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Ann has been feeling out of sorts for much of the week with a sore throat. Then on Thursday James came back from school with a sore throat too, so he and Ann went off to the duty doctor where they were diagnosed with strep throat and prescribed a course of antibiotics. That seemed to do the trick and they are both feeling fine again now.
I have a new sport to try and take decent pictures of: basketball. Emily's team, the Celtics, had their first game yesterday. Actually, they had so many girls try out that they split the team in two; experienced girls on one and first-timers on the other. As this is Emily's first year she is on the weaker team; it is also younger (Emily is the oldest player) and therefore shorter. In the game yesterday they played a team with players of two or three years experience and about six extra inches in height. We got clobbered, though there was one rousing cheer for the only basket we scored. I was quite annoyed as we were told, when they split the team, that we would be playing opponents of a similar skill level. It would be a pity if the experience soured any of the girls on the game, as it might well do. Emily is being quite tight-lipped about it, so it is unclear how demoralized she felt.
I have been getting up early all week to watch the Bermuda Bowl (the world bridge championships) on the Internet. At 6 AM our time, they had the first round of three played each day; I watched for about an hour and a half before going in to work. Unfotunately Canada, though mid-week they were in a qualifying spot for the quarter-final matches, faded at the end of the week and ended up 15th or 16th out of 22. I watched some of the quarter-finals matches today. They will continue this week with the last couple of segments of the final taking place next Saturday.
We have also been readying ourselves for Hallowe'en this weekend. David was at a pumpkin carving and costume party on Saturday evening. Emily, James and I designed our pumpkins this afternoon and I carved them this evening so that they will be ready for display when I return from work tomorrow. Emily and James went to a Hallowe'en party this afternoon. I was supposed to take them, but I went for a bike ride down the Lake Charles trail (it was a gorgeous fall day and the colours of the leaves are now at their height) and got a flat tire right at the far end of the trail. It took me some time to get home again, despite the kindly efforts of a passing cyclist who lent me his cell phone and tried to fix my tire to no avail, so Ann had to take Emily and James to their party. I must get back into the habit of taking a pump and a repair kit with me.
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As reported last week, Ann took David to have his finger X-rayed on Monday. We never heard back from the doctor, so presumably there was nothing seriously wrong. Anyway, it seems to be a lot better now and is no longer bothering him.
Saturday was a particularly hectic day. Ann left early for an all day seminar about the Duke of Edinburgh program that David is enrolled in. I took David to his guitar lesson at 10 AM, Emily and James to their swimming lessons at 11:15, then went back to get David while they were swimming. Then back to get Emily and James to take them home for lunch. Then James went to a birthday party at 1 PM. I picked him up at 4 PM in time to take him and Emily to their gymnastics lessons (Ann had arrived home by this time). As soon as gymnastics was over, it was time for James's birthday party (only three months late!). He took seven of his friends to the Ground Zero climbing gym where they spent a couple of hours scaling the walls in climbing harnesses. Then back home for hot dogs, cake and ice cream followed by a sleepover. We lined the floor of the upstairs bedroom with mattresses and threw them all in. They finally got to sleep at about 11 PM but were up again this morning at 5:30.
Luckily today there have been few demands on our time, though David did go to a band practice of the church band in the afternoon and is now (in the early evening) at a Venturers meeting. He was supposed to have a soccer tryout this afternoon, but it has rained all day so the fields were closed. I spent much of the day watching the Bermuda Bowl (the world bridge championships) on the Internet. Unfortunately, after the first of seven days of round robin competition, Canada is tied for last place out of 22 countries. The top eight go through to the elimination rounds.
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This weekend James and David went camping with the Cub Pack at Camp Kidston near Middle Musquodoboit. That's the same camp that Emily and James went to in the summer (see the Archive). As it rained for most of the weekend, it was fortunate that they were actually staying in the main cabin rather than in tents. On Saturday there was a race which included a series of different activities. James was one of only three cubs that completed the race; most of them quit because it was too cold and miserable. Those three each earned their green star. During the course of the weekend the sixes (the smaller groups into which the pack is broken) had a competition. James's six also won this earning him a patch. So, along with a patch for participating in the camp, James came home with a star and two patches; not bad for his first major Cub outing.
