Memories of my father's friends. |
Prompt ▼ My Father’s Friends My father had few friends, coming from a serious and thrifty generation as he did, but there were two who impacted me in different ways in my childhood and youth. The first, in the fifties, when I was no more than a young boy without understanding and overawed by the age and power of grown ups, this man was younger than the others and odd in that he knew my name, as if I had importance of some kind. I cannot remember any words that might have passed between us, but his image remained through the years so I knew him when he sent a cheque as a wedding gift, in spite of the years since there’d been contact - I forget the amount. Somehow that cheque was never cashed, forgotten in the turbulence of marriage, and, being found decades later, it remains a symbol of inexplicable friendship and respect I did not earn. The other was a loud and rough man, straightforward and unafraid to speak his mind, an extreme copy of a side of my father, and I, a teenager at the time, was drawn once, respect for age abandoned and patience depleted, into political argument with him. It was not my most sensible moment. The man, enraged, demanded my family remove me from his presence and I retreated, abashed but somehow proud for I’d not been browbeaten into silent submission. Years later, when all had been forgiven or, more likely, ignored, and the man and my father still friends, his wife, a mouse enslaved by her overbearing husband, took me aside and advised with concern that I should marry only a woman of equal intelligence. Good counsel or not (and certainly unasked for), it was clear to me even then where such wisdom originated. She was such a fragile, artistic little thing and so unable to deflect him from his conviction, I sometimes wondered how he caught her. But no matter how she came to the idea, I now know for certain she was right. Line Count: 55 |