Measuring Up Read online

  Praise for Measuring Up

  “A beautiful, clear-eyed elegy to families. How the foundation is laid, how the structure is crafted, and, eventually, how all of us have to manage its collapse. Dan Robson’s memoir is about sons and fathers. More than that, it’s about the hard road that leads from being one to becoming the other.”

  —Cathal Kelly, author of Boy Wonders

  “Dan Robson’s book is a heart-wrenching portrait of grief. Anyone who has lost a parent will recognize it, know it intimately as you roll through the stages and finally come to the realization that a parent’s ultimate gift to a child is showing them how to live.”

  —Tanya Talaga, bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers

  “Dan Robson skillfully constructs a monument to the legacy of his craftsman father. It is a testament to the unbreakable bond between every father and son. It inspires each of us to a straighter plumb, a truer square, and a higher level.”

  —Murray Howe, bestselling author of Nine Lessons I Learned from My Father

  “Robson’s reflection on male grief and vulnerability is as generous and courageous as the father whose ghost haunts this story.”

  —D.W. Wilson, author of Once You Break a Knuckle and Ballistics

  Also by Dan Robson

  CHANGE UP

  How to Make the Great Game of Baseball Even Better (with Buck Martinez)

  THE CRAZY GAME

  How I Survived in the Crease and Beyond (with Clint Malarchuk)

  KILLER

  My Life in Hockey (with Doug Gilmour)

  QUINN

  The Life of a Hockey Legend

  BOWER

  A Legendary Life

  VIKING

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Dan Robson

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  The author would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: Measuring up : a memoir of fathers and sons / Dan Robson.

  Names: Robson, Dan, 1983- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200238671 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200238604 | ISBN 9780735234697 (softcover) | ISBN 9780735234703 (EPUB)

  Subjects: LCSH: Robson, Dan, 1983- | LCSH: Fathers and sons—Canada—Biography. | LCSH: Fathers—Death. | LCSH: Bereavement—Psychological aspects. | LCSH: Construction industry. | LCSH: Family-owned business enterprises. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC BF575.G7 R65 2021 | DDC 155.9w37092—dc23

  Book design by Matthew Flute, adapted for ebook

  Cover design by Terri Nimmo

  a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For Oliver Richard Robson

  “For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty.”

  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

  Contents

  Part I:

  Things Fall Apart

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II:

  Foundations

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part III:

  What Lies Beneath

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part IV:

  Blueprints

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part V:

  Measure Twice

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part VI:

  Square, Plumb, and Level

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Acknowledgments

  Part I

  Things Fall Apart

  1

  It begins with a phone call, as these things often do.

  I’ve been asleep for only a few hours when the ring shakes me awake. I’m behind on a looming book deadline and have been working through most nights. I’m dazed, and my eyes feel too heavy to open—until the sharp cold-water splash of panic.

  I’m supposed to meet my publisher at nine. I’ve slept in.

  I grab the phone expecting to see that it’s him, calling me from a table at Starbucks, wondering where I am. But the display says “Jai.”

  Jai?

  Jai is my older sister. We’re a year and a half apart. Two of three siblings. Our little sister, Jenna, is five years younger. We’re close. Close enough to know that neither would ever call me at seven a.m.

  It’s that rare feeling that reaches beyond worry. You feel it in your chest. Something is wrong.

  I answer.

  “Jai?”

  “Dan. Are you awake?”

  Jai rarely betrays emotion when she speaks. She’s either happy or annoyed. That’s it, two modes. But this is different. She’s rushed. She’s scared.

  “Mom just called. Something happened to Dad.”

  “What?”

  “She thinks he had a stroke. He’s okay. But they’ve taken him to the hospital. She wants us to meet her there.”

  It’s the kind of news you know exists. You know it will come, one day—but you never expect it. Then it crushes you from the blind side.

  Jai lives in the east end of Toronto. We agree to meet at Jenna’s condo in the west end, since it’s on the way to the hospital in Mississauga. Our mother’s a nurse. She’s requested that the ambulance take our dad straight to a facility that specializes in strokes.

  To me that means she doesn’t think it’s a stroke. Mom knows.

  I dress quickly while Jayme, my partner, turns towards me in bed, trying to catch up and trying to slow me down.

  “It’s probably just something small,” she says.

  Her father had a scare with his heart a couple of months ago. But it was just a warning shot. It’s likely something like that, she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Probably.”