David had a soccer game on Thursday (they lost 3-1 despite having most of the play throughout the game) and somehow managed to hurt the ring finger on his right hand. It didn't seem too bad at the time, but during the Cub camp it began to swell. Luckily one of the other Cub leaders is a nurse and splinted it for him. Ann took him to the doctor when he got back; he has to go and have it X-rayed tomorrow.
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My father died early last Tuesday morning after a brief illness. He had been in the hospital for about ten days when, last Monday evening, I got a call from my brother Simon saying that Dad had taken a turn for the worse. I quickly arranged a flight to Toronto, leaving at 7 AM the following morning, but Dad died in the night. Ann's sister Martha kindly picked me up at the airport and drove me to Mum's house in Aurora. For the next few days Simon and I helped Mum sort out her affairs, but, since Dad was such an organized person, there was comparatively little to be done. Ann, David, Emily and James flew up on late Saturday night, stayed at Martha and Thom's, then drove up to Aurora on Sunday. Katy flew up early on Tuesday morning, arriving just in time for the memorial service. We all flew home together on Tuesday night, arriving home at about 1 AM. We let the kids sleep in on Wednesday, but since then it has been back to the usual schedule.
Dad's memorial service was very well attended. I saw several people there that I had not seen in 35 years or more. It began with a service in the chapel at Thompson's Funeral Home in Aurora, followed by a reception a block down the street in the Anglican Church. Simon, Nick and I all gave short eulogies during the service, as did Dad's good friend Joe Clark. I have included those by Simon, Nick and myself below.
Simon's Eulogy
"This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel."
Those words were written by Horace Walpole in 1776.
I think my father would have appreciated that. He always enjoyed an apt quotation, properly attributed. And if there was ever any question about the accuracy of the quotation — as there often was — he would pull out one of his multitude of reference books and look it up.
This particular quotation came to my mind a couple of weeks ago as it became clear that Dad was terribly ill, and I started thinking about his life and the kind of man he was.
The facts are straightforward enough. Allan Hally was born in Wolverhampton, England, in 1916, to a Scottish father and English mother. He was an only child. He was educated at Oundle School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he got a master's degree in mechanical sciences, also known as mechanical engineering. He then went to work with his father, who was managing director of the Daimler Motor Company. When World War II began, the factory where Dad was working was converted to making aircraft, so he was in a so-called "reserved occupation" and could have been prevented from joining up. But because of his position, he was able to release himself, which he did, and joined the Royal Navy. As an engineer lieutenant in the navy's Coastal Forces, he was responsible for keeping a flotilla of motor torpedo boats in good working order, and he also worked in the Engineer-in-Chief's Department at the Admiralty. Near the end of the war, in late 1944, he met Susan Nicol at a dance in the town of Bath. Three months later they were married, and 60 years later they were still married — and still to each other! He resumed his business career after the war and was soon in senior management positions. Between 1949 and 1954, Mum and Dad had three sons. In 1958, we all came to Canada, where Dad ran a number of companies in the steel fabrication and transportation industries. He retired from business in 1977 and devoted his time to his many interests, including family genealogy, chess and various projects that involved building things with his hands, which he loved to do.
Well, those are the facts, but what sort of man was he? I reflected on Walpole's quotation about people who think and people who feel. I'm sure Dad would have considered himself a thinker, a man of ideas and intellect. He was very clever and had an impressive depth of knowledge on a wide range of subjects, from science to literature to the classics — a result, no doubt, of being educated at a good English public school. He was proud to be a Professional Engineer, and engineers are trained to be logical, analytical and rational. He was all those things.
And yet, oddly for an engineer, he was deeply superstitious — and not just about walking under ladders and Friday the 13th. He knew all kinds of obscure superstitions, and seemed to believe them. Once, a friend brought my mother a beautiful arrangement of lilacs as a present. Dad immediately took the flowers outside and put them on the deck — because it's bad luck to have lilacs in the house, apparently. He would get quite upset if someone put shoes on a table, because that's bad luck. And if anybody tapped a wine glass and made it ring, he would shudder and say a sailor had just died.
Now let's be honest — those are not the beliefs of a totally rational man.
He could also be very impulsive and emotional, although I think he sometimes had trouble accepting and dealing with his emotions and his feelings. That may be another result of being educated at a good English public school.
He was a fretter. He worried about everything, from the state of the global economy to whether your coffee mug was leaving a ring on the table. And he was probably the most organized person I've ever known. He loved to plan and organize everything and everybody around him. He could hardly go shopping without doing a critical path analysis first.
