Memories of my DAD

Aug 03, 2008 News

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By Michael Jordan

A fellow journalist once asked me whether my father was a retired teacher. I told him, ‘no.’ I realize now that I was wrong. You see, my father was a teacher.

He taught us to revere the English Language. He taught us to speak our minds, to be determined in the face of any odds. And even while he lay gravely ill, he was still teaching us.

My father, Walter Ashmore Jordan, was born in Vergenoegen, East Bank Essequibo.
Things were tough for dad and his siblings. He lost his own father when he was a small boy.

They were nurtured by their ‘tough loving’ mother, Nellie Jordan, a proud and deeply religious woman.
To make ends meet, dad was forced to leave school and work as a postman to support the family.

Daddy spoke about having to learn to ride a bicycle in a single day, so he could make his postal rounds.
By dint of hard work, my dad eventually rose to the position of postmaster. By then we were living in Suddie, Essequibo Coast.

But dad wanted more. He enrolled in a correspondence course (The Rapid Results College of Education) to study for his GCE certification.

According to dad, some of his colleagues teased him about ‘running race with his children.’
Of course, dad had the last laugh when he passed his exams.

He would eventually become a university graduate, and would work in senior positions at the Guyana Telecommunications Corporation and the Guyana Water Authority. After retiring, dad became Public Relations Officer for the Mayor and City Council of Georgetown.

From as early as I can remember, daddy revered proper speech and grammar. Here we were, growing up in ‘the country’, saying: ‘I am’, ‘we are’ and ‘they have;’ saying ‘three’ instead of ‘tree.’ This meant that we all earned ridiculously high marks in English Language tests.

He was always with a dictionary. He told me once how he improved his stock of new words by constantly browsing through the Reader’s Digest column: ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.’

And he respected hard work. I remember one May Day, when I assumed that I would spend the holiday ‘liming.’

Instead, bright and early, daddy got the cutlasses out, and he, along with us three boys, spent the morning weeding our yard in Tucville.

A neighbour saw us in action and jokingly said to my father: “How you working on a holiday?”
“It’s Labour Day,” my father responded.

Dad was strong on black identity, but sincerely believed that a man could rise above his circumstances. He was vocal on white exploitation, but respected the hard work of the American pioneers.

He believed in participating. When an interior road was being built, of course dad was one of the people who volunteered to cut down the trees to make room for that roadway.

When the sugar workers went on strike in the late seventies, of course dad was among those who picked up a cutlass and helped with the task of harvesting sugar cane and loading the punts that seemed to have no bottom.

(Of course, he took his three sons along with him). He was a member of several prominent organisations at the time of his death. But dad was fun-loving too.

He played lawn tennis in Suddie. He made our first kites, and I can distinctly remember him raising a large kite on the backdam behind our home in Suddie.

When we moved to Georgetown, he took us to the Post Office Sports Ground to fly them. He bought plywood and helped us rig-up a tennis table at our Tucville home.

Almost every day, and particularly during the August holidays, our bottom house would be filled with boisterous boys from Tucville and other neighbourhood communities, waiting their turn for a game.

In this way, dad helped us to make lifelong friends; to ‘bond’ with other young men. (One of my nephews is now a table tennis champion in his own right in the United States). My father was also an excellent dancer, and had a fine baritone voice.

One of the things I most admired about my father was his willingness to voice his opinions, even if those opinions were unpopular. He refused to be a ‘yes man.’

Yesterday, a close friend of my dad’s recalled that the late President of Guyana, Mr. Linden Forbes Burnham (at the time Prime Minister), had once summoned dad and a few others from the People’s National Congress to the Residence on Vlissengen Road for a meeting.

According to daddy’s friend, Mr. Burnham made a point that many disagreed with. However, no one dared to voice dissent. No one, that is, except my dad.

“Everyone else was afraid, but your father stood up and told Mr. Burnham that he was wrong,” the friend told me.

Dad never quite retired. After leaving the Mayor and City Council, dad penned his ‘Watch Your Language’ column and others in the newspapers. And he also began to write fiction. He was in his seventies then.

I still remember the thrill I felt the day that I spied a pile of hand-written pages on dad’s cabinet and realized that I was looking at one of my father’s short stories.

He eventually published a collection of short stories, called ‘Passing Strangers.’ That was followed by an amazing manuscript, ‘Bush Corner,’ which will be posthumously published.

It seemed that dad would never slow down. But, last month, we noticed a difference in him. He appeared to be constantly exhausted. Eventually, he became weaker, and it became clear that he was gravely ill.

But he was still teaching us. I remember the night when we accompanied him to the hospital. Gentleman to the end, dad stood at the open taxi door, waiting for my mother to enter first. He worried about us not resting enough because we were attending to him.

When an old friend and neighbour passed away, dad insisted on attending the friend’s funeral to pay his respects. Eventually, on July 24, the same day that his eldest daughter celebrated her birthday, my dad passed away.

Dad was a modest man. If he could have attended his own funeral, my father would have been amazed at the tributes that poured in from the many people whose lives he had touched. He would also have wondered aloud what all the fuss was about.

It may seem strange, but I remember my father more with a sense of happiness than with tears.
They talk about people being larger then life. To me, my dad, my teacher, is larger than even death itself.

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