Fathers and tattoos

This is mostly not about me. On 4 October I found out that my dad, my father, John, had passed away. I hadn’t seen him since the early 1990s when he came back to Australia to visit Sydney. He needed to gain details of his Australian citizenship for an application for a Green Card in the United States. He was teaching at a university in Pennsylvania at the time. He held a Doctorate of Philosophy. He was teaching Mass Communication and Journalism.
My sons and I played soccer at Bradleys Head near Taronga Park Zoo. We broke two of his ribs.
My sister in California emailed me to call her. I don’t have a phone. So I emailed back. She told me, “John has passed away.”
I was sitting in the library reading foreign relations and the Chinese understanding of their situation in an increasingly hostile world. I went to an empty room and cried.
My first email was back to my sister [in Mandarin she is called meimei, little sister]. I simply said, I cried.
Then I unfolded, crumpled.
All I could think of was a poem by ee cummings. “I carry your heart with me(i carry it inmy heart) i am never without it(anywherei go you go.”
I never understood how hard it was to be a father until Jenne and I had Stefan. He was born in Bathurst on 7 December 1981. He was a small blonde haired baby. I cried then too.
John came to visit us in our small apartment in the busy Bathurst Street. It was before he moved to the United States to teach. He drove down from Toowoomba in his old Mercedes.
Being a father is a lot of work. I have never known how to work through some difficult problems at times and have not always taken the right course. There’s no manual.
When I was young my father would play Prokofiev's elegant music for Peter and the Wolf. Everytime the three horns played the theme for the wolf, my father would yell and snarl at us – I have a younger and older brother – and we would scream in horror and delight.
Another poem that comes to mind is by Sylvia Plath, “Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles.”
When my daughter, Greer, was born at Wollongong Hospital, I was asked by the midwife to take her chubby body and wash her. I thought I knew how to do this. I held her lying on her back in my left hand while I soaped her and sluiced the warm water over her greasy body. She smiled at me. And Floated. She was born on 26 July on the seventh floor overlooking Wollongong Harbour.
I’m in Hong Kong to study Mandarin. Which is quite difficult. Many Hong Kong Chinese show great respect to their ancestors. They provide offerings and burn money and other things to help the Ancestor in their after life. They also name their children with the family name first.
I carry Lachlan, after a former Governor of NSW, Philip from my father’s family, Norwood from my mother’s side and Harris, my father’s family name.
My second son Nat, was born on 11 September in 1984. He was born at Manning River District Memorial Hospital. He was a round smiley baby with folds and a smile that infected all others in the room. The one photo that is constantly on our fridge is one of Nat and Stefan; Nat is smiling and grasping for the camera. Not realising that he should not grab at the picture taker. His face is one big cheer.
I haven’t talked with my father for more than a decade and yet I couldn’t think of him without completely dissolving.
I visited the International Office to make a call home and speak with my partner Jenne. And I cried.
At home we still use the old 1956 World Atlas – it still features old names for Peking, and you could probably find Prussia if you looked hard enough.
I don’t know what my father did when he first held me. Did he cry? Did he wonder how I would be when I was 10. Or did he think – as I have realised – that this is a wonderful and miraculous life, but you are alone a lot.
And one last poem, this is from John Donne, an irascible bastard from 1635. A great poem about waking with his lover on a sunny morning:
She's all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ;
compared to this, All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
This always reminds me of my partner Jenne.
Do fathers have tattoos to remind them of their fagility and their life travails? Sometimes life gives you tattoos, on your heart, on your body. You carry them with you. Only a few people can see the beauty in the work.