My father, Hugo Mc Donald Day, passed away three years ago last June, but recently he has been on my mind lots.
Could be the articles I have been writing on rare diseases, one of which was about a lung disease, coupled with the fact that my second daughter has recently developed asthma, which has to do with the lung as well. And my father did die from the lung disease, emphysema, which resulted from his smoking two packs of cigarettes per day over many years, dating back from the non-filtered Anchor and Broadway cigarettes. Could also be recent experiences with "friends" brought my Dad forcibly to mind. You see he had just three friends throughout his life, who never ever let him down, Palmer Wilcox and Pat Massy, both deceased, and Carlie Dore, who is still alive.
My mother always told him that his funeral would be made up of these three people, to which he replied in clipped tones "what do I care, I would be done dead already so it doesn't matter." Most times my Dad came home from afternoon funerals in the wee hours of the next morning, as he went straight to Harvard Club from the church service to meet his chums, to send off the departed with some good liquors. Again my Mom would warn "and nobody is going down to the cemetery with you as your friends will also be leaving you by the club."
My Dad was happy with his immediate family, he never needed a long list of what most people call "friends" because in his wisdom he knew it led to too much "them say and they say." He was never a talkative person except when it came to reliving his experiences as a sportsman. He seldom ever spoke on the telephone, and just never had time for what he called "ole talk" but was really mauvais langue, because he could hold his own nicely in the ole talk that came with a lime.
His overriding interest was sport, and his advice when seeing us off to play a game still rings in my ears: "Remember somebody has to win and somebody has to lose, what matters is how you play the game." Many are the times through the ups and downs of Brian Lara, one of his Harvard cricket clinic proteges, when I clearly hear what would have been his gruff reminder to Lara: "Do your best and leave the rest. Even if your best is your worst, you can't do any better." But I just have never found the time or opportunity to remind Brian of what Grandad Day would have said to him.
My father was the epitome of forthrightness and honesty. To meet him was to know him and what he thought of you. He really couldn't care less what "people thought of or said about him", and lived his life to suit himself. His expression of his opinion and convictions was often limited to a good old-fashioned "steups." He had refined the old Trinidadian habit of "steupsing" to an art. And to quote from my brother's eulogy: "Nobody "steupsed" like him, there was a length, volume and tonal quality to his "steups" that distinguished it from any other. And it would be accompanied by some facial expression of contempt, disgust or disdain, and a rigidity of the body which left you in no doubt about what he was saying to you."
My father was a male chauvinist and had no time for women in certain parts of his affairs, such as, banking, payment of household bills, Harvard Club matters and management of his finances. One day he learned that my brother's salary was being managed by his wife, he scowled and steupsed roundly. Yet ironically he started his primary school life at St Joseph's Convent, where he was the only boy in the class taught by the nuns, and spent the last days of his life back in a female environment, in a women's room at a Nursing Home.
It is only since his death that I have realised he was the "constant" in the lives of his six children. He hated change, as was evidenced by his entire work-life from age thirteen to retirement at sixty being spent at Ross Drugs. Whereas my Mom to whom he had been married for 61 years at time of their deaths within five months of each other in 1997, loved change. Just goes to show that chalk and cheese sometimes do mix and successfully at that.