tales of Suchita

It was the first day of summer vacation and I had been left to my own devices. Usually that would be a best-case scenario but my vacations didn’t coincide with my friends so they were still in school and would be for another three days. Until then, I had little but the TV to entertain me. Dad had promised we’d go to the library in the evening but I was bored so I went to his room. Troubling him would be good entertainment.

I saw him sitting on the floor in front of his wardrobe. He had a shoe box open in front of him which unsurprisingly didn’t have shoes in it. I asked, “What are you doing?”

Dad started, which was something I hadn’t been expecting. He didn’t answer my question immediately. Instead of asking another question, I waited. It was a trick I had learnt from mum: she would keep quiet, whenever she wanted me to spill my guts to her. It always worked on me so I tried it on dad.

It worked because he said after a minute, “Just looking at some letters.”

“What letters?” I asked, sitting on the floor next to him.

He smiled and handed the first one to me. I skimmed it and realized… “Ew gross. These are love letters. Why would you give them to me? I don’t want to know how you flirted with people. Oh god, now I need a brain wipe.”

Dad laughed. “I wrote these when I was your age. To a boy I liked in school. He…didn’t take it very well. He told the teacher and…it doesn’t matter.”

Now intrigued, I took back the letter. For a fourteen-year-old, dad sure sounded sappy and embarrassing. “You had no game in school,” I said with a laugh, handing it back to him. “Why do you keep it still?”

Dad shrugged. “It’s to remind me of a time when I was brave.”

I nodded, then smiled slyly. “What else do you have in that box?”

This time when dad chuckled, I knew whatever else was in the box were happier memories. He handed me a paper. It had a sun, a brown blob with the helpful caption of doggy under it. There was a green blob which I assumed was a tree and three stick figures.

“You’re such a sap,” I said. “Is this mine?”

“Yes. Usually, you’d give your drawings to mum when you came back but this one you gave me. It was like you had approved of me.”

The next thing he showed me were blue booties that had pink ribbons on it. “Your nani made you these. I loved her for adding those pink ribbons and not being so rigid in her stance of what a boy is allowed or not.”

I took the booties from his hands and turned them over. Despite being closed in a box, they were clean, free of dust or lint. I could tell they had been well-loved and well-preserved. I put my finger inside each of them and walked them in air.

Then dad held out a photo that was of him and mum. I kept the booties back in their case and took the frame. They looked so young in it that I almost didn’t recognize them. They had less hair than before. There were lines on their faces now and that sheen of innocence had been scrubbed clean.

“You knew each other that far back?”

Dad grimaced, then laughed, and took the photo from my hands. “Have you heard the story of how we got together?”

I rolled my eyes. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear this but I could sense that maybe dad needed to say it. “Mum doesn’t tell me anything.”

“We met at a bad time. Mum would say wrong time but I would say bad and you would probably say dad those are semantics.”

I laughed. It looked like dad had tears in his eyes and I didn’t know what to do or say. If I hugged him, would he cry harder? I didn’t want him to cry because of me. “Dad, is everything okay?”

He sniffled. “Yes, yes. Just thinking about mum.”

I suddenly realized what all of this was about. Why he was sitting with a box full of memories. I rolled my eyes so hard I was afraid they’d pop out of my eye sockets.

“Dad, she’s coming back like tonight. God, you have no game whatsoever. How did you ever win her over I’ll never understand.”

He caught hold of me and we pretended to wrestle. Once I had defeated him, he told me the story of how they’d met. How it had been the “wrong” time and they had had to wait ten years for it to become the “right” time.

It was an interesting way of spending the afternoon and if it led to me writing my first homework essay on that shoebox of memories, well…

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Song: My Favourite Things by Julie Andrews

Check out the other posts for 2023 here. Written as part of #BlogchatterA2Z