1954
Dear Dan & May—
You will have gotten Buddy’s letter, and heard the sad news. Our boy’s morale is pretty low right now, and he really needs encouragement. His professors all feel he should keep on, but of course it’s pretty difficult for him to get started again. I’ve been trying to encourage him to dig into his research, and he’s beginning to do that. What worries him most is time—and the pressure he feels to start earning a steady income. I keep trying to minimize the latter and to assure him that we’ll make out all right, for I fear that once he gets involved in a regular full-time job, he will lose sight of this major goal.
Mom’s “sad news” was the mixed feedback Dad had received from the three sociology professors reviewing his PhD dissertation, which was entitled “Negroes in Toronto, a Sociological Study of a Minority Group.” The professors believed Dad’s thesis, while relevant and full of well-researched and interesting statistics, didn’t go into enough specific detail about the actual day-to-day lives of individual Negroes. This meant that Dad, who’d assumed his dissertation was complete, had a lot more fieldwork left to do; he’d have to spend time, and a lot of it, not simply interviewing but living with Black individuals and families. To Dad’s mind this was a major setback. How could he spend weeks living with families scattered across the city, earn a living and be an attentive father, not to mention husband? Something had to give. Dad was torn between two powerful Hill male traditions: supporting your wife and family versus joining the select ranks of educated elite. His choice, made clear in a letter to his parents, may have been the only responsible one, but that did little to assuage his sense of conflict: “Unfortunately, my thesis and graduate work are standing still and I am making absolutely no progress in this direction, I feel the necessity to do so many things both in the home and in the community that the PhD seems to be fading into the far distant, untouchable horizon.”
Part of him must have despaired that he was once again living through a variation of his failures in the army. Of trying to follow in his father’s footsteps and running into barriers as insurmountable as they were unfair. Dad, however, was not one to repeat past mistakes. Grounded by his family responsibilities, he was also married to a woman who matched his unflagging loyalty, a woman who believed in his thesis, shared his career vision and had the brains and patience and tact to nudge him forward with equal measures of love, support and advice.
On the one hand, Mom reassured Dad that, PhD or not, he had all the work he could possibly handle and then some. At the same time, Mom busied herself behind the scenes to keep Dad’s eye on the distant prize. She secretly enlisted relatives on both sides of the family to give her five or ten dollars for Dad’s birthday, so she could set up a “Deskfor-Dan fund” to “perk him up and get him back to concentrating on his work.”
Mom’s role of invisible, unofficial collaborator proved to be the extra gear Dad desperately needed to stay on task. So long as Dad was working, studying side by side with Mom, it took on the form of a shared project, more than a hobby but less than some onerous never-ending project. Suggesting ways he could humanize his thesis, Mom also played secretary, typing and editing his work.
Still, over the next few years, with all that was going on, Dad’s dissertation languished. By 1958, he was commuting several hours a day to Toronto, working full-time at the Social Planning Council (SPC) and studying and writing exams related to his university courses. He’d come home each night to an exhausted wife and three very young kids, all clamouring for his attention. In the back of his mind, he must have known he couldn’t put off his thesis forever. But as with any long, challenging and potentially life-changing project, the longer he avoided taking it on, the more overwhelming it felt to take charge of it again.
Eventually his faculty advisor said, “Hand in your finished dissertation by the end of the summer or you’ll have to start your PhD all over again from scratch.” This was exactly the kind of deadline Dad needed. He agreed to stop working full-time while managing, in his inimitable fashion, to procure a five-hundred-dollar grant from the University of Toronto. Dr. S.D. Clark, happy that his favourite student was finally buckling down, persuaded the head of SPC to give Dad the summer off, with the understanding that he’d return to work in the fall, once his PhD was completed.
Dad spent the summer of 1959 immersed in the Black community of downtown Toronto, where he interviewed and often lived with people in settlement houses. He visited railway porters, a teenager working at a luggage store, Blacks who had just immigrated to Canada and Blacks who had been here for generations. Dad’s letter to his father shows just how well his research was paying off:
During the month of June I was trying to discern the “way of life” of Negro families in the most depressed—physically, economically, morally—district in Toronto. I have practically lived with a lower class family as I chummed around with a young man who grew up in the area. I’ve been in dives, pool halls, beer parlours, destitute houses and have talked to all types of people. The people have accepted me—Black and white—so long as I’m with Duke (my friend) and I’ve amassed what I feel to be valuable information. Never did I or have I used pencil or paper in front of the people in “the district” but have used the technique of casual participation and easy conversation—devoid of the normal interview approach. I find this technique most fruitful and less damaging to the relationship I am trying to establish.
