brushstrokes..

It’s late here..I'm tired from the drive down to Morwell today but want to put down something before I go to bed. Something about mum and being with her on a wet November afternoon. She’d been out at an activities day organised by the health services at her local council.. She looked tired but better than she's been for some months.. We had a look at the garden.. I swept the path that was covered in rain-soaked pink fuchsia buds and made tea for the two of us.. An omelette which she seemed to enjoy. We watched the news as we ate and saw a boy from Morwell take a hat-trick at the Gabba.. I still don't know how much she actually sees.. Before I left to go home, as we stood together in the kitchen she picked up a brush and did my hair. . It’d been raining through the afternoon and the back of my head had gotten wet. . as she pushed the bristles through, so lightly that the ends flicked up around the sides of my ears, I remembered how she dried and combed my hair when i was young, how safe i felt tucked into her chest, how calm and strong her hands were and as I stood there at the bench trying with all my might to stay in the moment stay in the real and now with her at 92 and me touching 60, stay in this holy moment and hear her telling me  I have good hair and  I feel so loved, so young..

Wayne..

Wayne died on Thursday. He lived on his own across the road at 17. I thought something was up when I went outside about 6 and saw a group of people standing in the front yard of his house. Some were on mobiles, a few were smoking. His sister appeared from the back and went up to the house but no one followed her in. I tossed out the tealeaves, broke off a few spent geranium flowers and went inside.

Wayne barracked for Collingwood and during the season the front window of the house featured a Weg Magpie poster. Grand final day started early over there. Even when his side wasn’t playing he still flew the flag. The side gate would swing open around 9 and all morning his mates would be up and down that drive carrying in the supplies.

He liked a drink and was quite overweight. His parties were legendary. He held them for just about anything. Mostly they were loud. In the early days of living on his own they didn’t finish too well. Around 2 or 3 am when the music would have begun to tone down, there’d be an argument or a bit of shouting and on a couple of occasions I remember women screaming to stop what must have been a fight. It wasn’t Wayne’s fault though. His friends were the wild ones. A few times I went over in the morning to complain about the fact that we’d hardly slept and he’d look down at the ground and shake his head as if he couldn’t believe it either.

I liked his parents. They were an old-fashioned couple who’d lived in the area all their lives. Sonny retired from working at the Heinz factory in Dandenong not long after we moved here and I remember seeing him going off in a mate’s car each week in a white shirt and black trousers carrying a piano accordion on his lap. He played in the local senior citizen’s band. Rhoda pottered about in the garden looking after a few roses. On Sunday afternoons she’d be in an apron standing at the top of the steps waving her children and grandchildren goodbye.

They died within a year of each other and because Wayne was the only one of their kids who wasn’t married, he just stayed on. He wasn’t too flash with looking after the place. When the canvas awnings began to tear and then fray into strips that fluttered in the breeze, Wayne didn’t bother replacing them or even pull up the inside blinds. The house took the full strength of the afternoon sun and that was that. It was enough for him to mow the lawns and put out the bins on a Sunday evening. His mates would sit on the front steps smoking and having a beer. I don’t know what sort of a job he had. For some years he drove a yellow mini minor with a bumper sticker that said Don’t look too closely, your daughter might be inside.


I never saw him with a girl.

His nickname was Bluey, he was a committeeman with the local cricket club and the scorer for many years. I doubt if he ever missed a game.

Beyond a smile and wave when we were out the front at the same time, I only had a few conversations with him. One night I was home alone during an earth tremor and met him on the road when I went outside to see what had happened. He didn’t have a lot to say. We both laughed and said we’d meet again if the house fell down.

On Thursday night I went to my brother’s for his birthday and when I arrived home a fellow was standing on the porch. He told my husband and me that his cousin Wayne had suffered a heart attack in the afternoon. Apparently he’d been unwell for a couple of weeks but hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. An ambulance crew called and took him to hospital but he died soon afterwards. By 4.30 his mates at the pub knew.

He was 48.

