Yesterday made it 20 years, to the day, that my father died. April 4 fell on the Sunday before Easter in 1993, ensuring that the people my father left behind–I hesitate to call them "his loved ones"–remember the moment of his death twice, on the 4th, and on Easter weekend.
By a serendipity he might have loved, my father died on the 25th anniversary of the assassination of one of his two great heroes, Martin Luther King, murdered almost exactly a quarter of a century earlier, to the minute: my father died just before 5 pm; MLK was shot at 6.01 pm, but, at Easter time, Memphis is usually an hour behind Mt Hope; it would have tickled my father.
More important, though, was Hank Aaron, the black American baseball player who broke Babe Ruth's home run record and shattered the then-overpowering illusion of white supremacy. My father, an atheist, would all but bow his head in a reverence he denied God when he intoned Aaron's name.
Hank Aaron surpassed Babe Ruth in 1974, less than ten years after the Voting Rights Act that gave African-Americans the franchise, and a time when you could still find, in Southern towns, signs delineating "white" and "coloured" restrooms.
Broadcaster Vin Scully, calling Aaron's 715th home run, commentated: "A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol...And for the first time..that poker face in Aaron shows the tremendous strain..of what it must have been like to live with for the past several months." The "it" Scully refers to includes the hate mail and death threats that increased towards Aaron as he neared Ruth's record.
My father's poker face would have hidden similar, if considerably lesser, strain. He personally broke, here in Trinidad, several glass walls that would have kept the dark-skinned little half-coolie boy from Demerara out of many a boardroom and, perhaps, bedroom. Pictures of past presidents of the Chamber of Commerce make the point: my father and Ken Gordon look like the yardmen at a Country Club gathering.
My father was also a sterling provider of the sterling. He gave us all a start in life most people would be envious to finish with at retirement. If my mother works today it's because she's bored staying home or jetting around. My father set us all up so very well that even I, the least materialistic and wealth-pursuing of his family, couldn't firetruck it up completely.
But my father was as miserable a source of intangible psychological support as he was as efficient an underwriter of concrete advantage; the great man about town was far less impressive at home. He made sure we had a fine roof over our heads, but could not possibly care less what we did under that roof, once we didn't turn up the volume loud enough to distract him from his own pursuits.
Today, if I come to Trinidad between March and July, I arrive on a Sunday and leave on or before the next Friday because my son's football club will have a match most Saturday mornings, and I'd sooner miss a significant business opportunity of my own than a minor game of my son's; because I will not be here forever, but will be remembered, one way or the other, as long as my children live.
My father, my younger brother would tell you, never went to even the most important of his rugby matches. (I had no sporting events for my father to fail to attend, there being no tournament based on breaking away from school and no Olympic event of smoking cigarettes.)
My father grew up without a father himself, practically: my grandfather was more interested in extracting precious stones from mines than precious memories from childhood; and he croaked when my father was only 12, the same age my son is now.
For my son to go to an American university like my siblings, he'd have to win a scholarship. (Americans could never teach anyone anything worth US$250K, at least at my earning rates; and I went to UWI myself, costing my old man the grand total of TT$144, refunded upon my graduation, and $60 a year student guild fees; my siblings couldn't get through a weekend in the US on what four years in UWI cost our father for my legal education.)
So my son is unlikely to get as much material advantage from me as I did from my father; but my son has already had, at age 12, more fathering than I got in three times as long.
In the 20 years he's been gone, I've often wished my father had lived longer. I like to think that, having scaled the high walls he was driven to (don't mind he was landing in a prison, not escaping one, when he did finally get over the top), he might have placed more value on time spent with than money spent on loved ones.
Indeed, as I said at the start, even after 25 years, I cannot, in conscience, think of the people my father left behind as his loved ones, even if I tell myself he must have loved us. In his own fashion. I'd like to think that, if he'd lived to see my children, including his only granddaughter, he'd have been catching every Friday plane with me to see his grandson's football matches as unfailingly as he missed his own son's rugby games.
But it could well be that he might have ignored them as magnificently as he did us. And left them a trust fund large enough to make sure they went to Harvard.
�2BC Pires is an orphan. E-mail your father forgive hims to him at bc@caribsurf.com