worse, better,faster

it’s all going too fast

....the planet earth is spinning faster, the etheric web of time has shifted to another frequency, our DNA has changed, transformation, moving to a higher vibration, end of the Mayan calendar, a comet heading straight for us, the world about to end....

These are the sorts of conversations you routinely overhear at the farmers market on Friday morning in Mullumbimby, while buying your organic avocados, macadamias and locally grown ginger; or while sipping your local organic coffee or lemon myrtle tea, munching on mediterranean omelette or home made cake. 

It’s all very Northern New South Wales. I quite like it  - I prefer a bit of New Age wah wah  about energy and earth and spirit, to the conversations you might overhear elsewhere about drab (and equally abstract) concepts like say, the stock market , the economy, or interest rates.

Also, I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t some sort of truth among the ‘everything’s getting faster’  theories.  I sure feel like my world is spinning faster than it used to. The school week from Monday to Friday seems to be gone in a blink, the term, the year, flying past. I’m trying to hold on to my hat.  

Other people I chat to seem to feel this sense of acceleration too. Perhaps it’s the headspinning  speed of modern communication. It wasn’t so very long ago that we wrote letters, posted them, waited for a reply, the whole process taking days or weeks, which nowadays takes only minutes. Remember going to libraries, to find information, remember looking things up in books? I am nostalgic for those sleepy screen-free days of  the late twentieth century.

I feel kind of  speeded up in myself lately. Leisurely market mornings not withstanding. Lovely afternoon singing group at school, marimba group, writers’ group - I have all these grounding here-and-now activities in my life, and a garden to potter in, yet there is still an undercurrent, like a sort of whirring vortex. 

I reckon its more than just the whirl of my own anxiety or my caffiene-pumped pulse-rate. It’s the sense of the whole human world spinning faster, the rate at which we are trashing the earth, water and air, the madness of corporate greed and our own crazy consumeristic feeding frenzy while others starve, the exploding human population and extinction of other creatures on the planet. It feels like a runaway train with us all on board...

Am I being too ‘negative’? Not really, because these things are happening - there truly is a sort of madness in this world, and a feeling of rushing headlong towards....what?

I like the quote I heard ( via Pema Chodron) “Things are getting worse and worse and better and better, faster and faster” 

Because there is good stuff happening too...And thank god for the daily miracle of the garden. Time to go and water the veggie patch. 

the marimba bug

where F and i spent the weekend...

at marimba music camp

out in the back hills, south east queensland

where the air smells of grass and trees

eco-village nestled in the valley

out of mobile reception range

unplugged

the annual gathering 

of we who love 

hitting wooden xylophone keys, making music

jamming in time, playing in the moonlight

plink plunk bink bonk bang

interwoven rythyms

with trumpet soaring over the top

and clarinet

hungarian (bulgarian?) bagpipes

bass drum

circles, dancing, (old hippies us)

hugging, sitting on rugs on grass

yellow flowers falling like snowflakes 

tinkling down

from the giant tree

by the open deck of the cafe

where the marimba-kids perform on sunday afternoon.

waking early to mist, whipbirds, wompoos

birdsong forest orchestra.

campsite coffee, then strolling down the hill

past  lake

and grazing kangaroos.

Many familiar long-familiar faces 

so many children, grown so big!

we exclaim.

new grandchildren

old stories heard for the first time

chai, and enough time to chat

going nowhere

old tunes,

and new tunes 

while the little kids swing to and fro

and bounce endlessly on the trampoline.

to hear some marimba magic:
http://youtu.be/g2kXcvDJ18s

the doodle

*

This morning while I toiled and sweated at gym I listened, as usual to a podcast. It was a  short TED-talk by someone called Sunni Brown, and her subject was Doodling. According to Sunni, doodling - the making of spontaneous marks - actually helps us think. Far from being a distraction, or a time-waste it engages several modalities simultaneously (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic etc.)  and thus helps us to retain and process information. 

