My father surprises me

When I went to graduate school my father started writing to me. He and my mother used to take turns week about to update me on weekly news. My mother's notes were short and loving. My father's longer and more detailed, typed since he never wrote easily. He is left handed and found holding a pen awkward. His turn of phrase was sometimes very stilted (my niece once commented that getting a letter from grandpa was like getting a letter of rebuke from the bank manager) but he wrote with detail about what he had done or read or seen. I have a box of letters going back 20 years. When I moved to Hong Kong, he bought a fax machine so our letter writing would be more immediate. And the past 4 years he's graduated to e-mail. Ironically, the immediacy of e-mail has actually made him a less diligent correspondant but although the cost of an international phone call to the UK is cheap we still write to each other regularly. He's uncomfortable chatting on the phone but waxes at length in writing. This week he told me about the builder who is putting a new window in his dining room, about how the fact that this builder lives next door to him doesn't stop him from disappearing for days at a time; about his stress levels during the Six Nations; about how he has cut the grass three times this spring and what he plans to plant in his front garden; about his proposed itinerary when he comes out to Australia and New Zealand at the end of the year; about going to see Lost in Translation which he loved and how much he likes Bill Murray. If you'd asked me, I'd have said he didn't even know who Bill Murray was which just goes to show that people have the capacity to endlessly upset your preconceptions about them.

Comments

[anne]

Hi I am pleased that your father knows who Bill Murray is. People I know had very strong reactions to that film - someone I know actually walked out of it. I was in the love it camp.

In a moment of idleness I did a google search on Gadaffi and Miss S and your site came up as number 2.

Keep up the good work.

ab

[claire]

I loved the film too - it was refreshing to watch an american film that didn't fit the standard formulaic script, and left you feeling like you'd seen something interesting and thought provoking rather than the usual mindless escapism (not that there's anything wrong with that either!).

hugs to you and the girls.

[rara avis]

1. like your blog. enjoy reading it.

2. its excellent that your dad conscientiously writes those letters. i love letters. writing and sending them out and receiving and reading them. but i havent wrote one for ages. i think i will write one now. thanks!