Anthony and me: thoughts about my dad.

by Rick Johansen

I have been doing some more thinking about my dad in the last year or so.

It is coming up to four years ago since he became sick and then died, leaving an internationally and emotionally extended family bereft.

When he was alive, I don’t think I appreciated him as much as I should have. Yes, there was an obstacle – he had lived in Canada for over 40 years and I lived in Bristol, England – but there was so much more to know and so much more to learn.

As people can discover by reading the book Fair Wind and a Following Sea by Joy Johansen, the true love of his life, and a book that is as near to the autobiography I had been badgering him to write for years, this was a man who didn’t have a dream: he lived it.

Anthony Johansen was born in 1929 and as I have said in a previous blogpost joined the Merchant Navy in 1944, dodging the U Boats in the North Atlantic to feed his fellow countrymen and women. 15 years old. When I was 15, I was playing football at my local park, sitting at home watching TV, just messing about. I did a lot of messing about in the years that followed.

My dad sailed the seas and ascended the ladder of success, eventually becoming a Master Mariner and, when others might be thinking of slowing down, he upped his game, got a degree in Commerce at McGill University in Montreal and went on to work in a variety of high power jobs, culminating in a spell working in the office of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. It was a life well lived, a life of taking chances, of always believing the possible was probable if you worked hard enough at it. He railed against those who had a ‘can’t do’ attitude (like me!) and he did not suffer fools gladly.

And he was funny. Very funny. In a rich life, he met people all over the world and, no matter where he turned up there always seemed to appear someone he knew and there was a funny story to be attached.

I misunderstood him, I think, and I always chose my words too carefully for fear of a (probably deserved) critical putdown. He would not tolerate what he perceived as self-pity. You could always make your life better. He knew all that stuff but I was never bright enough to ask him. I am probably the exact opposite of my dad. His glass half full, mine half empty and about to be knocked over. He believing he could learn and do almost anything, me knowing – yes, knowing – that I found it hard to learn and do almost anything at all.

Anthony, dad, rarely looked back either. He told stories of old times, that’s for sure, about people he knew about places he went to, but only in the context of the time, no bowing to slushy nostalgia. It was never better in the old days.

I was a fool not saving up to buy flights to go and stay with him, to learn his wisdom, to see what made him tick. I don’t think there was a secret. Belief, confidence, drive.

No, I didn’t appreciate him enough for most of the time and, of all my departed relatives and friends, his is the one who has left the biggest hole in my life. That’s not some half-arsed dismissal of my mother’s influences on my life, an incredible woman who probably ensured I didn’t turn out worse than I did, but by the time she died, I knew who she was, what she was all about; I knew, in short, that when her time came there was nothing left to say. By the end, we were down to trivia, gossip, superficiality, saying the same things all over again. Of course, I miss her, this is not a league table of dead people but until near the last few years, I had a lesser relationship with my dad than I should have done. It is a regret. My dad always said that there was no point fretting about time gone by because you couldn’t ever change anything and whilst generally that’s true, it’s not always.

But in 2009, the last time I saw him, we had become closer than ever. We laughed a lot more, there was better contact, more emotion, we gave more of ourselves. By the time I flew home from Ottawa, I felt sure there would be even better times to come. Life has a funny way of treating you, just when you think things have been put back together, they fall apart again.

“Don’t it always seem to go,” said Joni Mitchell, “that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” and that’s exactly how I feel about my dad. I did appreciate him, I really did, but I could have told him so much more, I could have listened so much more to his wisdom.

If your parents are still alive and hopefully well, listen to their wisdom, enjoy their company and put all the memories in a box for later on. And tell them that you love them. I never did enough of that, either.

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