Unpacking The Present
By Raymond Te korako Ruka

It always excited me to unpack a present when I was a kid

Our dad was such a fraud. He’d pack the prezzie we got from him in that really thin, transparent, paper that even a little kid knew immediately what it was! Oh gee dad you’ve gone… (he, my uncles and the rest of my brothers and boy cousins are peeing themselves with delight because we all know what it was!

…and fixed up my train, the same one you gave me ten years ago. But it still has its wheels missing. What a lucky teenager I am!” Thank you so, so, much! But what am I going to do with a dumb wooden train with most of the wheels missing, pops?

My mum and sisters, aunts and nans and girl cousins have all gone outside into the sun to be cleansed by its beautiful rays from all the silliness!

Just us boys, brothers, cousins, friends, and my fraudster dad. And of course my beloved fraudster Uncles.

Then one day unexpectedly he’d just throw a little packet at you and walk off. I’d go off by myself somewhere quiet and cry soft tears while reading his letter. My real, priceless, prezzie!

He didn’t believe in stuff, made of material stuff.

After my work-related accident in 1985 which resulted in my paraplegia, I’d go and collect my dad who by now had had his right leg amputated below the knee because of his diabetes and was himself “sort of” semi-confined to a wheelchair but mostly got about unassisted on crutches.

Together, we got some giggles, which made us chuckle too.

When I volunteered to became a “Meals on Wheels” Driver, I’d go get my dad and he and my wheelchair (which I’d folded up) would sit in the back seat because my assistant, who was older than both of us, had to sit in the front with me to help with the map reading as we drove about the city delivering the meals to the elderly and disabled. All the packaged meals were put in a container in the trunk of the car by the kitchen staff at the hospital who prepared the food.

We had some laughs, because there were some really grumpy people who, because of their disability or age were housebound and most of the time the meals on wheels delivery, other than the nurses, were the only “people” contact they’d have. So my dad would volunteer to go back and sit with them, which he did. My dad liked grumpy people, because, by nature he was an “undercover” grumpy person himself. However, when you have powerful, independent-minded women in your linage, and having married one and from that incredible woman, sired two no nonsense daughters, one learns very quickly to mind one’s “P’s + Q’s!  

I’d been in the wheelchair for 6 years, when we buried our dad in our family cemetery at home at a little settlement called Taheke in the far north of New Zealand on the top of a windswept hill. I buried all his letters he’d “thrown” at me on my “birthday” with him. And thanked him for always giving me that dumb wheelless train that I didn’t have the heart or the courage to pass on to my own son’s.

I asked him, as a kid after catching on to the prank the 2nd time I got it for a xmas prezzie, if I could keep it in his wardrobe so that my cousins, especially the girl ones who were really jealous of it, while outwardly saying horrible things like, I’m dumb and trains are meant to have lots of proper train wheels. And “Whoever heard of a stupid wooden train with most of its plastic wheels missing?” just loud enough so my dad and aunts and uncles and nana’s and papa’s could all hear.

I learned how to answer questions like that, by simply smiling and not saying anything and staying fully present in the presence of the questioner. Making everyone who was present, when you were being asked the question, understand, that that was the perfect answer to give.

Silence. 

What a powerful friend when used appropriately!

One learns how to treat silence as an ally. To be comfortable with it. Like that one called Jack who never breaks the ice of his own making, but rather, always leaves it for someone else to do. Usually, that hotter one in the sky, or the one seeking the meal of fish underneath it all!

It wasn’t being rude by not verbally answering. IT IS SAID, A PICTURE PAINTS A THOUSAND WORDS.

One’s quiet and silent demeanor and total focus on the questioner, tells everyone present that, in your estimation, the question is not deserving of an answer. Not, in the manner the question deserves, but rather, with the respect the person asking it does!

I wish every kid could have a toy train that he leaves parked in a Train Station that is really his dads wardrobe, so that dad can give that son, the same present on his birthday, year after year until that father is no longer here to do the physical handing over of the said, sacrificial gift. But rather, have that son remember what power there is in ceremony, especially of the ceremonial part of it where we can merge all those physical, those meaningful, those incredible aspects of ones higher intuit of sacred ceremony, where we easily get trapped amongst one’s “learned” expectation to pre-empt a gifting and be disappointed at the “reality” not meeting the expectation.

What comes first: the knife or the fork. Or do they only do their “best” work together?

Expectation versus Acceptance. I would proffer an opinion, that most times our expectations always far outweigh our acceptances and so we, once again, climb down from our pedestal and meet and greet our expectations on one of the lower summits surrounding Everest.

Time and time again, our Everest of Unattainable Expectations remains inviolate.