Ghosts Of Christmas Past

Christmas1992 was the first Christmas after my mother died. She had always been the one who gathered it all together on Christmas Day: The white table cloth, the wreath on the door, the gold-sprayed pine cones, the green and red serviettes. The champagne, the turkey. And us, the straggling branches and broken twigs of the family tree.

Over the years she welcomed my Jewish grandfather and his third wife and her poodle, and my father’s overbearing older sister and her diplomat husband.  There were also various boyfriends of Mum’s, (in the time between my father’s death and her final re-partnering). And their adult children and their assorted girlfriends and  boyfriends and dogs. I remember someone's tattooed bloke who turned up one year wearing a ripped t-shirt . I saw him from the bathroom window  smoking a joint in the back yard.

Plus there were the occasional neighbours and orphans. One Christmas day someone brought a  big black mongrel that tried to hump the diamante-collared poodle.  My mother just kept passing out mince pies and pouring more champagne. She created the hearth where we all gathered for warmth, to exchange gifts and stories, to eat and get drunk and laugh and squabble and watch  t.v. 

I don’t think I realised until she was gone that it was her will that created these Christmas Day events. Her desire for family, for tribe. It was her determination to forge community, no matter how fleeting, from out of whatever material was at hand. I never particularly appreciated Christmas Day, went under sufferance as often as not.

Then on Christmas Day 1992 she was gone. She had been gone for three months by that strange, empty  December. I suppose there were outposts of the family and step-family where I could have spent the day. Instead, my friend J. and I got into my van and drove from Melbourne to Queensland. J. was on the run for reasons of her own, some romantic disaster.

She still refers to that Christmas day in slightly shocked tones as “ The Christmas Day We Ate Boiled Eggs For Lunch”. I have a vague memory of us picnicking outside an old fashioned road house - the sort that have now all been replaced by identical cavernous fluro-lit  BPs.

It was in some sun bleached place on the Newell Highway, a fibro dining room festooned with fairy lights and faded Fanta advertisements. I remember being cross with J. for smoking cigarettes, saying ,”You promised you wouldn’t smoke on this trip” and her shrugging as she lit up another rollie.

And I remember when we finally got to the beach house in Queensland and met up with our other friends, I was still grumpy about some petty thing, and J. said, “ It’s okay, you are still grieving for your mother”

Please Slow Down

This morning I went for (another) walk in the rain, wearing my raincoat. Down the bottom of the hill , where our road meets the road to town, I saw a couple of swamp hens bustling in and out of the tall grass that grows around the wetlands, the swamp as we used to say. The clouds cleared for a moment and the grass  suddenly lit up as if from inside, with dewy rain drops sparkling and flashing like a tiara in a chandelier-lit ballroom. . 

The swamp hens are goofy yet dignified-looking charcoal coloured birds with beautiful deep blue chest and wings and a sort of red blob on their heads that goes into their beaks. This morning one of them was just stepping out from her world of reeds & long grass, like a well-groomed housewife, pausing on the threshold with a shopping basket.

I love hearing the honking of the swamp hens echoing up the hill to our house. And the cows mooing, and the frogs croaking and the night insects tinkling: the soundtrack of our little neck of the woods. 

I thought of my neighbour N. and how deeply upset she is about  seeing dead birds on the road, killed by speeding cars. I watched the bird plod delicately across the road and  saw how easily it could happen. The swamp hen is a slow moving creature, and not a great flyer. 

N. and some others have erected small memorial crosses by the roadside to mark the places where birds and animals have been killed. Swamp hens, wallabies, bandicoots, echidnas, snakes, turtles have all died on the road in recent years. My neighbours are campaigning to reduce the speed limit. 

Why do I - and most of us - find it so hard to just Slow Down? In our cars, our thoughts, our lives. Even when our pace is  life-threatening, to both our own and other species. 

Last week in the writing class I gave the students an exercise: Write about the death of a person or an animal ( concrete sensory detail, hold back on the emotions abstractions & adjectives etc)

Several people in the room had lost siblings in motor accidents. As they read out their stories half the class was in tears. I guess that is how N. feels about the birds and animals.  

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Not humble swamp hens (haven't got any photos of them - it's been raining too much)... but stately white peacocks, mincing about like ghostly aristocratic brides on the lawns of the splendid Italian gardens surrounding the palace on the island Isola Bella in the middle of Lake Maggiore, Italy. F& I were there in July.

rain and mountains

A couple of days ago I went for a late afternoon walk with K. It soon started raining and we ended up getting entirely drenched. We walked miles along empty dirt roads, over the bridge across the river past cow paddocks, mango trees, bamboo clumps, farm houses.  The road finally ended at a cattle grid and a gate.  We were as wet as if we’d swum in our clothes. We walked all the way back to her place chilled and  shivering. Our two children - my son, her daughter - had been delivered home from orchestra practice while we were out. They were curled on her sofa reading TinTin books. 

