MY DAD!

Anyway, something happened recently that warranted my dad to write a letter and send it to me (we’re not in the same physical location). I read through the letter and smiled. “Na my papa write am.” I smiled because I didn’t expect less and my dad has never delivered less.

I grew up knowing my dad as an excellent letter writer. My papa dey write letters for the world, abeg! And every letter is unique. No two letter was ever the same! None! Not even if he was doing a follow-up for the first one he had sent earlier.

Now, unlike all the amazing tools we have now, my dad writes everything from his head. Till date! He doesn’t have to look anywhere. He needs to write a letter, he just starts writing on paper immediately. It’s a default setting for him.

My dad was (and still is) excellent at taking notes. No wonder they made him a secretary in sooooo many organizations, even in church and the area where we lived. He always took excellent detailed minutes for meetings.

When they just started teaching us letter writing in school and my teacher was still teaching us how to write informal letters, my dad had already taught me how to write formal letters. Well, I learnt from the best because soon, I began to write letters for my dad for people he needed to submit to (Well, it actually started with him forcing me to do so because according to him, “I played too much.” )

When I was done, he would go through it and either ask me to rewrite it again after making corrections or ask me to bring out the dictionary to take note of a word next time.

Ohhhh…..I am also excellent at taking notes. I used to have people who wanted to make photocopies of the notes I took while in class or when reading. (I nor dey give the one for when I dey read ooo. Shey you dey whine? So we should be writing the same thing for the lecturer abi kini? Shift, joor!)

This is why till date, you would hardly see me get tired EASILY of writing on paper. Nope! See essays and letter writing in English classes? Leave it to me. I nor dey fail for there. 

I even used to help people copy notes (for a fee). It was an interesting business, as long as my dad didn’t see I was writing for someone else. Well, thank God, he never did.

My dad didn’t write stories (at least, none that I know of) but all these helped me with me being the writer/storyteller I am.

My dad was also (and is still) very good with calculations. I’d say he got that from his mum (If you see my late grandmother calculating money ehhhnnn….. ahhhh…..I could never!). I tried for a while (and was good with it) but I came to the realization it wasn’t exactly a strength of mine.

Why am I sharing this? I didn’t understand why my dad was, in my mind, ‘forcing me to write for him’ then. But see how well it worked for me.

It’s one of the things I am grateful for about my dad.

#celebratingmyDad