To our role models: thank you, Fathers
TORONTO – I’d like to dedicate this column to the unsung heroes who have assumed the mantle of responsibility, selflessly, in developing our industrial and post industrial society while, with their actions they constructed an ethos for a culture that has become distinguished for the promotion of all that we hold dear.
It is not for everyone and is not intended to cast aspersions on those who do not or cannot identify with the “experience”.
Why now? Today is the anniversary of my coming into Pier 21, Halifax, Canada, with my mother, brother and sister, many decades ago, to reunite with my father after a four year separation. Post World War II, Immigration Canada’s application of the rules of entry separated many a family.
My mother, Rocchina, was the daughter of a “Canadian citizen” (British subject, since 1905, according to some records) who had lost her rights as a “Canadian” because she married my Father, Luciano, an “Enemy Alien”, so defined by the War Measures Act of 1940. But he was her “hero”. Mine as well. He was only 12 years old when an untimely death deprived him of his own dad; seventeen when his mother passed.
The “events” pushed him into taking on the functions of pater familias to five brothers and a sister. There were not may options in a mountain town 850 meters above sea level. But he had a love of learning and a native aptitude for mathematics.
Despite having only a grade three education, he could do my Grade 13 Algebra and Geometry homework with enviable ease; his calligraphy was artistic, and, he taught himself English, German and Latin. He critiqued every book I and my siblings brought home from school. When he was not doing that, he worked at “perfecting” his physical surroundings. with artisanal attention.
Two days after docking in Halifax (in the image here below is the ship Olympia), our freight train pulled into Toronto’s Union Station where my uncles and my Dad were waiting. I remember thinking “this Canada has to be the best country in the world”.
I do not recall ever hearing him utter a word of complaint on adversity – he just “stuck with it until he found a solution”. There was plenty of adversity to go’ round. Devotees of Catholicism will recall the scene on Calvary when a Roman soldier witness to the overpowering scene remarked: “ecce homo”.
Six months after my election to the House of Commons, I found a way, with the Speaker’s help, to deliver a part of my speech in Italian, to honor my family. Luciano could not believe what he was seeing and hearing.
Sunday is Father’s Day. I am reminded that Luciano was fashioned in the image of his father Giuseppe and his father in law Leonardo. I owe him and them thanks.
From left: Luciano Volpe (1920-1989), Leonardo Liscio (1881-1954) and Giuseppe Volpe (1893-1932)
