My father passed away

My father passed away a few days ago. He decided to donate his body to science, and we won't get to say goodbye in the traditional way. So I thought etching what I intended to say at his funeral in a blockchain, "for all eternity", was a nice way to pay my respects.

My father was not the average sports fan, beer drinking kind of fellow. As a matter of fact he was quite the opposite. He was allergic to alcohol. It made him sneeze. He always said he'd get drunk on his one hundredth birthday. Too bad he didn't make it that far, it would have been a sight to see.

He studied Physics at the Tufts University. During that time, he got involved in folk dancing, learning Contra and Square dances. He ended up calling and teaching folk dances for a living, all over the world.

First he flew around the United States of America. He was one of those people who studied the way airplane companies allowed you to criss-cross the US without paying any additional fees. I think they changed the rules after guys like him figured that out.

He also travelled a lot around the world, at a time when it was probably not easy being an american traveller. He went on teaching american folk dancing in places such as Greece, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Pakistan, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, to name a few.

Later on, he got very interested in eastern european folk dances. So he started going in remote villages, recording all the different pieces of music and making records out of them. Recording back then meant going with a tape recorder, and requiring several takes, as cows would make too much noise :)

It was his interest for greek folk music that made him and my mother meet. She attended a course he was giving in Brussels. As she was already a very good greek dancer, he picked her to show the steps to the other students. He apparently had this very funny way of teaching, and that stole her heart.

My father was always very calm. He would absolutely never get angry. Actually, when my parents were fighting, it was only my mother yelling. He would stand like a rock, saying nothing. It wasn't contained anger. It was absolute calm.

My sister and I took advantage of that. When we were young, we'd always go to him when we had bad grades, because we knew we wouldn't get stormed about it. He would simply ask us if it was the best we could do.

We dreaded one thing though: saying "I don't know" to one of his questions. Because we knew what it meant. He would get up, head to his Encyclopedia Brittanica volumes, fetch the word or piece of knowledge we didnt know about and proceed reading the long, very long definitions to us. It was an excrutiatingly long moment to live. Especially because it happened a LOT, and that once the process had started, there was no way for us to flee.

He told us then that it did not matter if we didn't know everything. What mattered was that we knew where to look for the things we didn't know.

There were times though, when he didn't want to explain. For those occasions, he had this mantra: "I cannot explain in 5 of 15 minutes, what took me five or fifteen years to learn". We hated it, because for us it was just a lame excuse.

My father also had some dark sides. He had that "better-than-thou" attitude which can be extremely annoying. Once my parents were at a chocolate store in Brussels. My father overpaid for chocolates, and the waiter asked "Don't you have change?". To this, my father replied "Yes". So the waiter waited, and my father waited. It kept going until finally my mother intervened, saying "My husband means: Yes, I don't have change". This is the kind of lesson giving noone wants, but my father would give anyway. My friends also learned the hard way not to ask him "How are you?", because you should not ask that kind of question if you weren't really interested in the answer, and thus he would go on and on explaining how his day had gone.

There are quite a lot more things I could say about him, good and bad. Quite a few things I didn't get to do with him. We had planned to do a trip around the world, the only rule being not to take any planes. We never got to do that, because I got involved with a girl, then with life. This is probably the thing I will regret the most, looking back.

As a father, he tought me to be curious about everything, to have an analytic mind, to not care what people think, and NOT to give unwanted lessons (which, unfortunately, I tend to do nonetheless)

As a man, probably the greatest thing he did was make a lot of people, all around the world, dance. I dont think many people can claim that ;)

Rest in peace, papa.

Richard "Rickey" Holden - Oct. 14, 1926 - Dec 19, 2017

This is my favorite piece of music from his recordings. It is a bulgarian dance called "Yove Male Mome" ("Jova, little girl"). It's the only one I learned to dance. The music in the video is, I think, the actual recording he did at the time.