As other sons have, I invited punishment when I was young.  And, it is true that when I last saw my father, in my youth, I was sixteen ... and that the gentleness of parting was somehow lost in the dimensions of the tiny sliding window of the metal door.  I saw him twice since then ... alive.  He was ever enigmatic to me.  He could not find his way intuitively between the islands, nor could he quite explain what causes half the moon to show, a quarter, or an eighth. But, he read Omar Khayyam and drank good Scotch.

Early in my U.N. Secondment to the Golan Heights I was called back to Calgary to identify and claim his body.  When he was flown back to Georgian Bay some bastard stole the scotch out of his coffin.  But he is home now, overlooking the islands, and underneath each rising moon.  His wallet contained a card stating that in life the one thing he hadn't enough of was good scotch; that since he had a morbid fear of rotting through eternity, too parched and dry, would someone “down a few” occasionally, drop by and piss on his grave.

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In the twelve years following his death I had not once thought of him and not cried ... Then, I had a dream...and in the dream an understanding was arrived at.  The poem was written many years ago, however, and though I have not cried because of him since, I continue to drink good scotch.