The Locusts

I’VE LONG REFERRED to my sons as The Locusts. In affectionate tribute to the days when all four were teenagers, and seemed to be eating me and their wondrous mom Libbie, my ex, out of house and home.

The Mills brothers still gather and eat, as the adults and close friends they’ve become. But swarming and devouring are no longer their defining qualities.

I want to tell of The Locusts in two parts. First, in this piece about my amazement before what they are doing right now, and which saves its “kicker” for the end.

And then, second (and a little further down the line), through a video-telling of a dream I had during the covid lockdown. Stay tuned for the latter —an amateur production to end all amateur productions— my “Big Silver Horses.”

Here’s part one, then: The Locusts.

Hector Jerome, the youngest, so locust #4, works in fibre optics for a big multi-national company called CommScope. He has a new car to go with his considerable care and charm, and sees to clients and accounts across Ontario, Canada. He is being gorgeously ushered into our complex world, and conferences with middle-aged colleagues (he calls “the bald dads”) from Vancouver to Cancun.

Hector in the garden

Hec is presently exploring Oktoberfest in Munich,

Hector (far right) at Oktoberfest

imbibing, er, local customs with former house-mates from his days at McMaster University in Hamilton. Hecky, if you thought you'd get away without going full Bavarian in your vacation attire, you’ve got another thing coming . . .

Son #3, Ian Penry, is a musician. An artist of beauty, a followers of ideas in sound. A few years ago he oversaw the repairs on a Wurlitzer electric piano that had once featured in his great grandfather’s jazz band in Saskatoon, the Ray Dahlen Sound. Those keys were played by a guy named Monty; he was the antithesis of my fairly strait-laced, rhythm-guitar-playing Gramps; I can still see Monty in his hat and with his bad-boy hanging cigarette.

Eee has recently acquired a 1970s Gibson acoustic guitar. A sunburst marvel that would have brought a tear to the eye of his great grandpa, and in which he has

Ian with Gibson, and a video clip just below

—understandably— become not just a little absorbed.

Aldous Matthew, son #2, got his mama's brains. He's an aerospace engineer who lives in Luxembourg. (Readers of Dispatches may remember our Belgian monastery & brewery tour last winter!) Aldous sent this photo just the other day from near Cape Canaveral, Florida, where he and his hosts dodged deadly Helene and Milton to launch Juventas, the satellite they've built.

Aboard its rocket, and part of the European Space Agency’s Hera Mission, Juventas is headed into space to monitor an incoming asteroid. Didymus, you see, is currently on a trajectory towards our beleaguered Earth. Adoo is a reader. When he was young, he’d read late into the night, and not only about space. Long after the world was asleep, if you went and opened his bedroom door, this is what you'd see.

Aldous reading late

Felix Joseph, número 1, is a gifted writer and, more and more (and perhaps to his own surprise), a coordinator of others, of complex initiatives. He works for “Environmental Defense,” a laudable organisation in several ways, not least in the Canada-wide urban transit initiatives Felix himself is heading up this autumn. Canada Transit Action Week kicks off shortly, and Transit for Tomorrow Summit happens in Ottawa on 28 October. When I visit Toronto, I now stay so very happily in his basement. Feel has taken to gardening, and lives inspiringly with Rebecca and a little rescue dog (from the Tex-Mex borderlands) named Henry.

Felix and Henry on the porch

Felix in the garden

THE LOCUSTS —IN CASE you didn’t see this one coming— are individually and collectively capable of life counsel, humbling perspective, in short, of handing their father his comeuppance.

A recent visit with three of “the boys” found us sharing beers at an outside table under a railway track in one of Toronto's latest cool zones. At one point, I —oh how dreadfully, oh how predictably— press the case for literature and history and the broader humanities in a world in which the value of such things can feel threatened by STEM emphases, by narrower pragmatisms, by the lures of short-term profit, even by the pseudo-social economy of “likes” and “followers” and “buzz” with which Substack cannot help but flirt. In my cups I overstate things, speak in absolute terms, binary oppositions, abandoning nuance; I contend as I patiently urge my students not to contend. Two of my sons differently, gently and cogently correct me, conveying what was left of my “points” into more intelligent and connective territory. The other two nod, and even more subtly, shoot me a glance. Lovingly. To see if Daddio is okay.

I’ve been thinking ever since about just who I was talking to.

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* photographs shared by respective sons, except for the final two (taken by different kind strangers in Hurricane’s Roadhouse on Bloor Street in Toronto). Video and guitar-playing clip by Ian Mills. Watercolours of the locusts by Kenneth Mills.