Tonight it’s Saturday night and not one light’s on at no 17. I look across the road and just see an empty house.

song of a late afternoon..

not much comes..
but here, just now as I stop to put the laptop away
and get ready to make the tea,
I hear birds..
I hear birdsong that's different to birds' voices at any other time of the year,
late winter, southern hemisphere, Berwick.
Outside my kitchen window
birds are finishing up for the day,
Closing their shops,
sweeping the floors,
putting away the bits and pieces of their work for the afternoon.
They're about to go home.

Before they go, they sing their music.
Squirt the notes into the cold air like this...

                                 s s s s s s s s s and wwwwwwwww and t t t t t t t t ...


                                     up and down, side to side, over and under,
                                                  over and over they sing
                                                     

They sing their song in through the window, over a sink
and all around this room where I sit
listening and waiting ...
finding my words at last.

boot..

On the way to my mum's yesterday, driving along the Princes Freeway not too far out of Pakenham, I saw a boot lying beside the road.. A brown Blundstone, in very good nick.. What caught my eye was this.. The boot didn't look as if it had accidentally dropped off the back of a truck, nor did it look as if it had been there for long. No. That boot was a freshly laid egg. It had a purpose about it and I recognized it straight away. That boot was the first art of the trip.


It looked as if it was about to begin a life of its own.. There was some power in the way it lay.. Instead of going off on the exit to Nar Nar Goon, it was coming on.. Heading into traffic..Kicking against the flow.. On a 45 degree angle and in the centre of the bitumen it stood there catching the light on its leather skin.. A bit like the way a man might stand - his back to the sun, drawing strength from the big yellow ball as he waited alone on a road.


I turned the radio down, right down as though that brown boot had slipped through the back window while I was driving by and now was on the seat beside me.  I had company for a while. The boot was with me.. I'd picked up a hitch-hiker.

I had to ask-

who are you?

how long were you waiting?

what's yr story?




I drove along smiling. I had a picture.  I had a story. I wondered who'd been wearing the boot before i'd met it..

 a builder or plumber- who couldn't face going to work?

a youth who missed his mum,

or his girlfriend

or his mates?

a boy who wished so badly he was back at school kicking the footy at recess

or talking to a girl in the corridor?


The boot had what's known as attitude but not something you'd take offence at, not that selfish, boorish stuff that passes for being cool. No. That boot had such a strong individual sense of itself that I wanted to put it on, hold my foot down on the pedal and for just a few kms try out some other life..

.a man's life at half past 11 on a bright winter morning..

a little black book..

.

The book fits in my hand like a slim paperback. Its black cardboard cover creased in a web of lines like old skin. On the inside cover written in a firm even script is his first entry
                                Geelong Police
                                1926 Phone Number


Just below this is a faded lemon 1 penny stamp and midway down the page is an inscription in my mother's own handwriting .

                Thomas Joseph Bowden a police man from 1915 until 1939.

The first page is in pencil and though the lead has faded I can make out the names of Alfred Edward Bush from Rupanyup and James Ross from Greens Creek who must produce their licences to Police within seven days.
My grandfather keeps a record of Seized Goods from around this time beginning with J R Hutchings on 28/12/28
         1 Buick Car
         1 Heater
         6 Draught Horses

I turn the pages and find longer lists of property items that tell stories of their own:

One race horse (known as Cashil)
one Bay horse 1 Black Pony
one Chestnut  one Grey
Two Draughts one Dray
Three Cows one Single Furrow Plough
40 Head Cattle one Harrows
one Writing Desk
one Lounge suite one Table
1 Carpet Square 1 Gramaphone
1 Apollo Phone
one Book Case one D.R. Table
1 Side Board 1 Tea Waggon
one Carpet square 1 Wash Stand
1 Dressing Table one carpet
1 oak Wardrobe  one dressing table
one Carpet
T Lindsay seized 4/9/29


