IN SEVEN YEARS, my late father will have been gone for as long as I knew him: 35 years.

But, 28 years into his ongoing death, I sometimes see him, now, as powerfully as I did, then.

We didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot while he lived. His politics were sometimes embarrassingly conservative – I’m particularly glad we never had occasion to discuss US Senator Joe McCarthy – but I learned intellectual pragmatism directly from him.

He was a free market capitalist internationalist who fiercely defended foreign exchange controls in the West Indies, because he was even more of a regionalist and agriculturist; and he foresaw, accurately, that opening our tiny economies would swiftly render local agriculture relatively unprofitable and make the Caribbean reliant on imported food.

And he knew in his belly that a nation that could not feed itself was mocking itself in saying it was independent.

There wasn’t a lot we didn’t bicker over.

But, what we agreed upon, we agreed squarely.

I’m sorry, now, that we never talked about religion seriously in adulthood. Once, as a teenaged acolyte at St Anns RC church, I asked him why he didn’t go to church. My mother would have filed his answer somewhere between “inappropriate” and “heresy” but he didn’t go to church, he said, because it was all so obviously made up.

I didn’t appreciate it while he was alive but our heroes weren’t as far apart as we often were. After writers – Joseph Heller, Richmal Crompton, Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, VS Naipaul, JD Salinger, Mark Twain – I took all my attitude from musicians, especially Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, the Bobs (Dylan & Marley), Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper and Shadow.

It was only after he died that I realised my father’s musical heroes, the Rat Pack – Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jnr – were the Rolling Stones of their time.

But I was a boy to my father’s man and his greatest heroes were proportionally greater.

It would have meant a great deal to my father, if he could have known, that he died 25 years after, almost to the minute, the death of his greatest hero, Martin Luther King: 4 April, 7:05pm, Memphis time, 1968; and 5.05pm, Mt Hope time, 1993.

My father’s greatest sporting hero, and a close runner-up to MLK in all fields of human activity, was Hank Aaron, the baseball player, who died last weekend.

And brought my father to mind again.

When I was in my 20s (and he, his late 40s), my father was entered in a big, bible-looking annual book called, Who’s Who in the World. It was a vanity publication. The publishers included you in their book; and then they sold you, at an inflated price, as many copies as you would buy to give to and impress your friends.

However, even though it was a business venture predicated upon the subject’s own sense of self-importance, the mere fact of being included was a genuine recognition of success: your head was so far above everyone else’s, the Who’s Who people saw you, not them.

My father was flattered; I was proud. (But would not tell him.)

One of the ways the publishers expanded their market was by allowing new inductees to suggest three people to be included in the following year’s issue.

And this is what I remembered again, this week.

I came home from UWI to find my father with Who’s Who in his lap. “You know,” he said, “they don’t have Hank Aaron in this book?” “Who’s he?” I asked. “And why does he have two first names?”

My father told me, then, of Hank Aaron coming from what was then un-ironically called, “the Negro League”, entering the major league and smashing Babe Ruth’s record; and, with that, the notion of white supremacy. (Or so we thought… until 3 November 2020 and 6 January 2021.)

“So you’re going to nominate him?” I asked. “Of course,” he replied.

But then he told me he hadn’t.

“But you said there was no one in that whole book who deserved to be in it more than him!” I said.

“Yes,” said my father, nodding vigorously.

“Then why the Hell didn’t you nominate him?” I demanded.

“I worry,” he said, “that he might somehow find out how he got into the book. Hank Aaron is a great man. He’s not supposed to be nominated by a nonentity like me.”

BC Pires understands the humility of the genuinely talented; from afar; from afar