Time travel
Some time ago, a friend of my Dad’s reached out to me over social media. This was a person whom I don’t recall meeting, but that Dad had known well, whom he had left a tremendous impression on. The brothers grew up in the Townships, but left the area many years ago, relocating to other provinces. Currently, the one who was the closest with Dad lives in Ontario and his younger brother has settled in British Columbia.
That kind of contact can easily just be a touching base, a kind of brief connection for an update on the status of the family, a moment of nostalgia tweaking the urge to explore where life has taken those left behind.
I imagine I could have approached the situation in several ways – I could have ignored the message, or responded briefly, or engaged in conversation. As my father’s daughter there really was only one approach – and that was the latter. Engage in conversation – learn about these old friends, and welcome whatever the connection brought.
Several months ago, another message appeared, this one accompanied by photos of our Dad in uniform that my family and I didn’t recall ever seeing. Seeing the new photos of a dearly departed loved one is a strange experience – even if it’s from the past…. it’s something new.
There were four shots. All in black and white, taken at the Sherbrooke Hussars regiment – perhaps the Sergeant’s Mess from what I could glean from the background – the photographs were sharp. The details were clean. The focus was on point. They were definitely among the clearest photos of Dad we had ever seen.
Sharing them with my brothers was a treat. We marvelled over the clarity – and how they were probably how we really remembered Dad the most. They were likely taken around 1985, when he was Regimental Sergeant Major of the Sherbrooke Hussars.
A month or so ago I heard from the brothers again. They were planning to visit the Townships. On the slate was spending some time with relatives around the Sutton-abercorn area, and the younger brother looked forward to doing some research in local military history at the Eastern Townships Resource Centre in the Old Library at Bishop’s University.
They wondered if I might be free to meet with them during their stay, for a coffee and a visit. Aware of my current work at Champlain College, and the busy nature of the early school year, they weren’t hopeful, but lo and behold a sliver of time appeared. They were thrilled, and I looked forward to meeting them.
On Friday afternoon, at Lennoxville’s Café Faro, the three of us sat down at a round table near the entrance, and time traveled. The older brother had the most tales to tell, recalling joining the regiment together, and some of the adventures that usually wound up in everyone sleeping over at my grandparents’ home, certainly treated to our Gran’s constant preparedness to feed any number of unexpected, slightly bedraggled overnight guests.
‘Your father! Oh man, when he told a joke. He had to climb all over the place. Got right into it.’ I told him that the first time my parents saw each other that is exactly what was happening – Dad was under a table telling a joke, when Mum walked into the room. Un coup de foudre that locked in the events leading to five years of MontrealRichmond courtship, and the existence of the three Quinn kids.
The older brother brought up a particularly poignant moment where Dad took him aside, requesting utmost confidentiality and secrecy, rather nervously, ‘I’m going to propose.’ That was our Mum he was referring to – I wondered if he knew the side of the story Mum had told us – ‘ He asked so many times I finally just said yes.’ Our Dad the hopeless (slightly goofy) romantic, and the love of our Mum’s life. Mum always recalls, with a twinkle in her eye, how her engagement ring sparkled in the streetlights as she walked home from visiting friends, not long after she finally said yes.
He talked about my birth, and Dad’s excitement at becoming a father. No one had ever talked to me about that before. Not about Dad divulging plans
of marrying our Mum, about our arrival into his world. We only knew the world that we shared, and only from our own perspectives.
With twenty-seven years since our Dad’s death (at the age I am now), there isn’t much that’s new any more. This was like removing a veil, a veil of time and space, blowing dust off of all of the clocks and letting them whirr again.
For one hour, these brothers - displaced Townshippers, not prodigal, but now from elsewhere - time traveled with me. We woke the dead – my father, his brother and sister, my grandparents. There was activity at 169 Dufferin Street, Richmond, again, where teenaged boys shuffled to the dining room for one of Gran’s feasts. They faced our Bampie’s lack of filters and funny questions.
Our father didn’t know our mother, then he did, then my brothers and I were born. It all happened over coffee.
We live in this strange time, where with exposé’s of much of social media’s nefarious creepings (The Social Dilemma – currently on Netflix), we may be slightly more hesitant about engaging on platforms where who we are becomes a commodity. The idea though, is to beat them at their game. To forge connections that veer from virtual to the real world, to create and allow for safe exchanges and safe places where we can benefit from the good we can bring to one another’s lives.
Perhaps, in all of this, one of the biggest lessons is something to aspire to though - be the kind of friend whom you love and admire so much that almost three decades after you’re gone, your old friends reach out to your kids just to remember what it was like to be with you.
Thank you, Ian and Duncan, taking the time. for