WHENEVER Trinidad out-Trinidads itself – like when the sitting government is so pleased with its own incompetence that it votes itself a pay rise, while asking everyone else to hold some patriotic strain – I cheer myself up by printing a few letters from the editor. Like all my best ideas, I stole it – this one from the National Lampoon, the nationwide spinoff of the Harvard University satirical magazine, a publciation that could not survive in an age where a man who brags about his ability to grab women by the feline portions can be shunted into the Oval Office under a system rigged in favour of the former slaveholding members of those Disunited States.

As always, I certify these letters are 100 per cent authentic because I made them up myself.

TRINIDADIANS WOKE UP Friday morning, basodee until they beh-beh, because they were forced to confront the prospect of having to go to work on a Friday morning after two consecutive public holidays in one week!

Furthermore, one of those holidays – Thursday’s, Corpus Christi – is not a fixed date, like Labour Day, the (holi)day before, which always falls on 19 June; Trinidadian bitterness was accordingly sharpened on Friday because, look here, almighty God Himself went to the trouble of making Easter Sunday come late this year, precisely so that Corpus Christi, 60 days later, could land on the day after a fixed public holiday. The way resentful Trinis see it, God Himself bent over backwards to deliver a potential five-day weekend – and the government didn’t even have the common decency to invent a holiday for Friday, the way they did in 2017, with the one-off First People’s Day. Why, Trinis are asking themselves, did we elect the PNM, if not to squeeze een an extra day-off when we need it most? How often does any responsible Cabinet get the chance to transform a solitary standalone workday into the glorious day three of a five-day weekend?

MY DAUGHTER’s middle name is Lee, spelled like the original English version of the old Chinese surname, not the fashionable modern Li or the more “Hollywood” Leigh. She was named after the most contented man I’ve ever met.

I wasn’t 19 years old yet and was about to start my LLB. I was doing the unpaid minor labour at a solicitor’s office that’s called “interning” now but was even less rewarded then: I had to buy my own Cokes. The lawyer, “Uncle Lutch”, my father’s friend, realised his conveyancing practice – he made a fair bit of money out of very many very small land deals – wouldn't hold my attention for a whole long vacation and took me over to a barrister friend’s chambers and kind of left me there for the summer.

The most remarkable thing about Lee was not his lightning-quick mind, his ability to dig a formidable legal defence out of nothing, or his easy concentration for exhaustingly long periods; what blew me away about him was his relationship with his son. The bonds between fathers and sons, however good and strong they were before then, usually become strained at adolescence. Up to then, your son wants nothing more than to be a smaller, lesser version of you; and you know in your heart that you were primarily responsible for his life. When he’s 13, though, if you buy a Kendrick Lamar CD, your son will put on a Katy Perry T-shirt.

And, for the first time, you realise that the real connection between the two of you is not so much that you think you created his space for him as that he’ll certainly take your place.

People write poetry about it.

“Strange case/ Rich, debonair.. Young Whittaker, the lawyer/ He got cancer, and would die… he had three months, no more/ He took it well, you never know who will: Straightened all his business with his wife/ Set up a Trust for John Whittaker, his son/ Drank the best malt whisky while he could/… Then he seemed to go a little mad:/ He checked himself in here, in Mercy Ward/ Understand, this is for the poorest of the poor/…He came in alone, not even with his wife/ Signed the forms and settled in his bed/ …No plea could budge him; his end came here/…Turning up the records when he died/ I found another Whittaker, named John/ Died in Mercy, seven years before/ I puzzled at it, not for long:/ Why dig for agonies that are gone? It lies too near the desperate human heart/ To tell for sure how sons and fathers part.” (Ian McDonald, The Cancer from the collection Mercy Ward.)

It lies even nearer the desperate human heart how fathers and sons stay together.

“Below the picnic plaid/ of Scarborough is spread/ To a blue, perfect sky/ Dome of our hedonist philosophy…I labour at my art/ My father, God, is dead/ Past thirty now I know/ To love the self is dread/ Of being swallowed by the blue/ Of heaven overhead or rougher blue below.” (Derek Walcott, Crusoe’s Island.)

The day I met Lee, more than 40 years ago now, I also met his teenaged son, who wasn’t yet 19 himself. Lee was holding forth, over lunch at a conference room table that sat a dozen, all listening raptly as Lee told hilarious stories – and, all the while, his son stood at his side, absent-mindedly stroking Lee’s bald head.

I mentally ran through the list of my friends, searching for one who would pat his old man’s head; I couldn’t even come up with one who didn’t sneer at his dad behind his back. I admired my own father unequivocally at the time but it was more likely I’d give the Pope a handjob than pat his head. Or even touch him at all.

You can’t hold your place in the chain of life if you don’t intuit when you yourself become the weak link. You should never go gently into that good night – but, for your children’s sake, you have to find a way to stop raging at the dying of your might. Your departure is the final recognition of your child’s arrival.

Last Saturday, my own grown son came back from London – to see his girl, not me or his mother – but, serendipitously, the trip accommodated my birthday celebration and Father’s Day.

He’s not yet 19 himself.

He slept late the first morning and didn’t emerge until after the second half of the UEFA Nations League England v Switzerland third place playoff I was watching, alone on the couch.

He stood behind the couch and asked about the time of the final between Portugal and the Netherlands.

As he talked, eyes on the game on the screen in front of us, he absentmindedly stroked the head I’d just shaved clean as a whistle.

My daughter was named after Lee, the most content man I’ve ever met; my son came after her and is named after my father, who I could never be sure ever found genuine contentment.

On the screen, Dele Alli leapt at a Raheem Sterling cross and the crossbar shuddered.

“What do you want for Father’s Day?” asked my son.

I angled my head to look up at him.

“I’ve got it already,” I said.

BC Pires is in the shelter of a Lee shore. Happy Father’s Day to all on Sunday a la Derek Walcott

SUNDAY WAS my birthday and what have I got to show for myself after six decades of this cosmic joke called life? Receding hairline, expanding waistline, infrequent byline and recurring firetrucking punch line: nine times before today, in birthday columns respectively headlined, 60, 59, 58, 57, 56, 55, 50, 40 and 35 with a Bullet, I’ve repeated the same hairline/ waistline/ byline joke I first made when I was 30 with a Bullet.

After turning 30 “in the papers” in 1988, I limited birthday columns to “significant” birthdays, multiples of five. In 2013, I realised every firetrucking birthday had become huge because each makes it more likely I won’t be here for the next! (No Pires male has lived past age 62 in five generations; I’m watching my elder brother, who turns 62 in two weeks, like the canary he is in our own coalmine.)

THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY WAS INDIAN Arrival Day but today’s burning question is where we’ve really reached, the hopeful, hapless Indians we all are – if only the West Indian in some of us.

But even the most doctrinaire members of the Afrocentric community – what a nice way to describe black racists – wouldn’t have to fudge their Indianness because, in Trinidad, we’ve all been at least partly Indian for centuries – and, the more Trinidadian you claim to be, the more Indian you necessarily are.

You don’t need to actually meet a Rastafarian named Singh in the Bamboo – and haven’t we all, anyway – to see the point I’m making: the aspects of Trinidad that were brought here by the people who crossed the kala-pani almost two centuries ago have weaved themselves fully and deeply into the fabric of ourselves; look here, I was 27 years old before I found out – and I had to travel to England to find it out – that the mysterious “chick peas” I’d been hearing about for decades was really channa; I only ever knew the Hindi word; because I’m from Trinidad.