Dad would stay up for hours each night writing down all he’d uncovered while his memories were still fresh. The five-hundred-dollar grant was spent on a daytime nanny so my parents could stay on schedule. Dad’s professors, impressed with this new thesis material, rewarded him with assignments usually doled out to professionals with far greater experience. Between giving weekly college lectures on the “Sociology of Deviant Behaviour” and working with a research team on a study of chronic alcoholics, Dad somehow found the time to complete his improved thesis. And in 1960, after what seemed like an endless struggle, Dad was awarded what must have surely felt like the proverbial (and literal, in terms of how it would impact his future salaries) pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Finally, just like his father, Dad had his coveted PhD.
If I try, I can still remember the commotion that swept through our Newmarket home once Dad’s accomplishment sank in. As a six-year-old, I studied my parents’ moods avidly, quick to understand that when they were happy I could get away with a lot more stuff—leaving my toys all over the place for Larry and Karen to trip over, interrupting Dad’s reading or Mom’s telephone conversation without receiving an icy “wait your turn” stare—than when they were anxious or unhappy. The period immediately following Dad’s PhD passed like one sustained celebration. People streamed in and out of our Newmarket house, bearing gifts, wearing funny hats and saying strange things like, “Now you’re a ‘Fud,’ Dan,” and “Do we have to call you ‘doctor’?” Parties would blend into more parties with semi-rude diagrams and illustrations plastered across our bathroom door. Towards the end of each night dozens of people would holler: “Speech, speech, speech!”
“Oh Dan, not this again,” Mom would pretend-groan. “We all know what you’re about to say!”
“Shush, woman!” Dad would roar, his voice soaring over the cacophony of clinking glasses and alcohol-infused chatter. He drew Mom tight up against his side and waited for her head to rest against his shoulder.
“Okay, Dan, you’ve set the stage now,” Mom observed, meaning the room had, on cue, fallen silent.
“Daggum, as you can all see, I married myself one hard-headed woman. My pappy always told me, ‘Buddy, the key to happiness and success in life is to marry a woman smarter than you.’”
“Hear! Hear!” the guests chanted.
Pausing deliberately, Dad tenderly straightened out Mom’s hair. Then he said, “Without this woman I would never have made it through the University of Toronto. And I would never have received my PhD. So let’s toast Donna, the smartest, most loving woman in the world.”
“I don’t know when I’m ever going to see this man now,” Mom added, once the hooting died down. “He was already working so many jobs before this big degree. Now he’s going to be so busy that I’m going to forget that I ever had a husband.”
“Actually, Donna, now he’s gonna work half the time and get paid twice as much!” someone in the crowd yelled out.
I remember this slew of PhD parties so vividly because they reflected the very best of what Newmarket symbolized to Dad and Mom, and by extension, our entire family. The shared momentum a couple feels building a life together hummed through our house. There was the unspoken, satisfying sensation of all things falling into place. The challenges and setbacks my parents had encountered during their early years in Canada could have easily divided them. But instead they drew closer. If they were, in a sense, outliers in this country, it was as they preferred it. It made them appreciate each other, as well as their small and quirky circle of socially conscious friends, even more. In their unassuming way, my parents defined themselves by how they didn’t fit into the prevailing culture that exerted its invisible hold on most of southern Ontario.
Not so long ago Dad had been an alienated, envenomed divorcé working in an ineffectual welfare department in Detroit. Now the world appeared wide open and welcoming, vibrating with promise and possibilities. A PhD was a rare achievement for a Black man in Canada in 1960, and it provided Dad with a status usually reserved for doctors and lawyers. As a sociologist, he understood all too well the importance of symbols when he declared, “No one will ever be allowed to call me Dr. Hill. I’m no doctor. I don’t want any special title.” Within a year, however, everyone other than his closest friends and relatives referred to him as “Dr.” And he never objected.
Much as Mom boasted that Dad hardly needed a PhD to give him a step up in the work force, she must have known that Dad’s employability was never the real issue. The name Daniel Grafton Hill III carried with it tremendous weight, responsibilities and traditions. Now Dad could deservedly call himself his father’s son.
