roadhouse blues

Driving home down the highway early this morning, F and I. Not having got the thermos/picnic together, we pulled into one of those ubiquitous, identical BP places. Why had I forgotten what a very bad mood I always get into the moment I step inside? 

To begin with there is never anything there that I want to eat. Nothing but mass-produced overpackaged overpriced impersonal crapola junk food, mumble grumble grump. 

I manage to stay calm while F happily hoes into his ( horribly unethical, I’m sure, battery-raised, don’t think about it) eggs and bacon. It was an extra two dollars for scrambled not fried, then the poor cashier (name badge Kelly, greasy orange shirt, anxious face)  couldn’t work out what code to put into the computer for scrambled, had to call the supervisor. When did simple become so complicated?

I buy a coffee. This annoys me: you used to get a real cup, but now its all takeaway throw away, and there are three sizes, with what used to be normal now called ‘small’. With a plastic lid jammed on top wrecking all the chocolate-y froth on my cappuccino. Because its health regulations. And an icypole stick instead of a spoon. 

etcetera.

But the thing that really tips me over, as we emerge from the toilets before getting back into the car is a whole big wall display mural  telling us how much BP cares about the environment, exhorting us to save water like they do, boasting about all their terrific recycling and reducing (‘where possible’). I think I’d also noticed a display about (how the global oil company is protecting) the Great Barrier Reef...

God it’s just so bloody hypocritical I blurt. Shhh, says F, glancing anxiously around, Wait till we’re outside Mum. 

From now on I’m gonna make sure I’ve got the thermos. 

not a roadhouse, a shopping centre, same thing...

back at the screen

like returning to an old lover who is maybe not so good for you, but so delightfully distracting...like chocolate, like addiction...etc

We’ve been up at the beach house for the last week or so of the school hols, computer-free & only minimally online, emailing via the mobile phone. Haven’t missed the screen at all. But of course now we are reunited, me and the Mac - hours of catching up!

Old friends - a family of four with two teenaged girls - from Victoria stayed with us. R & S have been holidaying at the old house since long before their girls were born, since back when it was my mother’s place.

Our days were miraculously mild and sunny after a week of rain. We spent quite a bit of time lying around on the deck reading our books. The girls ran on the beach early every morning, and their Dad went surfing, with his big Malibu board over in the National Park each day before breakfast. He introduced F to surfing too, on a golden lit late afternoon at Ti Tree Bay.

L practised her viola, beautiful melancholy music. R played ukulele and sang ‘Dream A Little Dream Of Me’. We went for long walks, ate candlelit meals, watched the moon rise over the ocean. We played Scrabble, and cards, &  a manic game called ‘Ligretto’ that one of the girls got in Germany. Also Chinese Chequers and ‘Cheat’ and Charades. We  laughed a lot. We chatted about  parenting and Steiner Schools and books and travel and mutual friends and the terrifying state of the planet. Bought icecreams from Massimo’s. A sweet old-fashioned family holiday. 

Was it really that perfect? Will I mention my own personal internal existential toilings and moilings about various other things? Will I mention that I felt a little wobbley inside myself; and unable to entirely unplug from certain stressful things happening via email and phone... Nah, I won’t mention any of that. It was perfect. 

And we all felt sad this morning when it was time to say goodbye and head home. Back to school in a coupla days. 

time is a tempest

End of term,  Autumn Festival, and the usual moist-eyed experience of gratitude while sitting in the school amphitheatre watching my child and his peers celebrate on the small colourful stage, what looks to be an extraordinarily blessed childhood. Singing, dancing, playing music. I felt proud of our boy - he did a great clarinet solo - the intro to a Latin dance piece before the rest of the orchestra joined in part by part.

After the various performances, parents and kids were all invited down to the huge new covered outdoor sport area. A couple of locally famous musicians and percussionists were playing with a handful of the older students.

We all - four or five hundred adults and primary and secondary aged children - danced around them in a circle to stirring  Greek/Israeli/ Celtic tunes, singing and clapping and swinging our partners  in happy swirling chaos with little kids running underfoot .

I had the sense of participating in something archetypal, a community ritual celebration of  the changing season. Wanted to store up the sweet memories, like sun-filled fruit preserved for winter. Also a ripple of something like melancholy, a knowledge of how quickly things can change, how fast children grow up, that we could all be dead tomorrow. Which made the moment  all the more precious.

year 5 Bollywood dancers

...Time is a tempest

and we are all travellers

travelling through the storm...

