Rendezvous
24 July 04 : 02.44 PM
I respect my father so much, and he's the only person I know that I can really consider as a man. Those guys I know, they're still boys trying hard to break into manhood, thinking themselves men because of their actions or places they've been to and seen. But I don't feel them that way.
I'm talking to Dad more now. I'm asking him to pick me up after my nights out. He knows what I'm doing and where I've been to. He knows, be it clubbing or the crowd I've been around, but he doesn't say.
Last night, I called him.
"Yes, darling?"
"Daddy, do you want to pick me up?"
"Of course. Can you wait for about 15 minutes?"
He's so nice now that I don't ever want to disobey him.
He always says, "Your mother and I are fucked up parents. We don't know how to bring up children. It's nothing great for a woman to give birth, the pain is nothing no woman can bear, it's natural. It's even easier for the man. But it's the upbringing that's tough. You can bring a life into this world easily, but to bring that child up well, that's hard. And that's what your mother and I can't do."
Dad's temper has mellowed over the years. Maybe over these few years, when business is bad. Money is just money to him now. Just paper.
I used to get so angry at him. How he can lose tens of thousands of dollars just one night at the turf club. Or a mahjong session through the night that wins him money, the amount of people's monthly salary but loses it again the next night. Who gambles away $1 million in half a year? Not a commoner, not us. The empire he'd built from nothing is crumbling. Business is bad. He's not doing anything to revive the situation. His resignation to fate scared me.
But that night at dinner we were talking. Someone, I forgot who, jokingly mentioned how Dad is so indifferent about money now that even when his horse wins the race, $20k doesn't make him happy. Losing that $20k also doesn't matter. Someone suggested maybe Dad is so used to bigger sums of money that this sum just doesn't interest him.
Or that the surge in property prices made him almost lose everything, that... and Dad said, "Perhaps it's just like quoting from John Lennon's song. 'Till the pain is so big, you feel nothing at all."
Dad made a rash decision when he bought Narooma. He saw the house, and immediately signed a cheque and gave it to the realtor. He loved the breezy feel at the dining area and the glassy partition which separates the basment room from the swimming pool. But even before the tenants' lease was over, he had to sell that house.
He has a house for each one of his children, did you know that? Because he'd worked for us, his children to be happy... So how could I be angry at him for spending his money the way he wants to?
One day I'd buy back the SL Mercedes that he used to own. If possible, the exact same one he drove with the top down.
He deserves everything good in life. I love my father.