Usually on Fathers Day I give my dad a Phantom comic, a bag of black jelly beans and two XXXX tallies, but I think one of the best gifts we can give is something from the heart, so this year I’m giving my dad an apology.
This was our family before my little brother came along and ruined the symmetry.
I spent a good deal of my teenage years at an all boys boarding school on the Gold Coast. It was great because, as a social awkward boy, I always found females to be distracting. I’m over that now, of course, and simply find them scary.
Mostly boarding school was all good fun, but there’s one incident which has haunted me throughout my adult life. It has to do with a bar fridge.
“It’s gone,” I said into the phone.
“What do you mean, gone?” grumbled my father.
“It isn’t where I left it.”
Having a bar fridge at boarding school was fairly unusual, but I had argued I needed a lot of snacks.
“Are you saying a bar fridge grew legs and walked out?” my father asked me doubtfully. “It’s got to be there somewhere.”
“Well, it isn’t.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I think it was stolen.”
“You think someone threw a fridge over their shoulder and walked down the hall, down two flights of stairs, across the grounds and drove off with it on their roof?” He paused for effect, something he really is extremely good at. My dad can say more in a pause than I can with half an hour and a keyboard. “And no one saw a thing.”
“No,” I assured him in the typical, teenage tone, “I’m just saying it must have been stolen because it isn’t here.”
“….right…”
Even now, some thirty years later, my father will periodically try to catch me out by question-bombing a conversation with, “So what did you do with the money you got for the bar fridge?” or “You know that guy you sold your fridge to at school…?”
So this Fathers Day I would like to come clean, publicly, on the whole bar fridge incident so we can put it behind us and move on.
Dad, I’m sorry. I am really, genuinely, hand on heart sorry.
As in, I’m sorry you still don’t believe the fridge was stolen.
But it was.
Happy Fathers Day! Also, I’ve drunk your tallies.
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