  But I’m running down the stairs. I have to go and I’m not sure when I’ll be back.

  “You need to take care of Henry,” I say. He’s our seven-month-old Goldendoodle.

  I stuff my laptop into my bag, hoping to get some work in—hoping Jayme’s right. Probably. But it’s self-preservation. The sound of my heart beating deep in my ears tells me it’s not true. Bump, bump—bump, bump—bump, bump.

  “Okay, love you,” I shout from the door. “Call you soon.”

  * * *

  —

  Mom is in the waiting room when my sisters and I arrive.
She is alone and looks scared. She’s pale. I’ve never seen her like this before.

  Dad fell on the floor beside the bed, she tells us. She’d been downstairs, and when she came into their room she found him there. He tried to get up, but couldn’t. He tried to speak, but couldn’t. She called the ambulance. She stayed beside him, holding him until they arrived.

  He must have been terrified.

  Time is a blur now. A nurse tells us that a doctor wants to see us in a private room.

  Mom used to work in an ER. She shakes her head, squeezes her lips tight, and then her voice breaks.

  “It’s never good when they want to take you to a room,” she says.

  She’s never flinched. She’s witnessed it all, no problem. But now she’s falling apart. I try to calm her as we wait in a lamplit room with two brown couches and flowers on side tables. I’ve never been more afraid.

  I hold my breath when the doctor opens the door. He is a serious- looking man, probably in his sixties. The hospital’s lead neurosurgeon. The title sounds important. Reassuring.

  He tells us that Dad is out of surgery and that it has gone well.

  I breathe, quietly—but it feels like a gasp after being held under water.

  He’s suffered a large stroke, the doctor says. They managed to find the problem, and he’s stable. But there’s no telling what the outcome will be until he wakes up.

  He seems positive. This is the lead guy. This man knows.

  There is some swelling around his brain and that needs to go down, the doctor tells us. Best-case scenario, he’ll recover well—although he’ll probably need some rehabilitation. But the damage could be much worse and there’s a chance the damage could be severe.

  “We won’t know until he wakes up,” the doctor says again.

  A nurse takes us out of the bad-news room and down a white hallway, through double doors and into a very serious-looking area filled with beeping machines, blue curtains, and busy people walking around in gowns and masks. I try not to look between the curtains as we pass, but I hear a muffled sob and see hunched figures over a bed. I look at the ceiling. We pass another bed. Then the nurse turns and leads us in.

  My father lies on his back, eyes closed.

  There is an oxygen mask on his face, and tiny wires and tubes running from his body into the grey beeping machines beside him. But it looks oddly familiar.

  For several years when I was young and scared of everything, I’d often wake up in the middle of the night and rush into my parents’ room. I wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep unless I was beside my dad. He always slept on the same side, closest to the door. I’d sit next to him on the bed, too light for him to notice. I’d watch him breathe, his chest rising and falling with a baritone snore. It wasn’t peaceful. My father was never a great sleeper, which is a trait he passed on to me. He’d go to bed late and get up early. Rest seemed like labour to him. But I’d watch him take several breaths before giving him a light nudge.

  “Dad?”

  He’d stir and half open his eyes.

  “Can’t sleep,” I’d say.

  “Okay, buddy.”

  And he’d shift over in bed, never fully waking, while I curled into him, safe from the wild beasts of my mind.

  My father does not look peaceful here. This sleep is not rest. I know that somewhere beyond his closed eyes, he’s working hard to make it home.

  We last spoke—really spoke—a few days ago. He was at the airport, on his way to meetings in Calgary. He was calling to check in, as we always did. He knew I was working towards a book deadline—as well as my regular job as a sportswriter, I write biographies of figures in the field—and that I was stressed. He could hear it in my voice. I wasn’t really paying attention to whatever we were discussing.

  “I’ll let you go. You’re busy,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll talk soon.”

  We hung up and I kept typing. But about ten minutes later, I felt sick. We never did that. We never sped through conversations. All my life, whenever I called, he’d never been too busy to talk. He’d step out of a meeting to answer the call. And here I was, thirty-one years old, facing a little stress and brushing him off.

  I called him back and he seemed happy to hear my voice. We spoke for about ten minutes while he waited at his gate to catch his plane. I told him I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to pull off the book I was writing in time. It felt like my world was going to collapse. He’d always been the person I called when I needed to be held up. There was something about the connection we had and the way I viewed him. I’d called him back that day because I wanted him to know that I’d never be too busy to chat. But it was a call that I needed much more than he did.

