everything's relative/unexpected art

December 21st Melbourne - Summer Solstice

These bleak grey Melbourne days remind me of why I left here sixteen years ago. Cold and mean under a leaden sky when it’s supposed to be mid summer and you’ve been longing for sunshine all dark winter long.

Our friends here apologise for the weather (as if it’s their fault) and say it has been warm and will be again soon.

And we say “But we like it!”

Yes, coming from hot and humid Northern NSW, we now welcome this exact same weather which used to depress us. It’s refreshing. It’s cosy and nice to not be sweating. 

We walked from Fitzroy down to the NGV ( National Gallery of Victoria) but discovered it was closed on mondays,which was disappointing. Then we found an unexpected art gallery in a nearby alley way.

frolic

At the end-of-primary-school celebration F’s teacher spoke about each child in turn, then handed them a farewell gift and shook hands with them or hugged them. She acknowledged individual children not only for excelling at music, sport, or maths, but also for their personal qualities such as inclusivity, sensitivity, a strong sense of self, quirky sense of humour, courage, generosity.

In summing up F she said he was “ a lovely young man”. It’s funny but now I can hardly recall what else she said - creative, friendly etc. What sticks in my mind is “young man”.

Looking at all the children that night - it was a big performance/party - I saw how they were on the threshold between childhood and adulthood. They will be kids for quite a while of course - yet in the last year most of them have changed and you get a glimpse of the sort of grown-ups they will become.

After every one had sung and danced and played music (F played ‘The Baby Elephant Walk’ on his clarinet)  and eaten and said kind words about eachother, we went home with full hearts. F said in the car on the way home “Thanks for sending me to such a great school”  This from he who has in recent months been protesting about going to school at all.

I woke up the next morning from a dream: I lost F in a big amusment park  like Disneyland where we went in Paris in July. I sort of wandered off and when I came back there was a huge crowd and I couldn’t find him.  I woke up in tears.

I realised that in the dream he was a small child, maybe 4 or 5. He was wearing a burnt orange polar fleece top that he loved when he was small, a hand-me-down from Ollie. 

I thought about how we all carry around inside of ourselves the little children who we once were, and how it is important not to abandon them. And I also reflected that that my little son IS indeed gone, has now grown into the “young man”.

I got out of bed. It was the final this-is-it, very last day of school and F’s teacher had very sensibly decided to spend the entire day at the local swimming pool. I got ringed-in rather reluctantly to be one of the parent helpers. I had a million things to do at home - like laundry and washing up and packing to go away. But once I got there I remembered how pleasant it is to sit around under the shady palm trees on the grass, or at a picnic table while the kids frolic happily in the pool. It was miraculously blue and sunny after all the rain.

A couple of other parents were there to help and a couple of others dropped by and we all sat on a blanket on the ground and chatted and watched the kids having a fabulous time on the ‘Inflatable’.  

One of the parents brought her two small children aged three and five. I played with them - chasie, tiggie, horsie, hidey, run-around-the-palmtree-giggling-and -squealing until you’re out of breath. It was a moment of innocent delight. I’d forgotten about that simple fun. Forgotten about that part of me that wants nothing more than to run around trees giggling with children. It was a good day.

school's out for summer

Last day of school today for this year. Also F’s last day ever in Primary School. There is a special farewell celebration this afternoon with food, speeches and performances; then a final fun event for the kids tomorrow at the local swimming pool, and that’s it. Schools out for summer.

I went for a walk in the rain this morning. I stopped to take a photo of a rainbow over a bright green paddock, and of  the whitened bones of a road-kill victim, a wallaby. I let my mind wander pleasurably into next week and back. We’re going to Melbourne for Christmas.

Back home, I pulled a few weeds out of the damp garden before I went inside. Oh my God! It’s almost eight ‘o clock and F is still fast asleep, sprawled in a tangle of sheets. He forgot to set his alarm clock, I forgot to wake him up. Come on Darling, get up, hurry up, we’re late!

We are prematurely in holiday-mode, obviously. Just can’t wait to unplug from the relentless schooltime routine. Last night F couldn’t go to sleep because he was so excited about the holidays. He sat on his bed playing his clarinet till I finally insisted on turning the light out.  

I stayed up late sorting out the papers on my desk, paying bills and filing stuff. At midnight my desk was clear of backlog, hallelujah. How I love a clear surface.

All the ‘finishing up for the year’ things.  Christmas parties large and small: The Writers Centre, the Community College where I run my courses, a dinner-gathering of the women in my yoga class, the neighbours' annual street party (Held indoors this year on account of the rain).  The marimba group met on Tuesday for the last time this year, and the final  session of my writing workshop was last Monday. Students gave me home made pickles and a card and brought pancakes for morning tea. The last meeting of  the Gestalt supervision group was  on Wednesday. No more  clients till next year, no more articles for the paper. Everything tied up with a bow on top and posted off into next year.

And we  head  off into the uncharted waters of the Summer Holidays - Yippee!

morning walk

                                            

stage fright

Yesterday at the school Christmas Market - second last in a long series of end-of-the-year events - there was a microphone and amp set up under a tree. Various of the older kids with various degrees of talent got up and played guitars and sang songs to a straggly, relaxed audience of school friends, siblings  and parents. A couple of these kids we know well for their impressive voices and song-writing abilities. One girl  sounds uncannily like Missy Higgins. 