She reckons doodling has long  been misunderstood and maligned by teachers and employers.

She says that our culture is too intensely focused on verbal and written information, at the cost of our visual literacy and creativity. 

A quick look on the web indicates that lots of people agree with her. Someone’s  even done some ‘research’ showing that doodling helps people to stay attentive in boring meetings.

Which made me think of another TED talk I heard a while back - Temple Grandin talking about being a visual thinker. I think my son is a visual thinker, so I’ve been reading up on it a bit . Seems some of us think - and learn - primarily in pictures, not words. These ’visual-spatial’ learners are often highly creative big-picture thinkers, but  may have difficulty with the lineal, verbal way in which most  school subjects are taught. 

Which made me think about how different we all are ( while being deep down the same) in so many ways... 

Which made me think of Dr Gary Ghapman’s “Five Languages of Love” and how we all communicate differently  too. He claims that couples, especially, can avoid a lot of conflict if they understand this. Some of us express our love with words - and  feel most loved when we hear the right words, but for others what matters most is the  receiving of gifts, or touch, hugs and sex. 

Still others express their love ( and like to receive it) primarily as acts of service and caring  - wash the dishes, cook the dinner, put out the rubbish. And for some of us the most nurturing experience is spending ‘quality time’, eye-contact, a sense of deep connection...

All of which is my mental doodle for today.

*This is the much doodled-upon blotter that was on F’s desk at school last year.

Purple, gold, red

I drive past this tree every time I go to town. Today I finally got out and took a photo. It’s already peaked, is now past its most intense violet moment of the year.  Summer green is coming through.

 October/November is the season of purple, gold, and red, here in this subtropical zone. Jacarandas, Silky Oaks, Flame trees. Harbingers of summer. Later, the crimson poncianas. And did I mention the first frangipani flowers are out ?

yatra

together, alone

Today I went on a ‘yatra’, a silent  walk, with a group of about twenty people, and one dog. During our initial check-in/introductions, sitting in a circle on a grassy cliff top, almost everyone said how much they enjoyed silence, and walking and nature, and the opportunity to walk in a group. Our leader walked ahead, his partner behind the group, and we could straggle or walk briskly in between as suited us. We stopped a couple of times to sip water, eat fruit and watch the whales and dolphins from the cliff top.

I found it comforting to be freed - temporarily - from the efforts and obligations of making conversation.

We walked for two or three hours then stopped for lunch under a clump of pandanus at Flat Rock Beach. We could chat during lunch, and we all did, for a while, though it felt odd initially, after the ease  of silence. 

We talked about what we’d noticed during the walk - both the external  things (wind rippling the cliff top grasses, a red hibiscus in full flower in the coastal forest, a Brahminy Kite soaring and diving for a fish) ; and also the internal landscape - the mind’s busy-ness of thinking/trying not to think/ going in and out of being present/ observing the body, awareness of the feet making and breaking rhythmic contact with the earth.

A bit more chat - it seemed livelier because of the preceeding silence - then most of us dropped back into companionable quietness. Some of us had a swim after lunch, others  snoozed in the shade till it was time to return by the same path, back to the carpark.

Our themes for the day (from Jason Siff’s ‘Recollective Awareness’) were gentleness, acceptance and curiosity. 

remembrance of things past

Aunt Dorothy

Three weeks ago I visited my 94 year old Aunt Dorothy in a nursing home in Canberra. She is my father’s older sister - ten years older than him, though Dad has been gone almost forty years now. God, these numbers make my head spin.

Dorothy and her diplomat husband Noel were a glamorous though mostly absent fixture throughout my childhood. They and my two older cousins lived an unimaginably sophisticated overseas life of cocktail parties and sea voyages and servants in white jackets. 

All this, while we mere Antipodean mortals washed the car, and mowed the lawn on Saturday afternoon in a dull outer suburb of Melbourne. Watched the footy up at the oval, couldn’t wait till the new Myer shopping complex was finished, down by Ringwood station. 

