Mummy let us go, DADDY take us there, to the Trans amusement park


If you lived in Ibadan as a child you've probably been to Trans amusement park, I used to go there every other weekend. My dad lived in Lagos when we still lived in Ibadan with my cousins, it was a nice big family around that err....*I don't remember the name of the area* I'm thinking Toun Ajagungbndade, its all woozy, around that foodco area sha. Anyways, my dad made it to Ibadan on the weekends and he'd drop us off either at Transamusement park or The recreation club around the stadium where the mallams now sell their overall thingies. I loved seeing my daddy come in friday night we'd all wait patiently for his arrival with bread from lagos express that we all dreamed about through the night and couldn't wait till saturday morning to eat. My dad is really cool.
I'm remembering the little things about him now because when I get home tonight I am going to get first class attitude from him, and in a way I deserved it, I was supposed to write about my father in his own words and all I could come up was the fact that he likes to seize the day. But if you look at it from where am coming from, its the safest thing to say, there's so many glorious things I could say about my dad but it would feel like he's bragging about himself if I wrote it.
My dad has charm. He comes into a room and it suddenly changes, never a dull moment around him, he keeps people at ease with a joke and tenses them up with a cough. *who else can do that*. No one ever knows what he is thinking and he keeps the best poker face, he is very diplomatic, sometimes to a fault.
When we first moved to Canada and lived on Church street, we didn’t know it was homo central at the time, well, my dad’s friends all told him oh move away from Church street it is dangerous blablabla *yeah gay people bite and then you become gay too and DIE!* pshhhh Anyway, my father finally made it Toronto one summer and I know I shouldn’t say this out loud but my dad attended the gay pride parade with my mum. They called me from there, he was telling me how gorgeous and colorful everything was, and he tried his first ice cream truck ice cream with peanut sprinkles. My dad was so hooked on that “delicacy” of his that every evening we’d drive around the area looking for an ice cream truck to get him his “usual”. Now that is something about my dad no one knows. He is very tolerant.
My dad taught me the value of asking questions when in doubt, he taught me to learn to about different cultures, so we’d go out and he’d meet a strange looking fellow and ask him where he’s from and you know how many friends he’s made and how many things he has learnt? He taught me to learn something new each day and that wisdom is not only from the wise, even the foolish can help in the eternal quest for wisdom. That’s my popz!
My dad is pure jokes at times. So one time we were visiting my uncle in New Jersey, and my uncle took us to this French restaurant in New Jersey that he and my dad loved to go, well my dad was in his French learning phase at that time and felt he knew a lot of French and so we got to the restaurant and my uncle was telling us how great my dad was in French…So the waiter comes and everyone else was ordering in English o, the menu ma was in English, next thing my father dearest with confidence turned to the waiter;
“Bonjour, je suis le poulet”
I died and went to funny limbo! My sister and I almost fell off the seat laughing, my uncle was so impressed, he was telling my mum “see your husband knows his French”. My dad “wowed” everyone with his confidence at proclaiming that he was chickenJ. Luckily for us the waiter knew that for my dad it meant that he wanted the chicken.
And there was that one time my dad was feeling like a chef with myself, I was making meat pie jejely in the kitchen o, my dad comes in he has a thing for seafood *and he can’t stand water to save Africa*. He wanted seafood pie, NOT FISH but SEAFOOD. He wanted us to blend prawns and a little bit of salmon, maybe some scallops to get the seafood all minced and ready to be baked! He said it such surety like he’d tried it before and knew it would work, surely we did and that was one amazing seafood pie. My dad had done it again

I have too many stories about my dad, I remember the first day he called me Mamarita, I nearly wet myself! So I was doing my e-thing o, I think I just started my webpage thingie then on jazzyngerians.com, sha, no one outside of the internet world knew me as Mamarita and somehow my father knew me as that. Till today I don’t know how he found out, I have a feeling he knows that I blog as well and so dad if you are reading this, THERE’S TOO MANY GREAT THINGS TO SAY ABOUT YOU LIKE YOU ARE THE BEST DAD EVERYONE ELSE WISH THEY HADJ
I remember 1998, that year was awful, terrible year I'd like to forget about, it all started the christmas of 1997, my dad was trying to be cool, so he decided that we'd all drive down to Abuja from our village a few days before christmas, sha on the road with my cousins and aunt, my dad started throwing up around that minna side, it was during the coup burst time with Late Abdulkareem Adisa,(RIP). Sha short story they flew him back to lagos, only for him to get even sicker, and then they kept changing his locations and he couldn't keep food down no one knew what was wrong, and everytime I'd see him he was all smiles and jokes. One day my mum went to see him in the hospital and she came back with my dad! Yes, he was missing home so he sweet talked the nurses into letting him come home after the doctor would leave for the night. This happened for almost a week, then he went to Ile-Ife to see some specialist and everything changed, but I didn’t know at the time.
Well we all went back to school, I could barely concentrate, shortly my parents flew to some faraway land and he came back a better man, a piece of tomato clogged his small intestine and they had to cut it off. Before this was discovered, my dad had been told by some specialist that he wasn’t going to survive and he kept it all to himself and I found out only because I was eavesdropping on my mother’s phone call.