Now that I got that off my chest...
It was Fathers' Day over the weekend. I didn't get my father anything, not even a card. He had just celebrated his sixty-fifth that week and I didn't want to spoil the man who had spoiled me my whole life. I had time to reflect on what my father means to me, what he has meant to me since the day I could consider the thing of it.
Children never consider things like compassion until decades later when they are trying to find a grown-up word to describe something. I definitely didn't know what compassion was when I was a boy; all I cared about was the world defined by the reach of my spindly little arms, the distance that my stubby legs could travel and the universe that my exhaustingly inquisitive mind could imagine. But my father is a deeply compassionate man, giving of himself and his wealth to right an wrong and reverse an unfairness or to soothe a wounded spirit. And he taught me compassion, not by lessons written down or passed on in conversation, but by doing that which is compassionate. In a hostile world, one of us has to be the fount of the milk of human kindness.
My father was strong. His nerve never failed him. His back was always ramrod straight. And he would only bend when he chose to bend. He is still strong. I have no idea how he does it. Is it the inner certainty that in that moment, with that choice, the only choice is the right one? Or is it years of experience - decades, really - where he knows what hands you have been dealt and he knows that if he holds out just a little longer, the minestrone you call a backbone will fold? I don't know and I think that I shall spend the rest of his life trying to figure out what makes him so strong in the face of such overwhelming odds.
He has the greatest sense of humour ever; he needs it more and more as his world is increasingly invaded by teenagers with massive smartphones and the intellects of weaver birds. (He knows a lot about weaver birds, by the by.) He lights up a room simply by pithily reminding its occupants of something or the other. His pith is without compare and those snot-nosed teenagers attempting to get by the intricacies of taxonomy are usually held rapt by his semi-casual delivery of the science and the theory of zoology, entomology and god-knows-what other -ology.
All that bullshit doesn't really tell you that he loves me, he loved me. It is here that we usually add "in his way." I don't have to. When I was sick, he worried. And then badgered Uncle Jasper to treat me even though he was not a paediatrician. When I was afraid, he gave me the courage to go out and try. When I couldn't make heads or tails of the simplest principles of mechanics, he patiently broke it down to its basics, and ensured that when I ascended to the realm of principles of physics my ass was not hanging out there like a bonobo's. He nurtured me. He protected me. He educated me. He made me a man.
How do you a buy a man who's done all that a fucking card?
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