Ashes Under the Maple Tree

A Son’s Meditation on the Cycle of Absent Fathers

“What’s it like being a father?” my father Dalton asked me. He left before I was born, as his father had left him. It wasn’t a cruel question; he really wanted to know.

The one time Dalton met my daughter was in my mother’s living room in Toronto. The house was on Markham Street, a block and a half south of Honest Ed’s, where grandmothers lined up in the cold on the street in front of the famous bargain retailer on Thanksgiving morning for discount turkeys. For a moment, he peered curiously down into the crib where she lay awake. He had no instinct to know the touch or smell of his granddaughter’s skin. He kept his distance. “What’s it like being a father?” He looked at me like a child asking his father what it means to be a man. My daughter was three months old. She’s nineteen now.

Dalton didn’t know his mother or father growing up. Dalton’s father left before he was two, and his mother was institutionalized when he was eight. His aunt and uncle raised him in Kilaloe Station in the Ottawa Valley. Hard-drinking Irish people with the trauma and desperation of the potato famine in their hearts. As a young boy, he watched as his mother was dragged down the stairs and off to a psychiatric hospital. “Don’t let them take me,” she pleaded with her son.

My mom and I moved around a lot when I was a kid. We bounced between Toronto, Montreal, and Ward’s Island and never talked about why. There were different men, and some of their children. The first man was violent, and the second kind and loving. By the third and fourth, I retreated. I adjusted to adults and performed long enough to satisfy their need to think I was ok, and get away. I wasn’t sad or scared. I was free — a little boy, free to roam the streets, getting in and out of danger, by myself. After a few months or a year, we always moved on, and I’d wander new streets.

The Author as a Boy in Montreal

I made up stories about Dalton since I didn’t know much about him. I invented a world where I was better off without a father in my life. I had seen men as fathers; they were angry and violent. I told myself that no man would ever punch me again.

I created Dalton, the character, so I had a tale to tell when kids asked. The man of mystery. He was a world traveler. He was off to important places and doing important things, and that’s why he wasn’t around.

I first remember meeting Dalton on a street near High Park in the west end of Toronto when I was seven years old. He lived in a nearby apartment and had recently returned from traveling overseas. My mom dropped me off at the curb, and I waited under the shade of a maple tree. I stood with my back to the tree so no one could surprise me. Dalton appeared like he had been walking for days. He looked like me.

We wandered the streets and talked about everything except his absence. It was easy to talk to him. He asked lots of questions and gave me two gifts: a bag of coins collected from his travels throughout Asia and the Middle East and a book of world fairy tales. In the park, Dalton read to me an African story about a girl, a witch, and a baobab tree. The witch ate children, but the girl tricked the witch and set her village free.

At home that night, I spilled the coins on the floor and ran them through my fingers. The coins were engraved with symbols I had never seen. Heavy coins that felt like they were made by hand. I imagined the people, languages, sounds, and smells the coins had gathered. I could hear the bustle of the street.

For years, Dalton came and went. He’d call every year or two around my birthday with plans for us to get together. “Sure,” I’d say. I never wondered why he was there or not. My mother never talked about Dalton so neither did I. I wasn’t happy to see him, and I wasn’t sad when he wasn’t around. None of it touched me.

When I was ten, he found out I was playing Little League baseball and came to Trinity Park to watch me play. He showed up for a game or two, and then I didn’t see him for years. It felt normal that he wasn’t around, but I thought about him and imagined his life. The light in his apartment. The plants, books, and incense. I drew from what I had seen and invented the rest.

There must have been something about May that reminded Dalton of me. I was born in May of 1972, three weeks after his mother killed herself and two weeks after he left for British Columbia. Each year in May, I wondered whether he would come around.

When I was thirteen, my mother and I lived in a small apartment on the third floor of a run-down building in Little Italy. On warm May days, I’d hang out the creaky window and breathe in the neighborhood. A few days before my birthday, Dalton called and told me he had made plans for us to see each other.

“I’m going somewhere with my friends,” I told him, which was true. “You shouldn’t just call me out of the blue and tell me you’ve made plans for me.”

After that call, I didn’t hear from Dalton for ten years. He lived ten minutes away, but we never spoke. As a teenager, I raged like an adolescent elephant in musth. I was athletic and fearless without rules, boundaries, expectations, or guidance. I fathered myself. I didn’t call Dalton, and he didn’t call me.

We met again when I was in college. I was the captain of the University of Toronto’s men’s volleyball team, and unbeknownst to me, Dalton had started showing up to our home matches. I didn’t know how he found out I was playing. As I sat on a bench in the lobby of the U of T Athletic Center with a few teammates, I saw a familiar man walking toward the ticket counter. Small and slender with a confident stride and a skullcap.

“Hey, Märt,” I said to my friend. “That’s my father.” Märt and I had been teammates for four years, and I had never mentioned Dalton.

I walked over and said hello. He smelled like a new-age bookstore. We exchanged pleasantries, agreed to meet for lunch, and continued meeting once every few months for the next year.

Father and Son in 2004

He told me stories of his life growing up in the Ottawa Valley, escaping to Toronto, and then to Germany, working as a radio broadcast technician for NATO. He kept moving, selling hash and LSD to finance his travels. Smuggling hash from Lebanon and Pakistan to Spain where he lived for three years on Mallorca before returning to Toronto. He got involved early at Rochdale College and that’s where he met my mother.

