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Disciplining children was left, in those days, to the father, and my dad was absolutely horrible at it.

He’d get home from work, my mother would fill him in on whatever misdeeds I’d committed that day, and my dad would attempt to paste a stern look on his face, as I would try to adopt a look of contrition. But we were incapable of maintaining the façade and my rare spankings invariably ended in us giggling together.

In later years, all he had to do was say he was disappointed in me, and I felt like my heart had been pierced.

As a rink manager, both in the town where I was born and after we’d moved to Toronto, he always had a small staff.

To my knowledge, in his whole working life, he had to fire only one person.

Among many other sins, as I remember it, this fellow had stolen from the rink; there was proof. My dad recognized he had to go; the rest of the staff were all but begging him to do it. Yet it took him weeks to summon the stomach. It gnawed at him before and after. He simply couldn’t bear inflicting pain on someone else.

I often wonder what he would think of the modern cost-cutter, who chops jobs by the dozens or hundreds, with what looks like ease.

More important, and how weird is this, he taught me what it is to be a good man

Once, when I was a teenager and our puppy had been spayed and a botched job it was, we lay on the cold linoleum in the kitchen with her that whole night, my dad on one side and me on the other. We rushed her back to the vet the next morning, but she couldn’t be saved.

And one time at the Toronto rink, when the annual skating carnival was on and the joint was in darkness, the little kids sparkling and twirling in their costumes on the ice, I caught him at the end boards, weeping at the beauty of it all.