Buried Treasure on Lyle Hill

He was the kindest, most gentle man I have ever known, and I loved him for it.

My dad was born at home in Greenock, Scotland in 1910. Thirty-nine years later, I followed suit. Unfortunately, I never met his dad, a crane operator in the Greenock torpedo factory, as he died shortly before I was born.

I don't know a lot about Dad's life before me - just snippets of stories about his childhood and youth, like the time he acquired a permanently deformed fingernail after one of his friends, startled by a frog, dropped a heavy storm drain grate; and later, when he sang tenor songs out the window of the YMCA to impress the girls in the street below.

Then came war. I've already written about how Mum and Dad met as pen pals.

Most of my earliest memories are of Dad taking me places - to the beach, to the Italian ice cream shop, and to my favourite place - the top of Lyle Hill.

Greenock and Gourock on the Clyde from Lyle Hill

There was a circle of indentations in the ground near the summit. Dad said if I tried digging in them I might be lucky and find buried treasure. I dug in one but didn't find anything. Dad suggested I try a different one. I did, and found a penny! He suggested some others, and I dug up more coins, even a sixpence! On our way home, I suspect he did a lot of internal grinning, and I was bursting with excitement to tell Mum all about our adventure. It was easily ten years later when I was marveling to him about the coins on Lyle Hill that he finally confessed to planting them.

In 1957, we emigrated to Victoria, British Columbia in Canada. Dad said he would have been more homesick, but was comforted by the similarity of the landscape and the mountains across the water.

Victoria on the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Gonzales Hill

Again, my memories of Dad's life in Victoria seem to be just snippets: my mum often playing his favourite melody, "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano for him; our suspicion that he was colour blind because of the blue trees in his paintings; and later, signs of his advancing Alzheimer's when the last batch of the blackberry wine he made every year turned to vinegar and he 'solved' the problem by adding large amounts of sugar...

Except for The Upper Room, a daily devotional he read every morning while eating his porridge alone (he was up and off to work before the rest of the house stirred), the only books he seemed to read were westerns. One summer we drove to California, and as we passed through Oregon, we came upon the Rogue River. Suddenly, Dad was like a little kid, so excited to see for himself the river he had read about in Zane Grey's stories.

Dad was a gifted carpenter. He loved to build furniture and fix things, and would never accept payment for the work he did for our friends. I still cherish his old hand tools with his name stamped into their wooden handles. We used to walk along the cliff top and he would identify different kinds of wood washed up on the beach below and then go down, saw them into chunks, and lug them back to his workshop in the basement.

After almost forty years, it was finally time for Mum and Dad to leave their house and move into a condo. I don't recall Dad ever getting angry or saying an unkind word, but on their last day there, Dad went down to the basement, fired up his table saw and cut some wood for the last time. As the noise of the saw echoed through the house, we knew how he felt.

Although he gave up driving, much to everyone's relief, he continued to go on long bicycle rides with Mum every day well into his 80's. It was a sad day when we realized it was time for him to stop, because his dementia had progressed to the point that he would cycle off and get lost if not closely watched, and because he would pedal so slowly that he fell over turning corners.

Mum used to do jigsaw puzzles. One night, she woke up to find Dad standing over the puzzle eating the pieces. After that, we moved him into a nursing home. He didn't complain, but expressed his disapproval by catching pneumonia and dying peacefully about a week after he arrived.

All my life, I never told Dad how I felt about him until, in his last hours, I thanked him for being my dad and told him that I loved him. I don't know if he heard me, but I hope so.

If I could have only half of his kindness, I would be a very lucky man.