My Dad
The things I loved about my Dad were his sense of humour, generosity, his
hard work and his Christianity.
Our childhood was salted with memories of his younger life in Australia, his
experiences in the war (most of which seemed to revolve around drinking)
his post war adventures in Australia and New Zealand with his mate Andy Smith
(many of which revolved around drinking) and a repertoire of phrases from
his youth, some of which (like 'Fair Dinkum' and 'By Jingo' died out by the
time I'd started school.
Some of my favourites are:
"Go to buggery"
"I'll kick your arse till your nose bleeds!"
"I'll knock your block off!"
threats he'd never made good on, no matter how much we annoyed him (and
we did. He never did give my brother and I the hiding we so richly
when we left the tripwires of fishing line all over his garden when the
novelty had worn off - tripwires that he located by himself - the hard
way).
A gentle and caring man, my father's life wasn't milestoned by a mass of
public and worldshattering accomplishments and resultant fame - he was
simply a quiet and private acheiver, raising a good family with love
and affection. And the occasional plastic spoon. (When you were
doing something you shouldn't be doing and you heard the cutlery
drawer open at speed you knew you were in trouble!)
My favourite memory of my Dad's sense of humour was when we'd gone out to dinner at a quiet restaraunt and I'd asked my Dad about how his iron injections were going. His loud (being mostly deaf) response was that he thought he was getting too much iron because he kept finding rust in his underpants...
As a practical joker my dad would enjoy his April fools jokes, although sometimes he couldn't quite wait till the right time of year - like the time he found a remarkably realistic stuffed cat, placed it in the vege garden and told us it had died there and we needed to go any bury it for him. I think we'd started digging the hole before approaching the corpse close enough to realise that maybe it wasn't all that lifelike.. (A hidden bonus for us kids was the hours of entertainment we got out of waiting for cars to drive by so we could commit some senseless act of brutality on the "cat". This was the 70's of course, where everyone minded their own business and abusing a fake cat didn't necessarily mean you were going to turn out to be a serial killer...)
I loved my dad, I'm proud of him and proud to be his son - and would be even prouder to be like him - rust in the underpants and all.