I called my dad on his birth­day this week. After the divorce I would never call him, spe­cial occa­sion or not, sim­ply because I needed to dis­tance myself from the sit­u­a­tion. He did call me on mine last year though, which reestab­lishes a sort of prece­dence and rit­ual, and he actu­ally thanked me for the call.

We made the usual small talk, about work and home.

Mercedes Benz SLK 55 AMG 2006

He told me he bought a car: a 2006 Mercedes Benz SLK 55 AMG hard-top con­vert­ible with 18″ rims and 7-speed-automatic trans­mis­sion. He’s going to keep the Beemer for win­ter dri­ving. It filled my heart with quiet joy when he said I could drive it the next time I vis­ited him. Not so much because he was let­ting me (for I was always allowed to drive the Sportline 300CE while liv­ing at home), but because I could tell in his voice that he wanted me to try it.

I asked him if there’s any his­tory of col­orec­tal can­cer in the fam­ily, which the doc­tor wanted to know at my last appoint­ment, to which my dad answered, thank­fully, no. He shared with me his own health con­cerns, the med­ical terms of which he only knows in Chinese. These are things I avoid ask­ing about when I visit him, as he pops some pills from a bot­tle kept with the dishes in the kitchen, and I real­ize that I’m learn­ing more about my dad than ever. It’s not so much out of a need for pri­vacy or avoid­ance of embar­rass­ment, but sim­ply out of con­ve­nience, as these top­ics would never get brought up.

It’s strange to bond with him in this way, only after so many years of leav­ing home.

I remem­ber him try­ing to teach me pho­tog­ra­phy when I was younger, but he soon lost inter­est, in both pho­tog­ra­phy and me1. Maybe it’s the dis­tance that makes us appre­ci­ate each other more, and it wouldn’t be the same if we lived in the same city.

In a way, I’m glad to have the rela­tion­ship now, and I’m able to for­get that I’ve never had it for most of my life.

  1. As such, all my pho­tog­ra­phy is self-taught, aside from one trick used to zoom a lens towards the sub­ject so that the edges are blurred that he showed me at the Statue of Liberty. [↑]