Every year or so they would return from their posting in Paris and join us for Christmas. My brother and I would be given gifts of children’s books in French, which we couldn’t read, but treasured nonetheless. I still have “Pistache et Dame Tartine” and also a book of 60’s black-and-white photos of Paris which they gave my parents. Paris was the only place you’d really want to live.

Both Dorothy and Noel were over six feet tall. They could quote poetry in several languages and looked surprised - and yes, a little shocked, but too polite to mention it - when at thirteen I couldn’t understand Dante or Rimbaud or Shakespeare, or even complete a quote from Wordsworth... The frisson of disapproval communicated by D with a certain narrowing of eyes, a twitch of eyebrow. As a teenager I felt irritable and inadequate around them. Who cared about stupid poetry and foreign languages?

My parents went into party-mode when Dorothy and Noel were around There would be epic dramas in the kitchen over elaborate recipes from Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. Much alcohol was consumed, there was late-night singing of old Anglican hymns. Revisiting of highly amusing stories featuring themselves and all their charming little foibles. Just entre nous. Everyone adored everyone else.

My parents visited Dorothy and Noel in Paris in the mid-sixties, and had a famous holiday with them in Italy. In the early seventies, they were posted to Tehran and Uncle Noel met the Shah Of Iran. Their life was even more glamorous and exotic than in Paris. A chauffeur, A cook called Hadjii. Men in white navel jackets with gold epaulets and blue sashes. Women in evening gowns.

Old Kodachrome slides (where are they now?) show my suntanned  parents lounging by the pool in Tehran with a hovering waiter and  a desert backdrop. My sophisticated cousin in a green bikini.

Thinking about it now, I feel a little miffed at their willingness to leave us kids  at home when they went off on these jaunts. The Iran trip was to be my father’s last - he died just a few months later, before the Persian rugs they’d bought in Isfahan had even arrived in Melbourne.

And of course that time now has the romantic aura of having been the final moment of an lost era - The Ayatollah was about to sweep away all the glitter and privilege that Westerners like my aunt and uncle revelled in. 

After Tehran, they were posted to Rome. And finally, I got to visit them. We had Christmas there in 1973, my brother and mother and I. It was a year after Dad’s death. I was eighteen and it was my first taste of  travel, and of Europe. After Mum and bro. went home,  I stayed for a year, working as an au pair  - in Paris, of course, and learning French. 

Dorothy was the elegant, imperious, gracious queen of her household in Rome. Arranging flowers, or giving firm, patient instructions to the maid in Italian. Inviting me, scruffy as I was in my old jeans, to sit beside her on the brocade-covered sofa, to sip tea from fine china, or gin-and-tonic from a crystal glass. We even smoked cigarettes together in a grown-up sort of way - this was the long ago time before smoking became unfashionable. 

It was the moment when I was admitted to the adult world, the golden circle.  And there was always plenty to chat about with Dorothy - art, literature, history, and of course our own, infinitely fascinating family. I was willing to overlook the little barbs. 

I stayed with them several times during that year. They were family, and they approved of me. I basked.

Retired to un-glamorous Canberra, late ‘70s

If I met Dorothy for the first time now, it would be hard to believe all this. She is a stooped old woman in a grey cardigan with a receding fuzz of white hair, who sometimes remembers who I am, sometimes not. She’s almost blind, and doesn’t hear well. She is softer, more benign than she was. Smiles lovingly at me, and at her daughter who is visiting from Paris. (Having grown up there, my cousin married a Frenchman, and stayed)

Our Canberra luncheon outing the other day involved helping her into her jacket, and  manipulating the walking frame, then the wheel chair, out of the nursing home and into the car, and then out of the car, then a ramp into the lovely Beaver Gallery cafe in Deakin.