Across the lawn parents and kids were pottering at market stalls selling candles and coloured felt Christmas decorations, chatting, queuing up for home made icecreams. F was climbing a tree with one of his mates. I wasn’t paying much attention to the performers until one girl got up - she looked about twelve or thirteen -  and played a couple of introductory bars on the keyboard.

Then she froze. Like rabbit in a spotlight. Paralysed. Her mouth moved but nothing came out. She just stood there, immobilized, in her striped shirt and denim shorts. D was sitting next to me. He’s suffered from his share of performance anxiety in the past and I could see it was excruciating for him. Still, the girl stood there. For an eternity she stood there. 

Then her friends started to chant her name, and call out encouragement. People, including the school music teacher shuffled in closer as if to hold her in their semi-circlur embrace. Still she stood there, head down, mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. Hand hovering over the keyboard. I expected her to bolt any moment. 

Then she played those introductory bars again, and finally her voice came out of her mouth. A clear, pretty voice, not even shaky. And finally she looked up, and her friends - and all of us - whistled and clapped, and D said, “Gee, she’s pretty good isn’t she?” And she was good. I don’t remember a word of her song, but I remember her shining face. 

At the end of her song, her friends surrounded her as she burst into tears. I nearly cried myself.  

before breakfast

I photographed these sacred lotus flowers at the Farmers’ Market early this morning. They looked so perfect, so radiant, I initially wondered if they were real. People were constantly stopping to admire them.

The man selling them told me he paddled out in a kyak to pluck the flowers from his dam. He thought perhaps the reason they seemed so magical was to do with the purity of the air, soil and water at his biodynamic farm.

“There’s an old story” he said, “When the newly-awakened Buddha walked upon the earth, a lotus flower popped up at each place where his foot touched the ground”. 

“All flowers seem like miracles to me” said the biodynamic farmer. “As if we are being offered a gift from Nature ”

I bought some of his BD tomatoes and continued on with my shopping. All this before breakfast.

happy (soggy) birthday to me

December 7th 2010: Probably the wettest birthday I’ve ever had. I haul myself out of bed at 6 a.m. and go off to sweat and pedal and push myself at the gym. I think of my young mother, all those years ago, labouring to bring me into the world, her first-born. 

On the treadmill I jog to Dusty Springfield iPod, and gaze out the window, across  the rain-beaten main street of this little country town where I have lived for  a bit over a year. There is a truck delivering bread to the health food shop. I have snippets of history here now - I can see “Imelda’s Shoes”, where I bought F’s last pair of runners, and the stationary shop next door where a man from my writing group works

Jog jog jog, my sneakers squeak on the moving rubber. The treadmill is idiotic, I am going nowhere fast, but it’s strangely satisfying. After I’ve done all the hard things at gym  comes the reward: I lie on the vibrating bed and get shaken up for five minutes of bliss before stumbling out into the wet wet morning. As I leave, G who works there always points  his index finger at me and says “Take It Easy” 

As I drive home I hear on the radio that the man who created Mr Squiggle died yesterday. Ah, how innocent the world once was, how low-tech.  

After the Morning off-to-school Rush, and before the marimba group arrives, I find Mr Squiggle on Youtube. Must be forty years since I last saw him.  He’s so polite, so diffident, so articulate. He uses words like ‘intricate’ and ‘calamitous’

Later in the day I spend a couple of hours feeling grumpy and resentful and miserable about some boring old stories of mine that recur from time to time. I try to ‘just observe’ my mind as it rattles off down it’s it’s all-too-familiar tracks. I tromp down to the shed with my umbrella and work on the mosaic project - a couple of terracotta pots for the new outdoor area. Grumpy, grumpy. I cut bits of tile up, stick them on to the pot. Cut, stick, cut, stick.

I’m still angst-ridden an hour or so later as I wander back up from the shed, hunched under the umbrella, picking my pathetic way across the squelching swamp which is our lawn. 

D. is lolling in the doorway of the studio, watching, and smiling fondly at me. He  bursts into song: ‘Happy Birthday To You’ in his sweet tenor voice, while I stand there in the downpour and try to let myself lighten up and savour the moment. Lucky D doesn’t know the unkind thoughts that have been churning through my mind. We laugh. It’s a high point of the day, a gift. 

Actually, it’s been a pretty good day, apart from that bleak two hour period of internal alligator-wrestling. Earlier, the marimba gang arrived with assorted cakes, cards and morning tea birthday treats. And late this afternoon while I was lying on my bed reading before going out for dinner, F wandered into my room in one of his sociable moods and tickled my feet and lounged about on the  bed chatting about his day at school. We prattled on like a pair of happy budgies. My delightful son. 

Then dinner at a Thai restaurant with D, F and our friend Katie. She gives me a book which I have admired many times at her place, called Art In Nature. Magical images by Nils-Udo. I’m so touched by this gift.

Back to our place for cups of tea. A fabulous chocolate cake appears, cooked by Kate. The rain is pounding on the roof as F lights candles, and gives me a drawing he has done, and insists that the four of us hold hands. They all sing me Happy Birthday. I feel blessed. 

These gorgeous images are from Nils-Udo: Art In Nature

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.