An old friend told me a lovely story about my Dad a few months ago. I’d completely forgotten about it – indeed, at the time it probably didn’t even register with me – but to my friend is was a small gesture that he appreciated enormously, and held as a mark of what made Dad so special.

I would have been in my early-20s – my friend the same – and I was selling my cherished Fiat Strada 105 TC. Now, the Fiat Strada wasn’t a particularly well-loved car, but the 105 TC was a different story. Or at least its engine was: a fantastic 1.6 litre, double overhead camshaft, 4-cylinder gem. The body, obviously, being a 1980s Fiat, would eventually rust into dust, but that motor…

Anyway, eventually I decided to sell the car, and my friend said he’d be keen to buy it. No problem, he knew the car, knew me, easy deal. For whatever reason, when he came to pick it up I wasn’t there to hand over the keys, but Dad was.

The point of this story is that, when my Dad realised that the car’s fuel tank was only a quarter full, he insisted on going to the local petrol station to fill it up for the new owner.

I mean, who does that?! It was a small gesture of goodwill that has stuck with my friend for more than 25 years.

Little things make a big difference.

It was only doing things for other people though. Dad was born in 1940, and grew up during and after the Second World War in ‘Austerity Britain’. He comes from a generation that looks after things, that makes things last, that fixes rather than replaces (and more on that in a future post).

Dad knew that small bits of regular maintenance would pay dividends in the future. He’d always clean the lawnmower and garden tools immediately after using them, not leaving mud and grass to dry and solidify which would make the job 10 times harder the next time he wanted to use them, and extend their life. He’d also regularly check the levels and pressures on the family’s cars, which he was also diligent about cleaning, and gently point out that I might have been less than attentive myself (“I put a touch of air in your cars tyres…seemed a little soft to me”).

It doesn’t take much effort to make a small gesture that has a big impact. That’s been so evident to me in the days following his recent death. Numerous text messages, emails, calls, and social media comments offering condolence, support, help. A few seconds to write and send, but they’ve meant so much.

I read something recently somewhere on social media which I think fits. A post which highlighted that many works of fiction are based on the premise that people travel back in time and make a tiny change that has a big impact in the future (think Back to the Future I, II, and III…), but few people believe that doing something tiny today will have a huge effect down the line.

Seems worth a try though.

 

 (This is the part of a series of lessons I’ve learnt from my Dad. Find the backstory here, and other lessons can be found here.)