The fathers in my life.

My life consisted of three fathers.

No, not all at once but each had one way or another contributed to the person that I later became.

My biological father whom most would have considered the first father to have had a bearing on my life was actually the last to have made an impact on my life.

Some may ask or say, "Why do I need a man in my life?" Which is a fair question to ask considering that it's usually mum in your face and dad kinda just moves around in the background. Speaking from my own experience I found that mums teach you how to survive in your world like how to keep yourself clean, to feed yourself, keep your surroundings clean and tidy, be respectful of others and use manners, etc. (I think it is unfortunate that many families don't have family dinners together anymore. Considering that is when respect for each other and manners was usually first taught, at the dinner table.)

Dads on the other hand teach you how to play or negotiate your world safely, like learning to play ball, ride a bike, drive a car, look after yourself and siblings when away from home, etc.

I was born during a time when governments never gave a helping hand to mothers who gave birth to children without a live-in father. So not long after I was born, my young mother regretfully gave me up to a couple who were only able to have one child but struggled to have another of their own. She did what she knew was best for me. These two were an aunt and uncle to her by blood, so I stayed in the family so to speak.

Unfortunately, this young couple suffered the trials and tribulations that a lot of young couples go through when first learning to live with one another.

I was in the hospital recovering from pneumonia as a baby when my foster mother's elder sister and brother-in-law came to pick me up and took me home with them. My foster mother told me years later that she had a big uphill climb reclaiming her own son back from her let alone me which is why I ended up being left to be brought up by her sister and brother-in-law who became my father number two. Her son and I later married sisters so we wound up becoming brother-inlaws in the end.

My father number two absolutely loved babies, he always had a big grin on his face when he had one in his arms, a trait that he unconsciously passed on to me. I used to like watching how he played with his grandchildren when they came along as this brought back fond memories of how he used to play with me when I was very young.

When I became a grandfather my son asked me, "how come you didn't spoil me like you do my two boys when I was their age?"

I said to him, "I wanted to treat you like that when you were that young, but my responsibility as a parent demanded that I didn't. That responsibility is now your problem, not mine."

I wanted to add, "Go running to your grandfather now?"...but I didn't.

I did find myself in time playing with my own children and grandchildren the same way my second foster father once did.

He taught me to give all young children special time, even towards those of my friends during visits, as this created for me some fine adult friends later on in life. After all, we are adults for a lot longer period than when we were kids.

I became number nine in his already full household which later included one nephew and at least five of his own grandchildren as his older children married and moved out to live their own lives. It's no wonder the man had a great sense of humor, his laugh was one thing most remembered about him other than the size of the man who stood over six and a half feet tall and full of muscle.

Our grandfather's family were itinerant workers doing jobs for the local farmers from fencing to shearing sheep and everything in between. Our grandfather used to tell us that an ordinary worker could carry one-quarter of a ton of fertilizer on his shoulders, and a pretty good worker could carry two. Spread by hand in those days. "But your father" (My foster father number two) he used to say, "Could carry four! Never seen anything like it." That was a whole ton. Which is, why through him they could find work easily. Farmers would gladly pay for a man that could do the work of four.

My first foster mother who I now refer to as my aunty related a story to me about him and his brothers. They had gone into town to watch a western being screened at the local cinema. Before the main movie started in those days they used to play a short story or cartoon whilst the theatre filled up. On this particular day, the theatre played a short story about a matador or bullfighter. My aunt went on to say that as soon as the movie was over these five strapping young lads raced home and jumped into the paddock where the bull was kept and tried to make it charge them. But it refused to.

So they started charging at the bull to see who could knock it over. She witnessed the whole thing as she laughed her head off explaining that before long the bull was trying to climb over the fence to get away from them?

Not long after they were married and long before I was born. My second foster mother told me a story about him. He was really upset with his youngest brother who was only about thirteen at the time, had stolen his horse and had gotten himself lost in the bush with it.

