What makes a great dad? To be honest, I’m still trying to put it all together. I’ve been going at this alone for a little bit now, just like anyone who lost their father young. I don’t have a map and my Pop isn’t around to offer advice.
My old man was lot of things. He was a dreamer, a fixer, a bit of a schemer, and a total skeptic. He loved any kind of discount and never minded bending the truth a little to make a good deal happen. My dad played the lotto twice a week, and at least once a week we’d all sit around the dinner table talking about what we’d do with all that money. Dreaming. One spring afternoon, when I was still in grade school, my family got rocked to its core. This was the day a dreamer’s dream came true. This was the day we got one of those You just won $10,000,000 sweepstakes letters in the mail.
I was the one who brought the massive envelope in after school, and wanted so bad to open it, but knew what would happen if I did. When Mom and Dad got home, he snatched it up off the counter and immediately called a family meeting. Rich and I made our way to the dining room, which was weird because it wasn’t Christmas, so whatever was about to happen was going to be big and formal.
“Sit,” Pops said to us. So we sat. “You see this? There’s a ton of pages here. I want you and your brother to look through it and see if you can find anything fishy.”
“Fishy like what, Pops?” I asked.
“Like the scam part. I’m not sure how they got my information, or what they want, but if this is legit, we need to figure out what we’re going to do. And if it’s not, we need to find the scam.”
We’d all seen those commercials on TV where the old guy with grey hair shows up with a giant cheque and helium balloons. The idea that my dad was taking this even a bit seriously was mind-blowing. He must have seen something. They had all his info, middle name and everything, and the longer we read, the more we thought this might actually be legit.
“See anything? Anything weird?” he kept asking.
“Weird like what? Like what’s weird?” I asked again.
“Look for the part where they ask me for money. It’s always about money. That’s the scam.”
As Rich and I flipped through the pages, back and front, Mom sat there saying nothing, humouring us, as we planned how we’d spend the million.
“We need a lawyer,” my dad told us. “Your first move is to get a lawyer to protect it. To invest it.” I’m not sure my dad had ever met a lawyer, but his head and his heart were in the right place. “We get a big place out in the country, we build it and live off the interest.”
I don’t ever remember my dad having a ton of wild dreams, but that’s the one I do remember. Pops always wanted a place in the country, with no neighbours. Something he could build from the ground up, with his own hands and his boys by his side. He’d often show up at home after work with these glossy brochures full of artist renderings of log cottages and cabins and floorplans you could buy and build yourself. I’d usually grab a few from the stack and head right to my room and construct a scaled-down version of my favourites with Lego. I’d pick out where to put my bedroom and the perfect spot for the TV in the family room, then run the whole thing downstairs and set it on the floor to see what he thought. “Looks perfect,” he always said.
I could see all that, the dream, playing out in his eyes as he flipped through that ten-million-dollar package. It was the same look he had every Saturday morning when he checked his lotto numbers. It lasted a few seconds, then it was gone, but he was never too broken up about never winning.
“There it is!” he shouted, slamming the stack of papers on the good table. “They want me to buy magazines. Right there! Look! If we want to qualify for the next round, to maybe win the millions, we have to subscribe to their shitty magazines.” That look faded from his eyes again and we all walked out of the dining room, shutting the lights off behind us.
Dad hated the idea of being taken advantage of—I know I got that from him—and he was always on the lookout. “If someone’s asking for your money, your vote, or your faith, they’re probably lying to you,” he told me. He also used to say the same thing about military service, and his credit card number. My dad protected his Visa number like it was it was the launch code for nukes. Cash was his thing, and anytime anyone ever asked for his credit card number, he’d lose his shit and they’d walk the gauntlet.
In the mid-1980s, when I was in junior high, we were a Beta family living in a VHS world. At first, things were pretty even, but after a few years they just stopped releasing the good movies on Beta. Rich and I would beg Dad to take us to the video store to rent a VHS player so we could load up on all the movies we weren’t able to rent on Beta. You know, to really make a weekend of it. Our video store was a two-minute drive away, and Rich and I had already called ahead to reserve the machine and a half-dozen movies we were dying to watch. We were stoked! As the clerk, who was maybe seventeen, loaded up all the gear on the counter, my brother and I double-checked all the movies were in the right cases.
