The totality of a Port Moresby night would have fallen the warm humidity of the thirty three degree day still lingering and there dad would sit,
His back to the wooden timber stairs leading up to the bedrooms under a suspended light bulb cloaked in a paper Japanese lampshade.
He was shirtless and only clad in a lap lap from the waist down,which is basically a piece of material tied at the waist, and was tuning the portable radio to radio Australia.
It was a ritual after dinner that Dad would have cooked,he would be smoking back then he smoked three packets of cigarettes a day and consumed a lot of instant coffee.
It was the early eighties and throughout our young lives we never had a family television set so the radio and coffee and eventually cigarette fueled conversation was our way of passing the time till we had to go to school or work the next day.
I started smoking after age nine when dad busted me having a Consulate in the back yard and said he’d prefer it if I didn’t do things behind his back and I’ve been smoking ever since.
Dad well he wasn’t your average dad, freedom was very important to him and he was loath to impose rules on us as children preferring us grow wild and free.
He did mention something about being Bohemian in the sixties but I have a limited idea of what that entails and he had a kick ass bookshelf among st other things there was a copy of The Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs.
I made the fatal mistake of trying to read it later on in my teen years, I’m still scarred by that little misadventure.
That’s a little snippet of how I remember him, even though we didn’t have much at the time it was one of the most memorable periods in my life.
There were times when we didn’t have food and dad would disappear off into the darkness, clad only in his lap lap of course, and materialize an hour or two later with a can of vegetable soup.
It taught me that he would do anything for us children and something is always better than nothing, I think if one goes through adversity together it creates an unbreakable bond.
He always did say to me, “Son you can live as a rich man or live as a poor man” it was his way of preparing us to be able to live either way and he was right.
