Without Next Of Kin, 2

It wasn't such a huge leap living without Dad.  His absences from home on his commercial fishing trips came to average nearly six months a year and my mother dubbed herself "the Old Grass Widow."  My brother was deckhand for another fisherman and was also usually absent.  I wasn't being hit anymore, or so it seemed.

On Mom's insistence Dad tried to form a relationship with me.  I think there was also a court order in place that he was obligated to follow.  During grade eight, when I was thirteen and fourteen, my father would either take me out for dinner and a movie downtown, sometimes followed by a sleepover at his bachelor apartment in Marpole or a Sunday afternoon drive.  I enjoyed these times.  It was the first time we actually visited alone together and he became like a friend.  I looked forward to our outings together. 

The outings together of course came to an end in the spring when he went out fishing for another season.  This was the summer of my independence.  I was smoking pot with other kids in the park and wandering alone downtown.  I was exploring.  I was buying and reading the Georgia Straight, well before it became a free rag and during the tabloid's radical roots.  Reading the articles and columns I became informed and interested in a plethora of issues that had been surfacing during the sixties: the environment, feminism, abortion rights, gay liberation, anarchy and social and political revolution, among other things.  For the first time in my life I was breathing and thriving on a fresh, dense and oxygen drenched air that I'd never before experienced.

When I started grade nine I was rather different from the bloated child that the other kids had known in grade eight.  Everyone in my grade seemed already younger than me.  Kids who ignored or taunted me in earlier grades were almost lining up for my friendship.  Feeling that I couldn't really trust them I did hang out with them a little but always knew where to draw the line.
In the fall of 1970 my outings with my father came to an end.  He seemed distinctly uncomfortable with the changes he was seeing in me and it was difficult for us to have a conversation about anything without arguing.  My father was an alcoholic, uneducated, right-wing in his views, and generally very backward.  I was no longer the child he had never raised. 

I recall one of our last outings.  I was in the basement putting my shoes on while Mom and Dad were bitterly quarreling in the living room.  This had already happened too many times.  I couldn't hide my disgust.  I rushed upstairs, stood between them and started yeinged at them both.  I was crying.  To my surprise, there was no punishment forthcoming.  They agreed with me.  They stopped fighting.

Soon my father all but disappeared from my life for the next two and a half years.  The child support money dried up. leaving us almost destitute. We still saw each other at Christmas.  Otherwise he was missing in action.