D sips white wine with lunch, and is reminded dreamily  of the Villa Rossini near Rome, and that day we ate melanzone. Her accents - French, Italian still impeccable, cherished. And the day at the Bois De Boulogne, My Dear!  All so Proustian! She read him in French, of course. Her daughter and I both admit sheepishly  to having only started, quite a long time ago on  Au Recherche du Temps Perdu....

With her daughter, three weeks ago at the nursing home. The painting of the bridge over the Seine has been with her for more than fifty years. 

Spring ginko

My third Cloudcatchers’ haiku ginko - autumn, winter, now spring.

We meet at a picnic table by the lake - eight or nine of us. Average age 65-70. I feel like a young spunk.

Several of the women have brought home-made biscuits in plastic lunch boxes. We all have our sun hats. They chat about a funeral and about who won various haiku competitions.

Their conversation is threaded-through with quoted, memorised haiku -  their own, eachothers’. Like small cherished objects, handed around.

We have an hour to wander about in silence gathering sensory data for haiku. Trying to engage the non-visual senses ( I close my eyes, suddenly notice the cool water-smelling breeze, birdsong, distant traffic)

surf club kiosk

The wide  ti-tree lake, fringed with paperbark is pale grey, peaceful. Across the road, the ocean beach is hot and harsh and loud. I spend a moment standing in the sand by the surf club, then retreat back to the banksia-shaded lakeside where willy wagtails flutter on the grass in dappled light. 

There is an elderly man in a motorised wheel chair parked by the lake. I’m aware of him in my peripheral vision several metres away as I watch six cute ducklings swimming and preening and shaking their feathers.  As if they’re in a chldren’s song.

I’m hoping for inspiration, something simple yet profound. Then I’m just watching the ducklings

'They were born right over there', the white-haired man volunteers, pointing to a shady place near the water’s edge about six weeks ago. I know every bird that lives around this lake. And the lizards too - have you seen the lizards?’ 

A moment later a water dragon scuttles onto a branch overhanging the water.

‘What are you writing in your book?’, he asks ‘I’m as deaf as a post  - you’ll have to write your answer for me.’

He comes here every day, he loves this place. He radiates some sort of happiness, just to be here. 

could i envy

the stillness

of an old deaf man in a wheelchair?

lake edge 

duck gobbles

at ripples in clouds

shall i sit and wait

for haiku

- or go searching? 

tuesday

day lillies everywhere

red pawpaw, summertime breakfast

green tea

school goes back today 

grey heron

floats ahead of us

down the driveway

bus stop, 8.15 a.m.  

car door clunk

bye!

he’s off into the big wide world

with his hoodie and his backpack

spring morning by the laundry door

- a hundred floating white star flowers 

tissue shredded in the washing machine

 - a hundred white specks 

on black shirt

Three loads of washing, a good drying day.

work

bills paid

- incoming tide of paper,

pushed back

for now

phone chat with Jenny

she says “ I don’t know how you do it”

I say “I’ve been a neurotic mess”

We laugh

roof creaks in the midday heat

parsley’s gone to seed

after school

his saxophone lesson

while I cook green curry

and listen...

teacher says

“the best way to thank me is to practise”

daylight saving 

dinner outside

in late afternoon light

three of us,

the family 

dishes washed

to Hilltop Hoods, Lonely Island

fierce kid music

(‘don’t listen to the rude bit mum’) 

putting out compost

by moonlight

-scent of lemon blossom

difficult customer, me

(low point of an otherwise pleasant day)

They’ll probably use their recording of my call for ‘training purposes’ : How to handle a cranky old woman who doesn't want to pay her bill and tries to rile you up with a whole lot of political/environmental ant-capitalist  hogwash.

I promised myself a while back never to do this again - get stroppy with the poor phone-answering wage slave employees, of the corporate entities which seem to rule our lives nowadays - Telstra, Optus et al. 