I'm afraid all this makes him sound rather grim, but he wasn't. He had a real sense of fun and a quick wit. He could be very funny, and would find humour in most situations — even as he worried about them. Until his later years, he loved parties and good eating and drinking, and the companionship that came with them. He liked to tell funny stories, and as he grew older he inclined to his own father's view that if a story is worth repeating, it's worth repeating again, and again, and again. He also loved animals, which was just as well, because my mother has said she would never have married a man who didn't like cats. He enjoyed mental games and diversions, especially chess and crossword puzzles, which he was very good at. He liked to recall one particular crossword from a highbrow English paper, which had him completely stumped. He couldn't get one answer — then it turned out the solution was entirely in ancient Greek.
The last time I spoke with Dad was Monday evening of last week, in the hospital. He had trouble talking because his face was covered by an oxygen mask. But his eyes were as bright as ever and he was quite lucid. We spoke of trivial things, as I was sure we would be talking again soon. That night he took a turn for the worse, and a day later he died. But though his body eventually failed him, his mind never did.
So if there's a lesson to be learned from the final stages of my father's life, it is this: keep doing those crossword puzzles.
Finally, I realized that Dad just didn't fit into Horace Walpole's neat categories of those who think and those who feel. He was too complicated a man, too full of contradictions. A superstitious engineer; a worrywart who may have taken life too seriously at times, but who also loved to laugh and make other people laugh.
To me, above all, he was my father, and I miss him.
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Nick's Eulogy
As I was thinking of Dad's long life and as I wondered what would be most appropriate to focus on for this occasion, I considered how he influenced his son's lives with his advice. I came back again and again to something that he very often told us concerning our careers and, more broadly, our paths in life. And in the simplest terms he advised Simon, David and myself to do whatever we wanted. He was a complex man and to a large extent he had not been afforded this luxury.
I'd like to relate an incident that occurred when we were all finishing or close to finishing high school and headed towards making our own way in the world.
I was back at home just for the weekend from school in Kingston and I had helped Dad set up the stereo so that the music in the living room, for obvious reasons, was separated from the music in the bedroom. I believe it was a Sunday and while I was resting in the bedroom and considering what to listen to first thing in the morning, Dad was in the living room fully immersed in the intricacies of one of his beloved cryptic crossword puzzles. Dad had a penetrating mind, he had been educated at one of the great universities, he was literary, scientific and he was a captain of Canadian industry, and he was in the living room enjoying his cup of tea on a peaceful Sunday morning.
That morning I thought it would be a good idea to start the day with some up tempo music but as I dropped the needle onto the LP I missed the spot where there is a gap between the adjacent songs and it landed right in the middle of one of my favourite guitar solos. A bit loud for the bedroom, I thought, and I moved to reduce the volume. It was only when I heard the shriek of anguish from the living room and simultaneously noticed that the inputs from speakers "A" were in fact plugged into the outputs for speakers "B", and vice versa, that I realized that something had gone terribly wrong. The music which I had assumed was coming from the speakers in the bedroom had in fact made its way to my ears through two closed doors and down twenty feet of corridor from the living room.
Now I imagine that there is a small yet statistically significant probability that within the group of highly educated, erudite professional gentlemen of my father's generation there is a subset of men who could, in fact, withstand the full and instantaneous 200 watt impact of one of those awesome, screeching guitar solos from Deep Purple in Rock, while sipping their tea on a peaceful Sunday morning. But Dad did not belong to that group.
I'm not sure which was the greater, his panic and rage, or my panic and terror as I heard him stomping down the hall for the inevitable confrontation, which took place in the bedroom doorway. Those of you who are familiar with Dad's intensity know that this would not be smooth sailing for either of us.
They say that the Oxford English Dictionary is becoming much more liberal these days in its acceptance of various words of jargon, commercial lingo and expletives, but fully half of what I heard in the following fifteen seconds has yet to be included. Dad was a man of boundaries which he set for himself and expected others to respect and the gist of it was that what I had done is something that one simply does not do.
Such was the essence of many of the early interactions Dad and I had as father and son (amongst them the time the TV fell off its stand and rolled across the room, the incident when the fire crackers exploded under my bed, and of course the car crashes).
