Conversations

There is much to be remembered. I spoke to Dad on a visit just before we both went to England for Brenda's wedding. I wanted to know a lot about how his father and mother was but our conversation was much more wide ranging, especially on relationships, both with his brother and first born.

The first thing that came up is the relationship with parents. He knew his mother was "going". His relationship with his mother was disappearing due to her illness.  There were conversations to discuss her health and it was decided that it was best that she'd be put in a home. Dementia is a horrid disease, he knew. Dad related how on his visits to Kingseat in Papakura to see Ma, he was too shaken to visit again. Ma just wasn't "there".

His father was an interesting man. Dad told me a story about how he sheared 330 sheep in a day and called his Dad to report it. His Dad didn't believe it but didn't come the next day to see it. My Dad didn't want to talk about it.

His father, my Pa, wasn't healthy. Tuberculosis had hurt him; he'd been a shearer but lost a lung, and then he was weak. Dad was busy and recollected the weekend of his death. His father came to Helensville for Friday and Saturday, after which he'd said, "You are rather busy," and chose to go home on the Sunday, after which he died. My Mum, Sue, told Dad of his death and the regret began ever after.

It was with her that the story becomes interesting. My father met her Papatoetoe where he spent time being educated. And he brought my Mum back to Waikawau Bay after marriage. Neither my father's mother or father accepted her though. My father found it difficult to deal with but it was hard to talk his parents around. My mother felt the chill from the start. She'd arrived in this unknown rural place, given natural creamy milk with her tea (which disgusted her) and her birthday wasn't recognized with her in-laws. My father admitted he didn't know the real reason for their resistance; I put it down to the rural/urban divide.

One family legacy is perhaps a tendency towards an Asberger's solipsism. Dad said as a child he was in his own world. horsing around in his own world. I could see some similarities with my uncles. I was in my own as well, listing snake types and writing about science. Adam, my father's second son, lives his own interior life by and large oblivious to the outside world. When others suggested to my father that Adam should be given drugs to regulate him my father refused with the awareness that both he and I came through the introversion to being successful individuals naturally. It reminded me of conversation with my friend, Edwin Liu, where we spoke about the natural condition of people not being medicalized. I don't know if I could be the kind of person I am now without the introversion of my early years.

The wedge between my father and my brother, according to my father, originates with my Uncle Ross's wife. This is quite consistent across my mother and father. The first incident was the death of my cousin, James, which Theresa/Trish attributed somehow to my parents. And then it was further torn by the will of Pa who said that his estate would be split according to the number of grandchildren, which after the death of James, was heavily favoured in the family of my father rather than his brother, Ross. Trish was seen to magnify these differences and Ross couldn't moderate the views of his wife.