Dear Father, if you'd been alive today you would have been 100 years old and I think now it's timely to let you know my passage to the ''Best Day of My Life'': the day I was capped with a bachelor of arts degree at age 56.
Even today, I can still hear your words of encouragement: ''Why didn't you bloody well do this study while you were at school?''.
Father, here's why.
I thoroughly enjoyed my four years at Otago Girls' High School.
I was really into sport, playing tennis, hockey, basketball and swimming and just didn't see the point in learning subjects such as algebra or French.
Take French.
We always had dicté, last class Friday.
Groan.
Our work was marked out of 10, with marks going into the minuses and I well remember getting special mention when I got into the pluses!
As a result, I left school having failed School Cert twice!
Well, you couldn't expect me to do sport and study, could you?
The following year, I did a one-year commercial course at tech and scraped through with one important skill: being able to touch type, learned to the tune of the Teddy Bears' Picnic!
That year I also found tramping, where I met and later married fellow tramper Ron.
About then, I realised if I wanted a job in the future, two failed attempts at School Cert and a certificate saying I could type wouldn't get me far.
With that I enrolled in the Correspondence School and scraped through School Cert and UE.
Father, it was your eagle eye that put me on the path to my degree, when you saw an ad in a University of Otago newsletter wanting a part-time clerk in the Hocken Library.
I got the job and the world of academia was opened up to me.
A few years later I got a full-time job, still at the university, and it was there, with the encouragement of my boss and my husband (thanks Terry and Ron) that I began studying for a degree in history, your favourite subject outside medicine.
I loved the challenge of study, especially Australian and Pacific history and archaeology.
Sadly, neither you nor mother were alive to join in with our friends and family to celebrate my ''best day''.
So there you are, that's why I couldn't bloody well do all that at school: I was just not interested then!Your loving daughter, Sara.
• Sara Keen is a Dunedin-based travel writer.
