Dad's on his way

Dad is winging his way up to Sydney as I type this. He'll stay there overnight before flying back to Hawaii tomorrow. As always it is a terrible wrench to say goodbye at the airport, but I'm hoping to be able to find some cheap airfares later in the year and visit him there.

It was very hot while he was here, and we didn't get to do as much as we might have, but still...

• There was the obligatory visit to Williamstown Beach, which we love, and there was a nice breeze off the water that day.
• We went to an aviation museum - Dad was a commercial pilot and has always been interested in planes. On that same trip we discovered a bayside beach which I'll return to when it's not so hot.
• We visited the City Museum which has a wonderful exhibition about Melbourne beaches. The museum is in the old Treasury Building which has very thick walls, and it was a cool escape from the heat.
• We did a couple of hikes in local bushland, both of which turned out to be longer than anticipated, as both of us like to do a loop and not retrace our steps and we sometimes lose our way. On yesterday's hike we retreated to the shade of a tree after climbing a hill with no shade. Here is a photo of us, but as Dad informed me a while back, he doesn't really like his photo on the internet, so I've made some changes to protect his privacy. heh heh!

Cats need to maintain their privacy too!

Alternative to the preordained

In my previous post which was a response to a meme, Stu thought there was a story behind my answer to the last question:
Name the person who inputed the most wisdom into your life?
My parents: Mom because she showed me the importance of family life, and Dad because he made me look at alternatives to what I thought were preordained paths for me to take.

There is a story, and I've decided to write two separate posts, one for each parent. Today's post is about Dad's influence.

After high school, I went on to university, what for me was preordained. (This is not meant in a religious sense, but more generally. More commonly expressed, I guess I'd say "it was a given", but preordained sounds better!) Anyway... my choice of major was also clear to me: German language and culture. Ever since I had started learning German in Year 9, it was what I loved and had a flair for. So far, so good. What I was going to do with a bachelors degree in German literature was something I hadn't thought about, but there was time for that, and anyway it was party time at uni! My first year was spent having fun, going folk dancing almost every night, and achieving rather mediocre results in my studies.

Dad had a different idea about how he saw my life heading: a degree in German, marriage and kids, without my ever going out to work. This was the 60s, before women in numbers started trying to have careers AND a family. Earning a living was an important experience he thought I should have. For myself, I was interested in marriage at some stage, but children were never a part of it.

This is what I wrote in English class when I was in Year 10. My teacher added her comments, she was right about the marriage and children, although the latter would come along another 25 years later!

So at the end of that first year, Dad said he would not fund my education for the following year, but would resume doing so if I went out to work for a year.

I thought it was the end of the world at first. It was not how I envisaged my life. That is, I'd finish my degree and then, well, something would turn up. Not much envisaging, was it? But I did go and get a job as a clerk in an insurance company in San Francisco, and plucked up the courage to move out of home and rent an apartment in the city (still possible to do that in the 60s). It was wonderful.

At the end of that year, Dad came up with another idea. Through someone at work he heard about a scheme for young people to work in Germany for 2 - 3 months. In those days Germany just couldn't get enough workers. I got a job as a maid in a small hotel on a resort island off the northern coast of Germany. At the end of my stint there I then started travelling around Europe, and my original 3 months became a year, including living and working in Hamburg for 6 months.

This did wonders for my spoken German, my self confidence, and it provided a focus for what I wanted to do with my degree: I was going to become a German teacher, which I eventually did.

So by Dad interrupting my studies, I went to do things I would probably never have done otherwise, and how glad I am for the way things turned out!

Travelin' Dad

As in most years, Dad came to visit us for a couple of weeks this month, crossing the Pacific in his nomadic way, spending a couple of days in Sydney and Auckland, boomeranging back and forth between California and Hawaii. Every year I find out something new about him. To my utter amazement, I discovered that he read On the Road - Dad is not much of a reader, but that's one he did read. I have always got the impression that he would have been happy "on the road", and having been an airline pilot would have helped that along. I think he's doing that to this day, at 81, still flying around the Pacific. And his nomadic ways would have started when he was about 15 or 16, walking and hitchhiking from New York to Down South to work as a busboy on a cruise ship.

For this year's visit, Melbourne weather turned on the heat, and tropical rain and humidity levels seldom experienced here. This would seem to have less effect on him than us, as he's used to Hawaiian weather and loves the heat: he even went for a 3-hour bike ride on a day of 33 degrees! Dad has only recently had to give up surfing as he injured a shoulder rotator cuff (while surfing). I hope I have his longevity genes - his mother lived to 101.

Dad was an early personal computer user, and built his own computer in the 70s from a kit he ordered by mail. He's been tinkering with them ever since. But as he said when we saw a historical computer display at Melbourne Museum recently, "The fun went out of it when you didn't have to solder the parts together anymore".

Picnic lunch in the Wildlife Reserve at La Trobe.

Dinner at home on the veranda with Aussie Nana (husband's mom), Yankee Pappa (my dad).

Photo album of Dad's visit

Trams - a family thing

This morning I ran out of time before I could finish my tram post before going to work. Tonight I got an e-mail from my cousin in Arizona, and he wrote :

"My father used to tell us about pulling the pole off the wire on the trams in Brooklyn and running from the conductor for kicks when he was a kid..."

Well, it must run in the family, because that's what MY dad did too, and I was going to write the same thing. Those Lank brothers ...

13 August: just talked to Dad, and he said we missed a vital point about pulling the pole off the wire: at the time they would be riding, for free, on the outside at the back, and pulling the cord was a way of slowing down the trolley so they could get off safely at a convenient place! I wonder if Grandma knew about that stuff.

My cousin Tim just sent me a whole list of websites to follow up on these interurban (long distance) trolleys that featured at the beginning of E.L. Doctorow's book "Ragtime". The Trolley Stop website looks like a great place to start.

Mel and I almost bought an old Melbourne tram in the early 80s. We put our name down to get one of the trams that were going to be retired in 18 months. In the meantime we needed to buy a block of land to put it on, and that’s why we bought 10 acres in the gold country, which was our favorite place anyway. So 18 months go by, and sure enough, we get a notice from the transport people to say our tram is ready to “collect”! It was going to cost $700 plus transporting it up to the country – no problem. Unfortunately, the local council was very strict at the time and they were not going to allow it unless we put up a house first. Well, that would have defeated the purpose because we were just going to make the tram into a holiday house. So we passed up the opportunity to get a tram of our own.

I had almost forgotten about another city I've lived in with a great tram system: Hamburg, Germany. I lived and worked there for 6 months in the 60s, and they had an extensive tram system. It is also the place where I had my scariest tram ride. I was travelling by tram to visit a friend who lived in an industrial area. There wasn't much traffic out there on a weekend and the driver was pushing the tram to maximum speed. The tram started to sway and rock so much that I thought it was going to leave the rails. This has stuck in my memory all these years, similar to the wild bus ride of Singapore in the 70s. But I'll leave it at that.

Web cam at Waikiki

Dad rang yesterday - it was my day off, so we had some time to catch up on things.

Occasionally I'll go to the live web cam site on Waikiki, look at the palms swaying in the breeze, and think: what if Dad happened to walk by at that moment? After I told him about this website, he did go to the Duke Kahanamoku statue on the beach and looked for the camera that's trained on the beach. (Dad, with your back to the statue, look up and to your right.) It's fun to watch the tourists walk up to the statue and then take photos of themselves. There's a steady stream of them. Just now, at almost 1 a.m. Honolulu time, there were still tourists out and about.

Dad and I at the Otway Fly