To the Man

I have a mother and a father. I love them both. I respect them. The relationship between them and I is often simple, and very occasionally, complex. I like to keep it simple, especially with my father. We do not discuss emotions or matters of the heart, or anything similar. When we are together, without the rest of the family, we discuss my mother (his wife), my sister (his daughter), the car, its maintenance, bills, finances, education, and so on and so forth. We don’t discuss sports, we hardly discuss politics (mainly because my father’s knowledge of politics is outdated, and I don’t know the first thing about the subject), and we often discuss Jesus and his significance in our lives. For all these things, I will be eternally grateful.
When I was still little, I developed a huge appetite for watching movies. My appetite for reading books developed even earlier. However, the movie issue was far costlier, and potentially harmful to my education. Although looking back now I would definitely say that watching so much trash actually did me good (purely in the sense that it gave my brain a lot of stimulation to grow and think in new ways), it didn’t seem all that good for me at the time. But, my father, a man with the kindest of hearts, could hardly ever say no to his smartass son. He would buy me movie after movie, almost every time I asked. I remember once, when I was still about seven years old, we couldn’t find a Jackie Chan movie I was looking for, and he searched far and wide all over Wadduwa, our hometown at the time, and found a small, out of the way video store that had the film. At the time, I never appreciated the man’s effort. I know that he didn’t expect me to, I was seven years old after all. But looking back on that incident now, I know that it gave him immense joy to see my happiness at finally getting my hands on the movie. He knew it wasn’t good for me, to keep watching useless stuff, and especially to keep getting anything I wanted, but still he did it for me, probably hoping that any lesson that I had to learn would be learnt later, and that my happiness at the time was all that mattered. The man has always gone out of his way for his son. He did it then, and he does it now, and I know that he will keep on doing it as long as he lives. Now that I am twenty three years old and understand the sacrifices that love makes, it breaks my heart. My father has been a man of immense patience, with me, my sister, with our mother, with us all. He has kept it together all this time, through the worst of tragedies a family can suffer, through the big and the small. He hasn’t fallen to drink, he hasn’t taken after other women. He has always come home after work, and given his time to us. He has been emotional, but he has never shut us out. He belongs to a class, a generation of men who will never weep like women (no offence to women here, so all you feminist types can shut the f**k up), a generation of men who only lived to comfort, and not to be comforted. I am sad that I am not a part of that generation. But at the same time, I am glad, I am happier than words can ever describe, at having this man as my father. He has saved my life again and again, and given me a fighting chance, again and again, at becoming someone worthy of his name one day. For that I thank him.
I write this to encourage people to just take a moment to think about everything their fathers, their mothers, have done for them. These are not things that we think of often. We should, especially now, in this day and age. If you sniff hard enough, you might even smell the world burning. Burning for the lack of love, pure and simple love, for the lack of understanding, the lack of empathy. Quite simply, our world has become what it was never meant to be.