My foster mother begged him to go and look for his brother but her husband refused to go. The next day she demanded him to go look for him but still, he refused to go. By the third day, she was very angry except this time after demanding that he go look for his younger brother she picked up the shovel and broke the handle on his back. He just turned and laughed at her, she was a small-framed woman who knew how to command large respect from others...but him, at the time. Later that afternoon they spotted the horse coming out of the bush followed by a tired and bedraggled boy barely hanging onto its tail.

My foster-father turned to his wife and said, "See, the horse knows its way home. Look how long it took him to figure that out."

He trained a horse for her in time. She was gathering flax in the swamp and became trapped up to the waist in the mud. She said that she sent her dog to get the horse which she had left wandering around the edge of the swamp knowing that just a whistle would call him to her after she came out. But she was too far in for the horse to hear her. The dog soon came back with the horse and brought her the reins which the horse then used to pull her out.

Uncles who had worked with him told stories of when they went to work with him. If they slept in, he would ride his horse into their sleeping quarters and get his horse to chew on the straw from their mattresses right beside their heads to wake them up.

Years after he passed away people still referred to him as the gentle giant. His singing and skill on a guitar were also legendary. He was too shy and humble to show it off and would make out that he was just tuning the guitar up if anyone caught him playing... but give him a few beers, wooh!

Inspired by him, I too became very proficient at playing music which got me asked to come and perform with several bands throughout my younger years.

His passion in his free time was playing snooker, billiards, or pool. He was a shark at it and taught us many tactics of the game. Over the years we owned at least two pool tables, one of which could be converted into a snooker table. By the time we became young teenagers we were beating veteran adult players at the game.

He loved the game so much that when he built us a large Brickhouse in town, he and his younger son went into town to check the place out. They saw a business on the main street and went inside all excited that the town had its own Billiard Saloon. But unfortunately, they soon realised that they had misread the shop front, it had said, "Salon" not "Saloon".

When the world-renowned snooker player Eddie Charlton toured our country playing demonstration games my foster father went to watch him. Eddie invited someone from the audience to play a game against him. The whole audience from our town all encouraged my foster father to be the one, as they considered him to be one of the best players in the district which included the city next to our town. This was a game he would always talk about fondly, although he eventually lost against Eddie, he got a chance to play against his all-time idol.

Not long after moving into our new house the neighbors across the empty paddock that surrounded our house started throwing oranges from their orange trees at my older foster brother and sisters as they played softball in the empty paddock.

Young Maori kids usually have a pretty good arm on them so started catching the fruit and firing them back at their antagonisers who were hiding behind the waist-high fence and orange trees. Somewhere along the mele that was going on an orange got sent smashing through one of the windows of their house. Of course, the neighbor kid's father came marching over to our house in a rage and hammered on our front door which was mostly crystal-cut glass panes.

This was one of the few times that I had seen our father looking very angry. As he swung the door open the neighbor burst straight into...a very large muscular chest. The poor man nearly fainted when he looked up and saw the size of our father. He quietened down pretty smartly too. He tried to accuse my foster siblings of starting the whole thing. Until our father reminded him that we don't own orange trees since we hadn't that long ago moved in. So how did his oranges end up way over where his kids were playing in the first place? My foster siblings had a chuckle later as they could hear our neighbor going off at his sons and his friends. Shouting something about paying for a new window.

My original foster father was in my life a lot also as I grew older considering that his wife and the woman I now called mum were sisters. I spent a lot of my holidays with them. He had a laid-back attitude and intelligence that he only brought out when the circumstances called for it.

He wasn't one to tell anybody how smart he was, that was something you found out over time. It came as a surprise to us when we later learned that he had attained a scholarship to attend an elite school for boys when he was younger. As an adult, he followed his passion which was anything to do with machinery, especially motor vehicles. He spent most of his life as a truck driver and used to do a lot of his own maintenance.

If your vehicle broke down he was the go-to man for those who couldn't afford the cost of a mechanic. He enjoyed working on motors that he would fix them for free. If it needed a new part like a gearbox, for instance, he would refurbish a second-hand one from a junkyard back to near new for them. All this being self-taught and thinking things through. A trait that I myself have used to save myself money that I couldn't afford.

