Kevin Patrick Bristow

Ophelia

Cadet
KEVIN PATRICK BRISTOW

My father’s name was Jonathan Bristow, but only his parents had ever called him that. Everyone else just called him Jack. He was born here in London, but his father was an American and he moved his family back to his hometown of Chicago when his son was just eight.

His childhood was pretty ordinary, he always said – Little League baseball in summer; sledding and ice skating in winter; football, the chess club, and the debating team in high school. The opposite sex, he admitted to me when I was old enough to understand such things, had always been something of a mystery to him. He didn’t date much in high school or college until he met his first wife, my half sister Sydney’s mother. I never have known much about her, but she seems to have caused her husband and her daughter a great deal of pain. She died of pancreatic cancer before I was born.

Imagine my surprise when my seemingly quiet, family-oriented father told me that three years before I came along he had retired after nearly four decades in the CIA. He seldom talked about that either, but felt he should at least tell me that much.

I remember a father who was kind and loving, if somewhat reserved. He taught me to enjoy both hockey and baseball, and helped me with my math homework. We used to watch the Three Stooges and laugh ourselves silly at their antics. Sydney saw us at this once and remarked later that she didn’t remember him laughing much at all while she was growing up. He was very proud of me when I made my school’s hockey team, attending every game. And he did an absolutely beautiful painting of the first building I designed after graduating from the University of Western Ontario School of Architecture. It still hangs in my parents’ living room. He had taken up painting after moving back here and got to be pretty good; he even sold a few paintings through a gallery downtown. There’s no law that says I have to sit in a rocking chair and vegetate just because I’m retired, he’d say.

His funeral today is a fairly large one; he had a lot of friends here at the United Church he and my mother had been attending for the last 32 years. It’s so hard to believe he’s gone – that the easy-going old man everyone knew is no more.

My four-year-old, Danielle, slips out of her mother’s arms and comes up to me as I stand over the open casket. There’s no point in hiding this from her, so I pick her up. She reaches out and touches his hand.

Grandpa sleeping? she asks.

Yes, sweetheart, I reply, Grandpa’s sleeping.
 
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