When my father was a little boy in Toronto in the 1920s, he used to walk down Yonge Street with his mother and conduct symphonies. His little arms would wave and dip in time to the Mozart in his head. Pedestrians would pause and smile.

He took lessons from Dorothy MacMillan (at the Toronto Conservatory of Music), who thought he had the talent to be a concert pianist, but basketball, and then polio in 1938, intervened. By the time I was born in 1949 in Vancouver, he was a chartered accountant who satisfied his musical passions at church, where he played the piano or organ during the evening service.

He could hear a tune once, instantly play it in any key, with endless variations. He could compose music while playing, and if you didn't know, you'd think he was playing Bach, or perhaps Handel. He never wrote down what he so effortlessly composed, and it died with him.

Along with my mother, he raised three children in the 1950s and '60s. In retrospect, it seems to me he related to his children much the same way most men did where I lived. (And I don't think it was much different anywhere else.) In those days, most dads in my Anglo-Saxon and Jewish middle-class neighbourhood were not "hands-on" parents. My dad was always at work, doing mysterious things we kids knew practically nothing about, other than that his work was conducted in an office in a very tall building.

Except for holidays, he left home first thing in the morning and came home by dinnertime. He was not a pal, and he didn't spend a lot of time keeping track of my day-to-day business, as far as I knew.

Nonetheless, I watched him all the time. Despite the considerable handicap he carried from his bout with polio, he built fences, played golf, paddled canoes. He could play the piano so long as his right arm was propped up by a chair.

He conducted discussions around the dinner table, about world events and Canadian politics. He was a Liberal, in the "Mike" Pearson vein, and my mother was a Diefenbaker Conservative. Long before anyone had mentioned such things in the media, I heard from him that Yugoslavia would fall apart shortly after Tito died and that the biggest challenge to the Soviet Union would be the burgeoning Muslim populations within the USSR's eastern satellite states.

I listened to him every chance I got. He played for us at night on the piano. Trilling lines of music floated up the stairs from the living room. For an unbroken hour of seamless music, he might connect a Chopin Polanaise to a Beethoven sonata, improvise a transition to In the Mood, followed by How Great Thou Art and on to Mozart, a burst of Rachmaninoff and end in a flurry of Boogey Woogey Bugle Boy.

Perhaps he thought his music would put his three children to sleep. But I stayed awake, listening to every note.

Three generations together in music

By the time I was in high school, I could play most of the things he played. and this was both wonderful and oddly disappointing. But I was never the musician he was.

The last conversation I had with my father was in 1992, a week before he died suddenly, but not unexpectedly. We were alone for a few minutes, and he said he was sorry he hadn't been more involved with me in my childhood — something like that anyway.

By then, he was surrounded by a culture with very different ideas about "fathering" than the ones that prevailed when he was raising my brothers and me. By 1992, many fathers were more proactive, more "involved" on a close and personal level with their children. My father was well aware that in 1992, fathers did all sorts of things with their kids he had never done.

He regretted not being more involved with me when I was a kid, doing more things together, having more fun. He said so.

But I had always admired and loved him and appreciated many things about him, including his music. It was a passion we shared. I had learned many good things because of the way he lived his life. I said so.

It is a simple fact of life that we aren't likely to understand much about our own parents until we have kids ourselves. Once we're in approximately the same boat they were in, we start to see things differently. It is also true that sometimes we can catch glimpses of our parents through our children or grandchildren. Sometimes, we only see something clearly when viewed from a great distance.

Fast forward to today, and here I am in my car, conducting a Mozart symphony while waiting at a stop light. The music is happy and summersaults out from the dashboard CD player in the car. In the rear view mirror, I can see my young granddaughter, and she is laughing. Her little arms wave and dip in time to a swelling crescendo.

And for a brief moment of inexpressible joy, that little boy on Yonge Street, my granddaughter at an intersection on the Island Highway and I are together, in the music, and full of life.

Letters

I am fascinated to read about Mary Ellen Lang's father and his musical talents.

I, too, grew up in that time when the fathers I knew were mostly fairly distant figures, out "at the office" every weekday until dinner time, usually just before my bedtime, and at home only on weekends. Mine liked to take me out in the local hills to fly a kite he had designed and constructed, and that was when he was at his most excited in anything. He was definitely not musically talented, in fact habitually said he was a "Philistine", meaning he knew, and wanted to know, nothing about music and the arts.

He was always proud of my own early successes in this field, however, and supported my efforts so much that I chose music as a career, later becoming a professional symphony violinist and, now, a violin teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Music, the same institution where Ms. Lang's father got his musical instruction all those years ago.

Later, I realised that my dad actually envied my musical abilities, probably not knowing that he might have had some talent in this area, too, had he had the opportunity to develop it after serving in the British army in World War II, instead of plodding away the rest of his life as an auto insurance adjuster in Birmingham.

– Helen Jacob-Stein | Toronto

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