It took years, but one day I realized that my dad had become my best friend

first person

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“Oh hi, Jeremy. How are you? Just a second, I’ll go and fetch your mother.”

This was the opening script to so many of the calls I made from my home in Montreal (and later Toronto) to my parents’ home in Vancouver over the years. It didn’t even strike me as unusual. It’s not that there were any issues between my father and me; it was just tacitly understood that I was closer to my mother and that the cost of long-distance phone calls – or the ingrained memory of how much they used to cost – did not allow for idle chatter. It was accepted that my mother and I would do the talking and that she would pass along any pertinent news to my father wh