I REMEMBER PAPA

Luky;

One of the most unforgettable characters I have met during my life is my father.  
  Though he died over thirty years ago, the memory of the shining look of love for me on his face comes to mind in shops overloaded with  Father’s Day gifts.

Papa, as we called him, was a humble man.    Though brought up as the son of wealthy parents, he never achieved riches in his own right. 

He had a heart as large as a church and would give his last cent to a needy person, of whom there always are many.  
  As a baker, he met people who could not afford the price of a loaf of bread but whose children nevertheless had to eat.  

My mother who always worked for him and saw behind the scenes believed that in hard times many were kept fed because of his generosity.  
  I don’t know if the story is true for his left hand never knew what his right hand did.

He was the humblest man on earth.  
  “Do you want to become a b... fool like me?” he’d ask us when our reports weren’t up to scratch.  

He had been offered every opportunity for study and advancement.  
  One of his brothers was a doctor, another a priest.  
  My grandfather had hoped that my dad, a brainy person, would go in for law, but he opted for the baker’s trade instead – and lived to regret it. 

He was determined we’d make our living sitting comfortably at a desk and using our brains, rather than having to rise at three each morning and physically labour from dawn until dusk as he and my mother did.  
  He was prepared to leave his country and all it meant to him behind and travel halfway across the world to make this possible.

A striking example of his humility is illustrated in a story about my sister Elly which I overheard him telling my mother about.  
  At the time she was attending an exclusive secondary school in Amsterdam, which taxed my parents’ financial resources to the limit.  

To pay for it and other needs, my father, after a hard day’s baking, had started delivering his own bread in a cart propelled by a bicycle.    
  Pushing this uphill was physically taxing, even to a man of his iron strength.

I would mention in passing that my mother was as different from my father as chalk from cheese. 
 Exceedingly self-possessed, she always demanded, and received, the utmost courtesy and respect. 

People seemed to think my parents were an ill-matched couple.  
 But with a lifetime’s experience behind me, I now  believe my father was able to be the gentleman he was because my mother protected him against all comers, though her fierce defensiveness on his behalf sometimes seemed to disguise the profound love for him which inspired it.

“I was pushing the breadcart up the bridge this afternoon,” he said, “when who came cycling up on the opposite side but Elly, a bike-riding male teacher on either side.  
 She was talking nineteen to the dozen, and they were laughing away.  
 I tried to hunch my face into the collar of my raincoat so that she would not be obliged to acknowledge me.  
 But as soon as she spotted me, she rode across to me, calling: ‘Papa! Hi!’  
 She got off her bike, threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug.  
 Both teachers smiled delightedly, saluted us and rode on.”

My father died in the late sixties.  
 He suffered for two years from cancer, but he died as he had lived, without fuss.  
 I still think of him and praise his example of Christianity, generosity, humour, warmth and personal meekness to this day.  

That the memory of so self-effacing a man can cast such a large shadow, or rather patch of sunshine, constitutes one of life’s enigmas to me.  
 The fact that I have always felt very comfortable with members of the opposite sex I ascribe to his shining integrity.

Before her passing, my sister Elly, then in her sixties, read a poem a woman had written about her father which reminded her of our own dad.  
 She phoned and read it out to me and I reminded her of his delight when she acknowledged him before her teachers. 

My younger sister sings my parents’ praises each time we meet.  
 One time I visited my brother, I overheard him telling another guest about our dad’s good looks, his great build and his magnetic personality.  
 “He was my hero and my role model,” my brother, a retired deputy principal of one of South Africa’s oldest boys schools, concluded. 

His hero and role model?  My humble Papa surely would have had difficulty believing that!