From serenity to chaos

‘The metamorphosis of childhood.’ Susan Choi. 

Write within the cruel constraints of time, even as the impulse might be to avoid. 

Reading Susan Choi’s novel Flashlight I’m stunned by her capacity with words to tell a story that is complex and compelling. A story that hints at the diversity of lives. The story spans the course of history and leaves you gasping. A type of insight into what it’s like to grow up in a country that is foreign to your birth right even as it is the land of your birth. 

Such is Seok’s story and then that of his daughter Louisa born to an American woman whose life takes a turn when she is nineteen and gives birth to a son whom her otherwise married to another partner takes away from her to raise with his wife. 

Louisa comes along years later after her mother sees almost nothing of her son and Louisa who begin life as a lovely infant whose Japanese/Korean/ American father is constantly fearful for her well-being grows into a precocious young girl who must repeat grade four because she shifts countries three times and although she masters at least two languages must also tackle the hardship of constant migration against her will.

And then when her father disappears which happens at the beginning of the book then trace back over the next several chapters to understand how we got there. The story of her parents till about the middle where we catch up to events in the beginning and then follow onto a conclusion that is as exciting and intriguing as any book I have ever read.

She talks about the metamorphosis of childhood, the way as children we shift constantly. And I my mind’s eye I see my own grandchildren whose baby years run so fast. And now grandmother of a nineteen-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old grandson I find these years the most perplexing as I found my own children’s adolescence the toughest time of all.

Mainly because in some way I think I might have by passed adolescence getting the message it was safer to by-pass that difficult period and move straight from childhood into adulthood thereby avoiding all that in between difficulty of the tempestuous years when we fluctuate between thinking we know it all and are invincible to its opposite. 

The image on the front cover of my copy of Flashlight intrigues me, the sight of a small girl around ten walking alongside her father, their backs to the camera heads bowed looking under the gentle waves that lap at their feet. Each in white shirts, his long sleeved her a t-shirt. She wears shorts and he rolled up jeans. Her hands at her side as if for balance against the wobbly sand while his are clasped behind his back. And once you’ve read the first chapter of this astonishing book you know that all this will change in a heartbeat.

From serenity to chaos.

And isn’t this the way life can be, including the metamorphoses of childhood when one minute all is calm and the world feels predictable, to the moment it tilts on its axis, and we’re plunged into a swirling abyss of not knowing what’s to come.

And soon I will walk the two dogs in my care, Dogs who have been with us for two weeks now and due to tackle another two weeks before they return to their arms. And life with dogs is also unpredictable. 

At this moment all calm peaceful quiet but at any minute they might erupt in fits of barking especially when my fifteen year old grandson who is also staying with us but he only for the weekend, when he comes down the stairs and the bigger dog, a labradoodle, black and furry and loud, wags her tail and barks ferociously at first seemingly out of anger but more recently out of a determination that he should throw a ball for her. 

The dog is obsessed with ball throwing as many a dog. Throw that ball and I will retrieve it and return it to you as is my destiny. This dog from the poodle family initially trained to be water dogs for hunters. The dogs fetched the dead birds as they landed dead over water. 

And just now my stream of thoughts was interrupted by the sensitive hearing of the little Jack Russell who can hear the meanderings of my grandson from bathroom to bedroom and will not be satisfied until he materialises. 

So, I will take these dogs for a walk to remove all trace of nastiness and then my day might well progress. With its ever-increasing swirls of certainty and uncertainty. Beyond my final dream of the morning, whose initial details are vague. Only I was engaged in helping friends and others rescue a small child from a family who do not want her, a type of Cinderella story and then I look down a flight of stairs and see the face of my analyst at her door. 

She has seen me from this distance, and I’m delighted to carry down my little granddaughter, plump in my arms, to introduce the two. But Mrs Milanova makes the mistake of sitting on the stairs as I approach, beaming up at me and by the time I reach her, her body gets stuck in some way and she cannot move. 

I cannot help her much as I want but she reassures me her sons will arrive soon and with them some person from elderly care who is trying to talk her into something she does not want. And her final words to him, give me a small pension, and then I will consider. And he disappears. 