As for Dad’s sense of contentment at this time, his 1959 letter to his parents confirms that he’d found, for a while at any rate, as perfect a balance as any man could possibly hope for: “I think at 35 years, I can truthfully say that my childhood lesson was well learned—love and devotion of family and home. This, mixed with what I feel is a proper balance regarding material and social values has made my new family life with Donna and kids both easy and enjoyable. Problems either melt away, become reconciled or are lived with in an atmosphere of love, warmth and mutual respect.”
While education was one highly effective way of transcending the colour barrier in the 1950s, Dad understood that geography played a determining factor as well. The general rule that the further north you ventured, the less oppressive the racism was a major reason why he’d moved to Canada. Compared to what he’d experienced as a soldier in America’s Deep South, Toronto’s “polite racism” at times intrigued and bemused him. For instance, when my newlywed parents had tried to rent a basement apartment in Toronto, the landlord would typically take one look at the two of them and apologize, claiming the apartment had just been rented. This was obviously a lie, but from Dad’s point of view, it still beat the American south, where miscegenation was against the law.
Since a typical Canadian wouldn’t admit to being racist, Mom simply had to show up at an apartment for rent with a Caucasian friend and leave a deposit, and then Dad would take the place of her Caucasian friend a few weeks down the line, when it was time to move in. But as Dad’s educational credentials became more impressive, even incidents of polite racism lessened. Class trumped race in almost every situation.
This sometimes lulled me into almost forgetting that Dad (and by extension, I) was Black. But that could be dangerous. Because then something unexpected would happen to remind me that the world was not quite as oblivious to colour as it seemed. Like when Dad spent the night in the Don Jail.
It was Dad’s first post-PhD job, working at the Addiction and Alcoholism Research Foundation, that landed him in trouble. His first assignment at the foundation was to lead a study on the phenomenon of revolving-door addicts. Why did so many alcoholics land in jail, serve a term, get released and then end up back in jail again? Dad, who was well acquainted with the warden of the Don Jail, obtained permission to interview several alcoholic inmates in their cells. One Saturday evening, halfway through one of Dad’s prison interviews, a new guard started his shift. When Dad was ready to go home, the new guard wouldn’t let him out of jail, claiming he was a prisoner who was using the interviewing sociologist disguise as a clever ruse to escape. The warden had gone out of town for Thanksgiving weekend. So Dad spent the night in the slammer while Mom paced the kitchen, stretching the phone cord to the breaking point, waking up everyone she knew, trying to track Dad down. When Dad finally stomped through the front door, it was already morning.
“If the warden hadn’t placed a call to the jail to check on things, no telling what might have happened to me. I could have been locked up in that place till kingdom come.” Dad was spitting out his words at such a clip that I was missing most of what he was saying.
“But Dan, how could the guard have possibly confused you for …” Mom asked, unable to even say the word “prisoner.”
“He knew damned well I was no prisoner,” Dad fulminated, his clothes wrinkled and foul smelling, his usually baby-smooth face displaying a hint of whiskers. “It must have driven him round the bend to see an educated Black man interviewing a white man in prison.”
Dad would eventually rejig his “night in jail” experience, sometimes going so far as to claim he’d escaped by picking the lock on his cell with his pen and tiptoeing by the snoring prison guards. There were two messages I absorbed from all of this. One: Part of coping with any bad luck thrown your way is to turn it into a funny story where you always—facts be damned—emerge triumphant. Two: All the professional status in the world could never guarantee Dad complete protection from the “crime” of being a Negro. Dad, and therefore all of us, were like animals roaming a giant game reserve, and no one knew when the bars would arbitrarily be slammed down, enclosing us in an invisible prison.
Dad’s best defence was to never stop achieving.
Not long after Dad’s prison stint, in 1961, he wrote a letter informing his parents that “the offers are pouring in for employment.” After meticulously detailing a whole slew of job prospects (listing them in order of status), Dad allowed a glimpse of his vulnerability to show through, something he was less and less prone to do as a middle-aged man: “Undoubtedly my PhD-enhanced job opportunities made the future for myself and family more secure … I want time—and a badly needed rest before moving on to the next plateau. I have been extremely tired and weary lately and sometimes wonder if the strain of the last two years isn’t catching up with me. I try not to think of it too much.”