(Half-remembered song from the Autumn Festival. Everyone joined in)

Autumn Festival 2010

electricity

There was a blackout last night, while I was at my ‘Beginners’ Ukulele’ class. The classroom emergency lighting came on and we finished the night plunking our way through ‘Jamaica Farewell’ and ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ in a sort of penumbral greenish gloom, barely able to make out the chord charts.

When I got home, D met me with a torch as I got out of the car. There was a candle burning on the front door step, and inside he and F had lit many candles. It was magical. 

Of course I couldn’t check the emails or fart about in cyberspace as I normally would, so I got into bed with my book at 9.30 and read by torchlight with a candle by the bed. Like the Olden Days. How simple, how cosy.

It was the second blackout this week. On monday night D was at choir and  I was playing Chinese Chequers with F when the lights went out. We lit dozens of candles and then continued our game wearing our camping headlight torches. 

autumn wind

autumn haiku

autumn wind

final frangipani flower

falls

after the rainstorm

clouds move across

sunlit puddles

last week's summer beach towel

still hangs on

this week's winter verandah

awesome relationship banking lifestyle

(one of my periodic rants about the horrible things being done to the English Language) 

My latest bank statement from Macquarie Bank has at the top  of it the new words ‘Relationship Banking’ Presumably this is meant to imply friendly personal service, despite the fact that all my interactions with Macquarie take place online. The only ‘relationship’ involved is between me and the Mac.

Then again, Relationship Banking could be a new product, where you put all your relationships in the bank, until later when you need them. Something like  a seed bank or ‘Self Storage’

There’s also a letter from American Express. It’s one of  the drab new terms and conditions sort, rather than the glossy  You deserve privileges sort. There is a new term and condition called called ‘Liquidated Damages’, which on close inspection means simply  ‘We’re gonna sting you and extra $30 if your payment is overdue’.

I go to the hardware shop and buy a couple of new terracotta pots, in which I plan to plant  marigolds. 

There is a sticker on each pot which says ‘Lifestyle Pot’. I’m not making this up. How a Lifestyle Pot differs from an ordinary plant  pot, one can only imagine...

My old dentist at  Noosa Junction did a big makeover on his premises a few years back - smart furniture, new receptionist with groovy hairstyle etc. And a new logo saying ‘Your Lifestyle Dentist’ Like, what, he only fixes lifestyles, you’ll have to find someone else to do your teeth? Or maybe going to the dentist actually is a lifestyle? 

Lifestyle : What a sleazy, shallow pathetic excuse for a word!  What a pretentious, unimaginative, vacuous, meaningless overused crap word! 

Still, I reckon Lifestyle is just about at the end of it’s run - It started off attached to exclusive property developments where couples in white clothes sipped champagne by their spa pools, then spread to dentists, and is now plastered on lowly pot plants, and every  other unpresteigous item in the marketplace. 

Who cares about the demise of dreary old ‘Lifestyle’ - it was a phoney from the start. 

A much worse affront  is the dumb abuse of lovely, once-meaningful words like ‘passionate’ and ‘awesome’ 

Words once used in connection with great love affairs, or crimes, or gods or erupting volcanoes, or piano concertos, are now applied to tacky real estate and new colours in nail polish.

There is always more on this aggravating subject. I’d better stop, before I get on to how ‘teaching’ has become ‘delivering curriculum’; and executing a plan has become ‘rolling out’ and evaluating something has become a matter of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and...

Yes ‘ I’d better stop and get back to that mess on my desk...grumpy grumble... mumble...

thinking about Maningrida

This boy was one of my students when I taught at the  Maningrida school in Arnhem land in 1989. Rodney. He probably has kids of his own by now. I don’t know, because I have never been back. 

It was the end of the year, and we went out to the billabong as a special break up celebration. What I remember is how the kids came alive out there - like all kids do around water.  They smeared white clay all over their hands, faces, and black bodies. They  looked so beautiful, and so right in that landscape. 

Much better than how they looked in a classroom, furrowing their brows trying to grasp hold of our peculiar whitefella ways, our measuring and labelling and  numbers. Their  own language had no words for numbers beyond one, two, three and many. 

They had six words to describe their changing seasons, and innumerable words (so the linguist told me) for local varieties of shellfish.

These kids’ ancestors had lived in this place for thousands of years attuned to  the tides and winds and seasons, with out ever needing to measure time or space or volume as we do. 

