into a piece of oak recovered from the Edmund Fitzgerald. But oh well.

Invention, innovation, and beauty.

Invention: When I was about five years old, those plastic lemons on a skipping rope were in vogue on Otterburn Avenue in Munster Hamlet. You would twirl it around on one ankle, and jump over it with the other foot. I was desperate for one...a shiny yellow lemon filled with beads on a dark green cable. The beads rattled when it swung.

Please, please, please, please, please, I begged.

I can make that, he said.

And so what I got instead of a shiny yellow lemon from the store was a tennis ball on the end of a piece of rope from the garage. It worked. It wasn’t exactly what I had wanted, but it worked.

He would never buy something if he could make it. I think he looked at pretty much everything and said to himself, How can I make that? And he did. It took me a long time to figure out that he made things himself not because he was cheap, as he would have us all believe, but because that was the fun of it. The fun of life: invent something, create something, make something where there was nothing before.

Innovation: I could go a lot of ways on this one, but I’ve chosen words. Dad had an interesting relationship with language, with words and names, usually choosing to replacing real ones with those that were better suited.

Let me give you a few examples:

Canadian Tire was Crappy Tire, despite the fact that it was his favourite store.

An avid, daily reader of both, the Ottawa Citizen and the Globe and Mail were the Ottawa Shitizen and the Grope and Flail.

I think I was sixteen before I realized that there was no restaurant actually called “Dead Bird in a Box,” which is how he referred to Kentucky Fried Chicken.

You make a better door than a window, he would say when we were blocking the tv, or the idiot box.

Who wears it? Or Who uses it? he would ask when we were searching for something.

Stay between the ditches, when we took to the road.

Everything was always so frigging cut and dry, and he had an answer for everything even when you didn’t have a question. Answers were short, and pointed, and – to him – obvious. Because that was his world: there was always an answer, and it could always be solved. Innovate.

And then there was the beauty. The beauty, as I said, of making something out of your own mind with your own hands. A boat fly bridge for your family, a spoon display table for your wife, a Barbie house or two, a family room where there was once a garage. A house for your son, a porch for your daughter. Rocking horses and shelves and airplanes and doll furniture for your grandchildren. Because you can, and you want to, and because that’s the way you live your life.

He painted and photographed and tried to capture the beauty of the natural world he appreciated so much as a geologist. He sang and played guitar and found in the music poetry I never saw him read, but often heard him sing. He and Mom travelled the world appreciating all it had to offer, often by car, appreciating the passing landscape mile by mile (or kilometre by kilometre) because it was there and it was beautiful.

My yoga teacher said something a few months ago that really struck me. We were sweating it out in a 104-degree room, difficult pose after difficult pose, thinking about where we were going next, how we were going to spend our days, when we could stop and get a drink.

“Don’t do it to get it done,” he said of the yoga. “Do it to do it.”

That’s how Dad lived his life. He did things for the doing, the creating and the building and the loving, and in doing so found joy. If he just wanted to get things done, he would go out and buy the table or the doll house or the plastic lemon. He would have flown from one coast of Australia to the other rather than driven. It sure as hell would have been faster. But it wouldn’t have been him.

Invention, innovation, and beauty. And in all of them, love.

Thanks, Dad. Love you always.