The Man Who Is My Father

If there’s one thing I like about growing up, it’s that I get to know my parents better.

As years of my life flip like a torn up calendar, I begin to take a lot of things in the way I see my parents. It almost seems that every now and then I have a chance to do these completely new close-up shots of them that I didn’t even know before. They started out as Mom and Dad, figures of authority who brought me to this reality, but ended up as a dude and a girl who happen to be my parents.

I quite enjoy it.

I don’t know exactly how it happens. Maybe it’s because as I get older, my life and my parents’ start to mirror each other (you’ve got less change when you’re older, right?). But one thing for sure, it always keeps me nailed in place every time I find their old photographs or hear some revealing stories about them, which are curiously always come from someone else.

Over the last few years, I’ve got a lot of stories like that, especially about my father. He is this really really old guy. I’m not talking about his age (which is pretty old too), but about his character. He walks slowly, whines, forgets how to pause or stop when talking, only likes music from his time (which involves a heavy dose of keroncong), doesn’t get current jokes, and is basically clueless about anything with screens.

Believe it or not, this character is almost how I always know him.

However, the stories I’ve heard these past few years gave me a lot of sides to the otherwise simple man. The stories come from the time around his early 20s before he truly met my mother, and I guess that is why they made such a deep impression on me. Not only did they give me some insight about him when he was far younger, but they are also surprisingly relatable (even though I’m definitely not in my early 20s anymore).

Here are some facts I’ve got from the stories:

1. My mother is not the first person he’s ever loved (perhaps it’s no revelation to anybody else, but I always thought that my parents came into this world already a couple - it’s stupid but hey, that’s how I know them all my life).
2. The first girl he loved dumped him the moment the world was against them, no matter how hard my father tried to change things.
3. My father almost became a priest. Had he not moved to Yogyakarta, he would have ended becoming one.
4. There was a time when my father was a player.
(these facts almost sound contradictory)
5. My father started senior high school at the age of 19 because for three years he just didn’t feel like it.
6. My father once gave a girl a ride home with a borrowed motorcycle without the slightest knowledge about how to ride one. It obviously ended with a crash. Everybody survived.

In short, he was this dude.

I need to remind you though that the second point devastated him and crushed his heart to pieces. He only managed to get through it with the help of his best friends. That’s why they’re still best friends even to this day.

Anyway, I guess the point that I want to bring can all be summarized with a title from a book I’ve never read, supposedly about someone’s father.

The title is My Grandfather’s Son.

Just like what the title says, my father wasn’t always a father. At some point he was just a kid, someone’s son. At one time, especially before he truly met my mother, he was a simple quirk no different than me, faced with the same (if not more) hardships that I have to deal about love, idealism, reality, friendship, money, and well, every single thing there is in life. I still hate the guy sometimes, and we even still have out fights, but nevertheless, the realization lets me respect and appreciate him in a different way.

Although of course, thinking that he was once a cheesy romantic fool is still a lot of fun.

PS: Don’t feel so bad about how devastated he was because of the girl. In the years after, he found a tough, beautiful girl, who also happened to be a painter and a dancer.

But, that is another story. :)