It sounds like my father was a young man with a keen sense of family duties, of tradition. When I was a kid he would go tend to his mother's flowers on the weekends. We would go to my grandparents on Sundays on a pretty regular basis.

He was a very well mannered man with a sense of decorum. He was gentle, forbearing and patient. He was honest, often very quiet. He also had more light hearted moments.

I don't think he was treated fairly by his father. When he went to get an agriculture degree at MacDonald College and ended up burning out because he was studying in English without the language foundation, his dad was not there to back him up. It was a situation where he was told "you don't want to study, go and work."

When I was young he was always studying in the evening. He eventually got his degree in chemistry.

He was not the kind of man I could learn a lot of manual skills from like carpentry, baseball or fishing. He was more cerebral. He spent time taking care of our flower beds, making "contacts" with his long wave radio and listening to classical music.

There is no doubt that he loved his children very much.

We ended up caught in the vortex of the sixties, he on the side of tradition, me on the side of the long haired kids. He was a good man. Too bad we didn't have much of a chance to know each other as adults. I don't think that we are in fact very different from each other. We'll catch up in the next world.

I certainly learned the good basic stuff from him: decency, honesty, respect of others, don't spend what you don't have, etc. We would probably get on fabulously now if he was still here, although by now he would be pretty old - but you know what I mean. We are pretty much peas of a pod.