A Story About My Dad

An essay for Father's Day

Hello, Drawing Book readers! Sorry I missed posting my newsletter last week - I’ve been sick, unfortunately. I actually had some comics from my old Drawing Book all ready to post today, and then I remembered it was Father’s Day. So maybe it’s a good time to share some excerpts from an essay I wrote about my dad, a few years ago. (The whole essay was too long to share in this newsletter.) My dad died in 2014, and this essay, posted here on my old blog back in 2016, was my attempt to make sense of my relationship with him. Along with a few comics, of course.

The Story about my Dad

I wanted to write about my dad, but it was hard to do. My relationship with him was sometimes rocky. Our paths didn't often cross professionally, as he was usually out among the movers and shakers of Calgary, and I was usually anywhere else, trying to figure out how to make a career out of being an introverted artsy type.

Because we didn't move in the same circles, my relationship with him was confined, I guess you could say, to the personal connection between us. That feels a bit easier to write about, and indeed, this post has turned into something of a personal essay.

My dad was born in Toronto and grew up in what's now Mississauga. He came from a family of entrepreneurs. He was the middle son, the artsy one in a family of scientists. Although he looks so scholarly in this class photo, he didn't love school. Actually, finding out about my dad's irreverence towards school was eye-opening for me. His standards were so high, I'd always assumed he'd have been a nose-to-the-grindstone kind of scholar himself. But academia wasn't his passion.

He went to the University of Toronto, where I later went, too. He told me about a professor who showed him the crowning achievement of his academic career: a leaflet squished between two other books on a shelf, according to dad. It apparently contained the solution to a long-unanswered minor literary mystery. Dad wasn't impressed.

He left after first year to travel around Europe and Africa. This was when he got the idea that architecture was the field from which he could learn the most, since it seemed to him to encompass so many other fields of study. He came back to get his B. Arch from U of T, where a charismatic lecturer warned the new students that the course would force them to "abandon all their cherished beliefs." This kind of challenge was more along the lines of what dad wanted.

After graduating and working in Saskatchewan, Dad went to Calgary for a job interview. He called my mom from a pay phone to tell her he'd been offered a job with a local firm. We moved to Calgary in 1976. Dad started his own firm a couple of years after that, which went through various incarnations before being swallowed up by a larger firm, when he died. I worked at his office a few different times, including around 1994 when I took this picture. Dad had grown up loving the folk singers of Toronto's Yorkville hippie scene, and although his taste in music took a turn in the "country" direction when he came out west, his guitar was always there.

Music, Part 1

My childhood was woven through with the sound of my dad’s guitar. My dad led our church's folk choir, which is why my head is forever filled with 1970's Catholic folk songs that I will pretty much never have any occasion to sing. Some of those melodies are lovely, and some not as traditional as you'd think. Dad put the words of the "Our Father" to the tune of Gordon Lightfoot's "Song for a Winter's Night" and that was the version we sang every week. I had no idea it was a "real" song until I heard it as an adult.

One of my first paintings was this one of my dad in full Victorian gear striding down Scarboro Avenue with a bunch of Christmas carolling neighbours.

We didn’t always get along. I was driven to distraction by his habit of informing participants of the plan - after it was already happening. He always seemed astonished when I'd complain about this pattern. He believed so deeply in the outcomes he was aiming for, that it didn't seem to occur to him that someone might take issue with mere logistical details.

Things seemed so easy to him. Everything seemed possible. No wonder he got frustrated when others saw obstacles that didn’t exist for him. He finally got his eyes checked around the age of 60. He’d been concerned that one eye wasn’t seeing as well as it always had. The doctor told him that his bad eye had gone down to 20/20. Dad couldn't believe this reduced standard was what most people considered the best case scenario. I think that’s how he saw the whole thing.

