Just saw my first D series licence plate. Couldn’t help but think back to the last conversation I had with my father before he died 17+ years ago. Memory and grief: forever linked, forever unpredictable.

I’ve always had an eye for licence plates. The series of green Fords my parents drove in the early 70s each wore FDK 999, below the Ontario slogan du jour, “keep it beautiful.” In those days, the plates stayed with the owner, not the car. While it didn’t yet apply to my life, I bet it made staying hotels easier. No yelling “hey, do you remember my plate number?” across lobbies to whomever you’re with. The letter/number combo was etched in your memory alongside your seven digit phone number and your locker combination. Sometime mid-70s, they changed the policy - plates went with cars. On the 1975 amber Ford Maverick, our plate was HUA 537. 

That three letter/three number sequence was in effect until 1986 when it reversed to three numbers/three letters. Ontario was no longer about the beauty: “Yours to Discover” had become our catchphrase. During that time, as a young driver, I knew cars not by their year, make, and model, but more by their licence plate. I once ruined a surprise for myself by ID-ing the car of an unexpected dinner guest by the licence plate of his car (not the colour) in the restaurant parking lot. 

By 1997, we moved to a seven digit plate - four letters followed by three numbers, starting AAAA 123 and moving sequentially through all billion combinations (I have no idea how many - this is the sort of calculation that would have excited my father, but not me). 

And that’s where we were until December 2006 when I retrieved my parents from their favourite downtown Toronto hotel, Bond Place.* I drove us across the Bloor viaduct to have dinner at 7 Numbers on the Danforth and attend a choral Christmas concert across the street at Eastminster United. Dad was in the front with me, with mom and my sister in the back. Talking with my father was never boring, unless you couldn’t muster interest in whatever he was diving deeply into at that particular moment. About a decade earlier, I’d made the sage decision to take up cello-playing, coincident with his lengthy pre-occupation with instrument making, so our conversations were satisfying ones that moved between my playing and his making.  

He wasn’t above the odd bit of absurdity or commentary about the mundanity of life, though, and it was on that drive, mid-viaduct, that he broke through the stream of instru-chat with, “you won’t believe what I saw yesterday?!” 

“What?” I replied matching his breathless excitement. 

“A licence plate that started with B!” 

“Wow! Really? So soon?” I wasn’t faking interest; I, too, take delight at such nonsense. We talked for a bit about the history of licence plates in Ontario, him doubtless sharing with me what plate the Studebaker bore or perhaps the ’28 Chev, cars that predated me but were legends in the family. 

That was the last time I saw my father. Within a month, he’d died, not having achieved a B licence plate of his own. When the Cs rolled out in 2017, I felt a pang of sadness. No-one I’ve ever known, other than dad, would have found it worth even the shortest of discussions. And then again when I recently saw my first D, that wave of ennui returned. 

Grief knows no calendar. While we try to conjure it on the biggies —  birthdays, holidays, deathiversaries — those gut-punches are more often triggered by the random mundanity of things like a new licence plate series.  

* He favoured it because of he could see Heinl’s on Church Street, a violin supply shop. “A room with a view,” he’d say, grinning.  

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