MGordon_MD
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Jan 15, 2010, 9:23 AM
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By Dr. Michael Gordon
The phone rang – “Hi, Daddy, I’m walking home from the library. Can we talk while I walk?”
It was later in the evening, and I knew my daughter, Talia, had been studying for her midterm examinations at McGill University.
We talked as she walked, and from time to time, she told me where she was. “I’m walking along the park” gave me a visual sense of where she was, as I had been to her apartment a few times and was familiar with the long park and its sports fields opposite her old-fashioned Montreal apartment with the outside stairway.
As we talked, she covered a wide range of subjects, from her studies and issues with her friends and flat-mates to her travel plans for the holidays.
“I’m walking up the stairs now, so I’ll say good night. I love you, Daddy.” These words are very special coming from my daughter, who is now a senior at university (using the American term for fourth year) and I am a senior by age and career position.
I remember when my daughter and my son, Eytan, were taken to the spot where a bus picked them up and took them to the schools they attended. The neighbourhood primary school, a five-minute walk from our house, was no longer in service. A busing service had been instituted to take the children to schools that were nearby but too far to walk to, so the old school building, which became an administrative office, was the drop-off and pickup spot for the children.
As the children got older and started attending schools for which no school-organized bus service existed, they began travelling on public transportation, or occasionally benefited from a pliant parent who took them to school or dropped them off part way, at the subway.
This is what happened when Talia starting attending a school downtown – something I, a former New Yorker who became independent on the subway system at age nine, supported strongly. Independence on the public transportation system was something I wanted my children to have, and as a result, the whole of Toronto opened up to them, without their parents having to be the doting pickup and delivery service.
The irony is that during the years when she was going to the downtown high school, when I would take her from home to the subway, a 10-minute drive, or on the rare occasion when I was going downtown and could drive her all the way to school, the last thing she wanted to do was talk to me.
“So what do you have today?” was usually answered with “I want to close my eyes and rest until we get to the station (or to school).”
“How did the presentation go yesterday?” was countered with a monosyllabic, “fine,” if I was lucky enough to get anything other than “I’d rather not talk about it.”
If I picked her up at the subway after school, the conversation was similar – short and not very sweet. I assumed that Talia just did not like to talk to me.
Now our phone walk-and-talks as she returns home have become a bit of a tradition – maybe once a week during this examination study time, when she stays late at the library. I consider them a real treat and a testimony to our close sense of each other. We often get on to topics that make us both laugh, which has increased our sense of each other and strengthened our bonds. How lucky can a father be?
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Dr. Michael Gordon is Medical Program Director, Palliative Care Baycrest Geriatric Health Care System in Toronto, Canada and Professor of Medicine, at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Gordon is the author of the engaging memoir Brooklyn Beginnings: A Geriatrician's Odyssey, published by I-Universe.
Brooklyn Beginnings is available in bookstores and online at: Indigo-Chapters, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and I-Universe
Moments That Matter: Cases in Ethical Eldercare: A Guide for Family Members, is available online at Amazon.ca.
His latest release is Late-Stage Dementia: providing comfort, compassion and care. It is available at Amazon and Indigo.
Visit Dr. Michael Gordon's website.
(This post was edited by MGordon_MD on Mar 22, 2010, 7:59 AM)
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