My dad loved his own parents deeply. For their 65th wedding anniversary in 2003, he had the Calgary Herald print a newspaper front page to bring to their celebration in Toronto. “Important dignitaries gather to celebrate Burgener anniversary,” the headline read. I always thought that said so much about my dad. He wanted to honour his parents, and “important dignitaries” was what he picked. Not, “Burgener marriage sets record for the deepest love of the century,” or “Burgener couple surrounded by dear friends and family on happy occasion,” or "A good time was had by all."

I sometimes thought public recognition was my dad's measure of success. He was featured on a billboard advertising the then-new Banker's Hall downtown shopping centre. He'd achieved notoriety by participating in the "Polar Bear Dip" (a jump into a freezing river to raise money for charity) in the buff. The billboard, which said simply, "As you are," poked fun at my dad's apparent reputation as a local nudist. The first time I saw it, I also happened to be with my dad, and driving a car. Needless to say, I swerved, and some words of astonishment escaped my lips - to my dad's amusement.

It was sweet and ironic to me that, in the last year of his life, my dad developed a passion for cappuccino. Did our ability to sip coffee together at last, actually help to heal our relationship? I actually kind of think it did.

Music, Part 2

When my dad got sick with cancer, it gave me an opportunity to spend time with him in a way I hadn't for years. Our paths had gone different ways, but we shared the same reverence for the music of my childhood. That's the only word I can use to describe it. Those songs just evoked a simpler, happier time. I'm the most self-conscious perfomer in a family of musicians, but I played my guitar for my dad whenever I could - because he couldn't, anymore.

I asked my dad what songs he would like me to sing. “I’ll walk in the rain,” he replied instantly. The chords of John Denver’s tune came up from who knows where they had lurked for thirty-odd years.

I asked my brother John if he could think of any songs dad would like to hear. "Isn't there a song that starts, “I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song,”  I asked. “He used to sing that all the time. But that’s all I can recall.” “That’s Simon and Garfunkel,” John remembered. I Googled it that night, and shivered to hear the echoes of my dad’s remembered voice coming out of my computer speakers:

Hello, hello, hello, hello.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…
That’s all there is.

That’s all there is

When we got the news that my dad had died, I was just about to start work. I was supposed to do some graphic recording for a full day's event with a really great local organization that my dad would have liked to know I was part of. My brother John had come out to volunteer at the event, so he was there too. Although we knew my dad's death could come at any time, we had already agreed that we wanted to be there. I had just seen him the night before. And after all, pretty much nothing could have pleased my dad more than to have known that I was finally earning my living as an artist and that my un-schmoozy brother was taking in a seminar about the value of authentic networking.

We got the phone call. There was just time to acknowledge the news and decide that we would just stay. The workshop started, and I went into the deep listening zone that I seem to go into when I am recording a talk. 

I heard the the presenter speaking, but suddenly noticed that in the background of my mind somewhere, I was hearing Simon and Garfunkel softly singing:

Hello, hello, hello, hello.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…
That’s all there is.

I had been working for about ten minutes when I realized I'd just drawn my dad. I drew my brothers and myself around him, hardly registering that that's what I was doing. I drew for about seven hours. That line, hello, hello, hello, hello... echoed through my head the entire time. It was one of the most surreal experiences I've ever had. But it was also nice to be surrounded by good people, doing the work I wanted to be doing, and having a quiet space in my mind for a whole day, to start to come to terms with the loss of a person who'd been there my entire life.

Parts of this essay may sound critical of my dad. I guess they are. He was a complicated person and we had a complicated relationship. I'm proud that, despite some fundamentally different values, we never stopped trying to reassure each other that we loved and respected each other deeply... even if we didn't always understand that that was what we were doing, at the time.

We never stopped trying to get through to each other. We railed at each other when we couldn't. We laughed, usually at funny old family stories that I fear I will have no one left to share with, now. And we cried over the same old songs.

Important dignitaries gathered to attend my dad’s funeral. That made me smile.

Thanks for reading! If you want to read the whole essay about my dad, which features a few more comics, you can find it here on my old blog. Happy Father’s Day!