My Story 5: Meeting Dad

When I was 12, my mother told me that my sister and I had different fathers, and he wanted me to visit him for a week in Prince Rupert BC. I thought it was a neat little trip. I took an airplane for the first time in my life, and spent a week having fun with this somewhat quiet guy and his wife May. He took me up the mountain on a gondola, swimming in the local pool, and he even let me push the gas pedal as he drove around town. I returned to Vancouver after a week and my mother said I would be going to live with him permanently. She figured, probably correctly, that he could offer me a better life than she could.
So I moved to Prince Rupert, and became a part of my Dad's working-class life. There were just the three of us, and it started out great. I stopped drugs and crime, and became a pretty normal 12 year old, playing guitar and hanging out in video arcades when I wasn't at the little lake down the street with the other kids in my neighborhood. There was a huge leap in my grades at school, and I realized for the first time in my life that I was good at this "school stuff." I also took on my first helping role. There was a young kid at my school with an acute form of epilepsy that needed someone to walk him home each day. I was eager to volunteer, and I was his helper for about a year, until we moved to another side of town.