DADDY’S MGB
Brendan McAleer and his dad take a trip in a classic.
My father is a fading photograph. The hands that grip the narrow rim of his MGB’s steering wheel are still broad and purposeful; the forearms revealed by rolled-up sleeves still flex with strength.
But as the road climbs ever higher, I’m struck by the way the silver and white has crept entirely over Dad, his head now as snow-capped as the mountains that surround us. There is a picture hanging at home of Dad with my mother Ida, newly emigrated from Northern Ireland, years before I came along. In it, Dad wears a leonine mane: jet-black hair and a Viking’s red beard. He’s clad in Donegal tweed, the real, true, hand-woven stuff, thick enough to repel rain and cold and possibly even smallcalibre gunfire. Strong and vital and hairy — he looks a bit like an Irish wookie.
And now, the fade to grey. Aidan McAleer has long been jokingly referring to himself as the “Oul Grey Fella,” a character in Brian O’Nolan’s satirical novel, The Poor Mouth. In the book, the Oul Grey Fella is forever perched atop a henhouse, delivering occasionally suspect wisdom to the young protagonist. A common phrase recurs throughout: mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann: “for our likes will not be seen again.”
I know this. I’ve passed that shock of realization in my 20s, when I learned that the oakhewn solidity of my father wouldn’t always be around, that he was human, mortal. As full and busy as life has become, it’s encouraged me to somehow find the time for an adventure like this one. My father is now 70 and his like will not be seen again. So let’s go do something daft.
The MGB — 1967, steel dash, sprung wheels — is a small red dot in a massive landscape. If you could pull back on the scene, take flight like a bird, you’d see it moving quickly south along a road that gambols through the landscape like a young creek.
We’ve travelled a long road together in this car. Starting out on a Friday morning in Hope, B.C., we’re headed east into the mountain passes near Manning Park, encountering lashing rain and eventually snow. We’re part of this year’s Classic Car Adventures Spring Thaw, 80 vintage machines running the gamut from a priceless ’57 Alfa-Romeo to open-roofed Mini Moke. By the time we climb the hills south of Lillooet on the Duffy Lake Road, we’ve covered more than 1,000 kilometres together through breakdowns and bad weather.
My father bought this MGB when I was eight or nine months old. The last time it attempted a lengthy journey like this, it did so with one-yearold me in a car seat wedged into the back parcel shelf. After a reasonably major shunt with a dump truck a few years later, it sat in a friend’s barn for years while we lived in various places around B.C. One of those places was Lillooet, when I was just entering grade school, and I can remember coming down these same roads in our blue Land Rover Series III when the route was gravel washboard and streaming dust.
Under the B’s bonnet, an auxiliary fuel pump is strapped to the air-cleaner, an emergency roadside repair done by Rob Fram of RX Restorations (he’s brought his Mini on the Thaw). It’s pushing too much fuel for the MG’s twin carbs, yet the four-cylinder is ticking over happily and scooting up the uphill sections like a yearling mountain goat.
It’s a perfect day, bright and open and lonely. I’ve got my camera out, trying to catch a sense of the road and the memory and the mountains and the companionship. It’s an impossible task, so after a while I sit back and just take it all in. On the first day of the run, we’re caught in a sudden hailstorm, and a pea-sized hailstone somehow sneaks past the MGB’s weatherstripping to land on my lap. I scoop it into my palm and hold it out to show Dad; as we both laugh the ice melts, as fleeting as the moment.
When he was in Belfast Teacher’s Training College, my father had a young future Nobel laureate poet as his English professor. Seamus Heaney, who died two years ago at the age of 74, wrote the following about driving through the West of Ireland.
Useless to think you’ll park
and capture it
More thoroughly. You are nei--
ther here nor there,
A hurry through which known
and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at
the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard
and blow it open.
My second daughter arrives six minutes before the dawn, flushing as red as a robin’s breast with her first gasping breath of oxygen. Her cry is like a songbird in the early morning, her eyes tightly shut. Also, as is consistent with my previous experience, in five minutes there is baby poop all over everything.
I sit by the window, holding her close to my naked heart. The sun breaks past the brick wall of a wing of St. Paul’s, baptizing her in light. She sneezes; I laugh.
A few hours later we bring her home to meet her older sister. I will remember it forever — the infant yet to be named in my arms, the bright blue dancing eyes of our toddler. She reaches out and gently strokes her sister’s head and I’m reminded of the day I first met my brother. Later, we’ll both go down the hill in my old Subaru, to give my wife a bit of peace and pick out a Hot Wheels or two for the new arrival.
In the afternoon, my mom and dad arrive from out of town. My mother clasps her hands over her mouth, tearyeyed with the tiny perfection. We chat, my eldest whirling around us like an orbiting electron.
One of my favourite pictures of my father and I reveals us together down on the beach at Spanish Banks. I am three or so, and he is hurling me skywards, higher and higher. I am screaming with delight, the thrill of flight, the surety that he’ll be there to catch me. Into these same arms, I am about to place my hours-old daughter for the first time.
It is early in the morning, and my littlest is swaddled and asleep in her cot. She is curled like a comma, a moment’s break, a breath and a pause before the story continues.
As I stand watching my father cradle that little life, rapt and ensconced, just such an instant occurs. I am apart from the experience and within it, an observer and a passenger. I see the tiny fingers unfurl and reach out. My father’s hands wrap carefully around her, hands that caught me and pushed me ever upwards in life, held spade and hammer, ratchet and wrench, the red pen and the steering wheel.
It is the same feeling I had on the road in the tiny MGB, the same sense of time flowing around us like a river around a stone. In the midst of the hurry through, the moment crystallizes.
Our fragile craft hurtles onward along the road: steel, rubber, gasoline and memory. We are most of the way along our journey together, and the road ahead beckons impatiently. I smile to myself in understanding. The photograph fades, but the memory endures; within me, within my daughters, my father lives forever.
We are most of the way along our journey together; the road beckons