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.”
