Thanks, Dad

Ross over at The Gazetteer has a beautiful Father's Day post:

My old man was a Union man.
And the folks in the Union fought like bastards...and they fought constantly, usually for the tiniest of things in each successive contract...And when I was a kid, especially during that time when I was a barely no-longer-a-teenager-aged kid, I thought the folks from the Union were just a little bit off their nut. . .

And he goes on to describe how he understands now why they fought so hard:

And most of all, I now get the fact that my Dad was, and is, my hero.

His description of his Dad reminded me a bit of my own father, a man who grew up during the Depression and spent his life as a farmer with a Grade 9 education, but who re-invented himself and his family as urban, self-educated, knowledgeable, thoughtful, opinionated, humourous. A lifelong member of the CCF and supporter of the Wheat Board, who lost and made thousands playing the stock market and the futures market, a gambler who played a mean game of bridge and poker -- enough so that when I met one of my dad's old poker buddies years later, he said to me "So you're Art's daughter, are you? I bought your shoes all through high school!" Most of all, he was a man with an utter distain for anything that struck him as BS whether it came from the right or the left -- and there is plenty of that in our society. He and my mother gave me my own progressive outlook and I thank them for it.