It’s likely that Dad was unknowingly sharing with his parents the early symptoms of his undetected diabetes. Regrettably, the closest he would come to getting some of that “badly needed rest” was writing about it. As always, his hastily scrawled comments about his insidious fatigue and wanting to spend more time with his family were tucked into one or two lines at the bottom of the page, once the latest news concerning his career had been catalogued.
Dad’s first big break came as a result of Mom’s behind-the-scenes connections. In 1962, after hearing that the Ministry of Labour was looking for someone to start up the Ontario Human Rights Commission, Mom phoned an old work associate who happened to be a close friend of the deputy minister of labour, Tom Eberle, and advised, in her usual direct manner, “You tell Tom Eberle that no one’s better qualified than Dan Hill.”
The first Dad heard of this conversation was when Eberle contacted him for a job interview. (“I didn’t want to get your father’s hopes up” was Mom’s reason for keeping Dad in the dark.) Within weeks of being interviewed, Dad officially became the director of the very first human rights commission in Canada.
During Dad’s twelve-year reign at the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC), he generated hundreds of news stories and newspaper headlines. One in particular sheds some light on the prevailing attitude towards minorities at the time: “Negro and Jew Spearhead March by Indians.”
It’s doubtful that, back in 1965, the readers of the Winnipeg Tribune would have considered this front-page headline to be anything out of the ordinary. My father, the “Negro” in question (the “Jew” was one of his closest work allies and the future head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Alan Borovoy), taped this headline to his office wall, where it remained a source of mirth and inspiration for many years. Incidentally, the facts behind the headline were accurate. Dad and Borovoy had surreptitiously bused Natives from northern Ontario into the town of Kenora, where their protests about hideous living conditions on their outlying reserves would catch the eye of the national media.
If nothing else, this headline indicates exactly how resistant the media and public were to the rights of minorities back in the sixties. The overall philosophy could be compared to many Americans’ views on gun control today. The idea that a restaurant or hotel owner could be denied his right to determine whom to serve, or rent an apartment to, was looked upon as an affront to personal liberty. Neighbours would accost my father in a grocery store or on our street and screech, “What about my civil liberties! It’s my democratic right to hire whomever I want!”
This was precisely why Dad was the perfect fit for the commission. He was a rabble-rouser who loved confrontation. Better still, because he was building the commission from the ground up in a country where no such agency had previously existed, he didn’t have to worry about following existing structures or protocols. Dad’s early days at the OHRC consisted of him, his secretary and his rusted-out Volkswagen—the antithesis of civil servant bureaucracy. Emboldened by the Ministry of Labour’s promise that he was free to conduct his start-up agency without any kind of political interference, Dad spent upwards of ten days out of most months driving all over the province setting up regional offices and investigating cases of possible discrimination.
Unlike a lot of professionals in the field of human rights, Dad could go from combative to charming, from deadly serious to slapstick funny, depending on the situation. How fitting that his combination of incorrigible mischief and considerable powers of coercion was put to such good use—especially when traditional methods failed to bring an alleged discriminator around.
One of Dad’s early cases involved a boathouse owner in Chatham who refused to rent fishing boats to Blacks. Dad countered by convening a public hearing. The boathouse owner had no way of knowing that Dad had a special gift for transforming public hearings into community events. Upon arriving at the hearing, the first thing the boathouse owner noticed was that almost everyone in the audience was Black, courtesy of Dad’s expert recruiting skills. During an especially withering cross-examination, the boathouse owner folded. Dad, suspicious of the man’s resolve, quickly called for an adjournment and pulled a bunch of Black people from the audience and into the judge’s chambers, where he arranged for them to immediately put deposits down on fishing boats for the summer. Some of the Blacks balked, claiming not to like fishing. “That’s irrelevant,” Dad said. “You’re going fishing, and that’s that.”
The best anecdotes about Dad’s work adventures came to my attention when his friends dropped by our house. There was always a parade of human rights types drifting in and out of our living room: an assortment of university professors, lawyers, left-leaning politicians and people who worked for Dad at the commission. They were, by and large, a serious bunch, huddled over glasses of scotch, puffing absentmindedly on pipes, discussing (and as the alcohol kicked in, shouting and swearing about) the Big Issue of the moment: Vietnam, the race riots in America’s inner cities, the Cold War, whether Prime Minister Trudeau was a true enemy or ally of the “cause.” It was as if the fate of the world lay in the hands of these dozen or so friends and colleagues of Dad’s, and if someone left our house harbouring the wrong opinion about something we were all doomed. Whenever things got too tense, usually when the last drop of alcohol was consumed, Dad would break the mood by launching into one of his stories. Whether summarizing some human rights case he was fighting in court or spinning some tale about his army days, he showered his attention democratically, his eyes dancing from person to person. He never failed to entertain, his laughter sailing above the debating voices, bathing everyone in warmth.
