I have this picture of my dad and my youngest son taken over 24 years ago, Nic had climbed on to a chair next to his grandad (it took a while) and once there, sitting proudly upright, promptly fell asleep. Sucking his thumb intermittently, his little head drooped and his whole body slumped slowly sideways in an attitude of total relaxation and suppleness which only the young achieve successfully. My dad watched him slide into sleep and extended his arm for Nic to lean on. He sat like that for well over an hour, never moving a muscle least the child be disturbed.
The picture moves me so. I have other better, clearer pictures of my dad doing a multitude of things, but this one always reflects who he really was more profoundly than any other.
My dad and I were close, we shared the same passions. We listened to stories on Springbok Radio together, me snuggled up on his lap the lights dim, my dad sipping a cup of coffee and making me jump with fright at the scary parts. I would take his face in both my hands and get really close and whisper 'Don't do that' he would chuckle and nod sagely, but he never listened.
We canoed and fished together, a lot, and once went hunting I hated it and he never asked me to accompany him again. He was a teller of stories too, oh he would sit on the end of my bed and relate the most fantastic African folklore and animal stories (which he made up as he went). When I had children of my own, he wrote and illustrated a little book for them which they have still.
The sound of his boots crunching across the gravel when he arrived home from work is with me still, I would frantically get his coffee ready as soon as I heard the car door slam. I can still see him filling his pipe and puffing quietly on the back veranda as he watched the sun set over the far Lebombo mountains.
I watched his skin burn in the fierce African heat as he dug a swimming pool for my sister and me. Day after day with only a helper to mix the dugga I would hear him shout 'Fugga lo dugga' as they mixed cement by hand and lined the pool. It stood the test of time and my children swam in that pool 20 years later.
He played hide and seek with us in the twilight and then rescued me from a tree I had climbed, he drove miles and miles to take us to movies at a neighbouring town and waited in his car for the movie to finish as it was too far to drive home again and then come back.
He healed my soul at times when I least expected it, often just with a word or kind touch. Oh I miss you dad, I miss the safety I felt of having you soothe my life. He was a solver of problems, a rock..my rock.
Nothing profound in any of these things I thought, just normal dad stuff, when its you. Now I'm at the age he was then and these things have a new level of meaning for me. Now, with a full heart, I watch my son-in-law with his children and I see the same love and patience, the same commitment to their well being and safety. I watch him fish with his son and play rugby with his daughter or read and patiently explain a maths problem.
I see them sit on his lap and reach up and touch his face, safe and unafraid, in the arms of a good man.
Happy Fathers Day to all you good men out there, loving fathers..young and old, near and far! The day is yours!