Think things through first all the way to completion, contemplating what problems I may come across along the way, always having a plan 'B' ready to fall back on if the original plans don't work out. He had a way of teaching by standing back and explaining to you how to do it. If you struggled, then he would jump in and show you. He wanted to be sure that you could do it without him if need be.

My natural father turned up and was introduced to me by my natural mother when I was about twenty.

From what I gathered, the family that I grew up in depending on your lineage was sometimes married off in arranged marriages. Apparently, my mother was arranged to be married to another guy and my father was also arranged to be married to someone else. But they threw a spanner into the works after they had met each other at a party that they had both attended.

Once it was found out that my mother had become pregnant by my father, he felt that he had to leave the area for his own safety. The reasons he gave me for feeling this way, I prefer not to repeat here.

He did tell me that his mother and respected members of our tribe had come to collect me when I was still a baby but were turned away by a family who had much more power in the district than them.

My first foster mother told me once, "You didn't end up where you are because nobody wanted you. It's because everybody wanted you."

My natural father had become a commercial fisherman. That's when I joked with him, "So you didn't stop running until you hit the sea?" he laughed at that analogy.

He was in the Wellington harbor riding the waves on his small fishing boat when a storm sunk the ill-fated Wahine ferry causing the deaths of no less than 53 people. He said there was also an oil tanker crashing through the giant waves at the time he felt both helpless and pity for its crew as they looked up to him wide-eyed with fear as if he was on top of a tall building staring back down at them. Thankfully they made it through.

At the time our country, New Zealand, didn't have a Tuna fishing industry. Yet we were giving a lot of tuna fishing licenses away to foreign industries to harvest our waters. So the decision was made to create our own industry learning from these foreigners that came to fish within our territories. After sending professional photographers out to take pictures, Professor Webster from Otago University wasn't too impressed with the beautiful pictures of the sunset and sunrise on the open sea nor the artistic brilliance of how the fish looked with certain lights glinting off them as they swam or after they were pulled from the sea. He wanted technical shots of the equipment used and how it was being used.

So he rounded up twelve commercial fishermen to do the job, my natural father being one. Their first port of call, Otago University, two weeks to learn how to use a Hasselblad camera. Considered to be the Roll Royce of cameras back in the day, due to its ability to blow a picture up almost as large as a wall without becoming too grainy. I believe the first astronauts also used this make of camera.

Of the many stories he told me about his adventures working with Japanese tuna fishermen alongside Professor Webster, was the one about the giant sea snake they encountered out at sea that was as long as the ship that they were in and far wider than a man. Someone did capture a picture of it. But the picture was considered worthless without something else to measure the animal with. He said they should have thrown in a pack of cigarettes at least. Just something they can later use to measure the snake with, using a pair of calipers, considering that we know the size of a cigarette packet. But in the excitement of the moment no one stopped to think until the photo was developed, in the water by itself it could have been any length.

Heart problems caused him to later be grounded after which he became the Heritage Manager for our tribal trust board researching the tribal history and reclaiming genealogical information that was left to him when he was younger as a student in the old ways (One of the reasons he was supposed to be in an arranged marriage, not everyone was taught this sort of thing. They learned it for the good of the whole tribe). Thanks to him I now have a very comprehensive genealogy to leave my own family containing both stories and charts. Some charts, of which are over two hundred years old from when our people first learned to read and write. From his teachings came many many stories that he would share with anyone that would ever come looking.

The thing that really blew me away about my natural father, most of my life people had complimented me on how beautiful they thought my handwriting was. When I saw his handwriting, I noticed that we were almost identical. The only difference was that I print and he wrote. Keeping in mind that I wasn't brought up with him.

He also, like myself, was a very good sketch artist a trait I thought that I had attained from my natural mother who was a very creative person and designer. I never realised that something like handwriting style was something that could also be passed down from parent to child.

From each one of these men, I learned some important things. They were good to me and I can't find a bad thing to say about either of them. From them, I learned that respect was one of the easiest things to attain, if you want it...show it. I appreciate and feel honored to have known them and to this day I look upon their memories with deepest respect and love.