Good seized at Grassmede on 24/7/29
1 Case of Gordon's Gin 1 Doz
1 Case of Black and White Whisky 2 1/4 Doz
4 Bots of Robinsons Yellow Label whisky
1 Case of Fosters Lager 4 Doz.
2 Cases of S..... Wine 8 Doz
2 Cases of Lawries Whisky 2 Doz
1 Case Snowy        4 Doz
2 Boxes Capstan Cigarettes 100 pkts
1 Box County Life Cigarettes
1 1/2 Doz Flasks Brandy Le Beaumont
210 ozs Doz Flasks Johnnie Walker
8 12 Doz Moonbeam Cocktail
7 Chairs 1 Piano  2 couches
1 Table 1 Wireless set  7 chairs
3 Tables 1 Over Mirror
Carpets   Cocoanut Matting
1 Piano   one Specimen Case
3 Lounge Chairs     5 Chairs
one mirror    one clock
1 Walnut Bed Suit  20 Carpet Squares
1 Wardrobe    5 Chairs
2 Tables    1 Side board
              1 Dressing Table
Mr Thomas Lindsay  
  Woolsthorpe
Seized in connection with County Court Warrant
on 24.7.29
    One Hudson car
  No. 747444
======================

Will fix it as soon as
 possible  possibly on
Saturday
=====================

One report is only 4 lines long

Ian Sharpley
13 years of age on October last
driving Car up Selby St Stawell
on 15.1.29 at 12.20 pm



I hope to put more of my grandfather's notes on this blog.

june 22nd..

I'm just about to finish the day at school and all I want to say is  I've thought of my sister  a lot throughout this the 22nd June, her special day.

I loved her sense of fun.

I loved her ability to see things plainly and simply "you know what you know" would so often be the words I'd take away after we'd hung up the phone..

She had the gift of being able to praise you when you needed it .

She had so much good in her-

A great spark in her being

Happy Birthday Michele wherever you are on this day

Loveyou...

x

on the page again..

so here I am at the desk.. back at the tree to be precise.  the apple tree  beyond the sunroom window... for company today I have two blackbirds -male and female- hopping on a couple of branches  that are higher than the ceiling of this room.. now they're resting in the leaves.. above the greenery a nest of blue sky..

******

I've been reading a series called My Hero in The Guardian..  Nick Clegg, the leader of the New Democrats considers Samuel Beckett his hero. Why? He admires the fact that the Irish author asked dangerous questions... Doing so came naturally to him..It was just his particular way of thinking I suppose..  Anyway like many others, I regard this as a refreshing insight into the mind of a politician..

Thinking about Clegg's choice prompted me to look back and see which heroes others had nominated.

Gordon Brown whom one of his party's candidates recently called  " the worst Labor Prime Minister the country's ever had"  was  more predictable in his choice.  Nelson Mandela.  According to Brown, Mandela is a man "whose generosity of spirit and capacity for forgiveness make him a true hero for our times."

Aside from those politicians,  I was actually more interested in the selections Irish writers Colm Toibin and John Banville had made. 

Jack Yeats, the painter and younger brother of the famous WB  was Toibin's choice. Apparently the artist spent much of his life trying to understand  and capture in his work  the  light of the Irish landscape. The  play of light that he saw in the sky, in city streets and as it fell on the faces of  people going about their daily lives. This is what most fascinated him.  Painting with the right kind of light  was the thing he tried to do - over and over and over.  Toibin says that Yeats left no record of himself other than his paintings and "it seems there is no evidence he ever in his life discussed anything that was of great private concern to him"
Could this be really true?

Banville writes about a labrador named Ben.   Not a word is wasted.  I take the liberty of quoting the final paragraphs of his piece.

Though Ben was a handsome fellow he was not overly bright, as is the way with labradors. He could be annoying, was often smelly, insisted on what he considered to be his rights – good grub and plenty of it and two walks a day – and could lick himself with noisy relish in places the equivalent of which in a human being are not even visible to the person's unaided eye. Yet he cared for us, kept us exercised, tolerated our children and even, when the occasion required, guarded them; and, a gift above all gifts, he made us laugh.

