Fathers & husbands

[Canadian Socialist]

For fathers everywhere, a sort of tribute...

MARTIN O'MALLEY:
Martin O'Malley - Editor, CBC News Online At least one generation of Canadians knows the line, "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation." Pierre Elliott Trudeau made it famous, but the line belongs to Martin O'Malley, who wrote it when he was with The Globe and Mail. He's written eight books, his latest "More than Meets the Eye: Watching Television Watching Us."


Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
– Neil Young

I know, I know, Neil Young wasn't writing about his father when he wrote those lyrics, but I'll never be totally convinced. The words fit too well. Neil has the same face as his father, Scott. He also has the same poetry in his soul. So many of his songs convey a sense of his father, with whom I worked many years ago.

How about:

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Scott Young died last weekend at the age of 87. By sheer coincidence, before I heard the news I had selected a few books to read by the pool this summer. One of them was Young's A Writer's Life. In one scene he and his second wife, Astrid, are having breakfast in their home in the Moore Park district of Toronto.

Young read in the newspaper that morning that the Peterborough Examiner was looking for a new editor. He got up from the breakfast table and phoned Robertson Davies, the novelist he'd got to know when he lived in Omemee. Young was making a pitch for the editor's job, but he had never consulted Astrid.
<snip>
http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_omalley/20050617.html