My father didn’t like to be taken by surprise.
As a civil engineer, his professional life was a matter of mathematics and rules. Driving over a bridge, he’d quote the equations that ensured it was safe and stable.
'To be at equilibrium, the horizontal forces and the vertical forces must be equal to what?'
This went straight over my head, which was usually buried in a book, probably a novel about an eccentric family in the Greek islands. 'Whatever you say, Dad.'
There were formulae in his domestic life too. Strict rules about stacking the dishwasher. Knives and forks pointed downwards, to avoid careless stabbings.
As for family holidays: the Apollo space missions that put a man on the moon were not planned with more attention to detail. Dossiers were prepared, detailed itineraries drawn up, budgets, timetables, maps marked with multi-coloured dots. Once the trip started, every event was documented in slides to be sorted, boxed and filed away for the years to come.
Dad kept his monthly accounts in notebooks detailing expenditure, bank balances, and cash in hand. He wrote out the figures with a fountain pen, double-checking everything on his old calculator. He never owned a credit card, because they deceive you into spending money you don’t have. He regarded the stock market as a casino and never invested in shares.
After dad died, I went through his desk and found a much-used leather blotter, frayed at the edges; lots of spare batteries; two sets of small precision screwdrivers; a Swiss Army knife; seven rulers; two metal tape measures and two ribbon tape measures; ten rolls of sticky tape; six packets of adhesive labels; squared notebooks containing plans of the house and garden drawn from various elevations; numbered lists of household tasks; a small compass on a chain.
There was also a box full of keys, all carefully labeled. ‘Greenhouse.’ ‘Large case.’ ‘Small case’. ‘Shed.’ ‘Shed—spare.’ Because God forbid that you’re caught without a spare shed key.
Dad died on a winter day in 2012. He was shopping with my mother when his heart gave out and he collapsed pushing a trolley outside the supermarket. They called an ambulance but nothing could be done.
The obvious moral, like a Dutch painting depicting the figure of Death at someone’s door, would be: ‘All your planning can never prevent the final, unexpected event.’
But Dad knew that life was unpredictable, and had his wild moments when young. He led a jazz band at 15, playing professional gigs. He got paid in bunches of notes which he stuffed into a tin, never bothering to count them.
A few years later, World War II pulled him out of university, put him into uniform, sent him overseas. At 21 he was in charge of a train hurtling through the Malayan jungle, hoping there were no mines on the track. Soon after the war, his parents died of cancer in quick succession. Still a very young man, he had a wife and a young family. Life forced responsibility on him. Everyone relied on him.
Perhaps his faith in equations, plans and measurements was his way of eliminating as much of the random as possible. He wanted life to be as stable as a well-made bridge.
In some respects I’m not much like Dad. I don’t understand maths, and I don’t know what makes a bridge stand up. I don’t organise my holidays carefully; in fact I migrated across the world without really planning it. I lose tickets. I don’t keep monthly accounts, I have a credit card but no Swiss Army knife, and I can’t find my shed key.
Maybe it’s just not in me to have those qualities—some quirk of brain chemistry sends me to novels instead of equations.
On the other hand, it could be learned behaviour. I grew up in a world so predictable I chafed against it. Dad did all the planning, so I never had to. I put my faith in the spontaneous, the serendipitous, the music of chance. At 21 I stood in front of a notice board of overseas teaching jobs and picked the first one that appealed.
We imitate and rebel in unintentional ways. I had the benefit of a childhood so risk-averse that I’ve loved surprises ever since. Maybe that was Dad’s gift to me.
Nick Gadd is a Melbourne writer whose novel Ghostlines won a Victorian Premier's Literary Award and a Ned Kelly Award. His Twitter handle is @nickowriter
Civil engineer image by Shutterstock.