But I lost it today. Back from holidays, sifting through the mail, there’s an overdue notice from Unity Water. They say I owe them $436.42, and that they are charging me 11%, compounding daily. For supplying water to the beach house for six months. I don’t know what to be more furious about : the outrageous amount, when we are such frugal water-users; the fact that I never got an original bill; or that this is after almost twenty years of punctual bill-paying. And isn’t it direct debited anyway?

I have to say that Leanne, the customer service officer or whatever they’re called, who is unlucky enough to get me on the other end of the line, is a pretty smooth operator. She patiently explains that water charges used to be part of council rates, but aren’t any more. 

And yes, I am correct - council rates have not been reduced accordingly, but actually increased since then. She says The Queensland Government decided to outsource water supply, and to make us pay. Unity sent me the required paperwork last year. I don’t tell her that I probably chucked it straight in the bin. 

And No, she does not think it at all  wrong that a private company now makes a profit from supplying citizens with such a basic need as water, and from charging interest, even on a bill never recieved. Nor is she concerned with the fact that, as it turns out, only $34 of my bill is even for actual water. The rest is all ‘infrastructure’, sewerage and  water ‘processing’ She thinks Unity are doing a good job. 

Of course you just work there, you don’t make these decisions, Can I talk to your supervisor?  Pathetic, cliched bleats of the powerless consumer. I can’t get a rise out of her. She’s enjoying humiliating me. I’m a fool. Just shut up and pay. 

But it is  depressing that our god-given water should now be commodified and sold to us. Back in the old days it wasn’t like this.  Do you reckon that’s fair? Leanne thinks it’s entirely fair. And tells me I’d still have to pay for the infrastructure, even if I did install a big rainwater tank.  

No alternative is there? I whimper, as she crisply  extracts my email address so she can send me the forms for my bank account details.

too much of everything

sunday October 9th

Back from two weeks of school hols spent up the coast. A rather exhausting holiday, though there were many delightful moments too. Can you have too many good times? I think so. Too many nice people, too many lively dinners and lunches and breakfasts and conversations. 

We had two different families at the beach house, staying with us from Victoria (September hols up here are always popular with the Southerners). All of them much-loved old friends and their children. We went walking on the beach and through the National Park and through the rainforest and down to the waterfall. We canoed up the river, played ukuleles, sang songs, chatted about our lives, rolled about laughing playing charades after dinner, sat round a fire with kids toasting marshmallows. 

We parents got sentimental watching our gorgeous long-legged suddenly-teenagers playing volleyball together. The photos show us all having a wonderful time. 

Seems ridiculous to complain of such an abundance of blessings. Yet somehow in the midst of it all, I yearned for a moment of solitude, of quiet and reflective time. I felt wobbly, a bit off-centre. Like I needed to withdraw into a quiet inner cave for a while, instead of being so out there, hospitable, engaging with everyone.

We went up a day before the end of term for Michael’s farewell event  - funeral/ memorial service. It was held in the ampitheatre beside the lake in the botanical gardens on a fine spring day. 

D and I joined with a small gospel choir at the beginning to sing Shine On Me. A sweet and tearful moment as Z , now a widow - what a strange new word for her - sang with us. 

Then a succession of people got up to speak, sing, play musical instruments, tell stories. Michael’s daughter A played the flute, and recited ‘Do Not Go Gentle’, by Dylan Thomas, who was Welsh like Michael. 

We heard about M’s intense working life in drug and alcohol rehab. People we'd never met made their tributes. One of his old patients, an ex-addict with an amazing voice had everyone almost in tears singing ‘Amazing Grace’.  Then a young GP - Michael’s local doctor for the last decade -  spoke of their lively debates about modern and alternative medicine. 

D spoke about how affirming it felt  as a younger man to have the approval and love of an older man, which brought more tears. We heard a recording of an old skit from The Goon Show - a favourite of Michael’s - which made everyone laugh.

After - I want to say ‘the show’ rather than ‘the service’ or ‘the funeral’ - we had lunch in the shelter by the lake, a place where, over the years, many of us had been for various picnics and kids’ birthday parties.

