A good father.

Fathers' day. I wonder why I haven't given to much thought to whether it ought to be a great day before. I somehow have always felt that fathers' day exists purely because there is a mothers' day..not because we ought to think particularly about Fathers but today I find I am thinking.
I have a really, really GOOD father, he is a good man and he is a great father. I am told that he and mum consciously decided that for them, family and children would be their treasure and they would forego financial and material wealth in order to obtain eternal and lasting wealth in a family.
My dad is incredibly clever, he knows Math, he doesn't know how to teach it because for him it just IS. He looks at any math problem and knows what the answer is, he and his dad used to ( for fun) list rows and rows and figures in £'s shillings and pence and then race to see who would win in adding them up. No carrying numbers over in columns and then converting the pence into shillings and then into pounds for these 2, just whizzing down the page doing it in their heads. ( oooh fun!)
He can fix stuff and make stuff and would ( given the chance) organise all of our finances so that we never had a moments worry ( or fun perhaps, but that all comes with being so clever I have noticed)
He is probably the most loyal and loving man I have known and we 5 children grew up without even knowing that men could be philanderers or abusers, we hadn't a clue that some men went to pubs or gambled.( I wonder if it wasn't coincidence that all 3 of his girls married men so unlike him and were all stunned and sad to discover the hard way that not all men are good ones? Lesson learned, all 3 of us are now married to men very like him in many ways! ) Dad's were workers and they came home for dinner and were there. Whenever he was needed, he was there.
I went away with my dad when I was 7, I wore green slacks and a handknitted jumper and wore slightly worn pumps. We had a veritable treat store of mint yo-yo biscuits and bananas and I slept in the cab of the truck while he drove it from Newton abbot to Wales to deliver someone's furniture. It never occurred to me that a bank assistant manager wouldn't normally be delivering furniture, he was doing it to earn money for his treasure I suppose.
There was enormous jealously on the part of my siblings that I was to go on this adventure but to my dad I was the only one who could accompany him. As I grew up he used to do audits for the church, travel around our part of the country tallying up funds etc every sunday morning and he would leave at the crack of dawn. I so adored my daddy that the thought of him doing this on his own every week was intolerable, I was a worrier when I was little too and I somehow imagined that he would come to some kind of horrible accident and he would be all on his own, so every week I crawled out of my bed and went with him. I wonder if the other kids knew that on saturday dad would buy and hide sweets ( blackcurrant liquorice mmmmmm) in the glove box and he and I would eat them and we never shared them with anyone who preferred staying in bed to travelling with us. So, it was, of course, going to be me who went on the big adventure to Wales and to this day, 38 years later I can still recall the smallest of details on that trip and can feel that feeling of both exilleration and absolute love with my dad.
My dad isn't a demonstrative man and hugging, I think, is painful to him, partly, I imagine, due to being raised in a home where it was thought nonsense and perhaps boarding school didn't help. He doesn't talk about his childhood at all, I can't think much about anything much he has told us, his mum was older when she married her beloved Wilfred and she had her first son Barry, followed by my dad and I have no idea how or why my dad is as great as he is but hooray for the unexplained in this case.
It is said that the greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother. How true this is......no memories of grand presents at christmas or designer clothes as we grew up could ever have come close to the memories of my dad writing " I love Peg" on the steamed up kitchen window and the friday night ritual of him bringing home a fish and chip supper on friday nights while other men were at the pub.
You can't beat a good Father...and mine is a gloriously grumpy, blissfully brusk, hug enduring man of such integrity that it would be hard to find a better one. Happy fathers day dad. I love you and I know you love me. Helen.