King of Hearts
I believe when you know the WHO of love your heart’s compass understands the WHERE of love. Like a homing pigeon that takes flight, ferrying its message to its destination and returning home once it’s been delivered. It’s a confounding display of knowing that one especially when you think about it.
When I talk with my Dad, the past falls easily from his lips. It’s recounted to me in the stories of his youth. I love listening to him. He comes from a generation that somehow keep their stories deep inside them, not so much unwilling to tell them as much as uncertain how to begin telling them. The retelling, surprisingly enough, doesn’t come naturally unless gently eased out of him by a nosey-for-life daughter with more than her life-share of inquisitiveness.
Life experiences imprint themselves in a person, some deeply while others are somehow made more significant and lie like a phoenix in the ashes of one’s memory. Waiting for a time. Waiting to rise again. Its nest made from the frankincense of childhood friends, the myrrh of childhood laughter and the spices of childhood adventures.
My father grew up in the generation where they weren’t allowed to speak their Maori language in school. English was mandatory. I think, though I don’t know expressly, that when something like that happens to you, you tend to put other things away too. Like your thoughts and your stories. At least that’s what I feel my father did.
I know many of his stories and the people in them by heart, and I sometimes feel I know them as my Dad did and does in the clear blue day of reverie. I know them because he’s told me about them and perhaps that’s enough. He’ll be whitu tekau ma whitu or seventy-seven years old this year. It would be fair to say I know parts of this man who has been my father all my life but actually I don’t really know him well. Does anyone really know their parents as well as they think?
I’m not so bothered by the details these days, though there was a time once when I was. I realise now, that was simply the impetuosity of youth. The wisdom passed youth is to enjoy the time we have together now. To be fully present with each other, now. That said, there’s a lot of hard work goes on and being done between the fully present and the together now.
My own foragings toward these unassuming truths have taken me the best part of a half century. There are many gaps in my knowledge about my Dad, gaps he feels no inclination to fill unless asked directly about them by me. Or perhaps he’s simply forgotten. It’s the way we’ve learnt to dance with each other. It’s a way I’ve found to continue to dance if I want to know him some more.
From time to time I feel myself getting hoha (impatient) about the ‘round-aboutness’ of the dance lessons and I’m at once reminded through a finely tuned process of conscience that it’s me who is the enquirer and with that status comes an internal code of enquirer etiquette. The key then is humility. And yes, moreso with one’s parent.
Some elderly people are munificently unhurried, end of story. Pointless I’ve found, huffing and puffing about their tell-timing of events. They’ll tell you when they’re good and ready and not before or even at all. The if even at all bit can really suck! Never mind. Other days can be absolute diamonds from the rough. Think on those days.
I’m beginning to think that Anna Donald (Anastasia Katherine ‘Anna’ Donald was an Australian pioneer in the field of evidence-based medicine, 1966-2009)and me we were speaking about two sides of the same coin. Your thoughts today? She asked WHERE is love and I surmised, when you know the WHO of love, you know the WHERE of it. Just going to have a cuppa with my own King of Hearts. I’ll say hi to my Dad for you. Ma te wa (Maori for see you later and pronounced ma-tey-wah).