But by lunchtime of the same day, after our nerves had settled a little, he surprised me by saying something completely unexpected. He said "You know, those rock and roll guys of yours, you know if that's what they want to do I say all the power to them, they make money at that too don't they, well I say if that's what they want to do that's just great".
And the point of course is that he used the short time we had together that weekend to impress upon me that I should follow my own path, which might be very different from his.
If I might, I'd like to pass this same advice on to Mum and Dad's grandchildren. Try to find out what you love to do, what you are passionate about, and do it. What you like best is not always obvious at first, and for the younger of you, don't worry it will reveal itself, it can take time. This sounds like simple counsel, and it is, but it is also subtle.
Because if you do follow your own passions there is a very good chance that you will become the fullness of who you are. It's an inner journey but if you follow it you will find that it will give you the strength and confidence to fit very comfortably into the much larger community outside of you.
It was a great relief to me and somewhat of a surprise when my Dad offered this advice to me 35 years ago, but I've followed it and over time I've seen that it works. For the past few years I have had the luxury of knowing that what I am doing is what I am supposed to be doing. Dad realized this too, and only a few weeks ago told me how glad he was to see me doing what I love. And over the recent past our relationship was as strong as it ever was.
So please consider this advice carefully — it's powerful and it's an extremely valuable part of the legacy your grandfather has left you.
My Eulogy
In the summer of 1963, and again in 1966, I drove with Dad, just him and me, on one of his business trips to the Maritimes. He took me on those trips, I presume, because he enjoyed my company, and I certainly enjoyed his. It was a time for me to see new places, to stay in nice hotels and to eat out every night. But most of all I liked it because I had Dad completely to myself so he could answer my questions about stuff. Any sort of stuff. Because Dad knew all kinds of interesting stuff about everything. Some of it was completely useless and some of it of great practicality. But most of it was facinating, especially to an eight year old with a strong sense of wonder.
On those trips I found out why there are tides. I learned that if a horse could run just a little bit faster, it could run across water without falling in. And I learned why a mouse, if it fell out of a tall tree, could get up and run away, but an elephant wouldn't be so lucky.
I was reminded of that mouse and elephant last week when, as a research scientist for the federal government, I completed a project looking for ways to reduce the fuel consumption of frigates in the Canadian Navy. This was a project in which I applied the laws of fluid drag to small ship models and the large frigates, exactly what Dad had explained to me over forty years before and what makes the small mouse fall more slowly than the large elephant. And I realized that for forty years I have never stopped following that sense of wonder because Dad showed me how much fun it can be to find out how and why things work.
Of course, Dad taught me a lot of other things over those forty years, not the least of which was how to be a good, kind and responsible person. And I like to think that I am still learning.
When I was still living at home, but after Simon and Nick had left for university, Dad and I used to play a lot of chess. Now, when Dad did anything, he wanted to do it well. But the fact is that, by then, I was better than him at chess and used to beat him regularly. What strikes me now is with what good grace and humour he took these regular beatings. I am sure that it was disappointing for him to lose, but this was transcended by the obvious pride that he took in the fact that I could beat him. That unwavering pride has sustained me in many ways over the course of my life. I only hope that I can follow Dad's example the next time my son David thrashes me at racquetball.
Emily succumbed to the inevitable this week and got glasses. We had had several clues over the past weeks that her eyesight was not as good as it should be, so Ann made an early appointment to have them checked (as we expect this for all our kids, though David has so far proved immune, we have been having them checked once a year). We picked them up on Thursday evening. Emily seemed quite surprised at how much better she could see and spent the rest of the evening reading us whatever she could find on the far side of the room.
Our Thanksgiving weekend has been fairly sedate (it has poured rain for three days straight), except that today we had 17 people for dinner, including Katy who came home for the weekend. We cooked the turkey and provided gravy, bread sauce, bread and apple and pumpkin pies (Emily and I made the pies yesterday). Appetizers, wine, salad, veggies and a few extra chairs were brought by our guests: Valerie and Jim, Carl and Roxanne, Claire, Rachel and Max, Ingrid, Mike and Alex and a doctoral student that Ingrid is working with. We added a few leaves to the kitchen table, put it in the dining room abutting with the dining room table in the living room and managed to find space for everyone. As usual with these pot luck affairs there was more than enough food for all, with leftover lunches accounted for for the next week or so.
September 2005 Archive
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