This long weekend

This long weekend I will be spending my annual "Foundation Day" with my daughter and my dad at the Association Cup for Netball W.A..  My girl will play about 6 or 7 games over the course of the three days (depending upon whether her team gets into the final or not) and then she and I will spend the evenings at my dad's flat as he cooks her her favourite high-carb hot meals and spoils her silly with custard and mini Magnum ice-creams with crushed almond coating.

It's a weekend to which I always look forward, as the weather is always beautiful with winter sunshine and its carefree ambiance, on the side-lines screaming for our team, and wandering around between games drinking coffee and reading on the grass, holds a great pleasure for me.  Things I would normally worry about are whisked away that weekend and there is just me, my daughter and my dad to think of.  And there are things to look forward to every hour - whether it be a tense and energetic match or that lovely feeling of the sun withdrawing its heat and the chill of early winter evening setting in, or the coming small joy of knowing you will soon be under a hot shower with a glass of wine waiting and a warm bed with your 79 year-old father cooking contentedly in his kitchen just for us.

He's been planning the menu for this weekend for weeks, I'll let you know.  He is a chemist (or was) and his planning of meals is legendary. He still thinks of recipes as 'formulas' - which they are! He used to cook for his 98 year-old mother before she spent her final year in the nursing home.  He would label every container and freeze them in batches for single meals and bought her a microwave to heat them (which she never used, instead preferring to thaw naturally and then heat in a saucepan). He is a wonderful cook and his specialities are minestrone, creamy pasta, the finest cuts of steak and fish, and an array of colourful Bulgarian salads.

I have been reflecting on how very fortunate I am to have both my parents still living and very much in our lives.  They have been divorced since I was nine (my father left the family home when I was six) and the years have been turbulent and angst-ridden much of the time, with long periods of estrangement and confusion between me and my father. But we have something now that is truly lovely. It took effort and time and patience and long nights up talking and opening up to one another.  But it's been worth it. One of the great sadnesses of my life is that my brothers do not share that same love with our father that he and I do. It's taken me most of my 42 years to realise that I cannot do anything about that fact, but learning to understand it has proved much more difficult.

So this weekend, as every Foundation Day weekend in June, I will spend it with my girl and my dad and I will not take for granted that I have both a beautiful, intense but warm-hearted daughter to watch play a sport she loves and to cheer her on as only a Tofu-hearted mother can; but also a beautiful, sweet, loving father whom I adore and dearly love in return. 

There may not be many of these weekends left in the future for us but I have this one. And I only too well know that, as Robert Frost knew, "[Life] lives less in the present /Than in the future always,
And less in both together /Than in the past. The present /Is too much for the senses,/ Too crowding, too confusing—/Too present to imagine." 

But I will try regardless.