The name’s Morton… Rob Morton.  M.O.R. – T.O.N.  Accountant.  Auditor.  Court Appointed Liquidator And Receiver.  Self Appointed Catcher Of Crooks.  Defender Of The Underdog.  Drinker of Grange Hermitage.  Driver of expensive cars.  Owner of expensive watches.  Driven, focussed and self-reliant yet compassionate, affectionate and loyal.  Confusing.  Contradicting.  Complicated.  Shaken… and stirred.  A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an Italian pin-striped, double-breasted suit.  To himself, the next incarnation of James Bond.  To me… my Dad.

My earliest memories of Dad centre around Canberra, Australia where our family resided.  I remember him helping me to ride two-wheels for the first time in the cul-de-sac we lived in.    Buying me a set of children’s encyclopaedia’s and sitting up in bed reading with me about spiders, dinosaurs and space.  Taking me to church, bellowing out the hymns, and teaching me the Lord’s Prayer.  Pulling me out of the waves when I got dunked and couldn’t find my way to the surface.  Pulling out the dryer to find a huge wolf spider that had scuttled into the house when I opened the back door, and smashing wildly away with the thong (NZ’ers read ‘jandal’) until he was sure it was dead.

Like most young boys, I admired my Dad and I knew from a early age that Dad placed a great importance on his work.  He would rise at unearthly hours to head into the office, and often I would wake up and sit with him in the semi-darkness while he ironed his shirts (“Your shirts should always be ironed, son”), and while he fed about 15 oranges like a machine through the home juicer to drink and pour on his cereal (“Has to be freshly squeezed to be the best, son”) and I would watch from the window as his car ripped up the driveway and sped off in the early morning mist.

When Mum and Dad split up in the early eighties, we moved to New Zealand with Mum, and Dad took on a new role as a father from a distance.  I remember talking at school once with a girl who was in a similar situation – mother in NZ and father in Australia.  She talked to her Dad twice a year and saw him maybe once every few years.  My experience couldn’t have been more different.  Dad rang practically every week.  He would call early in the morning on our birthdays and croon ‘Happy Birthday to you’ down the phone and roar with laughter at the end.  He bought us expensive gifts that made us the envy of our friends.  Nearly every school holidays my brother and I jetted across the ditch to Australia to spend time with Dad.  Or he would fly to New Zealand and take us on adventures around our own country.  He crossed the Tasman numerous times to celebrate special milestones or significant events with us.

At the time I have to admit he was a bit embarrassing.  He’d make appointments at our school to meet our teachers and demand to talk to our principal about our education.  He’d make gifts to the school library and my friends would then discover and tease me about some random book he’d donated with his name emblazoned on the inside cover.  They’re probably still there.  He’d take the centre front seat and clap loudly when I was trying to just get through a music performance for school assessment.  He’d wait outside the school gate and greet me in front of my friends with a big hug and kiss on the lips.  At the time I just wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole.

Dad was always good at making a scene – over the entire course of our lives my brothers and I have tried to blend into the shadows when Dad would unleash his special brand of Robert Morton chaos.  Whether it was sending back numerous bottles of wine because they weren’t up to scratch, giving the man on the door an earful about the overall quality of the hotel, or his speciality – chewing out medical staff and refusing to take medicine or listen to logic and reason.  I eventually learnt that protest was futile, when Dad decided that he was going to do something, heaven and earth could not deter him.

When Dad laughed, his whole body joined in.  His was not a quiet chuckle.  It was more like an air-raid siren, summoning all within earshot to come along for the ride.  One moment stands out for me, and it happened in Canberra.  I’d done my best to hide an upcoming music performance night at school from Dad, but true to form, he’d found out about it and invited himself along.  On this particular night, I played my piano piece and everyone had clapped politely, and we were on to the other acts.  Twin brothers got up, one armed with a trumpet and the other a trombone, and they commenced on a duet that to the ear was akin to slaughtering some kind of wild beast.  It was horrific.  But everyone sat and listened politely and tried to not make them feel too bad.  Everyone that is, except my Dad.  Halfway through the murderous rendition, I caught a glimpse of him doubled over on his seat, stuffing first his tie followed by his fist into his mouth and literally shaking trying to suppress his laughter.  The terrible thing is, the mere sight of him set me off too.  The two of us on opposite sides of the room became the targets of rude stares and nudges from those sitting next to us.  When we got out, we literally laughed all the way home.

