The best laid plans…

How does the saying go? Is it a quote from Of Mice and Men? Steinbeck? I could look it up for you. You could yell it at the screen. It’s not ignorance, it’s getting old that makes it hard to remember. It is stored in my head along with thousands of other quotes. When you have lived, as long as I have, you have read a lot of books and retained more quotes than you’ve had hot dinners. Steinbeck is one of the most well known American authors yeah, yeah, yeah… I was forced to read ‘clever’ books in school, books like ‘Catcher in the Rye.’ Reading them felt like pulling teeth and almost put me off reading forever. Calm down, I said almost.

I have a confession to make. I don’t enjoy intellectual books. Probably why I struggle with Substack. I feel intimidated by people who read Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Salinger, Thomas Wolfe and the like. Side note: Have you seen Jude law as Thomas Wolf in the movie ‘Genius?’ Brilliant. It gave me a new appreciation of editors.

I read the clever books in school, I had to. I’m a rule keeper. I understood most of them; well enough to write an essay about them. What I didn’t do was enjoy them. I preferred reading Daphne Du Maurier, Jane Austin, Madeleine L’Engle and Tolkein. Those writers are why I write. Second side note: [Who’s counting?] Tolkien ruined everything. I read the Lord of The Rings as a teen and all other fantasy books were ruined forever. I wanted to go and live in Rivendell.

Another confession: This entire blog is a digression. It’s supposed to be about the importance of creating and putting ‘it’ out there, after all you never know whose life you will touch with your art. Hold that thought until the March issue. I sat down to type up my notes about creativity. Then I remembered the date and sat here thinking about my dad. Thomas Daniel Smith.

Today, February 27, 2024, would have been his ninety-fourth birthday. He would have hated it. He didn’t like getting old. He didn’t like the thinning hair and the failing eyesight. Getting old made gardening harder and he spent hours in the garden. He loved planting natives long before it was a thing. He had two acres brimming with them when he left the planet. Gardening was really an excuse to daydream. He spent hours leaning on a rake staring off into space. No doubt thinking about molecular structures in the universe.

He died August 8, 2002, and I still miss him. To say he was intelligent is an understatement. We were brought up to value knowledge and education above all else. He was an academic through and through. His Dad, my Grandfather, owned and ran a Butcher’s shop in South Wales. My Grand-father started work at the age of seven down a Welsh coal mine in the Rhondda Valley. He could barely read or write. I think my Grandmother must have done the books because they did very well for themselves. It would have been bitter sweet having such an intelligent, clever boy. He wouldn’t take over the family business, instead he would excel at University and take his family 12,000 miles away. My grandparents visited as often as they could and our parents went home to Wales many times.

My dad would often have his nose in a book or would sit in the living room marking huge piles of exam papers. We would have to make ourselves scarce. He didn’t have a study. Too bad if you wanted to watch television. ‘Read a book if you’re bored!’

Even though he worked long hours and read more than anyone I knew, except perhaps our mother, he knew how to relax. In summer we would go to the beach most weekends. We would spend all day there. Mum would pack a picnic lunch and a gigantic polystyrene bottle filled with cordial, rattling with ice cubes. The ‘golden holden’ station wagon would be packed to the gills with umbrella, blankets, towels, flippers, spades, buckets and all the paraphernalia needed for a family of six. We would head off early, down the Dingo road. That’s what he called Warragul road. Dad liked to remind us it was an ‘aboriginal’ word. We would spend the whole day at one of the beaches at the end of the Dingo road. Black Rock, Mentone, Brighton, whichever one had the least people by the time we got there.

At the end of the day Dad would lash out and buy a cray or some crabs from the fishermen on the pier. All day at the beach in the sun and the waves would leave us caked in sand and salt and starving like a pack of wolves. We’d take the exotic creatures home and feast, fighting over the claws and cracking them open for the wonderful meat. We’d fill up on home made chips with bread and butter. One crayfish doesn’t go far between six hungry people.

