I put down the receiver, amused as usual by my father. I have just finished my weekly call to my parents, reporting to my father that by the time I called them, my daughter was 138 centimeters tall and weighed 28 kilograms exactly, telling him she got 98 for her Chinese, 96 for her math and 96 for her English in her final- term examination, ranked No.6 in her class, a 63-student class.
My father was a math teacher in a junior high school. He had taught math for about 40 years before he retired last year. He is forever interested in figures and math problems. Math is in his life every minute.
I remembered when I was very young, about 8 or 9 years old, my father made a small wooden bench out of three pieces of extra wood left over by the carpenter when he made a cupboard for us. He used two pieces as the legs and one as the surface, it became a bench as well as my younger brother’s horse then. He played on it all the time, rode it, hammered it, banged it …… I did not remember exactly how long the bench survived but finally, it split into two from the middle, both the surface and the two legs. My father pinched my brother’s nose and said laughingly to us all, “ Do you know when one minus one is two? Look at our bench!” I can still remember clearly how my mother looked at my father with an admiring grin on her face.
My elder sister and my elder brother both failed in their college entrance examination. They were heart-broken and my parents did not say much to them. Later my father said to me, sadly ,“ I have four kids, I know you are all smart and good children, but in this important examination, your sister and brother made an arithmetic mistake, that is one adds one should be two, they produced me a zero. ”
The time when he just retired, I called him more often than usual, worrying that he might have a difficult time to get used to his retired life, and my mother might face a difficult father to take care of. Yes, my mother told me in my call, “He missed his students and his classroom, and he felt lost. but I have my way. You know what, he is the family accountant now.” My father endeavored to this new duty of his with great new-found zest, he kept neat record for all the family expenses and incomes in great detail, though not very expertly. Everything everybody brought home from the market has to be reported to him, and enter his account.
My mother also told me, with the students’ summer vacation drawing near, my father began to prepare math lessons for his only summer student—my nephew, who is in junior high school now. Right after breakfast every day, he would seriously tell everybody not to bother him. “ I have to tiptoe in an out when I do the cleaning up” Mama said. He prepared just like he would face a full room of students, and the preparation itself has already given him profound pleasure.
Each time I call home, my mother will ask me about the meals I cook for my daughter and give me some advice on it while my father keeps a detailed history of my daughter’s growth. He notes down the heights and weights of my report about my daughter and compares them with the records of my nephews and nieces. And these figures he often cites triumphantly when he argues something about the children's s growth with my mum.
And this is my dear father, a retired math teacher, yet can never retire from the math science he loves deeply.