I had been a bit miserable earlier in the day. That diffuse grey Life is futile/ everything is too hard/may as well eat more chocolate mood that descends on me from time to time. Which dovetails with overwhelming despair about the appalling things our species does to the planet and eachother  and my fear for the future. 

After our walk I realised that my mood had  changed. The rain washed away my gloom, rinsed it off my body.

I once heard someone at a talk with a Tibetan monk ask about what to do when you are depressed. The monk said that in Tibet, a depressed person (not that they had a word for ‘depressed’) would be taken to the top of a hill or mountain, some place offering a wide view,  to put  things back in perspective. 

eulogy for broken glass

    

November 23rd

My talented friend Lesley made this glass, which got broken in a freak accident in the washing up water last night.

I’m not quite able to throw it in the bin yet. I’m going to let it sit on the window sill till I am ready to let go of it. 

It is a reminder  that life is full of  loss. Sometimes huge and life-changing loss, sometimes tiny.

A reminder also that grief  passes eventually, sometimes in a moment, sometimes after a lifetime.

Meanwhile, I’m still hangin’ on. I loved that glass. 

As Khalil Gibran said

When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

And some other wise person - a Buddhist - said when you are attached to a material object, try to imagine that it is already lost or broken. Then be grateful for the time you still have it in your possession.

Yes, all this profundity sparked by a trifling incident in the kitchen sink.

About the glass itself, just a few last words before I consign its body (and my rantings) to the kitchen tidy-bin: It was one of a family of four, of which only two now survive. They were a gift from Lesley, and for a long time I had them displayed on the top shelf, along with the other look-but-don’t-touch things that were Too Nice To Use.

Then I realised I might die one day with out ever having allowed myself the pleasure of using them. I had the same routine running with a treasured set of fifties dinner plates, all different  retro-ish colours,  which I had  found at Yandina Market. I always stashed them up the back of the cupboard, and  used the ‘every day’ white ones instead. 

So I started using the  good stuff. The green and pink and blue and orange fifties plates, the hand-decorated glasses. Delighting in them.

And I guess inevitably when you use things, when you embrace them and engage with them, there is always a risk of breakage, damage, loss.  

Which must be a metaphor for something. Life, relationships, everything? 

The last drink taken from this glass was a warming sip of a lemon liqueur called Limoncello. I bought it at the local  farmers’ market, from the people who made it. It is an occasional treat and we always drink it from Lesley’s glasses. 

Well I think that was the eulogy. Cheers.

On the subject of getting loose of our attachments and what it means to be fully awake, enlightened ETC, I was listening to Jack Kornfield on my iPod early this morning as I toiled away at the gym and he quoted this:

If you can sit quietly after difficult news

If in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm

If you can see your neighbours travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy

If you can happily eat whatever is on your plate 

If you can love those around you unconditionally

If you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill

If you can always find contentment just where you are

....you are probably a DOG

which made me laugh.

Grandpa

                                             

F is doing a project for school: Write a biography of someone in your family. He is doing my grandfather, Cecil Edgar Berkman.  Grandpa died at the age of ninety seven, five years before F was born. To research the life of his great grandfather, F is going through an interview video I made of Cecil in 1993 a few months before he died.

I haven’t looked at this video ( now transferred to DVD) for many years and is a strange experience for me, sitting beside my twelve year old son in 2010, hearing again the forgotten-but-so-familiar cadences of Grandpa’s squeaky old voice. His steadiness. The way he tilts his head and  punctuates his reminiscences with ‘At any rate...’ The way his wife interrupts him, gently correcting details about who married who, or when they moved house.

I hear things I never knew, or had forgotten: My grandfather had a dog when he was a boy, a St Bernard called Carlo. My grandfather had an older brother Aubrey, who was a gambler. This Aubrey bought a ‘trotting horse’,  called ‘Warlord’, from Piccaniny. It was 14 year old Cecil’s first paid job to look after Warlord. F is taking notes, and looking older and more focused than I’ve seen him.  Black and white dog, Cecil’s friend, he writes.

Cecil was born at home, above his parent’s jewellery shop, in King St Newtown, in 1896. He remembers sitting with his siblings on the upstairs verandah watching the ‘passing parade’ of traffic. In those days it was nearly all horse-drawn. And in those days, most births were at home. This is interesting to F. because he was also born at home, three generations later, when it had become an ‘alternative’ choice. 

