364: Look, I Am Your Father

I have finally decided to make a separate Facebook account for my students yesterday because I got fed up with all the photo tagging.  As I was adding friends to my account, a familiar face popped up.  My dad in the friend suggestion box.  I added him and waited for the result.

Today, I woke up late as usual.  Dishes, lunch and a shower later, I had a few minutes to spare for Facebook before heading to the cinema for what else.  I promised Van I'd be done in five minutes.

I refreshed my Rated PG page and sure enough, my dad added me.  Interesting.  I haven't heard from him for years.  I haven't seen him either except for some photos a couple of months ago.  I was hoping I'd see new photos but what I saw in his account were baby pictures of "all his children" or so the album title suggested.  His five sons from three mothers.  I wonder how he pulled it off.

I dreaded most of the photos because I looked awful back then but one picture brought back a memory.  It was a portrait of myself.  I was probably eight years old.  I remember my father fixing my hair before the picture was taken.  I also remember a year later my dad decided to take the photos himself.  He got excited one afternoon, loaded the Kodak camera with film and asked me to fill a basin with water.  He put the basin near the window where it caught the sunlight.  He then told me to sit in front of the basin.  He seemed satisfied to see the ripples of light reflected on my face.

"Five minutes!" Van in his usual grumpy way.  I decided I've had enough daddy dreams anyway so we got going to the movies.  Coincidences have a funny way of showing up though because the movie we watched was Inception which, I later found out, was a full-blast father and son film.  The only thing missing was Cat Stevens' (aka Yusuf Islam) classic hit.

I purposely stayed away from anything that was written about Inception because I didn't want to spoil the fun.  I had a vague idea of the concept, but even vaguer was the story itself.  I had no idea it would be a three-level father and son medley.  I remember how I bawled with Frequency, and I feared I might do it again while surrounded mostly by men in the theater.

Towards the end of the movie, the younger Mr. Fischer sat beside his father's deathbed.  "I was disappointed that you tried [to be like me]," the dying tycoon Mr. Fischer told his son (sorry for the semi-spoiler but let's leave it at that before I ruin the whole thing).  That got me.

Growing up with a man's man father was tough for me.  Being a basketball coach, he was often asked whether I was following his footsteps.  I have tried my best.  He let me join the basketball clinic he taught in one summer.  He'd take me to all his matches.  But it wasn't in me or early on I decided that he's a tough act to follow anyway.  One day at the court, I was waiting on the bench when his friend asked him if I was going to be the next MVP.  My father took one look at me and said, "Nah, he's doing ballet."

I wanted to show him he was wrong. I started to learn the game.  I read a lot of books about basketball.  I got serious in my basketball PE classes.  I had a plan.  I would be best bb player in my city and I will never play for my own father.  I will embarrass him by not playing for his team.  But the plan became meaningless when he moved out of our lives.

The film ended with the now famous totem, top, spinning on the table.  I got teary eyed again just before the credits rolled.  If you ask me if the film was good, I can be technical about it and enumerate a dozen reasons why it's an instant classic.  But I can tell you one reason why it's the best film of the year so far.  It touched my heart.

I still dream that one day I will see my father again.  I can be honest and say I hated him when I was a teenager.  But now that I'm in my thirties, practically the same age as he was when he left the family, I couldn't blame him anymore.  I can be a bitch and dwell on the heartaches but now, I'd rather just remember the tender moments like when he fixed my hair for that photo shoot.  The creases on the photo are evidences of the many wallets it has been through.

Now, it's all good.  One day, I'll see him and probably, jokingly tell him I took up ballet and didn't like it.  And when that day comes, my top won't be spinning endlessly on a table.

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