Wait for me!

Life is fleeting.

I’ll be doing something and suddenly there it is: an insignificant moment from more than 50 years ago, as fresh as if the events occurred just moments ago.

I see myself following Dad along the ‘inside track’, as we called it.

Dappled sunlight comes through large pine trees. It is a magical day. Summer is over but Winter is still a little way off.

Dad is five to ten meters in front of me and moving briskly, rapidly increasing the distance between us.

He is tanned and strong, a farmer, and is wearing a khaki work shirt and shorts. He is barefoot, one of his idiosyncrasies. His leathery feet stride out over the sandy track. Native bushland is on the right but to the left there is a single row of huge old pine trees.

He planted the pines himself as a boundary between the inside track and the public road which ran parallel to it.

Dad was a tree lover, an enthusiast. He’d planted this row long before he understood that this exotic species adapted far too well to the cool climate of Queensland’s high country. The pine trees dropped seeds and rapidly invaded the native bushland, changing its ecosystem forever. The rare native plants there, such as Grevillea Scortechinii and one type of Boronia, were to later struggle against extinction as a bed of pine needles accumulated and altered their home.

This fact was not understood at the time of my memory. Dad’s intentions in planting all sorts of vegetation were laudable, and this must count for something.

I am young in this memory, not much more than a toddler.

His head is down as he hums and strides further and further away from where I struggle to keep up. He glances up every now and then but is deep in thought.

He doesn’t look back. Does he even remember that I'm with him?

I hear myself begin to whine, ‘Wait for me! Daddy, wait for me!’

He pulls up abruptly, jerked back from wherever he was in his thoughts, turns to me and smiles.

‘Well, come on!’ he says, cheerfully and tolerantly. ‘Come on. Catch up. We haven’t got all day’.

And I ‘catch up’.

A few minutes later the gap is growing yet again. My pleading resumes. Dad again pauses to let me join him, hoisting me on his back for a ‘piggyback’ ride.

The memory then fades out.

Dad went on to father eleven children. He, like the pine trees, scattered his seed liberally, albeit in one field. Like the unintended pine trees which then sprouted, some of his offspring deviated from his hoped-for vision for us. Our real futures, like the bushland he accidentally altered, were not what he had anticipated.

Life didn’t wait for us. Mistakes were made and life went on, marching relentlessly towards something.

It wasn’t entirely Dad’s fault that I was often left behind on the bush track.

The exact moment when I broke the bones of my right knee remains a mystery because I used to ‘bung on funny walks' (my parents' words) to amuse my older siblings. So, it was only when I didn’t stop ‘mucking around’ (their expression again) with the latest funny walk that it slowly dawned on them that I wasn’t …well, ‘mucking around’ any longer.

I just couldn’t walk properly.

One of my childhood games was climbing onto high things and jumping off. Several of my siblings had noticed me leaping from the ‘old shed’ roof in the days preceding the Funny Walks. It is likely that I did some damage in one of my four yard vertical leaps.

I vaguely recall doing this, but not my motivation. I may just have wondered if I could fly.

It could have been as simple as that.

Did I have a quick cry when I cracked my bones? Probably, but I would have stopped quickly once an older sibling or Mum comforted me. I was tough, after all. My two older brothers had nicknamed me ‘Hardhead’, a reference to the fact that my head endured ‘rough play’ remarkably well when deliberately banged into walls during their games.

So began a period of diagnosis and rehabilitation that I didn’t understand at the time.

For my broken right knee, not my head, I should stress.

The bones had healed wrongly by the time my parents understood that I wasn’t just ‘mucking about’. It would be easy for me to now judge them for their slowness to understand, but they did have ten other children to look after, after all.

Regardless we were soon periodically driving to the city, an all-day adventure back then, where I would have an appointment with the specialist.

His treatment was revolutionary. Because the break had healed wrongly, some intervention was necessary. Breaking it again to reset was not an option. Instead, I wore special shoes for the coming years, the right shoe of which was built up so that it would force my leg on a certain angle when I walked and would basically force my gait to be correct. As I grew, the shoes were updated, and my bone growth would magically normalize.

I didn’t know any of this at the time. I just enjoyed getting new leather shoes regularly and the day trip to the city. There was usually a treat involved after the shoe fittings. Sometimes it was a pie with mushy peas, sometimes an ice cream.

Unlike my dad, I had to wear shoes in all my waking hours.

It worked amazingly well over time.

I found it hard to keep up in foot races in the first 4 or 5 years of primary school, but by the time I finished year 7 there was no obvious difference in my walking or running abilities to anybody else. I wasn’t the quickest but there were, unbelievably, some kids who were slower.

I now understand why Dad seemed to always be accelerating away from me as I followed him.

Maybe he was walking briskly as he thought about whatever it was that was on his mind. But I would have been moving slowly in the years after the injury.

I see a khaki clad man again, tanned and with bare feet, briskly striding away from me on a bush track. I hear a child whining for his father to stop. The man swings around good naturedly and eventually picks up the child and puts him on his back.

The imagined film is clear. I smell the tang of pine needles, see the greasy brown and yellow fungi poking through the pine needles, and feel the coolness of the impending winter. The warmth of the sunlight breaks through gaps in the canopy above.

Dad ultimately waited, but I now also understand that time waits for no-one.

I’m 61.

Dad is long gone, followed by Mum recently.

It feels sometimes like their lives never happened.

A pine forest has largely replaced the native Australian bushland where my memories formed. I’ve heard that the new owner, my eldest brother, has cleared some of the remaining bushland.

There are now dozens of grandchildren and even more great grandchildren, nephews, and nieces.

My memories, seemingly insignificant, are still there, though, ready to be activated on a whim.

As fresh as if the events all happened just moments ago.

There is something both painful and wonderfully reassuring about this.