because.

My dad, in Kananaskis, June 2009

“…I search desperately to find the obvious meaning…” 

– July 24^th entry from Barthes’ Mourning Diary.

i.

My dad’s sense of humour was (or perhaps is? Does your particular brand of amusement as a genre die with you?) always a bit weird. My mama often said that even after knowing him nearly 40 years, she still didn’t always know when he was joking. My mama tends to appreciate a good pun most of all, and while my dad too was fond of wordplay, most of the time he was just silly. He took great pleasure in the pure absurdity of the surrealist joke, which I remember him teaching to my sister and me when we were quite little. He told us that when he was our age, this had been quite the fad in his elementary school.

These jokes could be relatively basic, where you ask someone a known riddle-beginning, like “Why did the chicken cross the road?” But, when they give the assumed, predictable response, or tell you they don’t know, you say something like, “No! Because elephants don’t make pancakes!” And then you cackle wildly with glee, as Caity and I would do, for a very long time When we got tired of this ‘Why…’ and ‘Because’ formula, we’d then play with the syntax, so not only were our responses non-sequiturs, but our phrasing rather idiosyncratic:

Q: What is the difference between a camel and a pie? (etc.)

A: Fish pee in a lake! (and so forth…)

These jokes came to resemble ridiculous parodies of koans; we’d say each word very slowly and with great gravity, partially because we were just making things up as we went along, and also because we were trying not to laugh, and also because it was funnier that way.

When I was a bit older, my dad and I would go on long drives to the mountains to hike and camp. On these journeys, I’d inevitably be reading, and from time to time I would tell him interesting tidbits of information that came up in a book, or things I’d think of while looking at the scenery. We were both quite content with silence, or with music in the background, so often these little snippets of fact came out of nowhere (or out of something I said hours earlier), often leading to hilarity.

For example, at one point, we have a conversation about what the difference is (in English) between legumes and other vegetables. 100km later I remark, seeing a field of clover: ‘Did you know that clover is a legume?’

These sorts of random remarks then became new go-to phrases for surrealist-joke punchlines.

Aside from his surrealist jokes, my dad also had a repertoire of about three otherjokes, which he’d often repeat to us, over and over again. ‘Did I ever tell you the one about the—‘ ‘Yes!’ These jokes then became monstrosities, compound variations that were basically a series of intertextual references of joke fragments.

The purpose was not to understand them at all, of course, but simply to delight in one that was particularly well-timed and reached new possibilities of ridiculousness in the remixing of the standard elements. My favourite trick was to pretend to begin asking something serious:

‘Dad?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I was wondering if I could ask you a question?’

‘Sure, of course!’

‘What did the bicycle with egg on his face say to the little boy as he rode around the block on the horse?’

This could go on for entire trips, until he finally got weary of my persistence and made threats about making me ski the rest of the way to the mountains, or walk back home. I’m not always good at letting it go.

ii. 

I mention these jokes not because they are funny outside of the context, or the moment, outside of what we shared, but because summer is coming and I am filled with such yearning and swallowed-stone sadness for our fishing and hiking trips, that I sometimes feel like I am going to choke, what I wouldn’t do to be able to go again, I can’t even articulate. I can’t.

Because it’s getting harder to deal with, because time does not soften grief, but sharpens it with the edges of his absence; time pulls at me, slowly unravelling the realization that this is real, that I am truly not inhabiting an alternate timeline. Because I feel nauseous sometimes with the vertigo of that understanding, and because sometimes when I am up awake, unable to sleep, my mind is plaintive, I am such a child again, with the persistent and infinite ‘why’, trying to make sense of this: Why is he not here?

Because when I am faced with this, I tell myself that perhaps many things work as the smallest atoms do; on the broader scale, there are causes for things, but the smaller things get the more a-causal everything becomes. An element may have an established half-life, but it is utterly unpredictable when an individual atom will decay.

Because perhaps when you ask why your father died as he did, the best answer you can even hope for is something along the lines of ‘because elephants don’t make pancakes’, and then you can laugh so as not to weep.