The wake, back at the house, was quite a party. When we finally got home to the beach house late that night, the first of our Melbourne visitors had already settled in there. I’d barely had time to get their beds together - the house was still half packed up after being painted. There were boxes of stuff in the corridor, and paintings waiting to be re-hung stacked against walls.  

I guess that’s part of why the time up there felt so full-on. No time to even get the house in order, let alone to reflect on Michael’s death, or on anything much. Too much sociability. Much as I loved hanging out with everyone. 

Today, second-last day of the school hols, we are home. All three of us have been peacefully pottering about, barely even speaking to eachother. Unpacking, messing around on the ukulele, pulling a few weeds out of the garden, flicking through the newspaper, doing a bit of laundry. I can feel myself  coming back together. I’m even looking forward to the rhythms of term-time routine.

angels watchin’ over him

*

another death

Our friend Michael has left his body at last. He was eighty one years old, and the father of a thirteen year old daughter, A. 

I met A’s mum Z in a yoga class twelve and a half years ago. I don’t think either of us ever made it back to that yoga class, early motherhood being what it is. But we discovered, while assisting eachother in down dog, that  not only were we both ‘older mothers’ of new babies, we also lived in the same street.

We made immediate arrangements to have a cup of tea together that afternoon. We were both desperate for a laugh.

It’s a common and lovely story, the lasting bond between women who meet over playgroup play-dough, nappies, breast-feeding. Baby-vomit on your shirt, the feeling that your intellectual life has gone forever. The sleep-deprived generosity we are able to extend to eachother during that humbling, unglamorous “Do The Hokey-Pokey” era,  when our children are toddlers and every adult conversation is interrupted. Our children growing up together. 

I was a little surprised when I discovered Z’s husband, the retired psychiatrist, was so much older than her. She was already 43, like me,  but Michael was more than old enough to be A’s grandfather, and was sometimes mistaken for it.  Z and A were his third family. You sensed a hard-living past. He went to AA meetings every Friday night.

Michael and I did not get off to a great start. I thought he was grumpy and sexist and rude. He thought I was...well I don’t know exactly why he didn’t seem to like me. Stroppy feminist  perhaps.

The great thing is that we both got over all of it in the succeeding years, and came to be fond of eachother. We mellowed. Our two small  families, both  exiled from or without extended family nearby, grew close in a way that felt like family. We got to know and  love eachother’s kids.  And our two kids can’t remember a time when they didn’t know eachother. 

They’ve had their moments, the children, their squabbles, their rivalries. For a while it seemed like A was always lording it over F. Until he learnt to stand up for himself. We all agreed that it was good practise for them, to have to sort out their conflicts with eachother, in the absence of siblings. 

At times we all had our judgements about eachother, talked behind eachother’s backs, just like real family. A was sent to the uniforms-and-prizes mainstream grammar school; F to the rainbows-and-fairies Steiner school. But we all knew we were there for one another, in that solid, loving  way that matters. Michael taught F how to be teased, and that we only tease people we really love. He was like a robust,  affectionate grandad.

*

We all used to meet almost every Saturday at the market. Often with J and T, who are also beloved old playgroup pals, also single child/older mother.  We’d sit at the same table each week drinking coffee, ordering laksa. 

In the early days we’d take the three kids down to clamber on the choo-choo train in the playground. Later they roamed the market  with a mobile phone and money in their pockets, collecting free samples of popcorn and banana smoothies, buying bubble-gum, seeing school mates. For a while they earnt good money busking.

It was a sweet routine. Z and I shopped for fruit and veg at our regular organic stalls, bought bunches of flowers, chatted to various people. Michael would be hunched over The Sydney Morning Herald, getting  indignant about all the stupidity and greed in the world. He’d chat with D. Friends and acquaintances came past. We met eachother's relatives - Anyone visiting from interstate was brought to the market on Saturday morning. 