“All right, Mr. Weston, you’re all set,” the clerk chirped as my dad leaned on the counter checking out all the cables and power cords. “That’ll be fifty-six-fifty for the two-day rental of the machine, twenty-four dollars for the movies.”
As my dad pulled out his wallet and started flipping lose bills all hell broke loose.
“We juuuuust need a credit card for the deposit of the machine.”
Oh. Fuck, I thought.
“What do you need my credit card number for? I’m paying cash.” My old man stared a hole through this poor clerk’s head.
“Well, it’s just a security deposit in case anything happens to the machine. It’s a standard deposit. We don’t charge your card unless anything happens.” This kid was nervous as hell, and Rich and I were mortified.
“What does that mean? ‘In case anything happens’?”
“Well, like we won’t charge you unless it breaks or if you…”
“No. Keep your machine. We’re out of here. I know how this works. You send me home with a lemon, I plug it in and it doesn’t work, then I buy you a new VCR. No thanks.”
Here we go again.
“Come on, boys. This is a scam. I’m not getting dinged for six hundred bucks.”
My dad didn’t get us that VHS machine that day because he thought it was a scam, but he did eventually get us one by running a scam.
My mom’s brother worked in insurance and had pulled this particular scam a few times in the past. It wasn’t illegal, and nobody got hurt, but a scam it was. My uncle called my Pops one afternoon and told him the plan. He laid it all out, and said he needed my brother and me too.
“It’s a fire damage claim. Smoke damage. No big deal,” he explained to my dad over the phone. This whole thing wasn’t so much a scam as it was a scam-on-a-scam, and it was brilliant. My uncle got a call to go check out the damage on a client’s house fire to be able to put through the paperwork and get the family, the ones who had the fire, all the money they need to buy all new shit. When my uncle arrived, he walked into a normal-looking house, with normal-looking things. None of it was burned. “Smoke damage,” he said again. “How do you prove that? It was a small kitchen fire that was put out right away, but the family is claiming smoke damage on all their old things so they can buy all new things. Nothing is ruined, everything is like new, and it all has to go.”
“What do you need?” Dad asked.
“I need a moving company,” he answered. “If someone puts through a claim like this, we have to make sure they’re not going to keep all their old stuff and just double-dip when we send the cheque, so I have to hire a company—you, Rich, and Roz—and we load everything up and get rid of it.”
So that’s what we did. My old man rented a U-Haul and drove my brother and me two hours away to unpack a stranger’s house. The whole time we were there we had to pretend to not know my uncle. My dad named his made-up company Ralph & Sons Hauling and told us to “use that if anyone asks.” I was maybe twelve but looked big enough to pull off my part in all of this. This was one of the best days of my life.
Instead of dropping everything off at the dump like we were supposed to, we drove that truck back to our place, unloaded everything onto our front lawn, and my dad and my uncle divided it all up between them. My uncle took most of the furniture, my mom got a fur coat, my Pops grabbed up all the speakers and stereo gear, and my brother and I went straight for the VHS machines. Three VHS machines! We grabbed them off the lawn, stacked them on top of each other, and Rich ran them into the house while I followed behind with that glorious family’s home movies in two huge open-topped boxes. The collection turned out to be 40 percent vacation and Christmas videos, and 60 percent porno.
Rich couldn’t rip our old Beta machine out fast enough. He yanked it and it came out of its little compartment in the TV unit with all its cords and cables still attached. Ninety seconds later, we were officially a multiple VHS family.
“You guys get what you needed?” Pops shouted from the top of the stairs as Rich and I tried to figure out what the hell to do with it all. What do you even do with that much porn?
“Yeah, Pops. We’re good!” we yelled back up. “Everything works. Machines are great.”
