The Holiday

My dad would have really enjoyed this movie. Today is the 8th anniversary of his death. We were so incredibly blessed to have him while we did. This is not an occasion for sadness, but rather for remembering and rejoicing and being grateful for so many things. And for laughing. ^_^

My dad had a zany sense of humour and was always doing crazy things. If they had already invented (the label) ADHD when he was a kid, he would have been the poster child. If they used it for adults, he would have been the poster adult. He was a spontaneous, enthusiastic, and exuberant guy, and he was always hatching hare-brained schemes. If you've seen Over the Hedge, think Hammy, only with a brain. ^_^

One time, he went through a hot-air balloon making phase. He took those super thin plastic food-storage bags (the kind with the plastic that appears to be cross-hatched when you look closely, and that you close with a twisty) and cut them apart and ironed a bunch of them together in a big bag shape. Then he suspended a candle beneath the bag with string (fishing line maybe?) and chopsticks. It worked. I remember that it seemed to take forever to fill, and I can still picture it lifting slowly up into the night sky and then off over the jungle, to the oohs and ahhs of us all (a bunch of his students came to watch.) I'm still unsure of why the jungle didn't catch fire. ^_^

Another time he went through a phase of making smoothies. He was all about speed. (his nickname as a kid was "Road Runner" because he NEVER walked) The faster you could assemble food or drinks, the better. My favourite smoothie involved a bunch of stuff plus 7up and a poorly secured blender lid. It also involved a lot of clean-up after the lid blew off. ^_^

He made up a lot of silly family words, some (like "Nuftegyew" -- something a monkey once said to him ^_^) inspired by his childhood in India, China and Taiwan. He taught my sister and I how to curse someone in Urdu, and he wasn't scandalised when I said the word "crap" when I was 7 or 8. He could cook a mean curry, and loved to sing, play and compose music. He had his pilot's license, and wrote a COMAL (computer) language programming book. When he saw smoke on the horizon, he'd bustle my sister and I into the Rover (or later the VW Bug) and we'd go stomp out the fires. He taught us to swim, dive and snorkel, and he was the one who discovered that we could swim with the blue jellyfish without getting stung.

He was kind to animals, and caught some of the rats and mice in our ceiling with humane traps made from Klim or Milo cans, and let them go in the jungle. One time he cut a hole in the bathroom ceiling to free a trapped rat. He lured it into a cage with a slice of green apple, and took it to his bio lab to show the kids before letting it go. We had a chicken in Indiana, because he incubated chicken eggs for his bio class and then brought home the chick for us to keep. It had imprinted on him and he had to show it how to be a proper chicken. ^_^ We also had a pigeon named Pea Brain. Students would bring him animals that they rescued, like the baby bats they found in the library.

He would let my sister and I hang out with him in the lab, and take apart and build the anatomy guy. He showed us how to burn sugar into crisp little carbon cakes on the bunsen burners, and he brought home miscroscopes so we could see the world in a different way.

And he loved movies. Theatres had been verboten to us in our first religion (though he did sneak us all off to see Star Wars - my first theatre film.) Once we broke free from that, he made up for it with a vengeance. The theatre people came to know him and encouraged him to attend showings for free. He found something to like about almost every film he saw. But that's he how was about life - there was always something to like, and if you couldn't like something, you could laugh about it. ^_^

I'm sure that if you made it through all that, you can see my dad in me. And I can see him in my sister and in my kids, especially Fishy, his namesake. (well, you know ^_^)

Even when he was sick, he laughed. The morphine made him say and think some pretty weird stuff and a moment or two later he'd realise it and laugh himself silly. One of the best ones was when he announced that "hundreds of Russian women" were "coming over the hill. In tiny cars!" ^_^ So today I remember Daddy, and I laugh, because there is so much to laugh about. :)

Wow. Orignally this was just going to be a title and a YouTube. Bless you if you made it this far. ^_^ What makes you laugh?