What Makes a Good Dad?

COMPILED BY MARGARET POLANYI

I GREW up on a dairy farm outside Ottawa. One summer when I was about eight, we were away visiting relatives when we learned that our barn had burned down. It was brand-new, with state-of-the-art milking facilities.

       My father was no doubt stunned. But I don't remember any complaining. He rebuilt the barn, with local farmers pitching in. My father believed you can't descend into self-pity. You have to rise above it. So today whenever something doesn't happen the way I want it to, I won't let it get me down -- because he never did. You have to brush it off and move on.

       One time, when I was in my mid-20s, my father visited me in Toronto. I had been asked to do some picketing to show support for ACTRA, the actors' union. As my father and I drove by the designated spot, we saw just a few people there. "It's raining and nobody's here," I said. "I really don't want to do this."

       My father was very quiet. Then he asked, "Did you tell them you would do it?"

       I said, "Yes." That was the end of it. I knew exactly what he was saying. If you make a commitment, you live up to it. I got out in the rain and walked with the other picketers. And felt good for doing it.

       Later as a young actor, I debated whether to go to Los Angeles. The prospect was frightening -- to go to a city where you don't know anyone and nobody knows you. I called my father and told him my concerns.

       "What if things don't go well?" I asked. He said: "You will still have gone there. You'll still have done it. That in itself is an accomplishment."

       His words gave me the courage to go, and within five weeks, I got a role in a pilot for a television series. I had put myself out on a limb and survived.

       My father knew about taking chances -- and about resilience. He was the oldest of 11 children in Holland. Just after World War II, when he was 25, he came to Canada with my mother, looking for better opportunities. They had to find a farm and bring the rest of the family over to begin new lives.

       A few years ago, I overheard a conversation in the next room between my father and my daughter, then seven. She was talking about her day at school -- about another girl saying she was ugly.

       What a hurtful thing to say, I thought. She's beautiful! I wondered how my father would respond.

       I heard him say, "I can touch the ceiling."

       My daughter said, "What?"

       He repeated, "I can touch the ceiling."

       My daughter didn't say anything.

       Then my dad said, "Just because someone says something doesn't mean it's true." He was telling her not to depend on what other people say -- to make her own decisions about herself. I loved him for that.

Sonja Smits is a Gemini Award-winning actor who starred in the series "Traders."

ONE DAY when I was a teenager, I was driving a tractor on my father's farm in Milton, Ont., towing harrows, a wide rakelike implement that makes the ground smooth for planting. Due perhaps to my inexperience, I caught a fence post and broke the long pole that the harrows drag behind. I was angry and disappointed with myself. My father had told me specifically to mind the many posts that lined the property.

       I drove the tractor up the field towards my dad, who was working at the other end. I was shamefaced and scared at having to admit that I'd blown it. He was mad, but he held his tongue. "We're going to have to fix this," was all he said.

       We took the implement back to the garage and welded it together again. And, typical of my father, he used the opportunity to teach me the skills involved. Afterwards, he put me right back on that tractor. He'd taught me that I could make a mistake and fix it, that it's not the end of the world. And he taught me to have confidence in my own abilities.

       The last time I flew on the space shuttle, we docked with Mir, the Russian space station, and had to build a long tunnel between the two vessels. We were pretty familiar with our end, but the other end, of course, was a Russian-built hatch. We'd seen it only once before. It was my job to get the hatch open from the outside so we could enter. When I got to the other end, I saw it wasn't what we had expected at all and was bound with various mechanisms and tape.

       All I had with me was a Swiss Army knife -- something my father had always carried -- so I got out my knife and unlatched the hatch basically by undoing things, taking apart small bolts, cutting away the tape and strapping.

       The hatch opened and there we were, welcoming the crew of Mir, slapping backs with the guys who were living in space.

       Growing up on a farm and having the skills I had learned solving small problems -- what my dad taught me -- got us into Mir that day. For me, it was the watershed of the flight.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield's next space flight is slated for Father's Day, 2001.

IN MY LAST year of high school in London, Ont., some kids asked me to run for student-council president. I was a "brain" and, in the '50s, being a brain was like having leprosy. I didn't play basketball or football, and I wasn't part of the in crowd. So I turned down the suggestion.

       When I told my father, he asked, "Why did you say no?"

       "Well, there's no way I could win," I told him.

       My father looked at me. "If you're going to go through life never wanting to lose, you're never going to do anything," he said. "There's no shame in trying and losing, because there are always going to be people better than you."

       So I decided to run. I recruited my cousins and sisters. We wrote slogans like "You'll Rave About Dave" on every blackboard and drove around in my father's Model A with a painted sign on top. On the last day before the election, the candidates gave speeches. I wasn't nervous and delivered my speech with verve. On election day I got more votes than all the others combined.

       In high school, I found, you gain a little bit of knowledge and suddenly you think your parents don't know a thing. One day, for example, my father told me something he had noticed as a boy. "I was watching wasps," he said, "and they had tiny parasites that looked like lobsters on them."

       I said, "Oh yeah, that's interesting." But I was thinking: That's stupid. What does he know?

       Years later, I took a course in ecology. Reading a book, I found there were parasites called pseudoscorpions that look like lobsters. My father was bang on. I realized he had been a tremendous observer of nature -- far more acute than I. And I realized how ignorant I was.

       But I still had more to learn from him. At 16 I went to Amherst College in Massachusetts. The tuition and cost of residence was double what my father earned in a year. The only reason I could go was that I had a scholarship. To keep it, I had to be in the top 20 percent of the class.

       In my second year, I got a letter from my girlfriend, telling me she had met another guy. I was beside myself. I hitchhiked to Toronto and tried to win her back. But she was infatuated.

       Devastated, I limped back to college. By midterms my grades weren't looking good. I called my father. "Dad, I might not be able to hang on to my scholarship."

       My father said: "David, I'll do everything I can to keep you in school. But you've got to be able to look me in the eye and say 'I did my best.'" He knew I hadn't.

       It was humbling. I sat down and cracked the books. My grades went up and I kept the scholarship. I was the first Suzuki in the clan to graduate from university.

David Suzuki is a world-famous environmentalist and host of CBC's "The Nature of Things."

What did you learn from your father that helped make you the person you are today? To post your stories, use this submission box.Your comments may be used in a future issue of Reader's Digest magazine.