My pop digs holes in the ground.
Not just small holes in which to plant things, but large holes.
Holes big enough to live in.
The first hole I remember was on his empty block next to Rawlings Park in Lake Albert.
There was just this little shed in the middle of the block and in this shed was a door leading to a hole in the ground.
I remember it as the place where my dad stored his pictures of naked ladies on nice cars. My favorite was the red car.
There was always a lot of bugs down there.
My pop has had a few holes in the ground. My nan rolls her eyes when they are brought up in conversation.
The most recent hole in the ground is out near Yass somewhere. Pop and his wife Evelyn lived in it for a while before moving to another town (Not only is my pop a mole, but a gypsy. He never stays in the same town for long.)
My stepmum, Deb, says to drive past it, it just looks like a block of land covered in rubbish, but once you get underground, it's lovely!
She laughed, "There's even one of those moving framed pictures of a rain forest on the wall that they pretend is a window!"
I'm told by my dad that my pop can't sell his' holes in the ground because he doesn't get council permission to build them, so he just has these blocks of land all over the countryside.
I read a short Miiler family history written by one of my aunts that gave me a little bit of an explanation as to why my pop likes holes in the ground. When he was a child, his family were waiting at a train station when a bunch of planes flew over and bombed the place. His father threw him into a bunker/hole in the ground and they survived. This may or may not be the reason, but it makes sense.
(Another story found in this book was the story of when my aunt Draga was held at gun point by a german soldier, demanding she give him a horse that belonged to her employer. When we asked Pop about this, he miss understood what we were asking and exclaimed "I didn't point the gun at her head! I pointed it at the ground!"
No one had mentioned him or where the gun was pointed.)
Holes in the ground is just one of many unusual aspects of my Pop;
My Pop is an avid Jehovah's Witness who preaches to everyone he meets. He wasn't born into this religion or converted by anyone, he went shopping for the religion that offered the best afterlife, and J-Hos were the way to go, apparently.
In Croatian, my name sounds like the word for "shit". In the couple of birthday/christmas cards I've received from Pop in my life, he has spelt my name the "Croatian way"
Pop has always been one for money making schemes. One in particular, I was told about recently, featured him putting my dad in a room full of telephones and making him place bets all day. He's also quite the hoarder, only not small things, like ornaments or furniture, but big things like truck parts and sections of houses.
Pop's first name was originally spelt Antun, but he had it changed because he was tired of it being misspelled
The family's surname was originally Miiler, but he also had this changed for the same reason, only now, he tells me, people spell it with an A instead of an E.
I only see my pop once every few years, but the times I do see him, it's always very entertaining.