Anybody can be a father, but taking your two sons along for the ride of their lives to pull off an insurance scam for free VCRs is what makes you a dad. That much I know.
My dad’s dreams weren’t huge, and besides winning the lotto, most of them were totally attainable. I don’t know if I ever saw him set a goal that he didn’t crush. But that house in the country, though. The one with no neighbours, that he built with his boys. The solitude, privacy, and freedom. The kind of house you could die in and not mind one bit. He never got to build the place of his dreams. So I did.
I’ve had my foot to the floor for most of my adult life. For my first eighteen years, all I wanted to do was get away. Escape that small town, leave it all behind, and never look back. I was drawn to the action, opportunity, and anonymity of cities, so I fought like hell and clawed my way there. But I was always so preoccupied with escaping, I never bothered to take a look around and truly appreciate what that small town gave me. I made my life, career, and my home in a city of nearly six million people. I set that goal, and I crushed it. But now I needed a change. Roxy was getting older, I’d reduced my time with ET Canada down to four days a week with Fridays off, and I found myself being pulled back. I needed space and stars and sunsets, a place to recharge, slow down, and detach from the hive. A place where I could let go and disappear.
When Roxy was five, Katherine and I spent ten weekends driving out to the country to look at cottages and vacant land. After a few failed offers, and seeing a ton of spots that wouldn’t work, we found the perfect place: a small two-bedroom up on a big hill, overlooking a lake. It was a little over an acre surrounded by hundred-acre farms, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t see another house from anywhere on the property.
The agent described the place as a teardown. It was like walking onto a movie set—shag rug, wood panelling, floral wallpaper, a mint-green toilet that matched the mint-green sink and bathtub, and windows that were so old and busted you could slide a whole hand through the gaps. It looked like someone locked the door in 1976, walked away, and never came back. The whole thing was for sale for a little more than the cost of a parking space back in the city.
As the agent walked us through, trying her hardest to make the best of it, I looked out one of those old windows and saw Roxy rolling down the lawn. I don’t know if she had ever played on grass before—not like that, anyway.
“The roof is garbage, there’s no furnace, and that big circle on the living room floor is where the fireplace used to be. But they pulled it out because it wasn’t vented properly—that’s why everything in here smells like smoke.”
Smoke damage, I thought.
“We’ll take it,” I told her.
We spent that first summer rolling through the grass and running through the sprinkler fully clothed. During every rainstorm Katherine and Roxy played ukuleles on the back deck, singing “The Show” by Lenka, while I spent two hours boiling twenty pots of water just to fill the tub enough for them to have a bath when they finally made it in.
This place wasn’t perfect, but it was a home. It just needed love. It needed Katherine’s heart and a kid who danced under rainbows in the backyard. One who stayed up way past her bedtime to catch fireflies in her pyjamas. We didn’t tear it down, like the agent advised. We fixed it.
Because that’s what we do.
My dad never played the lotto because he wanted to roll around in stacks of cash or buy flashy things to show off. It was emotional for him. He just wanted to know how it would feel to not have to worry about money for once in his life. Same thing with the dream house. It was never about the house; it was about us. It was about living wild and making our own rules. Slowing down and coming together. It was about getting a taste of freedom. Even if it was only on the weekends.
Here’s the surprising thing: kids don’t actually need much, and the thing they need the most costs the least. They just want to hang. They want to kick it with you, do fun shit and have you say yes more than you say no. They want that little taste of freedom. They want you to boost them up over a fence with a clear No Trespassing sign because that tree on the other side looks too good to not climb. When they’re way too young but tell you they want to pitch a tent and sleep out alone in the backyard for the first time, they don’t need a lecture, they just need you to leave the porch light on and the back door unlocked. They want you to play where they play, in a homemade fort, under the back deck or lying on the living room rug with boxes of Lego. They want you to break character every now and then, follow their lead, and just do stupid shit. Those moments become their stories, and just like my dad, I’m the King of Stupid Shit.
Anybody can be a father, but running fully clothed through a sprinkler on a dare from your kid when you’re already twenty minutes late for work is what makes you a dad.