The Icing on the Cake

My Writing groups, complying with the 'Stay at Home' ordinance, have been postponed for the foreseeable future but one innovative leader organised us to have a virtual meeting, using a program called Zoom.  After a few initial hiccups, we made connections and it worked pretty well. We're going to continue them until the virus clears and we can again meet in person.

This is my story, written for the occasion.

THE ICING ON THE CAKE                                                                                       3 APRIL, 2020

Stuart, when he was little, thought his father was the cleverest man he knew.  No matter what was happening, his father always had a wise saying that explained the situation. Not that Stuart always understood the meaning of the words but his mother and other people would nod their heads and mutter, “Very true.”

“Make hay while the sun shines,” his father would say when they were going for a walk and it took a while for Stuart to realise it had nothing to do with hay but was the sort of thing you said when you were going to start doing something.  “Early to bed and early to rise” was another popular saying in the house, and was always said when his Dad tucked him in at night.  There were a couple of Dad’s favourites which Stuart would get mixed up: “Give him an inch” and “Give him enough rope” but they seemed to make perfect sense to his Dad.  Every time there was a shower, you could depend on Dad to say, “It’s raining cats and dogs” and, if it was sunny, “The sun is splitting the trees.” 

By the time Stuart was in Primary School, he was becoming a little embarrassed by his father.  The other kids used to tease Stuart by quoting often-heard phrases, like “Actions speak louder than words”, and “Children should be seen and not heard.”  Stuart stopped inviting his mates home because he couldn’t be sure his father wouldn’t regale them with more of his folk wisdom: “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” or “East or west, home is best.”

High School was little better. Stuart discovered his father’s little quotes were called aphorisms and he found lists of them in various books in the library.  At one stage, he tried the tactic of trying to beat his father at his own game and would drop aphorisms into his own conversation.  Sometimes he would start a well-known saying and leave it to his father to finish it: “The more things change, …”  But it only seemed to encourage the habit.

Stuart hoped things would get better as he grew older but it was not to be.  His father always watched the Breakfast Shows on commercial television and he picked up their habit of talking in clichés.  More and more trite sayings were added to Dad’s vocabulary.  Stuart couldn’t understand how his mother had tolerated it all those years but Dad said she had ‘selective hearing’ and was used to it.

Stuart began to avoid seeing his father and inevitably drifted away from his family as he made his own life.  It seemed a very trivial reason for cutting them off but, by this stage, Stuart was a well-respected academic and his father didn’t fit the image that Stuart was developing for himself. His father often said that “absence makes the heart grow fonder”, but Stuart could not believe there was truth in that.

There was only the occasional phone call with his mother to maintain contact and one day Stuart received the news that his father was in hospital, not expected to live.  In the lift on its way to the hospital ward where his father lay dying, Stuart thought about what the old man might say: something resentful, perhaps, like ”Oh, the prodigal returns” or “A bad penny always turns up” , but even Stuart, with all his experience, didn’t anticipate the words which were squeezed from his father’s lips, “Well, this is the icing on the cake.”