Portrait of My Father

You know how when you’re young you think the sun shines out of your parents’ orifices? For some people this feeling passes when they hit puberty, but for a lucky few, that feeling persists, growing deeper still, because it has become an adult kind of appreciation.
My father and I had our fair share of disagreements when I was growing up. There was that time he told us expressly not to play at the neighbor’s house, and returned to find us hanging upside down from the jungle gym—on the neighbor’s side of the fence. He walloped us so hard that day that we could barely walk for a week, and he did it in back of the house so that our friends—who were still hanging from the top of the monkey bars—could witness our humiliation.
There was that time in P.7 vac that I wrote him a hateful letter, detailing why he had made my life miserable. I used several epithets in place of my step-mother’s name. I remember the expression of hurt that crossed his face as he read the letter. I remember him struggling to regain his composure before sitting me down and talking to me about my grievances—adult to adult.
I remember an episode in S.4 when I had promised to deliver newsletters to the school (such an ambitious child!), and the printers broke down at the last second. I had hyped up the newsletters so much that I felt that if I did not deliver them, I would be a failure. I called my Dad to moan. He printed out enough copies for 800 girls and drove down to Namagunga with them—at 8 p.m.
My Dad has his flaws, yes, but I have always been able to count on him to deliver. He is the most honest, hard-working man I know, and when he makes a promise, he keeps it. He absolutely does.
Now that I have painted a somewhat biased portrait of my father, I’ll move on to the real point of this post. When my father told me two or three weeks ago that he would be coming up to the U.S. for a few days, I was apprehensive. I did not know what to expect—what was our dynamic outside of Uganda? Sure, I had grown bolder over the last three years, and I spoke to him the way I would speak to a peer (over the phone and via email/ chat), but what would he think when he saw me the way I am now?—no longer a child, capable of making independent and adult decisions, and ready to meet him on a somewhat even ground? Would we revert to our old dynamic of awed daughter and strict, but kind father? Or would we meet as we had met online and over the phone? So many questions!
But from the moment I arrived at his hotel on Friday just before midnight, being with my father has been the easiest thing in the world. We picked up as though we had seen each other just the other day, and our conversation was natural, unforced. Riding the shuttle to the metro station yesterday (my word, the subway system in DC is like a dream compared to NY’s); he pulled out a book and dived at once into it. He leaned back into the chair, utterly comfortable, and began to enjoy his book. This is almost always the attitude I adopt on a shuttle/ a bus when I have a long way to go and do not know the driver. It was amusing to watch him and see a bit of myself in him.
At the mall, he refused to pick out shirts unless they met a particular set of criteria. They had to be: white or light blue, Oxford, Stafford, 18 ½. He would not settle for less. He had the salespeople running around for half an hour trying to find him what he wanted in the Big & Tall section. But he did it all with a sort of jovialness, so that the salespeople actually wanted to help him. I laughed, because I am picky when I know what I want. You don’t want to try and go handbag shopping with me, for example, unless your feet are ready for an entire day of grief. Oh wait, I suppose that means I am not exactly like my father—he, at least, made us all laugh—but still, I believe you get my point.
I’ve really enjoyed our mini-vacation together, and I really will hate having to go back to school tomorrow, but maybe the true beauty of happy moments is that they pass quickly—that way we can immortalize them as perfect bubbles. Who knows, if my father and I had stayed together longer than a few days, maybe our inner monsters would have reared their ugly heads and we would have parted on strained terms. Tonight, however, we shall have our last dinner on the water-front. By the window, it will seem as though we are looking out onto floating lights. We will talk about the books we will have purchased from this awesome used-books store we just discovered (he is determined to complete his collection of Westerns by an author whose name I can never remember), and we will pause occasionally just to savor our meal and enjoy the view.
I love my old man. I hope I turn out to be half the man he is.
P.S. Is it foolish that I am wearing a polo t-shirt and jeans today just to be match-y–match-y my father? Yes? I don’t care!