A friend of mine is making a documentary about fathers. She has asked if she can interview me for it. I’ve said yes. It got me thinking about my father, and situations, memories, things that could say something about him as a dad.
My dad is a big man, and he has the answers to everything. He doesn’t cry. Except for in the case of death in the family, I only remember seeing my dad cry once. I was eleven, and we were in Venice. It was our last day, and I really wanted to travel by gondola. I had seen them in movies and I wanted to try it myself. But all the gondolas we could find were either busy or shamelessly expensive. It seemed like I wouldn’t be able to get a gondola ride this time.
I didn’t throw a tantrum or anything. I was just disappointed. And on a narrow bridge across a back canal in Venice, I suddenly realized that dad had tears running down his cheeks. He wanted to make my first visit to Venice perfect, and now I wouldn’t get to do the gondola thing. He felt so helpless and sad and frustrated that the emotions simply overflowed into physical form.
That’s how loved I was.
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By chance, when we’d already given up, we found an affordable gondola with a very chatty, very Italian gondolier, and I got my gondola ride. The photo dad took of me, excited, big-eyed, with the gondolier in a striped shirt in the background, ended up on the front page of the biggest news paper in Sweden. As most trips I’ve done with my dad, this was research for an article.
Katja Malmborg 