Back in the habit

Every Friday night Dad for years Dad would come home with takeaway dinner after work. I was in my very early teens, so it must have been when he worked at LW Parry in Arncliffe. maybe at the Esso servo in Brighton. He'd get hamburgers with chips from Paul's at Sylvania for the rest of us and barbecue chicken and chips for himself.

We'd all sit in front of the TV to eat and watch English comedy shows on ABC like Dave Allen and The Two Ronnies, which was unusual – we were a commercial network household. He'd be in his usual chair adjacent to the door into the hallway with one of the nested tables in front of it for his dinner. There's a photo somewhere of Tiddles reaching up for his plate wanting a piece of his chicken.

He'd always buy me a peppermint crisp chocolate bar for after dinner. I don't think I even really liked them a lot – certainly not as much as some other chocolate bars – but he'd got into the habit by then so it was etched in stone.

Just like David said at his funeral, Saturday night was Chinese takeaway night from The Fountain Inn in Caringbah and the one time somebody decided to have it on Friday night instead he didn't quite know what to do with himself.

When he and Mum separated he went to live with Jimmy all the way over in Randwick even though he still worked back in Menai near the rest of us. Now, a drive through peak hour traffic between Randwick and Menai would be enough to bring on a coronary most of the time, let alone twice a day, and if I remember right he started work between 7.30 and eight o'clock and finished at five or 5.30, so he would have been in the worst of the traffic both ways. I assumed when he moved he'd just get himself together, put up with it for a couple of weeks or months and then move somewhere back in The Shire to be closer to work.

Instead, he lived there for nearly 10 years.

The number of kilometres he put on that little van with the walls that felt like tinfoil and the shockingly high centre of gravity must have been jaw-dropping – he must have driven the equivalent of the circumference of the Earth.

When I was a kid he went to the tip on Saturday. After that he'd do whatever he was doing in the garage and backyard with the rugby league playing over an old radio that I remember as clearly as the Rank Arena TV that lived in the lounge room my entire childhood. When he made dinner – almost always on Sunday night – it was (very well done) steak, potato scallops, peas and tomato and onion gravy. He fell asleep in front of the TV every night, snored, denied he snored and then went to bed around 10 or 11.

We all know he was a man of simple tastes and pleasures but as the above stories also intimate, Frank was a man of extremely staunch habits.

I always hated habits, inevitable though some of them are (these days I find myself cleaning the house every Friday. Why? My mother does it, so I think Friday is the only natural choice to clean a house). But if you asked me I'd be very conscious that I want every day and every experience to be something different.

For Dad, habits were the framework he used to make sense of the world and his life. It might be something to do with the different times we grew up in – he never went overseas in his life (another habit; the mention of 'overseas' meant a joke about a ferry trip to Manly) and he grew up in an era where doing so was probably something nobody except rich people did.

When we were growing up everyone did it, I first went overseas at 20. Travel was a way of having an adventure in life that I just don't think men or boys of his generation were raised to expect or want.
Or it might just be that we were different people. It might be because I grew up seeing how a middle class, suburban life was so defined by habits and ended up railing against it.

But like so many things I wonder about him now he's gone, was he really happy like that? Did he want to break out and do something crazy and different occasionally? I never saw his countenance crack for even a split second so I wouldn't guess he did. I suppose nobody but Janice or maybe Muriel knew him that well.

Were the things he wanted that transparent you could see them in him by the way he lived his life to such simple principles and values? Were there any hidden depths and ambitions he gave up on or decided not to bother with?

Something else I think his generation learned was that you grew up, got a job, had a family, enjoyed a beer (or several) at the end of the day and that was all you needed. Did he internalise or believe that to the extent where he always seemed completely satisfied with his life?

Or maybe I have it completely arse-backwards and he and Mum (probably Mum on her own, if anything) realised what parenting experts have said for millennia – that habits are the best way to raise children because they know what to expect and where their boundaries are?

Did they do that so much they ended up forgetting any sense of spontaneity or ambition they once had as kids or newlyweds? Mum's told me plenty of times she wanted to be a model when she was a girl, and for the last few weeks I've been scanning hundreds of photos from their wedding and she could have been. How she passed two babies through that twig of a body I have no idea.

None of us will pretend Frank was the perfect father any more than he was a perfect husband, but one of the things he (maybe unwittingly) taught me was that if you're responsible for people you don't falter in providing for them.

But he was so constant at it there was something almost robotic about it. Maybe he went too far with that and should have occasionally showed us that he sometimes got sick of it, that he used to want to do other stuff with his life, that he was an individual before he was Jan's husband or our dad. That he was human.

After he and mum separated there were a couple of more personal things he opened up to me about, maybe because he felt like he could relate to me as an adult. Nowadays I wish I'd asked him a lot more.

... we even went to a Chinese restaurant once (the one at the top of The Boulevard on the Princes Highway in Sylvania Heights) by ourselves, and would you believe it was on a Thursday