JUST WRITE!
Happy day, dad!
By Tracey Coveart/The Scugog Standard

My dad turned 75 this week. Somehow, I cannot put that number next to my father and have it make any sense. Three quarters of a century? Not Paul Coveart.
_Our family is not blessed with longevity. We Covearts are, however, genetically predisposed to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which means we spend an inordinate amount of time confronting our own mortality and/or contemplating the particulars of our untimely demise.
_My paternal grandfather, a brilliant musician-inventor-denturist-alcoholic who gambled away the family fortune in a card game, died of a heart attack when my own father was just 16. Two of dad’s sisters passed away in their thirties. My grandmother, a tough old bird who smoked Black Cat cigarettes, drank Carling O’Keefe Ale and rarely smiled, died when I was three months pregnant with my first baby.
_Covearts don’t have the pleasure of great-grandchildren. Our hearts give out long before we get to feel the love.
_But looking at dad, born Dec. 6, 1936, I feel as hopeful as a fatalist can be that he might be the first of a hardier generation. That his will be the first Coveart ticker to make it past 80.
_Anyone who knows my dad, is as surprised as I am that he just celebrated his 75th anniversary on this earth. He’s far too busy and far too A-type personality to slow down.
_A rebellious boy who spurned school and the Catholic Church, dad grew into a rebellious man who refused to join a trade union and developed a healthy disrespect for people who worked just one job, paid someone else to do their electrical work and set their alarm for anytime after 6 a.m.
_As generous a man as a stranger will ever come across, dad has given even more money to charity in his lifetime than he has to the OLG. It was the Irish Sweepstakes that got him started on lottery tickets when he was just 14 years old and he’s been playing the numbers weekly ever since. I shudder to think how much this proclivity has cost him over the years, but he can’t quit now. It’s like bailing a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. You’re committed, even though you’re reasonably sure the ship is going down with you in it.
_I didn’t inherit a gambling spirit from my father - if I drop $20 at a casino I am sick with regret - but I did get his flat feet, the infamous Coveart nose, his stubbornness, his inability to say no and a liberal dose of OCD.
_I’d like to think I also inherited some of his most admirable qualities: his integrity, his work ethic, his time management skills, his energy, his helpfulness, his curiosity, his extraverted nature and his goodwill.
_I remember once, when I was a very small child, I stole a gum ball from a convenience store on a road trip. Miles later, dad discovered my crime. He turned the car around and made me take that pretty pink orb back to the shopkeeper, apologizing profusely for my transgression.
_Trained in CPR and emergency response from his years as a marshall at Mosport, dad never drove past the scene of an accident. He would tell my brother and I to lay down on the floor of the car - this was in the days before seat belts - while he stopped to see if there was anything he could do. To this day, I head in the opposite direction of a siren because I can’t get down on the floorboards when I’m driving. (Not a great trait in a reporter.)
_Dad never passed a Salvation Army kettle without depositing at least a fiver and he gets ‘Trusting we can rely on your continued support’ letters from not-for-profit organizations I’ve never even heard of.
_When I was young, he custom built our first camper van and took us all across Canada. We didn’t go on exotic Caribbean holidays like my friends, but I had seen more of this country than any of my schoolmates by the time I was 10.
_It was dad who drove Stephie and me to countless distant medical and therapy appointments, when I started to fall asleep at the wheel from stress, fear and exhaustion. And once each month, he would make the four-hour drive from Toronto to Ottawa so mom could help me take care of the babies for a week while he fixed whatever needed fixing around the house.
_Dad isn’t much for PDAs, he doesn’t often apologize, and he never admits he’s wrong, but he is an angel in his own right. His halo may sit a little crooked at times, but it’s nothing another quarter century of living and giving can’t straighten out.
_Happy 75th birthday, dad. I love you.