When I was younger but not living at home, each Saturday morning I'd have breakfast with my Dad. We were extremely close and every Saturday he would pick me up from my house on his motorbike at 7am and we'd ride into Brunswick Street in Fitzroy and have breakfast.
One morning he pulled up and instead of his bike, which I LOVED being on the back of, he was in a shiny red sports car. It was extremely pretty and he was extremely proud of it and for reasons that I don't think I'll every fully understand, he'd stopped on the way and brought me a bunch of flowers. Birds of Paradise flowers to be exact. He was a very strange and interesting man my father. He had a genius mind, was extremely creative and was completely outside the box in every manner that you could think of.
He was a free and somewhat radical thinker, very innovative, a very decent human being when it came to how he interacted with other human beings. He was decidedly NOT an arse hat and very much the reason that one of my own values is don't be an arse hat. He had his own ideas about things that were often just something I had to attribute to being his way, some which seemed logical and obvious, to me at least, if not to others, but only because I knew him so well and so they didn't seem as strange to me as they might otherwise. One of these things, these 'ways' that he had, was that he didn't give flowers. He just didn't do it. It wasn't like a religion or a rule or anything. And it wasn't that he was in the camp of people who say buying flowers is a waste of money cause they die and other similar opinions. He just didn't do it. He'd give a bonsai tree, but not a bunch of flowers.
So it was extremely odd this morning when he pulled up and got out to open the car door for me, another of his ways, and at the same time handed me a bunch of flowers. I asked him why he'd brought me flowers and he simply said when he'd spoken to me on the phone the night before that I'd sounded a bit down and as he had driven past a flower shop on his way to picking me up and was thinking about that phone call, they had caught his eye. I was stunned but very pleased. I said so, but also added that it was very odd, that he'd never brought me flowers before. He responded that, "Flowers don't like motorbikes very much."
Later that day I sat on my couch and watched the sun highlighting the dust particles that floated around the bunch of flowers, now in a vase on the table. I decided to paint them. It was almost 20 years ago now, the picture is dated sometime in May 1997. I was 19. I called the picture Flowers From My Father.
Flowers From My Father
I started this post with the intention of just posting the picture and how it came about, and then wrote a whole page about those breakfasts with my dad. I then realized that those stories and others about my dad are going to be a different post. My dad and our relationship and the circumstances that led to me referring to him in the past tense is actually an entire book in itself, but its something I want to share, that I probably need to share truth be told, but not in this post. It will take a lot more than I have available to give right now at 1.43am on a Tuesday with a head-cold and a cat asleep on part of the laptop to write it. But I'll come back to it.
If you'd like to hear it, or you just like my posts, which have a diverse range of disconnectedness about them, fell free to follow me and comment below and say hello and tell me something about yourself...maybe something like your favorite flower or if you are someone who likes to give flowers or is from the band of 'its a waste of money', or anything else you'd like to tell me.
Till next time, don't be an arse hat and don't give people bunches of poison ivy cause ...well that's pretty much being an arse hat isn't it!