Chapter 1: FATHER
There was a time when my father and I were very close. The passage of time alters many perspectives, and the past is merely an interpretation informed by the here and now. However, although it has been eight years since he and I last spoke with each other, I have clear and distinct images of my father and me in my mental film archives. Just memories now, but they are fond memories. Will they fade in time, as surely as do our own impermanent sojourn
through life? Of that I have but a parenthetical interest.

Fleeting as life is, each moment is a spark, a distinctly different one, that ignites ever so briefly, before it disappears into a dark and intangible abyss called “the past,” never to
touch or be touched again. Favoured with an ability to
physically relive the past, we may opt to pursue different paths, partake different options, or verbalize different
thoughts, and perhaps engender a different present. Or not.

Who’s to say? The older I get, the more convinced I am of our own insignificance, even irrelevance. We, children of an industrial-technological age, like to indulge ourselves in some
megalomaniac arrogance of being instruments of change,
masters of our own destiny. Fate is relegated to the ghettos of the ignorant and the unwashed. But fate, like time, beguiles us with its ephemeral substance; insidiously exercising its dominion over us. Auden was right, of course, we cannot conquer time.

How would my father see me now, I often wonder.
Would he be pleased that his son graduated Magna Cum
Laude from Osgoode Hall Law School? Or that upon being
called to the Bar, I opted out of a lucrative corporate law career and instead chose to work for Amnesty International?
Terar Dum Prosim indeed. Would that I had mastered the conquest of time, I could show him and perhaps give him reason to be proud of me. But alas, fate had other ideas.

The morning after our big fight, my father was killed
by a drunk driver.