Often Dad had me bartend his little get-togethers. Nothing pleased me more as a sixteen-year-old than getting his earnest, intellectual friends plowed out of their minds. As the evening wound down, Dad, slightly tipsy, would start bragging about my musical gifts. “Danny must’ve picked it up from his grandfather,” he’d laugh. “Now go grab that guitar of yours, boy, and treat us to one of your latest protest songs.”
I’d get my guitar and be singing for Dad and his friends within seconds, before Dad could have a change of heart. But my moment of glory was always short-lived. Midway through the first chorus of my latest masterpiece, Dad, unable to contain himself, would shout out, “When did you write that, son?” expecting me to explain the song’s origin and continue singing without dropping a beat.
His friends, reacting to me as though I were the first teenager on earth to sing an original song—while simultaneously playing the guitar no less—would pounce on me with the inevitable question once my song was completed: “Are the lyrics autobiographical?”
I’d just finished a seven-minute, two-chord first-person epic about a boy who, ostracized from society, had clubbed a man to death.
“Yup,” I’d answer, so intoxicated by all this high-powered attention that I’d managed to forget that “autobiographical” and “biographical” don’t mean the same thing.
“He’s a human rights songwriter,” Dad would pipe up, as if that somehow justified my homicidal leanings.
“Ahhh. Of course,” someone in the group would say, as they all nodded thoughtfully. Then, before I assaulted his friends with another marathon minor-chord dirge, Dad would revert to form, saying, “Danny, time to start cleaning up.”
Usually, the last guest to leave Dad’s rousing get-togethers was Alan Borovoy. Dad and Borovoy became acquainted in the late fifties when Borovoy was just a rookie lawyer. They were both getting their feet wet as professional activists, or, to use Borovoy’s term, “shit disturbers.” A good decade younger and greener than Dad, Borovoy took immediate note of Dad’s ability to flatter people without coming across as unctuous. If there was one thing that people in power shared, it was an inordinate amount of vanity, something Dad loved to exploit. When, early on in their friendship, Borovoy expressed concern that his bosses at the Jewish Labour Committee wouldn’t allow him to pull off some of the more radical things he wanted to implement, Dad’s solution was “Make a dinner for them and honour them. You do that and they won’t pay any attention to the things you’re doing; the dinner’s going to be uppermost in their minds.”
Physically, Borovoy and Dad were compelling opposites. Borovoy, a bundle of wiry intensity, his small, darting eyes upstaged by thick eyebrows and a jockey’s lithe build, perfectly offset Dad’s deceptively easygoing, lumbering physicality. Together, their irreverence and rascally spirit crackled through our house, standing in sharp contrast to their outer, public demeanour as no-nonsense human rights activists. An avowed bachelor, Borovoy would have Dad in stitches over his misbegotten romances, while clearly enjoying the helter-skelter family atmosphere of the Hill household. Above all, the two of them shared a Machiavellian philosophy when it came to advancing the cause of human rights. According to Borovoy,
[Dan’s] instincts, his judgment was so good. We were doing God’s work but we were also having an incredible lot of fun with the whole thing. I remember once saying to him, “Dan, if there is a frontal way you could solve a problem with the government or an anal way, you’ll always choose the anal way, simply because it’s more fun for you.” I believed in his integrity completely, even as I delighted in the amount of skullduggery in which he could benignly engage.
Surely, Dad saw a lot of his former self in Borovoy: the unrepentant womanizer, the good-hearted troublemaker, the practical idealist. Dad’s own need for a trustworthy co-conspirator had remained unchanged since childhood. Borovoy turned out to be the perfect adult replacement for his younger sister, Doris, or his high school chum Mushmouth.
