FEBRUARY 16 — Every son who has grown up with a father would have heard these words; “I need you to help me with something.”
Most times, it’s probably to carry something, or to move the table from location A to location B. Water the plants. Whatever it is.
My dad had other ideas.
At a time when I had just only managed to negotiate with my mother the freedom to cycle on my own to town to play basketball with my friends, my father decides it best to start a “project.”
Did it involve carpentry? A little bit. Did it involve ingenuity? For sure. Was it back-breaking manual labour? Definitely.
Having grown up in a poor family, my father saw no point in paying people to do something that he and his son could perfectly do on our own.
So we built a pool.
A THIRTY-FOOT-LONG CEMENT POOL.
Replete with a water pump, electrical lines so the pump could work and piping to get the water to the pool.
As a teenager bent on meeting his friends at the court at 4.30pm every week day, of course I had a problem with the project.
I basically had to expend energy meant for competitive sports for a construction job that didn’t make any sense to me. So the arguments ensued.
In the end, my dad and I came to a compromise -- for three hours after school, I will help him manually mix cement and pour it in to set in the wooden framework of the pool, after which I can cycle the seven kilometres to town to play ball with my friends for three to four hours.
For almost three months, I toiled with my father. Fill a wheelbarrow to the brim with rocks, wheel it to where I dumped two wheelbarrows’ worth of sand and throw in a 50-kilogramme bag of cement. Add water, and mix with a shovel till it reaches a thick consistency.
Proceed to transfer the sludge into said wheelbarrow, and transfer the cargo to wherever I need to fill in to form the floor and walls of the pool.
Three hours daily, five days a week, not including the extra labour on Saturday mornings, for nearly three months.
Eventually we completed the pool, which ended up with two partitions so that my dad could separate the fish fries from the bigger fish.
And I thought it was so I could go lounge around when the weather got too hot.
For years it boggled me. Why the heck did we have to do all that?
It took me a while to realise that my dad was, for as long as I remember, an oilman. Which meant weeks on end sitting on a rig in the middle of nowhere, away from his family.
And every time he comes home, his only son had grown that much bigger, that much older.
Every time he comes home, he knows even less than he ever did about his son.
Every day he spends earning a living for his family, is a day away from the reason he works so hard.
And that is time that he will never get back.
Some nights when I’m back visiting, as I’m having a cigarette, I’m reminded of my dad’s ridiculous strategy to make his son spend time with him.
It was so silly, I almost miss the back-breaking work.
The pool, however, is still there.
This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