As I floundered around explaining how there were sixty seconds in a minute and when the big hand was on 8, it meant ‘twenty to’ , it all seemed sillier and sillier. I felt like I was sinking into quicksand.

I also noticed how we whitefellas are always asking questions. And how so  much of being a (white, Western) teacher was about asking questions you already knew the answer to, and waiting for someone to get it ‘right’. 

The kids often took this as a wild guessing game. As I pointed to countries on the yellowed classroom map of the world, they enthusiastically  called out random names of countries - ‘America!’ , ‘China!’  - hoping to hit the jackpot.

They yelled out times tables in noisy rythmic unison, like a chant or a prayer - and had not the slightest sense of what multiplication was. 

At times I wondered what the hell I was doing there.  I always had the feeling I learnt more from the kids than they did from me.

Maningrida was a sort of exile for me, a magical and lonely time in a country more foreign than India or France. I’d come with a broken heart, having fled as far from Melbourne and my ex-lover as I could go without leaving the country. The children at Maningrida helped heal my heart, with their  bright voices and cute dancing , their joy and affection.  They were like Nature spirits, so pure.

With their husky midnight blue voices. There were two questions they always asked “Where’s your Mother?” and “Where’s your Country?”.

As I pointed vaguely to the south, there was an empty, displaced  feeling in my heart, of my own foreignness to this country.

Mum's voice in the mildewy phone box under the mango tree, from two thousand miles away, coughing. A few weeks before the end of term. Her cancer had returned. The smell of rotting mangoes filled my nostrils. I walked down to the muddy, mangrove-y beach and looked out at the Arafura Sea, where you occasionally saw crocodiles sliding through the milky water. I knew it was time to go - back to my Country, and back to my Mother


Soon after the day I took these photos, I left Maningrida. As the little plane took off and the settlement shrank into a toy town among swampy greenery and snakey brown rivers, I had the thought that I would probably never return

Now, more than twenty years later, I’ve been presented with an opportunity to go back to Maningrida, for a couple of days. It's in a few months time, as part of an environmentalists/philanthropists field trip. I think I’ll go .

hairy metaphors

D has started blogging. More accurately, he now has a blogger ‘account’ and has been checking out other people’s blogs. And he has a title for his own as-yet unwritten blog.  It gives us something in common, apart from F. 

It also gives us  something to talk about in the car driving up to Maleny last Friday arvo. We are going up for one night,  for our old friend  L’s 60th  ( yes, sixtieth!) birthday celebration ‘soiree’. We’ve left F behind to have a sleepover at his mate’s - a first. 

As we drive north through the green hills of the Tweed Valley I tell D I’m a bit sick of my blog. I’m sick of my nice, fair-minded, sensible persona, and all those pictures of flowers. It’s dull! I’m nostalgic for a younger, bolder version of myself who told it like it was and bugger the consequences.

Though actually, it was excruciating at times, my terrible teenage/early 20's honesty. My Saggitarian tactlessness was a social handicap. I was always the one saying how bad someone’s new haircut looked, oblivious to the fact that everyone else had gone quiet because the  person was walking in the door behind me. I also learnt that  most people don’t really want to hear the truth. Still struggle with that one. 

I envied those quiet mysterious girls who the boys found so alluring. I tried to be like them, tried to just shut up and look mysterious - but sooner or later I’d blow it and blurt out some un-mysterious thing.

Later for a brief period, I embraced being loud, at least visually - blue spikey hair and red (‘80s feminist) overalls.

Since then I have cultivated discretion and diplomacy. All very wise and necessary. But I am missing something. Some sort of risk-taking edge, some willingness to let fly. In my life, and my writing. Maybe it’s just a symptom of middle age, of responsible parenthood. 

Yeah says D, his eyes on the road as we slide up the Bruce Highway through the dreary concrete and asphalt  limbo of South East Queensland. I know what you mean. Up until now he’s only ever said he likes my blog, good, easy to read etc. 

He tells me about going to a hairdresser in London thirty years ago. Some very flash place, Vidal Sassoon. It was  a sort of masterclass for hairdressers, he was one of the models. The woman doing his hair did a lovely job, he was happy, it looked good. Then the visiting celebrity artiste-hairdressing instructor came around and said “Yes, very nice, Darling, but it just needs a bit of ...- this!” And in a wild spontaneous guesture she snipped out a chunk of D’s hair.

And it looked even better. The person who’d given the original  cut was upset. But I bet she learnt something. That’s what your writing lacks he said. Hmm. How to cut to the chase?