Dad was not a strong swimmer, I don’t think he ever learned to swim, not properly, he only knew side stroke. He taught me to swim before we came to Australia, which is why I almost drowned, in a swimming pool, on board the ship that brought us here.

He made sure we had proper family holidays. Every year, on the last two weeks of our school holidays, we would pack the car with monopoly and cards [no tv] and head off somewhere for a holiday. We had holidays in Albury at the Hume Weir, staying in the original worker’s huts. Then, after all but one of us left home, there were holidays in Blairgowrie and Sorrento.

Mum would book a beach house and we would visit with our various partners. It was like Muldoon’s picnic. Umpteen cats, several dogs and the Cockatiel in his cage. Mum bred Burmese cats, didn’t everyone, and one year even the kittens came on holidays. Loving being surrounded by the chaos of our family on holiday, Dad would say: ‘Wife, children, home, everything. The full catastrophe.’ ― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

He rarely talked about his work. When we came to Australia the newspapers ran stories about a Rocket Fuel Scientist who had come to Australia. In his field, he was kind of a big deal. To us, he was Daddy. To his colleagues he was Tom Smith, a Reader in Chemistry at Monash University. I never really understood what he did. My mother always insisted he was called Dr Smith. I guess she, of all people, knew how hard he’d worked for that title. No doubt she had sacrificed her fair share while supporting him.

Dad often brought weird and wonderful chemicals home. My favourite was dry ice. We’d watch it bubbling in a bucket creating fog and freaking us out a little. He would sometimes bring home chemicals to make explosions. Using the back garden as a testing ground and leaving huge craters behind. There would be an almighty “BOOM!’ shaking the whole house and rattling the windows. Dad and my little brother would be seen, running for their lives, giggling like Uncle Fester and Pugsley, my brother’s nickname.

it wasn’t all loud noises and magic tricks. He used to make different coloured dyes for our mother’s wool. He’d use gum leaves and various other organic materials to dye the wool. Mum was a spinner. That’s a whole story in itself, involving long day trips to farms for mum to choose the fleece off the sheep’s back. My Dad almost always wore home knitted, hand dyed ties. His favourite was called ‘Ginger Tom.’ Now you can match paint exactly when you go to the hardware shop and no one knows how or who figured it out. I do.

He wasn’t perfect, who is? He had an explosive temper and we often walked on egg shells. He also had an explosive laugh. What I remember most is the fun we had. Dad would play water fights on a hot day chasing us around with a bucket of water and sloshing whoever was slowest, usually me. We would play French cricket in the backyard until the cows came home. He wasn’t really into sport, apart from Rugby Union, but he loved yelling, ‘You’re out!’ He was a fan of the Three Stooges, the Goon Show and Sgt Bilko, and he loved big band music. He was a fantastic dancer. He only knew one dance, the two step, but he was amazing. I got to dance with him once, when I was sixteen, it was unforgettable. I felt light as a feather and he made it feel effortless. It was the closest I’d been to him since I was tiny. He wasn’t a hugger or even a hand holder. He would hold my wrist to cross the road, it drove me crazy that he wouldn’t hold my hand. At that dance he swept me off my feet, holding my wrist of course, then he returned me to the table and took his favourite dance partner for a spin. Mum’s was the only hand he would hold.

In one conversation we had, not long before he ‘exited stage right’ for the last time, he said time seemed to be getting faster the older he got. He didn’t know how little time he had left. He was right. Time does get faster as you get older. Today, as I think of him, I am reminded of the importance of enjoying each day. Savouring the moments. My Dad knew how to savour the moment. He could make a funny moment last all day. He would be chuckling for hours over something that had tickled his funny bone. He would randomly burst into fits of laughter, never telling us what was so funny. It drove us all crazy but we laughed along anyway. He had the most infectious laugh and a wicked sense of humour.