Nietzsche writes: "I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal." Ben, I am certain, recognised our terrible, human, predicament and tried to help us as best he could along our hard road. We were, however, a constant mystery to him, and it was in his brave, unwearying, dogged efforts to understand us that his heroism lay. Good dog, Ben.

old friends..

I come home with a speculaas in my hand. The small, flat Dutch biscuit that tastes of cinnamon and sugar. I put it on the table. I cannot eat when I’m sitting there with the two of them. Feels like the end of something good. She’s so dependent on him.

Thin. Hair's cut short. Like a young boy who’s been clipped by his dad. Hollow cheekbones. Can’t focus. Bony. Maroon cardigan. Pale blue blouse. Tan woollen skirt. Short socks. Slippers.
I hold her hand and stroke her arm. Skin is warm and shiny. Like old satin. Now and then she takes her hand away and fiddles with her hanky. Rubs it across her mouth and then feels for the pocket in her cardigan to put it back into. Takes her a few goes before she finds the hole.
Her English is going. I speak louder than normal. As clearly as I can. Tell her about the kids and hope there’ll be something familiar in what I say that she can hold on to and remember.


I wrote that note to myself a year ago. At the time Nan and Bob were living across the road and most weeks I saw them. Either walking past on their daily circuit of the block or on my days off when I'd pop over for a coffee in the afternoon. Nan had been gradually losing her sight - macular degeneration- and her confidence. Bob did everything. In a matter of weeks he had to learn to shop, cook and clean the house. Then as time went on, she needed more care and Bob took over the task of washing and bathing her. He shrugged when I told him it was hard on him. "No matter" he said. "She's been good to me. Now it's my turn."

But after a few months like this it became too difficult to manage so they left their house and moved into their daughter's unit in the next street. A temporary thing. Ellen put up a few of their pictures and brought around some furniture. The coffee table with the fretwork legs that looked like tiny musical clefs, made by Bob when he was a young man, was now in a small sunroom. Up in the corner above the main window was the heavy wooden wall hanging that looked like the front of a pedlar’s cart. Bob had told me it once belonged to his parents and that he and Nan brought it out on the ship with them when they migrated to Australia in 1952.

The flat was crowded and the kitchen where Ellen and her husband might be talking was only a few feet away from the room where we sat. . When I went to see Nan and Bob I felt more like guest than a friend. Much as I wanted to keep up the connection, going to the unit wasn't the same as being able to just pop across the street. Gradually the frequency of the visits dropped away.
Last week, after a long break I called to see them.. Ellen and her husband were about to go out and Nan and Bob were sitting in the sunroom. Nan in a long white skirt and blue blouse (a peasant woman from an old painting) and Bob in his trademark flannel shirt and light trousers(he's a man who's used to being busy). Before they left Ellen took her mother for a walk around the room, a slow shuffling exercise holding onto her arms. "Don't lift her up while we're out Dad. It's not good for your back" Nan was shaky when Ellen lowered her into the chair. Her blindness is almost total. She's put on weight, looks puffy now. Bob didn't move while this was going on.
I thought of those lovely afternoons when we'd sit together and chat. Nan would make coffee and put out the speculaas. She had a way of saying his name with an upward note in her voice that sounded girlish and happy, as though no matter how many years they'd been together, she was still so proud of her catch.

"Bor-b.." she'd say and he'd pull out the table for her to put down the cups and saucers and just go on talking. He was interested in language. There were Dutch and English dictionaries on the bookshelf and when words came up that we were unsure of, he'd take those books down and we'd look things up and try to find a common thread. Dutch vowels were "so simple" he told me and I'd repeat words after him to prove it. One day, not long after I first visited them, I said that I felt at home in their house. It was more than feeling comfortable though, it just seemed as if there was a particular spirit in the room itself that made our time together so enjoyable. Bob nodded and told me there was a Dutch word for this feeling kuzzella. He wondered if I knew of an equivalent in English but I couldn't come up with one so we settled on the Dutch to describe the secret of the afternoon. After this, so many visits would end with that word. Kuzzella. Thanks for the kuzzella I'd say.