During one of my teenaged bartending stints I cornered Borovoy, after plying him with a few stiff drinks, and persuaded him to speak at my high school in his capacity as head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. This was my rather awkward way of reaching out to my father, trying to connect with one of his closest friends. The afternoon that Borovoy spent at my school was a great success, even though it almost got me a failing mark in history. Enjoyable as it was to watch Borovoy make a fool out of my pompous, reactionary history teacher during their debate over Trudeau’s War Measures Act (“Excuse me for talking while you’re interrupting,” Borovoy quipped at one point, whereupon my teacher’s sputtering was drowned out by the roar of auditorium laughter), it was his handful of stories concerning Dad’s work at the commission, which he shared with me during our walks to and from my school, that truly affected me.
Alternating between rarefied professor-speak and lively street slang, Borovoy unspooled the story of Dad dropping everything to drive to the southern Ontario town of Amherstburg to investigate a cross-burning incident. There was enormous concern that this may have been the work of the Ku Klux Klan, a suspicion that was dividing this small city along colour lines. Dad quickly discovered that the Klan had nothing to do with the incident. Rather than packing up and going home, or making provocative speeches to further heighten the festering racial tension, Dad stuck around for a few days, gauging the mood of the community. Using the pressure of the aroused community as a bargaining chip, he convinced the mayor of Amherstburg to set up a committee to find jobs for young Black kids in areas where they had never worked before.
I’d been tempted to respond by mentioning to Borovoy that Dad’s conciliatory talents were not quite so obvious in the privacy of our own home. But I became distracted when Borovoy lectured me on the importance of staying in school, wondering, as I walked him to the bus stop, if Dad had put him up to this. I managed to check my indignation over two of Canada’s heaviest human rights hitters ganging up on me by focusing on the irony of the situation. Dad might well have been Mr. Selfless Arbitrator in the outside world, but at home he loved nothing more than to stir things up. In fact he was at his happiest when he had the household up in arms.
Despite Dad’s impressive negotiating skills, not all of his cases ended in triumph. No one hated losing more than Dad. In 1971, he took a case all the way to the Supreme Court. A Toronto landlord had refused to rent out the apartment in his house to a Black man. Because the apartment did not have a separate entry (the landlord might have to witness a Black tenant cross a shared stairway to get to his flat), it wasn’t, technically, a self-enclosed apartment. Thus, according to the law at the time it was not legally an act of discrimination.
The decision came down 5–2 in favour of the landlord. The defeat left Dad deeply upset, all the more so because the Ontario government had insisted that he use a government lawyer in the Supreme Court case. Dad had believed his only chance of winning the case was to use John Sopinka, arguably the top constitutional lawyer for this kind of case in Ontario. (Sopinka went on to be a federal Supreme Court justice.) What angered Dad the most about being saddled with an inexperienced lawyer was his belief that the government didn’t actually want to win the case. In Dad’s view, it came down to politics. What if the public, thinking the government was stepping into the sanctity of their personal property—in this case by letting an “undesirable” tenant lope through a shared stairway—voted against it in the next election?
Dad didn’t publicize his suspicion. But in 1973, when Tom Eberle was replaced by a new deputy minister of labour, Dad felt he had less autonomy at the OHRC and announced his resignation. Dad’s official reason for leaving, while diplomatically worded, still manages to convey his enormous pride:
I left the Ontario Human Rights Commission after 111/2 faithful years (the last two as its chairman) … It’s time to do something else. I stayed with it longer than I had expected to… Ontario’s human rights laws are the best in the country. We were the first province to give its commission statutory powers… It was very rewarding work but I needed a change. Change, change, change—human beings need change.
Dad was on the verge of turning fifty. His twelve years of work at the OHRC must have felt like one sustained sprint. Had he not stepped down it’s conceivable that, given the insistent tick tick tick of his diabetes (still a secret to all but his family), he wouldn’t have made it to sixty, or even fifty-five. But he couldn’t have worked as passionately, nor could he have driven himself as hard, had he not loved what he did.
Like so many highly driven people, Dad was a different man outside the home than he was with us. A man can only have so much charm, his reservoir of diplomacy and playful cajoling can only run so deep. Did my transformation into a brooding, withdrawn teenager contribute to Dad’s frequent ill temper when he arrived home? Or was it the other way around? All I know is that my moods were in constant lockstep with Dad’s, my antennae expertly tuned to his emotions whenever he marched through our front door. I may have been resentful of Dad’s power over me, but because our home felt complete, safe and far more stimulating when Dad was around, I longed for his presence. Even as I hated it.