all about my father

One evening, I was taking the bus home, and right in front of me stood a big brother in camouflage overalls, who was carrying a tool bag with all kinds of screwdrivers in it. Screwdriver, the name is so old, I haven't called it by its name since I learned to say it from my father.

When I was distracted, my eyes kept wandering, and I saw other tool handles that I couldn't distinguish, a green mineral water bottle without a cap, and even a red hard hat hanging on the side of his tool bag.

The phone rang, and I saw him change his hand to stabilize it, then took out the palm-sized feature phone from his jacket pocket, and pressed the answer button to start talking. I tried to listen, but couldn't hear what he was saying.

But his cell phone ringtone is really impressive, I can clearly hear the singing: yellow rose, don't cry, you are the most beautiful of all flowers.

That's why I couldn't help but get curious and wanted to raise my head to take a good look at him. But he turned his back to me at that time, so that at the end he got out of the car with the shovel wrapped in a woven bag, and I couldn't see what he looked like or what kind of face he had. .

But I can't help but think, maybe a decade or so - that's probably what my father was like more than a decade ago. Maybe longer.

I have been trying to forget for so many years, but when I am not paying attention, the memory always pops up for no reason. I'm used to pressing them back again and again, and then pretending to live as if nothing had happened, but now it's not easy for me to really recall them.

I don't talk about him often. A while ago, I saw someone complaining about their parents, saying that they still don't know what major they are studying in college. I thought to myself, this is actually quite normal. Many of our parents never went to college, and even if they did, it would be very different from today. Your long and complicated professional name is something I only remembered when I got used to it, how can I expect my parents to remember it.

But that's not what I want to say. I think of my father. When I was in elementary school, he didn't know what grade I was in. Although I don't say it, I know that I blame him, deeper than this.

I haven't had contact with him in years, and neither has he. The last time I called, just to tell me what a terrible person I was and what a disappointment to him. And I was still standing there as if I was punished when I was a child. I forgot to refute, even forgot to open my mouth to speak, and only tears continued to flow down. Even hanging up the phone was the simplest action to stop being hurt. forgotten. I didn't retaliate, but he hung up the phone in a hurry.

What makes this unforgettable is that it sent me into a spiral of self-denial, and the hurt went on for a long time. I had just felt as if I had grown up a little and didn't have to be afraid of something, but his presence suddenly interrupted that imagination. So I huddled up and quickly turned back into a helpless kid, like there was nothing to do, nothing to do.

A father may not be born a bad father. I often see parents with young children who pamper that child with anticipation in their eyes. I think the moment this child came into the world, he received a lot of love, and everyone who knew him looked forward to him. I may have been expected, and my father may have expected me too. (I was going to add, "I'm ready to love me too", but I still find it disgusting.)

The best memory of my father left in my head is the memory of the yard. But to be honest, I can't tell how much is real and how much is made up by myself. But when I think that I would take the initiative to process and fabricate, to beautify a person in my memory, so that one day I can exonerate him, I feel deeply disgusting again.

So, I'm just going to believe, my memory is true, this guy really left the best part of it in my yard.

In the yard where I can't remember the whole picture, my father would bring back a kind of tender and elastic branch, sit in front of the door, use a machete to cut a uniform pattern diagonally, and then carefully peel off the bark , the branches can be used as slingshots, and the bark can be used as a whistle. His hands are so skillful that he never seems to make a mistake.

Besides, he also taught me to identify the iron su on the mountain, which can cure my headache. Every weed in the field needs to be pulled up, it is a weed. Alfalfa and Vetch can be brought home to play, Dodder is a vampire, with 100,000 hair in a mess, with thousands of knots in it.

He seems to be very good at dealing with strangers. Foreigners who pass by here want to go into the mountains to find orchids, and often live in our house. Because of my father, these people always please me first and give me some gadgets. Looking back now, I can't remember whether they found orchid, but at that time, the house was very lively and I was very happy.

Behind the yard is a bamboo forest, and bamboo shoots grow in spring. But my father is a very lazy person. In my impression, he never digs up bamboo shoots, and our family doesn't eat them often. But he likes to plant trees, chestnut trees, plum trees. He was very greedy. I remember that the chestnut had just grown into a green thorn ball, so he took me to hunt chestnuts, taught me to break it with stones, and eat the fresh chestnuts in the middle. The cyan thorny chestnut bark was scattered on the ground and returned to the tree.

When I was old enough to bring my big and small friends to our house to steal plums for food, I felt that my father would no longer care about the yard, and the back mountain suddenly became deserted.

Later we moved to town and also owned a yard. There is a persimmon tree planted on the side of the yard with four petals. I sit under the tree all day and string flowers, and I want to make a necklace for myself. After the flower leaves the tree, it only has a lifespan of one night, and it will wither the next day. I am sad for a while and continue to string.

There are oleanders, leek orchids, and cannas in the flower beds, and it seems that nothing has changed. But in this yard, my father began to teach me ancient poems, "The moon falls and the black frost fills the sky, and Jiang Feng fishes the fire to worry about the sleep." The pattern becomes...

There's nothing to say about it after that, it always seems to get worse, just like anything else in the world.

Although I treasure the memories in the yard, objectively I want to treat him as an ordinary person. But I know that if I face him again, it won't be any better than the last time.

Everything I wrote about my father was just everything he was a father, everything he left in the yard.