They were never a couple. I don’t know whether they dated. My mother didn’t think she could have children, so her pregnancy was a surprise. When she told Dalton I was coming, he said he was leaving for British Columbia the next week. My mother never mentioned whether she wished he had stayed.

As we got to know each other in my early twenties, Dalton had settled into a rhythm of low-cost living in Toronto. He tried and disliked the corporate world, so he reduced his spending to a minimum so he could subsist without a job. To make money, he sold rich rum cakes he bought from a monastery in Northern Ontario to Bay Street bankers every Christmas season. He read, walked, and tried to think his way to healing the pain of abandonment.

It was unsettling for me to discover how much Dalton and I were alike. Had I been him watching more closely than I was willing to admit? Had I cared all along while pretending to be unaffected? Or was I acting from my genetic code?

Our conversations flowed across politics, religion, philosophy, history, art, and travel. I never asked why he wasn’t around when I was a boy. I didn’t learn until much later that it’s natural for boys to want to know about their fathers, and it’s painful for boys who grow up without one. He told me fascinating stories of what he was doing instead of being a father. I thought he was interesting and I should be interesting too.

After I graduated from college, I went traveling. Six months alone. Once around, East to West, following the sun. Toronto to Vancouver to Tokyo to Hong Kong. By air, sea, river, rail, and road. Bangkok, Saigon, Hanoi, Vientiane, Luang Prabang, Phongsali, Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, Amasra, Uludeniz, Kusadasi, Santorini, Athens, London. I was looking for something, but I couldn’t admit it was my father. I collected my own stories and coins. I wanted to understand, or have something in common. I discovered my capacity for solitude, and I began to wonder whether it was my fate to be alone.

When I returned home, I struggled to relate. I felt isolated, like I had seen a secret world that didn’t matter to anyone but me. Dalton and I stayed in touch over the years as I started working, got married, moved to the US, and started my own family.

When I visited Toronto with my wife and children two years ago, I called Dalton and asked if he would be in town while we were there. I asked whether he wanted to meet my children. The silence was familiar.

“I don’t know. I’d be nervous.” He told me. “They might ask why I wasn’t around.”

“Yeah, they probably would,” I replied.

It was the only question my kids asked when the subject of my father came up in conversation.

“He was never there? Why not?” Where was he?”

These were healthy questions. My daughter and son asked me separately as they matured. They seemed fascinated by the idea that a father would leave his child.

“I don’t know,” I told each of them. “He left before I was born. I met him a few times when I was young and got to know him when I was in my twenties.”

The boy inside me tried to answer without answering, the way I would have responded when I was a kid. But my kids deserved a better answer, and I had healed enough myself to have a deeper understanding. “He didn’t have it in him,” I continued. “He didn’t know his father when he was a boy, and he never found a way to heal.”

I have marveled at simple moments with my children, wondering what it’s like for them to have their father around. Little moments: waiting for them to finish brushing their teeth, parent-teacher night, tucking them in at night, or waking them up in the morning. They both grew up with a father. I wondered what it was like for them.

I went alone to see Dalton. His apartment looked the same as the other two I had visited over the years. A radio to listen to the CBC. A reading chair. Shelves overflowing with books on psychology and spirituality and trinkets gathered from his travels. He pulled up a chair for me, and we sat and talked for two hours, and I asked him questions. He told me his stories.

Dalton at Home

“I’ve never felt love for anyone,” Dalton told me. “The closest I’ve come is respect. I have this feeling for you.”

He told me he was never able to heal from his childhood. “I just never got over it.” By it, he means abandonment and neglect. “I didn’t want to pass this darkness on to you. I thought if I were around when you were a boy, I’d mess you up.” Dalton’s belief that he couldn’t heal weighed more than the idea he could.

I know the guilt. It’s the cog on the karmic wheel that turns fatherless boys into absent fathers. It’s taken a lot of work to escape. Reliving the hurt can be devastating and liberating. Looking at Dalton, I saw the eyes of a young boy yearning for the love of his father. I’ve looked into my son’s eyes and marveled at the safety and love I saw reflected. Somehow, I’ve found the love to give Dalton and my children and to break the cycle. We hugged and said goodbye.

We still talk every year or two, usually about him. I call. He tells me he’s thought of calling, but something stopped him. He still worries he’ll hurt me. I didn’t call him last year on Father’s Day. Not out of anger or resentment, but I didn’t feel like it. I’m curious about him and his past, but if I ask about his relationship with my mother or his life when I was a boy, I don’t hear from him again.

When we spoke last year, Dalton told me he’s planned and paid for his death. I’m his only relative, and when he dies, his attorney will contact me. That’s how I’ll know.

“I have a bit of money. Do you need it or should I find a charity?” Dalton asked.

“Up to you,” I replied.

He told me he’s planned for cremation and asked if I would bury his ashes under his favorite maple tree in Trinity Park. There’s a row of trees along the Dundas Street end of the park, though I didn’t know exactly which tree he was talking about.

“Sure,” I replied. When the time comes, I’ll find the tree and rest Dalton’s ashes in the shade.