One morning they had a clean-out and in the afternoon when I answered the door they were standing there with a small print of Amsterdam that had come from the mantelpiece in their lounge room. In the corner of the picture was a dark brick building and at the entrance way a woman was bent on her knees scrubbing the flagstones. .In a cobbled lane beside the building another woman leaned over a wash trough. In the early years of their marriage, I knew Bob and Nan had actually lived down that lane. "We thought you'd like this. You know all about it.” I made room for it on my mantelpiece. Later when they'd left I looked to see if there was a hook on the back. Instead I found a slip of paper pasted onto the board. Het Straatje. Johannes Vermeer Van Delft. (The Little Street) I felt so honoured.

Last week, when I visited them, Nan didn't know me. I kissed her on the cheek but I could have been anyone. Her eyes were frightened and she spoke in Dutch to Bob. "She's saying she doesn't remember you. It's okay; she's not sure about anything anymore."

So Bob and I just chatted. He'd had a recent trip to hospital, a little trouble with his heart and he told me he had to take things easy. That explained why he'd hardly moved from his sunroom chair.

Then when it was time for them to have lunch, we said goodbye. Bob followed me to the door. As we were saying goodbye he held my hand tightly in his. I kissed him on the cheek and he told me he'd never forget me.  When I reached the footpath I looked back and saw that he'd stepped out from the warmth of the room and was standing on the porch waving me off. The little spark was still there. It was only when I got home that I realized I'd forgotten to thank him for the kuzzella.

snippet from the past..

One week in and I’m as young as them. Drive, walk, eat, talk, laugh, sleep. Easy living. Nothing better. We plot our way around the country like gypsies. Today we’re off to Glenveagh because the man behind the counter of an internet café in Westport has told us we shouldn’t miss it.. The landscape slips by like a spool of film across the glass. There are cardboard signs for Wexford strawberries and New Potatoes then a painted board outside a library reminding me that CHRIST DIED 4 THE UNHOLY. . It’s Sunday and no point asking the boys if they’re interested in going to mass. I’m not either. Our rental car is the best little church in the world.  Peaceful and warm..

reasons..

Reasons why I haven't written..
Because of Jack's will we have money to fix up the kitchen.. After 30 years of watching the pennies and five kids moving through the house there's a lot to do..

During August/September tradesmen ring the bell at 7 am most week day mornings. Probably not every day but the fact that one could come means things are out of sync.  It feels like we're living in a share house and I start putting on a dressing gown as soon as I get out of bed.. .Some are here for hours pulling out pipes or slapping on plaster and overall they're loud and funny to listen to... The plasterer gets so angry, so angry with the ceiling... He talks to it as though it could answer him back ....  And then there are the silent ones, the apprentices who hardly say a word..Awkward and sleepy looking,. I wonder how long it is since they were at school with their mates, kicking a footy at recess,  each day taking care of itself.....All past tense now as they take orders from a boss..  Builder, electrician, plumber, cabinet maker, plasterer, floor sander and the last on board is the painter who turns out to be the father of one of the children I teach. .They arrive in overalls and boots and take up their tools and do the job .. Only one is grouchy and I can't work out why until I comment to the air-con fellow who's noticed it too and thinks if might be because he's expected to do something he hasn't allowed time for.. On the way to the car we cross paths and I tell him I'm sorry if he didn't know about the job. and he says he'll try to fit it in ... The following day late in the afternoon he's back on the doorstep. I do not recognize him such is the change in his face..  He's dropped by to put in a dimmer switch and even has time to advise on another part of the job.. I'm amazed at the change in his manner. .. .I tell him he looks so different and say it might be his cap  but we both know it's not..


Ad because they're here there's no pattern about the day. I feel like I'm on duty with them. I find myself distracted from whatever it is I'm doing, just watching them work.
This is my nest after all.

After they've gone, all gone,  I discover the pleasure of painting.. walls and ceiling, architraves, skirting boards, dado, doors
One wall takes 3 days to get right. I hang up a still life by Margaret Olley when it's finished.

