Yesterday, the 28th, would have been Dad's 59'th birthday.
Several things happened yesterday, most of them trivial and none of lasting consequence, but like most days I am kept busy with the small. There were few moments of pause. In the one in which I now sit, at 2am on the following day, I am thinking of the void left with Dad's passing many years ago.
Mum is visiting, and she is the only other person in this house who knew him. He had passed a few years before I met my wife, and long before children stopped seeming (to me) like something that happened to other (much older) people. We have some photographs. No recorded films, no recorded sound. The works he did, in building the farms we lived on, the houses we lived in, have been sold whole or subdivided. The physicality of the time we knew him has largely been absorbed.
What remains? There are some small pieces - a clock that I helped build from an old red-cedar stump we dug out, tools, some clothes. But in a sort of parody of memory, they don't
do anything. My memory of Dad is one of constant, nay, frenetic activity. He moves through the still-life, slow-motion memories I have as a child with speed. Almost all my memories seem to be about getting out of bed at some ungodly hour of the morning, with Dad fully awake, radio on, rushing breakfast and zapping off to fix fences, chase cattle, spread fertilizer, do
something.
It can't really have been that early, I mean the sun is
usually already up in those memories, so it must have been more my perception than reality. And to have Fate tweak my nose, nowadays I seem to be dragging Lilly from bed, forcing toast into her and zapping her off to pre-school whilst she is still closer to sleep than wake. I guess she will grow up thinking that I must have been awake forever each morning since I now wake her up and already have the radio on....
As I write this, I am having many happy memories, but it is not my intent to recount them here. My thinking is more toward a simple question: How will I introduce my own children to their Grandfather?
For them, he would seem to be not much more than four celluloid pictures living on the breakfast bar, in a world which doesn't really value a few still images. Gabriel's second name is Warwick in memory of him, and I tell Lilly stories about things he and I used to do when I was her age. But I remember that Dad also used to tell me stories of the things he and his father did -- and to that small me, listening at that time, the only real character of those stories was Dad. Some not-quite-law-abiding child-version of himself, for whom the father and brothers were more props in the stories than actual characters. I don't know, if I had never met them all many times in real life, if I had not spent Christmasses with all the characters in those stories many years later, I don't know that they would have been very memorable to me.
And perhaps, perhaps, if we'd had tape-cassette recordings or if we'd video-taped a conversation, then perhaps we'd have something more real. But I don't think so. Nowadays, with movies by the thousands, and all the vision and sound and documentaries we have to distract us, I think a few moving- or audio- snap-shots would not be so much more than the few still-frames we've got.
If, as the cliche says, a picture is worth a thousand words, what price are memories? For I think that is my ultimate desire - to allow Lilly and Gabriel to see what I have seen, and hear what I have heard. Not on some crackling, fading, stretched 180minute VHS or audio-cassette, not sitting in an armchair in the lounge room, but being there, actually there, then.
To know Dad as I did, which surely would be nearly as good as meeting him for themselves.
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