Editor�s Note

Where I grew up, the winters were bitterly cold. Nearly every house had a garage, and if it didn�t you could count on the fact that any cars in the driveway would have their block heaters plugged in to keep the engine�s vital fluids from icing over. You know the place you live gets cold when you have to worry about antifreeze freezing.

Like every other house in the neighbourhood, ours had a garage. But I can remember only a single day from my childhood when our family car would fit into it. It wasn�t that our car was to big and luxurious to squeeze in � unless you consider a powder-blue �77 Chevette with dented doors to be big and luxurious. No, our humble automobile was subjected to the merciless extremes of the northern American plains because of my father.

Describing my dad as a pack rat is a gigantic understatement � the word just isn�t big enough. Our garage was packed from floor to rafters with stuff that my dad had collected seemingly since his childhood. You�d be hard-pressed to find room for a Matchbox car in there, let alone a real human-sized vehicle.

There were at least two refrigerators, shelves full of books, bicycles, beads, cooking supplies, pieces of furniture in various states of repair, boxes filled with fabric, boxes filled with Halloween costumes, boxes filled with tools and boxes filled with boxes.

To give even a brief rundown of the contents of that garage would take more energy than I have to type and more patience than you have to keep reading. Standout items, however, included an old tuba that at one point was destined to be a flower pot and several Hefty garden bags stuffed to bursting with pine cones. It�s still best not to bring those pine cones up as a topic of conversation at family gatherings.

One of my biggest fears is that my dad will pass away before he cleans out the garage � a task that with comic regularity he has undertaken every year since my family first moved into the house. If he does meet an untimely end (which could, ironically enough, be linked to an unexpected conversation about pine cones) the responsibility will fall to me to find those bags and use them to start a fire to burn the whole garage down. Believe me, even with the arson charge, it would be less trouble than sorting through all that stuff.

Despite the looming terror that the garage might someday pass into my stewardship, there is something comforting in thinking about that hopeless mess. My father and his garage will always be linked in my mind � it�s almost impossible to think about one without the other. The garage is Dad�s sanctum, workshop, warehouse and white whale all rolled into one.

It makes me feel good on this Father�s Day to imagine him in there right now, sorting his pine cones and leaving the car out in the cold.

Sean Vale
Editor
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