One of the people who made the biggest impact on my early life was my maternal grandfather. After a hardscrabble childhood in Glasgow, he immigrated to Canada as a young man with his parents and sister to train as a draftsman and parts engineer. An aptitude for the work and for study in general made him a success within a few years and he was soon able to provide his family with the sort of respectable, cozy comforts that they had always aspired to in their homeland.
People of his generation and background approvingly described him as “a careful man” — a certain sort of sober fussiness being viewed at that time as one of the proudest and most patriotic of Scottish virtues — and he was as meticulous and discerning about his pleasures as he was about everything else. Our own, less kind era might hang the label of “OCD” on his morning hygiene and dressing routines, his fastidious care of such household objects as clocks, vinyl records or decorative biscuit tins, or his use of a level to straighten all the picture frames in the house once a week.
Despite his enjoyment of many small, bourgeois luxuries, I am proud to say he was an optimistic, open-minded and politically progressive man for his day and one of the most enduring, if frivolous, symptoms of his faith in the goodness and intelligence of all human beings was his insistence on ordering a very specific gin martini (very dry, one olive, glass frozen) wherever we went…
