Freestylin

Sometimes I can let my mind drift, floating through the flotsam of my experiences of my life. It can be quite dull but, occasionally, I find a forgotten gem, a phrase spoken with paternal love (or advice), some realization of maybe just random junk. Some times I think of my Dad.

Measure thrice and cut once – you can always make it shorter (my paternal ancestors were blacksmiths for quite a few generations). It’s a hard life -. I understand my Dad a little more each year.


You see I car pooled with my dad for the first four years of my working life. My dad, amongst other things was a craftsman. He would relate stories of conquests against intractable mechanical problems with machines from an age where the intelligence was in built into the shape of steel. Cogs, pullies and cams executed their fabricated algorithm. Each piece had to work in synchronicity. Alignment and timing solved four dimensional problems of pick and place as the mechanism changed raw to finished. From engines to looms to weapons of war my Dad had played with it all.

He was born in between the wars and worked in Belfast at a time when it was the Mill and ship building powerhouse of the British empire. As a young man he was apprenticed as a fitter, I think it was in one of the mills where linen was spun and fabric loomed. From there he worked in a number of places learning his trade and honing his skills. During the second world war he worked on armaments, he told me stories of how to align aircraft machine guns, or pack a belt (tracers, armour piercing then incendiary).

Through time he progressed to be an inspector of machines and a foreman of trades. He had a little punch with his initials on it so he could pop his approval on a finished piece.

When he was around the age I am now he plucked up the family and moved half way round the world to this town (I was 3 and ½ at the time). He got a job as a fitter, on shift, at local mineral processing refinery.

I don’t think he was very happy at that time of his life but I was to young to know of such things. I do know that he worked every hour of overtime to provide for six kids. I didn’t get to see my dad much. Later I learnt how frustrated he was working on the primitive pumps and valves that made up the refinery. His skills were meant for building and repairing precision machinery. An unused talent will cause sadness.

He was also skilled at organising things and had a talent for analysis. He became a foreman once more, but still on shift, and still working too many hours. He felt obligation strongly.

I can’t remember exactly how old he was when he started suffering the effects of the smoking, a fatty diet and irregular sleep that would eventually kill him. His arteries accumulated the debris of this abuse and angina set in. So in his mid 50s he had multiple bypass surgery. After that he got a sideways promotion as foreman of the refineries mechanical workshop.

Around that time I was fooling around and had dropped out of school. I had a dream job as a DJ in a local roller skating rink and life was great. My dad convinced me to get a real job and so I applied and became an apprentice at the same refinery. So I car pooled with him. I miss that.