“I’ve never seen you cry”
– Son, a few months ago

Well, he’s just not been there because I do cry. Ask Wife. I cry when the world treats me unfairly or when my kids do yet another wonderful thing and the emotions are just too much for me to keep under control.

I cry out of pride and I cry out of pain.

Different kinds of tears, I know. They even taste different.

The tears of pride are sweet, even if the look on my face isn’t. But I can deal with that.

The tears that roll when I have been treated unfairly are bitter, because they mark my surrender. There’s nothing I can do to make things better and nothing that I’ve done has been enough to make things better.

And then there are the tears that Son never sees because they never roll when he’s there. They get bottled up inside while he’s crying when the world has treated him unfairly. There’s no time for me to cry. I have to make the world, his world, a better place again.

Dad doesn’t cry. Dad laughs. And Dad makes others laugh.

Like my Dad. Who I never saw cry when I was a kid.

One autumn day, when I was five, when there still wasn’t snow on the ground, I came home from daycare, complaining about pain in my right hip. Maybe I had hit it somewhere, climbing trees, which we did a lot. I remember hopping around the living room table, trying to shake it off, but nothing helped.

I don’t think I ever knew the diagnosis then, which is not surprising. Thanks to my father who has never thrown anything away in his life, I could now go back into the archive and see that I had the Legg–Calvé–Perthes syndrome, which, according to Wikipedia, is a “degenerative disease of the hip joint.”

At that moment, however, I did know that I had to spend quite a lot of time in a hospital, with quite a few traumatic memories to go with it, starting from the first bath when I was originally taken in. The water was just too hot, still too hot, and still too hit, until the nurse was running almost only cold water, refusing to believe that anybody could bathe in such cold water, and insisting on making it warmer.

I remember spending a lot of time in bed, with my leg in traction, and getting around the hospital, lying on a red, wheeled mattress, speeding up and down the corridors.

A couple of weeks into my stay the hospital dentist pulled all my front teeth – still baby teeth, fortunately – because antibiotics, unrelated to the hip problem, had destroyed them.

And then a chicken pox epidemic hit the hospital, so I got to spend – what felt like – weeks in isolation, reading Emil of Lönneberga books. Even today, I think of Emil every time I drive by that Helsinki hospital.

Then, one day, I was released, and I could return to climbing trees even if everything wasn’t like before. One, because my treatment wasn’t over yet, I had to wear a brace in my right leg, and to compensate that, I had to wear a thick soled shoe in my other foot. And I had to continue with special workouts to make sure the hip and my legs and feet got exercise.

And they did, and I got rid of the brace just before I started school, and a couple of years later I picked up hockey, and the hip’s never bothered me again. (Although, I did get out of military service thanks to my hips, which the doctors examined and wondered, “how have you been able to play hockey with this rotation”?)

But before the military service medical exam and after I had started school – I must have been about ten, or younger, not more than ten – I once had an argument with Dad about something, and was talking to Mom about it. She was trying to make me see that even if Dad was angry with me at the time, he did love me very much.

How much?

“You know that Dad doesn’t cry very often,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “He never cries.”

“But on the day that you had to stay in the hospital, he cried,” Mom said.

It was news to me, like it was supposed to be. Dad didn’t cry. Dad laughed. And Dad made others laugh.

But sometimes the world was just too unfair.

*) Northern Lights – Tears are not enough (1985)