  “I don’t know how you’ll do it,” he said. “But you will. You always do.”

  He knew nothing about writing books, but I knew that his belief in me was real. It always had been, despite me. And even though the confidence he had might have been uninformed, it lifted me the way he always did. We hung up, and Dad took his flight. And I took a deep breath and wrote and wrote and wrote, feeling that confidence too.

  We had one more conversation, a couple of days later. It was quick. He was still in Calgary, driving back to the airport. There had been a big construction contract on the line with a major gas company that the engineering firm he worked for desperately needed. He didn’t want to talk about that, though. He asked how the book was coming. I told him it was getting there. The call was cut short as he drove by a car wreck on the opposite side of the highway, just a few minutes outside the city. It looked pretty bad, he told me. There were several ambulances.

  “I hate seeing that,” he said—and then he said something about people’s lives being affected forever in a moment.

  He had to go. Traffic was heavy. He’d call me when he got back to Toronto.

  “Love you, buddy,” he said.

  “Love you too, Dad.”

  I walk to the side of the hospital bed and watch him work through sleep. I know he’ll wake up soon. That’s all we’re waiting for; then we can figure out how to overcome whatever comes next, together.

  I sit on the edge of the bed and lean towards him.

  “Dad. It’s me,” I say. “I’m here.”

  I take his left hand in mine.

  “It’s Dan, Dad,” I say. “Can you feel my hand?”

  He squeezes, twice.

  Two times.

  Love you, buddy.

  He knows I’m here. He knows.

  We just have to wait.

  There’s a chair in the corner of the room. I decide that I should sit there, take out my laptop, and work on the book until my father wakes up. He would be coming back, after all. He squeezed my hand to tell me.

  And when he did wake up, he’d see me there—working on the book beside him, getting the job done, just as he believed I would. He’d shake his head at the commotion he’d caused and tell me to get back home to work. I’d smile and he’d smile and life would move on, and we’d all be better for this reminder of how fragile it all is.

  But I can’t type a word.

  * * *

  —

  Waiting consumes everything. We wait, and wait. We call family and friends, and reassure them that we’re just waiting.

  “It looks like he’ll be okay,” I tell Andrew, a best friend who lives in San Francisco. “We’re just waiting.”

  He’s already booked a flight home.

  Everyone is on the way to us. The waiting room fills up with all the people we know. They sit quietly, making small talk and trying not to look nervous. My uncle, Dad’s younger brother by a dozen years, plans to drive in from two hours away. I tell him we’ll call when Dad wakes up so that he won’t have to drive the whole way. My aunt, Dad’s only sister, arrives with my ninety-three-year-old grandmother, who almost never leaves the
house.

  When I go down through the lobby to meet them, I see the hospital’s lead neurosurgeon standing in line at the coffee shop. I give him a nod and he smiles softly back. I want to tell him how much I appreciate his saving my father’s life, but the man’s just trying to get a coffee. No need to embarrass him, I decide. Be cool.

  Hours pass.

  I don’t know how. But I still don’t type a single word, and soon it’s almost night. We’re still waiting. Some friends from my parents’ church come in to Dad’s room to say a prayer, hoping for healing. Everyone around us looks sadder and sadder. It annoys me. Their discomfort makes me anxious. They don’t know: he squeezed my hand. Dad just needs to rest.

  I leave to sit in the waiting room for a while. But I’m there for only a few minutes when I see Mom through the window into the hallway. Her face is white. She’s walking fast. Jai and Jenna follow quickly behind.

  My aunt asks first: “What’s wrong?”

  The doctor did a routine check on Dad while their friends were in the room to pray. His eyes didn’t respond, Mom says. They’re rushing him down into a CAT scan.

  No one speaks.

  It’s just a test, I tell myself, and I want to believe it. I sit there, numb and blurry.

  I don’t know how we arrived at the glass doors to the ICU, but the four of us are there now—some indefinable time after the scan to find out where my father has gone.

  A doctor opens the glass door. He’s new. Where did the old guy go? This guy has just started a shift. He’s young—probably younger than me. He couldn’t be more than a couple years out of med school. He has a stubbly beard. He has a clipboard.

  “Is this just the family?” he asks.

  It is.

  He wants to talk to us privately.

  We follow the doctor down a hallway, outside of the ICU. He stops when he can see that no one else is within earshot. Through the window behind him, I can see Dad’s hospital room across a small courtyard.