Perfect match with the gum green background...

the watcher..

little Paddy
old friend
lying in the sun
waiting on a word..

out there..

Yesterday I took a few pictures of the view from the sunroom window. It's the room where I write. In previous lives, angled-off by a folding door, it's been a play-room, study and when we were really pushed for space we squeezed in a mattress and base and it became a bedroom for a small boy-Michael first and  some years later, Dan.. 


I like working here. I love the way light sifts through the apple tree.. a kind of lime and yellow light  For the past year or so because of a laptop i've had to have for school, I've gravitated to other places - the kitchen table, the study (also once a bedroom) and on warm afternoons on a table out the back. .... lately, however, the laptop's been playing up and  in the last few weeks I"ve begun life anew on the computer here in the sunroom.. This desk is the place where I started taking writing seriously. The place where I began to think I could put things down a little more permanently than in exercise books and on bits of paper I carried in my bag.
Anyway after that little preamble I want to show you a photo I took yesterday..

look hard.. a fabulous lorikeet has just dropped by..

bird and bell..

how it is..


yesterday i had a mini meltdown.. an American term i know but the way i felt and the way i might have looked to you if you'd seen me, would make you think the description was pretty well on the mark..
i'd spent most of the day in the classroom at school, setting it up again for the year.. most starts-of-the-year i'm like this but yesterday it was a stronger upheaval than usual.. i do not want to go back to work.. i think i've probably just had enough.. being at home seems like the best way to live.. it's not that it's easy.. more that life lived at home taking the days as they come has become my reality of peace, being here in the day gives me time to make sense of the world outside this one..

am i a writer? i try to be.. i do what i can with what i have.. i like my own company and i like the company of words.. i'd like to say i play with words but i don't really think this is the case.. i'm more of an amateur in that area.. still making connections with them.. still pulling them out of the sea inside my head, still trying to work out which ones to keep and which to toss back..

and, saying all this, under the green umbrella of a cherry-plum tree in the back yard, can i tell you that i've not long finished reading My Father's Suitcase? ..Orhan Pamuk's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. .. my friend Vilma gave me a photocopy of it when i saw her last night.

it starts : Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts, and notebooks...

i am sitting in a backyard in Berwick, Australia January 2010 reading the words of a man in Istanbul, Turkey speaking to an audience in Oslo in December 2006 and i feel his presence with me as though he was sitting on the other side of the table..a green, wooden bird-spattered table tucked inside a shaded space, bamboo chime clunking in the breeze behind us..

just after i finished reading his essay, i had one of those moments where every moving, sounding, seeable thing seizes on your attention and gets it.. one by one i go through what i see hear, feel, smell can touch, can't touch, have met before, haven't seen ever.. an all-of- a-sudden rises up and i'm aware of the life of a thing in the big world of everything.. the dog lying on his back in the stick-up grass rubbing back and forth on an itchy spot, the heat-burnt purple bottle-brushes of a shrub near the fence that would flake into black crumbs in my fingers if i touched them, two pieces of pottery nailed to the palings, one a circle of chubby angels, the other a terracotta square with a central flower ..and while i'm thinking what the flower is,

a rush of wind blows over the yard and throws me off course and i hold onto the papers and listen to leaves and shut my eyes and hear a breath in my head ..the breath of my sister.. Michele used to catch her breath when she was sleeping a little k.kaw i could hear lying on the top bunk beside her single iron bed that had belonged to the nuns, her bed against the window on the other side of our room. my sister who died and now lives in my head, in birdsong, in birdflight, in the windchime i bought at a nursery in Warrandyte in December..Three tin birds connected by a beaded leather cord and on the end of the cord a funnel shaped bell that rings now in the wind like a school bell did in the 50s in Morwell where we all went to school. all nine of us.. here we are again, here we run around the playground ringed by pines, the long block of playground and us running all over the place and yelling to each other free and noone looking at us and all on our own here in the yard of my mind.