Cecil’s father, we learn, was a peddler, a poor Polish immigrant who sharpened scissors & knives from a kerbside cart in the streets of Sydney, and later travelled to the county with a horse and caravan selling jewellery and haberdashery. By the time Cecil, the youngest of six was born, the Berkman family had became prosperous. 

“Of course there was no income tax in those days” puts in my step-grandmother on the video. “That’s right” agrees Grandpa, meditatively. Like those were the Good Old  Days. The days when anyone could work hard and get rich. He used to work in his parents’ shop after school. 

When I was a child my grandfather was like Santa Claus - he lavished my brother and me with gifts and treats and icecreams and trips to the circus, Luna Park, the Pantomime. 

Later, when I was a uni student and into my early twenties  I rejected him as ‘capitalist pig’ and a right winger. Fortunately he lived long enough for me to tell him what a wonderful grandfather he was and how much I cherish the childhood memories.

I mention to Felix that Cecil would have had his bar mitzvah in about 1908, when he was twelve, probably at the Newtown synagogue, where his father was the treasurer. A couple of kids in F’s class have just had their bar mitzvahs.

My grandfather married for the first time when he was twenty three. Soon after the wedding  his young wife died in the ‘Spanish’ influenza epidemic  that reached Australia in 1919. His older sister Ruby also died in the epidemic. 

...And so on. Next installment tonight after school. ( He marries his first wife's cousin, my mother is born...) So many lives, loves, deaths, so many stories, all teeming past.

garden haiku

i search 

for garden haiku

kookaburra laughs

'gorgeous', 'beautiful'

we say, though

the book says

'common'

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why does the bamboo

bend like that?

 - Ah!

(she who left her winter skin across the bouganvillea by the door)

up and down

November 3rd

With the laptop in the favourite cafe. I always feel like I’m having a little holiday when I sit in this place with the huge ponciana tree sheltering the outdoor tables. The whole place half-outside really, another tree growing right up inside through the ceiling, and a resident water dragon often seen scuttling between tables or among the foliage just outside the open window next to me. Life in Mullumbimby always feels good when I come here. They play funky music ( Jack Johnson right now, Marvin Gaye), I like the look of the other customers. And it feels cosy to come here alone. 

This Saturday we have finally invited some friends over for a very belated house-warming celebration. We have been here about fifteen months now. Not long, still feels a bit not-quite-real. Still feel a bit confused about  where ‘home’ is. Melbourne, where all the oldest friends are?  Or the old Queensland  beach house, where I feel so fully myself, and so connected with the memory of  my mother and with the ocean?

Meanwhile, life is here and I’m sitting in the cafe and I am about to go off to a meeting with fellow Gestalt Therapists, a group supervision session, something I always enjoy. I’m sane and cheerful this week. Going to gym every morning. Just started a new writing course - new batch of students came on Monday morn. 

Poor old D is a bit down. Sometimes seems like we have a seesaw relationship.  He lies on his bed in the middle of the afternoon. Drinks red wine in the evening, then regrets it the next day.  I think he needs a project. In fact he is about to embark on building a pergola, so that will probably cheer him up. 

The other day at M’s gallery opening, someone - an acquaintance-  asked D how he was, and D said “Oh you know, up and down” which I thought was an absolutely fair enough response. But the person who’d asked him looked nonplussed. I guess he expected the formulaic ‘Good thanks mate’.

Are we not all ‘up and down’ at least to some extent? I certainly am. Some of us have bigger ups and downs/ mood swings than others. But aren’t we are all ( to state the obvious)  somewhere on the continuum bipolar-wise ?  To have no moods or emotions would be like having no weather - unimaginable...

                            Anyway. Talking of mood-swings, both personal  and macro, I am still reflecting on Melbourne After The Rain. The gardens bursting with life and colour ; and the amazing greenery in Central Victoria. At G&B’s place near Castlemaine the transformation was utterly miraculous. 

                           In the fifteen years I’ve been visiting them there, there has been pretty much a perpetual drought. Constant fear of bushfires. It’s a               dry climate anyway and most of the topsoil is long-gone, the earth ravaged by the Gold Rush of the 1850’s. It’s a land of searing summer heat, biting winter cold, a landscape of gravelly greys and browns.

Now, it is a different place. The dam, usually half empty, with  brown muddy water is now a glorious shining blue lake. The stony ground - how can this be? - is suddenly carpeted in green grass. And there is a stream, tinkling through what now feels like a meadow. There are wildflowers  - purple, yellow, white, red - popping up in the forest where they must have been waiting dormant for so long. B and I lie on our backs on the soft grass and marvel at all of this. The power of water. Yes, she answers to my question, it does feel like everyone’s moods have changed too. The coming of the rain has lifted peoples spirits, softened their emotions.