Nangle Natters: Daddy cool

It’s Father’s Day this Sunday which means that my brother, his wife and children, my sister, my other brother, and I will all be heading over to Dad’s place for a barbecue. Pray for good weather for us.

My parents went their separate ways when I was eight years old, and not only were they now living in different apartments, but shortly after they were also living on different continents. Which meant that every Sunday my brother and I got a long distance phone call at lunchtime from my father, asking how we were. Each week we also received a letter addressed to the two of us, written on airmail paper (who else remembers the tracing-paper thin sheets that went with an envelope with stripes around the edges?) telling us what he’d been up to and responding to whatever we’d told him in our weekly correspondence efforts. Thinking about it now, it can’t have been easy to find things to write to two small children yet to enter double figures in age.

Before too long his letters brought the news that we were going to have a brother, and then how much our new brother liked to throw his head back and scream – as babies are wont to.

After several years the small family moved back to this country, which I found quite discombobulating having gotten used to a ‘holding period’ between my parents on an airplane. I adjusted. And was rewarded with the arrival of my sister. Hurrah!

It can’t have been easy to find things to write to two small children

Throughout the Sunday lunchtime phone calls continued.

I went away to university and my Dad was patient with the fact that I was possibly less easy to get hold of on Sundays at lunchtime, but he pursued them nonetheless.

Now the only times I don’t receive a Sunday phone call, or make one, is when either my Dad or I are out of the country or if we’re seeing each other in person. He continues to forward the one piece of postal mail I “just never seem to get around to correcting the address on”. I finally admitted to him the other day that this might be because I still like to receive something through the letterbox occasionally with his cursive writing spelling out my name on the envelope. Like when I was little. No, you’re soppy!

So it’s Father’s Day on Sunday and all of the family that he made, or had a part in making, is descending on him in one fell swoop. With cards. And bags of butter fudge. To tell him that we love him. Good old Dad.