Walking with the church walking group on Wednesday we passed a house where one of the older women had raised her family. She was ecstatic. She pointed out whose room was whose. She showed me where the kids made huts, where they played cowboys and Indians and told stories about what her five kids got up to around the section. All with a wistful smile on her face. "Those were happy days" she said, "Busy- but we had a great life here."
I was involved in such nostalgic thinking myself over the weekend. At a fire station last Friday I watched a bit of the cricket test - a rare pleasure for me these days. It took me back to playing cricket with my kids, coaching school boy cricket and those fun days. Life in a family is messy isn't it?
We used to play cricket on the front lawn. The pitch was so short the bowler had an advantage. We would go crashing through the hedge to field balls and the hedge would get wrecked. There was no grass growing at both the bowler's crease and the batsman's crease, only bare patches of mud. Big scratches across the lawn marked both creases. We broke a window once, but it was so much fun. Often there was an evening game before and after tea. In time the kids got to be better than me, much more coordinated.
At another time my wife and I went away for a weekend to conduct a wedding, leaving our daughter in charge. When we came home there was erected in the middle of the back lawn a skateboard ramp in all its glory. The boys had done a great job. Phil had used tech drawing skills, got into my nails, wood and tools and made this great looking contraption. I did not know whether to weep or jump for joy at their creativity. My saw was blunt, my nails were gone, a hammer was broken but they had fun.
When we first moved there the boys enjoyed the bush up the back. Phil borrowed a book from the library on being a "frontiersman" - how to survive, trap animals etc. They busied themselves in the bush after school. One day Dan came screaming out of the bush, "Dad! Dad! Phil's caught a possum!" One of his clever traps had worked and I discovered this possum under a bush with a noose around its neck going ballistic. I had to find some way to set him free without losing half an arm!
There were underground huts, more skateboard ramps, precious things brought home from the local tip and my tools were forever being lost and left out.
There was no sitting around reading the paper in the mornings. Lunches to cut and kids to hurry out to the van to deliver to school. There were seven seasons of coaching school boy cricket on Saturday mornings. I had an old van with bus seats in the back and most of the team came in that. I threatened to sing to them on the way home if they lost the game!
Now the lawn has no bare patches. The bat and wickets sit unused in a closet. There is no skateboard ramp construction. My tools are safe in the workshop and I get time to rip into things I have a passion about.
But I wish there were those bare patches on the lawn again. I was busy trying to be a good minister and those days rushed by in a blur. I was too busy to really appreciate those family days. The children grew and I did not keep up with all their changes. The kids became adults and are now all over NZ and for a time some were in the USA, Poland and Scotland. Now I long for rusty lost tools, bare patches in lawns and noise and mess. A chance to be a real father, a better one this time.....And a fun game of cricket with all its shouting, diving and mess. (Photo: The family when we were all younger.)
No comments:
Post a Comment