Poppa

Joseph Meclea Gauthier, Mec to his friends. My mother’s father. Poppa had retired to his bed, and all my memories of him were in that bed.

When we came to Cochrane to visit, we always stayed at my mother’s parents. Karen and I would get out of the car and run up to the house, a large green painted, cinderblock building, mount the stairs two at a time, and greet Nanny at the door. We’d leave our bags to our parents to carry. They were probably heavy for little kids, you can’t convince me otherwise. Having kissed Nanny, we’d race up the flight of creaky stairs to our Poppa’s room. I’d jump onto the bed with him, hug him and kiss him. He was a small man, rail thin, sporting a somewhat longish beard, making him a new age hipster, way before his time. He was the only man I knew with a beard. I’d seen others, it was the early ‘70s then, so they were scattered about, but it was also Northern Ontario, and barely out of the ‘50s despite the date.

Poppa should not be judged by his largely unkept state, or his having retired to his bed. He cut quite the figure in his time, despite that small frame. Born in Quebec, he mostly grew up there before his family moved to Ontario. It was rustic here, then. Matheson, Cochrane, and Timmins hadn’t been around that long. There were few roads, none of them connecting the North to the South. Indoor plumbing may have been a luxury when he was young. His father bought the Stanley Hotel in Matheson, his mother was a school teacher, a family of note in the North, middle-class. They valued education in a time when most people in the North quit school after grade 7. They insisted on it, sending their boys south to school in Toronto, a rare occurrence in those days.

Mec and his brother became pharmacists, graduates of the U of T. He met my grandmother while in Toronto, married in 1926, and settled back in Matheson first and then in Cochrane once he’d bought a pharmacy there. He was one of the first people to drive a car north from Toronto to Cochrane once the road north was finally completed in 1927, a trek that took 9 days, I’m told, 3 to North Bay, then 5 to Cochrane. He was an important figure in his community, never turning people away without their prescriptions, medicines he had to mix and dispense, himself. He kept a book of what was owed him, but he was paid in eggs and chickens and cut meat on occasion, often probably. He was in charge of rationing in Cochrane during the Second World War. He counted Judges and the leaders of the town among his friends, and a certain railroad worker named Jules Leonard, as well.

His memory and his welcoming hugs warm me still.