Here my dream ends. And with it, this meandering post from Flashlight to dogs and dreams.

On hope, ageing and experiment

‘We are already born. We are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.’ Toni Morrison

The operative term here is that you respect. Morrison goes on, ‘Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part, but the grandeur of that life is in that attempt, it’s not about the solution.’  

Likewise, people tend to talk about ageing and death as problems to be solved rather than parts of our lives we must live out. The ageing part that is, if we’re lucky enough to live that long. 

As usual I’m finding it hard to slip into the part of life that is mine, to hold, to keep and in time to give away.

It seems like yesterday and I was young. Not so much hopeful as fearful though I’ve long held the optimistic bent of my mother, not her belief in miracles so much as a belief that over time good will prevail. Good in the form of loving feelings that override all the narky ones.

I’m reading Kathryn Heyman’s Circle of Wonders which deals with death, of two mothers, one who is of an age when death is inevitable and her daughter who is dying prematurely of breast cancer after a long period of remission. 

The daughter’s life to her own mind has not been exemplary. In a different way from her own mother, she has been a negligent mother moving around the world in search of her dream as a musician or a hippy type of person looking for a chance to fly. 

Her own mother less dramatic, more a creature of her generation when children were typically born but intentionally kept down so they did not grow too conceited or confident or whatever else it was that people of my mother’s generation found so worrying.

I can remember coming home from school in my secondary years with good reports and looking forward to her response, which was always lacklustre though I believe it mattered to her that all her children succeed. 

She boasted of this often enough as we were into young adulthood, not so much our achievements and relationships as that none of us took to taking drugs. Drugs taking was her biggest fear. Alcohol and smoking never troubled her, but the idea of drugs sent her into such prohibitive language, you could hear the hell fire and brimstone come out of her mouth, like a dragon.

As I suspect it does mine.

I have never used mind altering substances except once when I was a student visiting a friend who lived in a share house on Grattan Street in Carlton. Hers was part of an upper storey in a Victorian terrace perched over a bakery near Lygon street. In the early morning when I stayed overnight on warmer days the yeasty smell wafted through my open window and left me feeling even more nauseous after a night of heavy drinking.

This night one of my friend’s friends was handing round a joint. I drank alcohol only if it was sweet: vodka and orange juice, ouzo and coke, port and lemonade. Sick making concoctions but sweet enough to appeal to my long standing sweet tooth. 

I did not smoke at this time and had a revulsion at the thought of cigarette smoke reaching what I believed in those days were my pink lungs. Pink in contrast to my father who went through something like three packs a day of Craven A filter tipped. The proverbial chain smoker.. 

The stubby bit of a rolled-up joint moved from one set of fingers to another and when it came my turn I puffed on the end as if clutching the thing in my teeth and holding it there for show. 

I did not let anything get past the top of my throat as I had learned to do while swimming to block off my throat and nose so that no water could enter my lungs.

It worked and I stayed the same only the effect of the alcohol was closing in. And this day I had ventured into new territory. I wanted to join the cool folks in my time who instead of the sweet lolly stuff we females typically drank, or the boys their beer, I wanted to try wine. The only wine available, a heavy Cabernet from the Clare Valley. 

I took a few sips and was repulsed by its lack of sweetness but made myself persevere to the extent of half a glass. Then I hoed into the cheese plater. Something about the sharp tasty cheese my friend had bought from Victoria Market that morning and the red wine had a strange effect on me that first time. 

My lips swelled as though I was living in the time of Botox and had endured a major injection of the stuff. Red swollen and pulsing I feared they might get so big I could not breathe again. I washed them down with cold water and stopped taking anything in, until they settled. Which they did as the saying goes, in the fullness of time. 

 Time is indeed coming for us, and memories like these within the treasure chest of my past stand out in all their resplendent or dull glory.

And to borrow from a quote a friend offered me yesterday from Jericho Brown – 
I must look him up – ‘Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.’ 

Make of this as you will but hope to me is the most essential ingredient of our lives however often we falter.