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Is it Fathers' Day in America?

I think today might be Fathers' Day in America. But I'm not sure. I heard someone mention something about going out for Fathers' Day this Sunday and there have been ads galore on the telly.

Not having a living father, I don't take much notice of Fathers' Day either here in America, or in Australia where it falls in September. Perhaps because even when my father was alive he rarely lived with us. My parents separated first while I was being born, and several times after that, until the final separation and divorce when I was thirteen. He'd visit occasionally when he travelled to Melbourne from Rotorua where his spent the latter part of his life.

Today I was organising old photos for my own children, and was not thinking of fathers at all. And then I chanced upon this rather scary photo.

I vividly remember the day it was taken. And yes, that's me on the left. My dad was taking me back home after spending an access day with me in the city on one of his infrequent visits.

We'd just been thrown out of a hotel restaurant where he'd taken me to lunch. The maître de had taken one look at my dad and decided he was an old perve seducing a young girl. I remember ladies in twinsets and pearls staring, and although they probably didn't hiss at us, I heard them hiss in my head!

So we left and walked down Swanson Street towards Flinders Street station. On the way we passed a photo shop. My dad insisted on a photo, "to remember the day". And so yes I've remembered it. I was so embarrassed I could never forget it. Looking at the photo now, I can see why the hotel staff thought my dad was a pervert. He looks so debauched. And I have a sly look on my face. I think I look like a disturbed teenager. It's the sort of photo you'd see in an Anne Rule book depicting the early life of a murderess.

They certainly don't look like people you'd care to meet on a deserted street at night.

I saw my father on and off after that. He was forever being accused of wanting to seduce woman, and although I know he did, and he always had a wife at least a decade younger than himself, he was not a child molester.

My dad died on Palm Sunday, 1982. A fitting day for a man who was a pacifist and against all religion. He didn't make much of a mark on the world. He had a few small parts in half a dozen New Zealand films during revival of their film industry in the seventies. He invariably played a loser or a villain. He was the priest who gets hanged in the bell tower by Maori warriors in Utu, and a drunken hotel manager, with Sam Neal in the cult movie Sleeping Dogs. He even has a very small filmography on the IMDB database.

He died alone and lonely in an old peoples' home in Rotorua. He was buried in an unmarked grave, an atheist to the end. But in his heyday he lived life to the full and he did come a long way from his childhood days in the Saint Augustine's orphanage.

He left the world three ex-wives and two 'for sure' children, and perhaps a couple of others. One of these was born a few months before my own first child came into this world. We've become sisters, of a sort.

A few years' ago, my 'sister' looked for Bill's grave in the Rotorua cemetery. And my sister-who-may-be-not-a-sister could not find the grave-that-was-not-a-grave. Bill would have appreciated that.

So happy dad's day Bill. Your children and your maybe-children, remember you with love.

Kate Juliff
New York
June 2005