Michael and ‘the girls’ had moved to the hinterland by this time and often D, F, and I would go back to their place, which was nearby, after the market. We’d sit on their big verandah overlooking Cooroy Mountain, drinking coffee, sometimes staying for lunch. We’d watch king parrots and rainbow lorrikeets feeding in the grevillea, egrets down by the billabong. The kids often had a sleep over. 

Even after moving down here, we’ve kept up the Saturday market ritual whenever we are up on The Coast, which is at least every month or so.  

M has had quite a few health scares in recent years - a couple of strokes, cancer, emergencies with ambulances and hospital. Gruelling times for his wife and daughter. He’s fought his way back from death’s door on several occasions. 

We hoped he’d live to see A graduate, or turn 21 or something. But then again, looking after him was wearing Z out terribly. It’s been a hard time for all of them. Constrained. Often when we’ve been there the last year or two he’s been mostly dozing on a lounge on the verandah, or in the recliner. His glasses askew, the newspaper flopped in his lap. 

Then a week or so ago, another stroke, and  the definite sense that he was getting ready to go. I went to see him four days before he died. Z had a Siddha chant, Om Nama Shiviya playing quietly in the background, and vases of flowers in the house.

Michael had stopped eating and was an insubstantial blur under the doona. A faint remnant of the big hearted old patriarch, who’d always greet you with a  rib-crushing bear hug, holding you to his heart. He was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him, but Z nudged him gently awake and said ‘Jane’s here to see you’

The old voice boomed out from somewhere inside his shrunken body:  ‘Hello Jane, I love you’ . ‘I love you too Michael’ I said, then sat in silence by his bed for a little while, feeling strangely peaceful and complete, and remembering when he used to sing the deep bass part in Z’s gospel choir Angels watching over me

He died at home with his wife and daughter beside him. 

We were all in Samoa together in 2008

*portrait of Michael by his wife
portrait by Michael's daughter of her parents several years ago

an afternoon of rare spontaneity

A friend rang today and asked if I could babysit her nearly-three year old daughter. Miraculously I was free  this afternoon, so I said ‘Yes’, and little Ellie was delivered to my door shortly afterwards. I was flattered that she was happy to be left with me - It’s the first time, and she’s a girl who knows her own mind. 

We waved off her Mummy and went back inside. E scouted around for a good spot and settled on the loungeroom floor, then set to getting out the contents of her little pink backpack. I had decided I would hang out with her, not try to keep doing stuff in the office.

She pulled out  some coloured modelling wax - just like F used to play with - and together we made various things - a flower, a snake , an umbrella, in yellow, purple, orange wax. We stuck them on a little wooden house which E’s Mum, she told me, had got at ‘a elephant’. A white elephant.

We conjured up floods and boats and ducks and cups of tea - at that point Ellie leapt up and sang “I’m a little teapot” complete with actions. I joined in. Tip me over, pour me out

Later I dug out an old Ikea children’s tent of F’s, and put it up on the verandah. She sat in there giggling and zipping and unzipping the front door. I was asked in. 

Then it was time to go and collect F, do a bit of shopping in town, then head up to K’s, where we’d been invited to come and pick mulberries. 

Click-click, into the car seat, familiar from long ago. I felt like a grandma, what a nice feeling. A little sticky hand in mine. Bright, open eyes. 

We met up with E’s Mum, and she joined us on the mulberry foraging visit. ‘It’s primal isn’t it?’ she said, as we stuffed ourselves with sweet fruit straight off the tree, our lips and fingers stained dark wine colour. Everyone rummaging among the greenery. Late afternoon on  this suddenly hot summer day, sitting in the grass, lolling about till almost dinnertime. 

inclusivity, love, mortality

30/08/11: 

Mary died yesterday morning. She was over ninety, but l’m not sure of her exact age. She was the sort of person you felt it would be rude to ask. Mary was an old-fashioned woman, the soul of discretion and integrity. A lady in an almost Jane Austen sense: fair-minded,  quietly spoken, perceptive, and always impeccably groomed. I was surprised when I discovered that beneath the conservative exterior lay not only a sharp mind, but  also some very non-conservative political opinions. 

