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My greatest admiration, without a doubt, goes to my father. To be sure, I might not have been as forthright with this declaration, say, four years ago [from the time of this writing], for in those years, the later ones of my teenage years did I rebel the most against the man. Those were years in which I bore a perpetual grudge against him, and vowed to be his antithesis [whatever that was]. Yet, without a doubt, I look up to my father. I was born the year before my father obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the University of Ilorin. At the time, he held a position within a special revenue-yielding project at the National Youth Service Corp, and was subsequently the Accountant at the University bookshop. As a child, I regarded my father with an amount of awe that might have been sufficient for the very creator. I was convinced that my father was invincible, and, ah, yes, immortal; indeed, I used to tell my friends that my father was one thousand years old! On one occasion, when one of them countered that his father was one million years old, I retorted that my father was uncountable years old. That effectively settled the matter; even our young minds understood that there was no number greater than “uncountable”. Invariably, my attribution of the superlative to my father assumed numerous variations: “My daddy can beat your daddy,” or “My daddy can drive faster than your daddy” or “My daddy has more power [i. e. sheer physical strength] than your daddy…” My father wore an ever-rounded afro with sideburns reminiscent of a lion’s mane; he wore neither a moustache nor a beard though. I vividly remember him driving his nuclear family (me, my sister, and my mother) to school and work every morning, in his deep-blue Volkswagen Beetle. I would sit in the back seat directly behind him, and would marvel at his looming omnipotence. Father (and mother, for she sat in the front passenger’s seat) would drop me and my sister at school, dad squeezing shiny ten kobo coins into each of our palms as we climbed out of the back seat of the bug. My father was, in my estimation, the most brilliant mathematician ever, for he could solve every mathematical problem that beleaguered me. Mathematics was the bane of me those days, and that one subject never failed to soil my report card. But dad knew mathematics—more than enough to deeply intensify my awe of him. I took it for granted that he could solve any problem I presented to him, and, he had a remarkable knack for explaining in the minutest detail. And so passed the innocence of childhood, and then came my admission to Command Secondary school, an army-run boarding school whose motto, straightforwardly, was “discipline and knowledge.” Though it was the norm to attend a boarding secondary school in my day, I resented being at Command. As I have another occasion to say, Command repressed one’s sense of one’s rights, instilled a disabling, perpetual, and overwhelming fear of authority, and might have quite possibly warped one’s finer sensibilities. My resentment of my predicament and of the seemingly insurmountable forces that impelled my attendance of Command manifested itself in the generally moody disposition I assumed when I came home for the holidays. I would fume at the slightest provocation and scowl for days on end, vexed by any single incident. My anger, one could say, knew no bounds. And because my idea of a holiday differed fundamentally from my parents’, I was always at odds with them. While my conviction was that the holidays were meant for me to relax—a breath of fresh air from the rigors of boarding school, if you will; my parents thought I was supposed to help with chores around the house. Specifically, I was assigned the task of cleaning the car every morning—a task I took exception to, for it required me to wake up early—a rather distasteful proposition at the time. And then at my June 14, 1997 graduation from Command (in which I won the award for the Best Student in Economics) my dad told me he would be traveling to the States in a couple of days. He returned every six months, while I took a six- (actually, nine- or ten-) month data processing program at AB Computer College, an appointment as the assistant to the proprietress of a private nursery and primary school, and a remedial program at the University of Ilorin. I was to join my dad in the States exactly two years and two days later, on June 16, 1999. If his anticipations were reflective of mine, they’d have been that both of us living together, half-a-world away from the rest of our family would strengthen our father-son relationship. And if our expectations were similar, we were both to be disappointed, for the next three or four years were to be the most contentious ones ever. While I had never found the voice (or more truthfully, the gall) to articulate my disagreement in the past, I suddenly became the most disagreeable son there ever was. I’d argue, for no other reason it seemed, but for the sheer sake of disagreeing with him. But then, gradually, yet suddenly, after four years of a relatively rocky relationship, I outgrew that feisty disposition, and assumed renewed respect for my father. I must have looked at him one day, and reckoned that I ought not to be as antagonistic to him. Perhaps, I suddenly realized that life was short, and that I ought to make every moment with him a memorable one. Perhaps I began to contemplate my own impending fatherhood, and scared of the remotest possibility of such a rift in my relationship with my son, sought to repair that in my relationship with my father… In any case, I had a long, fulfilling conversation with my dad today—the type of conversation I haven’t had with him in awhile, and somewhere during that conversation, I realized that I had come full circle. I had returned to the wholesome, fulfilling relationship I had with my dad in my childhood years. 10 September 2003. Revised: 1 July 2006. Postscript:I started writing this piece for a scholarship essay (Who has been your greatest influence), when at some point it started to devolve into a nostalgic rendering of my childhood from the perspective of my relationship with my father. Of course, I could have restrained myself and stuck to the topic at hand, but I allowed my nostalgia to translate into words, unfettered. I am happy with the result. |
