A Son of My Father Author Keith Koberinski Copyright © 2018 All rights reserved. ISBN: 13 A Son of My Father DEDICATION For My family for their encouragement and support. !2 A Son of My Father I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE THE WORDS COME FROM, OR WHERE THEY LEAD. I JUST WRITE AS THEY COME TO ME AND ALLOW THEM LEAD ME FORWARD. I WANT OTHERS TO KNOW ME THROUGH MY WORDS, AS DREAMER AT HEART, BURSTING WITH A LIFE I NEED TO SHARE, WITH ANYONE WILLING TO KNOW. KEITH KOBERINSKI 2017 !3 A Son of My Father CONTENTS CHAPTER Forward Pg 6 1 Where I Come From Pg 10 2 Youth Pg 22 3 Leaving Home Pg 33 4 On My Own Pg 38 5 Work Adventures Pg 50 6 Marriage - A New Pg 62 Beginning 7 Church Pg 70 8 Politics Pg 85 9 Family Pg 97 10 Sports Pg 108 11 Ordinary Time Pg 122 12 Be The Bridge Pg 132 13 Music and My Life Pg 137 14 Laughter And Pg 145 Caring 15 Where I Am Today Pg 155 16 The LastWaltz Pg 162 !4 A Son of My Father Forward These days I awake to a different world. For the first time since I can remember since childhood, I awake to a totally free day. For all of my seventy-five plus years, I have always been responsible to someone or something every day in some way or form. From learning how to walk, talk, attend schools, get a job, get married, raise kids and providing for them all were real responsibilities for me. My thirty-five year career in civil engineering, as a government employee meant meeting deadlines, making decisions and making sacrifice. My career called me away from family for weeks and months on end. There were far to many hotel rooms, many with smelly beverage rooms below. There were those one horse eating establishments where the only food you ate food was what was served. No questions were allowed and no complaints accepted either. There were cold northern winter campsites, eating camp food each day and working outside in sub zero weather. There were long trips over winter roads with only a shovel and a heavy logging chain for emergency backup. There were deep northern roads across muskegs requiring extra preparation in order to obtain aggregate sources for summer use. Sometimes you would have to find the gravel pit too. There were landowners, and utility companies to work with over long summers, sometimes hundreds of miles from home. In those first early years there were no communications with my family, leaving a young wife alone, responsible for our three children, with no extended family for backup. It's only now that I realize the sacrifices my wife and children made to compensate my being away from home so much. On the other hand there was the excitement of seeing new places and working with a wide variety of men who shared the same sense of excitement as I did. Later on women assumed their role into the !5 A Son of My Father workplace, working side by side with men. In building new roads in the 1960s and 1970s I considered my work and the lives of those that worked with me, to be the last pioneers of the prairie landscape, I remember times where I found myself in some of these smaller outlying town on a weekday evening, when construction workers of every trade along with travelling salesman took over the eating establishments and the local bars, and made them their own. Trouble of all kinds were usually the order of the day. Some marriages were lost and some marriages were made in these unruly, wilder times. I think those of us during those years took a major role in the settling of the Province, and were the last group of pioneer explorers. I see my participation in those years as a great accomplishment, and take pride with the small role I played in its development. I remember those times too, because the fine men and women I worked alongside. Many the fine men, once local legends have now passed away. Their lives will always be remembered by me. Today, when I drive over these roads, now settled and overgrown with new life, I feel such real satisfaction and great memories. It is reason enough to make the effort to put down on paper that part of the story, so others will know before it is lost forever. Later, in 1980s and 1990s the first attempts took place to bring the people of the far north into a more meaningful way with their southern neighbours. Northern work required different skills and equipment, because of the deeply wooded forest, the many rivers and open muskeg. Because of the far distance, there were very few regularly scheduled work weeks when working in those northern work zones. Days away often turned into weeks away from home and loved ones, and work was always unpredictable. The results of this hard work led to the opening of the vast lightly populated north. This allowed proper access for tourism, mining and vast forest reserves. Today more people find themselves free to enjoy the many !6 A Son of My Father benefits of the growth and new prosperity with our northern neighbours, while northerners too can do the same with the rest of the province. This pioneer spirit I felt in my career also had an effect on my home and personal life. With a sense of responsibility I inherited from my own father I naturally found myself becoming actively involved in my community. The well being of my family always meant being a being part of the larger community. I feel my father's life had a greater influence on me than I could know. It helped me see why the title of this book came so easily, right from the start. Father's influence in my religious upbringing as a good Catholic man, called me to reach out to others, as both my parents had always done. On reflecting back on life I probably felt the need to belong to a larger group too, and therefore needed to feel important and even have my unconscious ego stroked. My road building career and my personal life, fit well into my desire to be a dreamers. I love life and all it brings. I will always be a dreamer. I have been given a great life. There is nothing I ever care to change. Since my teen years I always dreamed of putting on paper many of the events that shaped my dreams and allowed me its be I am today. I started writing a blog on Google in May 2012 , that I call, Rambling Erratic with You (http:// ramblingerraticwithyou.blogspot.ca ). I always had the need to share with others the thoughts going through my head. There is something both frightening and freeing by allowing those thoughts to be shared openly for others to see on paper. I started this blog to prove I could. Writing, became a risk, knowing that no one might care, or I be judged as something less. I proceeded anyway because of the freedom I felt inside seeing my thoughts come alive. I wanted to write for my own satisfaction. I am amazed that in these later years of my life, how I can produce thoughts and words for anyone, anywhere to see, by pushing a button and seeing my own words on the Internet. !7 A Son of My Father I am encouraged when people actually read my words. I receive some very kind reviews. I know others have read my words in silence and were kind enough, to not too critical in return. Mostly my writing is therapy for the mind and soul. A nice feature of Google blogging is how I can actually see the number of people that at least went to the site. No one likes negative criticism ever. Pride is a difficult vice, but communication requires listening, even to those who do not agree. Since I started publishing my stories, my daughters have gently urged me to put down my memories of the many events of my life story. My story would then help their own sense of history someday too. I have always had in my heart the need to actually do this. Their encouragement only strengthened that resolve for me. Therefore it appears my days of doing absolutely nothing will quickly come to an end, as I search for words to put down on paper a story of a life I have lived. The best thing about this will be the fact that I will be sitting in the warmth of my own home, out of the wind and cold, and perhaps in my favourite warm pyjamas. Oh, well, back to work I go. This, then is my story. I hope many of you might see as your story too. !8 A Son of My Father 1. WHERE I COME FROM Back in 1971 my parents came to visit my family. Their visits were always a delight. They came to us, kind, humble, and grateful for the hospitality shown to them. My children loved their grandparents very much. With little money to spend, their visits were always appreciated by us all. My parents were proud of the success we had achieved in our life, compared to the hard lives they had been through. I wanted to make them proud of us, and share our lives with them in whatever ways we could.