Before You Were My Dad

There is a photograph of my father in an old family album, taken five years before he would become my Dad. In it, he is wearing a hideously colourful shirt, and holding a double track cassette recorder, grinning from ear to ear.

It's so easy to forget that our parents were young once, and as I grow older I begin to imagine what that young man was like - what car did he drive? Where did he go to enjoy himself? What music was playing out of that boombox?

At this time in his life, my Dad drove a shiny red Proton Saga - I remember this car. I remember using a rag to polish the paint that had by then faded in the sun. I remember, after he sold it, seeing it drive past us. This car had character, and soul, and it represents who my Father was before he had me.

That is his shirt, on the wing mirror - his shoes in the sand. He has just put on his favourite tunes from the '80s, and gone for a swim in the cold ocean, somewhere along the sandy coast of England. Not yet my dad.