My dad was the strongest man in the world. He may have only stood five foot ten but he was a colossus that bestrode my world. He smoked 40 Camel plains a day and drank beer like he was Donar smashing his hammer into the world. He fixed cars with a screwdriver and a slew of profanities. He built an entire house from wood and then installed the wiring and plumbing with his fingernail. He was so immense that he wore a bushy moustache almost his entire adult life and never once felt a moment of shame. He was a man’s man in all its gendered, stereotypical glory.
He would make me watch as he wired plugs or refitted kitchens. He would pass down great fatherly wisdoms to me as he went about refashioning the world. None of these I can remember as I was so wracked with boredom, my heart longing to go and read a book or watch a movie. I loved him madly and he never judged me when I declared my intention to be a writer, an actor, a storyteller. He just helped me to become myself. (Surely his greatest feat.)
He was mortal though. He died of emphysema, another altogether human statistic of the deadly nature of tobacco. He faded slowly in his lounge gasping for breath.
His aura of invincibility had already slipped years before he sat struggling to breathe, thin and emaciated, on his living room couch. I was twenty-seven when my friend Sue went off to go and teach English in Japan. Her car had broken down close to where my father worked. She was unable to organise someone to collect it before she left. I told her not to worry that it was down the road for me and I could easily move it to wherever she needed it to go. It was the kind of adventure my dad loved so I enlisted his help.
We walked from his shop to where the car was parked on the side of a gentle hill. It was an old 1980’s VW golf. I had the key so we checked to make sure that the vehicle had not fixed itself in the intervening two days. The engine failed to turn over confirming Sue’s earlier diagnosis. ‘We need to move the car around the corner so that we can push start it,” my old man said, his voice still thick with traces of his German ancestry despite some thirty odd years living in South Africa.
“Okay.” I walked around to the back of the car.
“What are you doing?” My dad asked.
“I’m going to push the car. You can steer.”
“Don’t be ridiculous you can’t push this. It will roll down the hill. We will need to tow it. I will get my car.”
I stopped and stared at my dad to make sure that he was being serious. There was nothing to suggest that he didn’t mean what he said. “Crap I can just push it.” I leaned into the driver’s side window and undid the handbrake. I walked around to the back and slowly but with little difficulty began to push the car up the shallow incline. After a moment’s hesitation my father grabbed the side of the car and helped to steer it around the corner. It was too late though I had seen it. In the hesitation there had been the disbelief that I could do this and then the dawning realization that I, his son, had taken his metaphorical place in the hierarchy of the world. The hammer was now mine.
We both stood in the middle of the road uncertain on how to proceed, each of us aware, in our own way, of what had just happened. I felt the need to tell my dad that I loved him but I was sure that he would want to move on as quickly as he could from this moment. My father did not know how to deal with extreme emotion. “Let’s get the car moving,” I said. He hopped in the driver’s seat and I gave it a shove. The engine came to life in fits and starts and then settled into a steady hum. “Thanks dad,” I said as he climbed out the car.
“It’s a pleasure son.”
I needed to tell him that everything was okay without saying it so I enveloped him with a hug and squeezed him to bursting. He returned the embrace. Then he walked off back to work without looking back.