Throughout my life Dad would always be ready to share the latest joke he’d heard – and many of them were not clean in the slightest.  There were numerous times I had to remind him about the small ears listening in our house – at which point he’d usually apologise, and try to quickly sneak in one that was far ruder….

Dad was a high achiever, and he pushed himself again and again for the best.  He had high expectations for himself, and more often than not, my three brothers and I felt the weight of the expectations he had for us too.  He made no secret of times when he felt we hadn’t done our best, he could be a very hard person to please, and you really didn’t want to have to tell him that you were quitting something.  Funnily enough, these qualities ended up working in my favour when it came to music.  Dad wanted me to learn piano, so at the age of 8 he bought my first piano for me from a music store in Auckland and paid for my music lessons.  Within weeks I discovered that I hated the piano.  I hated having to practice, I hated the theory I had to learn and I hated the pieces I had to play.  Every time Dad came over I would psych myself up to telling him I was going to quit.

But then when I was talking to him, the pressure coming from him to keep going meant that I never quite had the conversation.  So I kept going.  And eventually I fell in love with playing.  Since that time music has been such an important part of my life, and it may never have become that if it hadn’t been for the pressure from Dad.  Unfortunately once I could play… then anytime we were at an expensive restaurant with a grand piano there, Dad would be asking the waiter if his son could ‘tinkle the ivories’ for everyone and I’d be dying of embarrsement again.

But last year a funny thing happened.  Dad said that he wanted to buy me a new piano as my one was falling apart, and we went back to the same music shop where he’d bought my first piano all those years ago.  He sat next to me propped up in the wheelchair as I played for him different songs he requested on the piano he was going to buy, and while I played he sat there and just cried and cried.  Everyone in the shop stopped and watched silently.  The staff gathered around transfixed.  But this time I wasn’t embarrassed.  I remember sitting there playing and singing, and thinking how proud I was of him.

And I knew that even though it wasn’t often on his lips, that in his heart he was proud of all his sons.  And he was proud of me too.  Dad openly acknowledged that although he’d enjoyed a fair measure of business success in life, he had made many mistakes on the family front.  In a number of areas he wanted us to learn from his failings and not follow in his footsteps.  So many times when Dad would visit us in New Zealand, we would be saying goodbye in the driveway and he would turn to me and say ‘You’ve got gold in that house there son, pure gold.  Don’t ever lose it’.

I wasn’t ready on Saturday night to have my last conversation with Dad.  It’s the strangest thing in the world, having a conversation with someone and knowing it will be the last time you ever speak to them.  I wanted to be more prepared.  I wanted to be able to cover all the bases and tell him everything that was on my heart.  But in the end all I had time to say was that I loved him, that he’d been a great Dad to me, and that I was grateful for all that he had done over so many years.  And then it was time for goodbye.  I didn’t want to say goodbye, I wanted to somehow stretch that moment out, but he was fading fast.  So I said my farewell, and hung up the phone, and held my wife and my kids and wept.  I booked tickets to travel the next day with the hope of seeing him one last time, but it was not to be as we took the call from Harry early Sunday morning to say that Dad was gone.  His personalised car number plate read ‘ITSQIK’ – “life’s a short road”.  How true that turned out to be.

I have never had anyone in my life who had the ability to draw as many completely different emotions out of me all at the same time.  He could take you from appreciation, to curiosity, to shock, to rage, to acceptance, to love… all within a matter of minutes.  At times he could be so hard-headed, dogmatic and unyielding that I’d be ready to strangle him with my bare hands.  Yet at other times, his depth of understanding, and his ability to take care of difficult situations made me feel like I was the luckiest person on earth to have him in my life.  I knew that if Dad was around that somehow there would always be an answer, always be a way.  Maybe he really was a bit more like James Bond than I realised at first.

My Dad had a strong Christian faith and I have not the slightest doubt that he’s in the arms of his Saviour now.  He spent his whole life working, and now he’s finally at peace – his spirit no longer battling a tired, weary body, but healed and free and alive in the presence of the God he loved.  The Bible says that we have many teachers, but not many fathers.  I was so lucky, to have had Rob Morton as my Dad.

Thanks Dad for everything.  You’ve been the best Dad you could have possibly been.  I will always love you, always appreciate you, and I will never forget you.