Five years ago the National Post published my series My Father, His Firebombs and My Messed-Up Sixties Childhood. Since then I have sought to find a publisher for a book on the subject. I still seek a publisher. As I search, I will continue to work on the book with occasional blog posts that fill in holes in the story. If you are a publisher interested in my book, please contact my agent, Morty Mint, in Nelson, B.C., through morty@mintliteraryagency.com.
I have only one memory from my childhood of my parents as a couple, and that memory is so vague and out-of-focus that I cannot be sure that it happened at all. It involves an apple.
My father had a flare for the dramatic. It must have been autumn when this happened. What I remember is that my mother and father, and my two elder sisters and I were living in a little house in a village on
the edge of a school yard. My father brought home a limb he must have torn off an apple tree, laden with apples, and nailed the limb above the frame of the living room door, which led to the hallway with our
bedrooms.
“If you eat an apple before you go to sleep it’s just as good as if you brush your teeth,” he announced. That made me very happy, because it meant I didn’t have to brush my teeth. I was very little, maybe
four years old, so I couldn’t possibly reach an apple on that bough by myself. Somebody handed me one, and I happily ate it and went to sleep.
I presume that my mom went along with this. She had learned by then to pick her battles. Since my parents had separated two years previously, I believe this took place on one of their several failed attempts to reconcile.
Until well into my marriage I still believed this statement, about apples as a substitute for dental hygiene. When our daughter got old enough, one night my wife told her to brush her teeth.
“Or you can eat an apple,” I said. “That’s just as good.”
“What?” said my wife, incredulous. “That’s ridiculous.”
Of course, it was ridiculous. Like many of the things that my father said, it was absurd. Incidentally, I have pretty much always had terrible teeth, and this may help to explain my problem.