My father is crazy, he is eccentric and self-absorbed but he is also funny and loving. As a child he would always tuck us in and say ‘good night, I love you, don’t get married until your thirty’, seeing as though he and my mother were married and divorced very young I think he only had my bed interest at heart. As a kid people always told me I was going to look like him when I grew up and I would cry for hours because I thought that meant I was going to go bald, with side tufts of hair that stick out like a Koala, and grow a beard. I learnt way later than I should have that as a girl this was unlikely to happen. We weren’t that close in my teenage years as many fathers and daughters aren’t. He would try to reason with me that when I didn’t clean my room that it hurt his feelings and being a moody teenager I did not give two hoots about his feelings being hurt because I left the milk out.
It was only when I hit my mid-twenties that I realised he was actually a wonderful character who I could learn a lot from. For starters he is incredibly intelligent but also very silly, he is not allowed to play trivial pursuit with the family as he knows way too much but on the same hand is silly enough to try to bludge a smoke of a man in a parking lot who had threatened him 5 minutes earlier that he would steal my father’s car if he did not give him $5 euros.
He is stylish, as a child he would always dress me in ‘the latest styles from London’ or whatever that meant, he seems to always be ahead of the times in his dress and once when we were out at a restaurant for dinner he left went to the shop 2 doors down, bought a shirt and changed in to it because he did not feel “hip” enough. But for someone so stylish he can be so very uncool when he starts shouting and running through a train station because we may miss the train that leaves in half an hour or even worse someone could be sitting in our assigned seats. Safe to say he does not deal well under pressure and I saw that even more recently when he was trying to write my brother’s wedding speech. In the end it was a good speech even if he did use a line from the film gladiator.
If you’ve actually bothered to read this far you’re probably wondering why I’ve dedicated this opportunity to my dad and the reason is because after everything I’ve written he is still a small town man, who has lived in his hometown all his life, built the home we live in and spend his nights on the couch buying things from eBay he doesn’t need, I want to make him as great as I believe he is and having people from all over the world read about him, gives me one slight chance to do that. Also because, on a recent holiday in Europe I was frantically running through the station to board the euro star pushing pensioners and children out of my way in a panic that I would miss the train and I realised I was in fact not only looking more like him every day but acting like him as well…. and I was proud.
Hannah
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Melbourne, Australia