| My father died in July of 1986 of a heart attack.A few years before that he crashed his car into a power pole in the middle of the night and was in constant pain until his death.I've been thinking about him a lot since last October when I turned 41 as Dad was 40 when he died.I've been thinking about the time we spent together and the things we shared that carried over into my adult life.My fondest memories of my father were the two of is sitting in front of a television set.I watched what he watched and gained a great appreciation for comedy films and television shows.I loved him to see him laugh at something.He didn't just laugh...he would convulse with laughter and tears would stream down his face which would then set off a chain reaction of laughter in me. The things we liked watching most were shows featuring Irish comedian Dave Allen, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the Goodies, Monty Python, Paul Hogan etc. We also loved watching stand-up comics like Richard Pryor and Billy Connolly.Dad also passed on his love for the films of Peter Sellers and Mel Brooks, just to name two.I learned at an early age to study what it was that these people did that made my father laugh so much.It gave me a great appreciation of comedy and what it takes to make people laugh.We also spent many a late night staying up until the wee small hours watching horror and science fiction films.This was in the days before VCRs so if you wanted to see a particular film, you had to stay and up and watch or you missed it.Dad's love of film was infectious and I would buy books about movies to educate myself...and when I saw a certain film I'd read about was going to be on, Dad would sit up with me and watch it.During the ads, he would tell me about what it was like to go to the movies when he was my age.He'd tell me about the old serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and then about the main features.Sometimes we'd stay up to watch an old movie like the original Dracula with Bela Lugosi and we'd both be woken up by the sound of television static to find we'd missed most of it (all these years later, I still find most of it boring).Other times we'd go to bed at 3am after successfully staying awake all the way through Five Million Years To Earth.Dad was always the one who'd let me stay up and watch films like Taste The Blood Of Dracula and War Of The Worlds well after my pre-teen bedtime.I remember being as young as 8 when he allowed me to stay up until midnight to watch a double-bill of Planet Of The Apes and King Kong.He liked to read as well.I only wanted a couple of his things after he died and one of them was a book I bought him for his birthday one year, Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers.He loved this book and I enjoyed it just as much when I read it after his death.He was also a great fan of Sherlock Holmes.He read the books and always watched any television series or movie featuring the character.I ended up being a fan too...I'm looking over at a bookshelf near where I'm typing and there sits all the Basil Rathbone movies and a complete collection of all the stories.It's hard to believe that he's been gone for over 20 years now.He is still with me though...every time I watch something I knew he would have enjoyed, I think about him and about how grateful I shall always be for the things he gave me. |
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