When I saw her in Melbourne a few weeks ago I knew it would be the last time. She was suddenly a frail, pale old woman in a hospital bed, fading away. Still trying to put everyone at ease. She reminded me of my own mother in her final weeks. 

I sat on the bed and held her hand, a level of intimacy we would never have shared normally. I longed to tell her how much I’ve enjoyed knowing her. To recall the conversation we had a few years back, about how we women need our own solitary activity - Mine, writing, hers painting. She did exquisitely detailed botanical water colours.  

But I didn’t want to embarrass her. And it seemed as if it would be very bad manners for anyone to mention Death, or  even Goodbye. I shed a few tears when I walked out of the hospital room.

As recently as last Christmas Day, Mary and her companion, Dick, my stepfather, were still looking well turned-out. Sipping champagne and wearing Christmas bonbon hats  and joining in the conversation. Dick carved the turkey, although his hands were a little shaky and his son was at his elbow. 

Mary is the third of three much-loved women who Dick has lost. The first was the mother of his children. She  died of some sort of awful arthritis, a few years before he met  his second love, my mother.  

Mum was a decade younger than him, younger than I am now, when they met. She was healthy and bright and still beautiful. No one could ever have imagined she’d be dead ten years later of  breast cancer. 

I think the years with him were the happiest years of my mother’s life, and a sort of healing. She’d had a tough time with my father, then a succession of dodgy blokes. We all rejoiced when Laurel and Dick got together. And wept when she died, nineteen years ago today, strangely enough.  

Dick grieved terribly for my mother. He and I spent a lot of time together that first year or so after she died. We had cared for her together in the final months. He has been a sort of second father to me, a kind and sensible man, so unlike my real Dad, who was cynical and moody and drank too much. 

For about two years Dick’s  sadness lingered. He was never falsely cheerful, nor maudlin, but just accepted his feelings. I think it was his ability to allow the grief to run its course that ultimately freed him to love again.

Mary had known my mother, and also D’s first wife. She was a widow who had brought up her niece and nephew after their mother died. 

I often marvelled at the inclusiveness of this clan that gathered around Dick and his kids. He kept in touch with old friends of my mothers - even some who’d been my long-dead father's  friends or relatives, who he’d met via Mum. The names of my mother, and of his first wife were often 

spoken.

Dick and his family were a blessing bequeathed to me after Mum died. His three kids and their partners all seemed so different from my own experience of family, which had been full of petty feuds and fallings out. 

When I first met them - I was only in my twenties - I thought there was something wrong with them, that they wanted to have Sunday dinners together, to share a few glasses of wine and have rowdy dinner table conversations about books and politics, then go for a walk on the beach together. Like, Get A Life. 

After a while I realised they genuinely enjoyed eachother's company. And I enjoyed theirs. Somehow I  too had become family, or almost family. None of this changed when Dick re-partnered with Mary. They were both in their late seventies by then, but amazingly youthful. They always welcomed me and my little family whenever we were in Melbourne. Never ever forgot F’s birthday, or Christmas. Always had some interesting opinions, or books to recommend.

A few months ago Dick told me  cheerfully ( on the phone - I call him every few weeks) that he didn’t think he’d be here next Christmas, and I said “Don’t you dare die!’ and he joked back   - I could imagine his twinkly eyes  “ Oh alright, just for you I’ll hang around”

He is ninety four now. Everything is suddenly failing - He can barely walk, he is going deaf, and getting a little confused too. He is no longer able to look after himself at home. And now his companion is gone. 

His kids have found him a good place where he is cared for and it’s not too institutional and he can eat dinner in his room. But he knows this will be his last place, the final chapter of a good life. I know I’ll have to let go of him soon.

Human mortality is so sad. Even when people have had long lives. Or so it feels to me today.