Month: January 2012

Don’t talk to strangers

Last Sunday morning when I let the dog out of his bedroom in the laundry after a good night’s sleep, or at least what I presumed had been a good night’s sleep, he would not come out, as is his custom.

Usually he makes straight for the cat door unprompted and goes into the garden to do his business but this morning he would not leave his bed.

When I called to him after several prompts he hobbled out. He could not put any weight on one of his front legs and it looked to be broken. He managed to limp out and then flopped on the floor.

I panicked, consulted my husband and both agreed that we would need to take him to the vet despite its being a Sunday.

I rang the Lort Smith animal centre to make an appointment. The Lort Smith is miles away in north Melbourne but they provide seven days a week attention.

I sat in a queue on the telephone, the ninth caller. I put the call on loudspeaker and had time to make a cup of tea and to bring the dog some breakfast and water which he sniffed at but declined.

I was even more worried then and went out phone in hand listening to the prompts in an effort to distract myself. I was now sixth in line in the queue. I went to get the newspaper and when I returned there was the dog on all four legs eating his breakfast.

So there you have it: an emergency that converted into almost nothing in the space of ten minutes.

We decided the dog must have slept on his foot and his leg had gone numb, as sometimes happens to us humans. He would have woken up to a numb leg or to pins and needles and it needed time for the circulation to start moving again.

What a relief. And so it is. I tell myself. I can panic so easily and sometimes the panic is quickly resolved.

I did not panic when I went to meet fellow blogger, Isabel Doyle, on Saturday at 11 am in the cafe Moravia on top of the Bourke Road hill in Camberwell, but I was a little apprehensive. My husband had walked up the hill with me for company. He joked that I might ring him if it looked as though there would be trouble, ‘If you get kidnapped or anything’.

I had told him I was off to meet a writing friend whom I had not yet met offline.
‘How will you identify her?’ he asked. Isabel had emailed to tell me she would be seated close to the front of the café if not at an outside seat and she would be carrying a pink floppy hat.

And there on the chair at the second table as I walked in was the pink floppy hat hung over a chair like a flag, and there was Isabel.

We shook hands, not so timidly as I might have expected, but with some hesitation.

It was her accent that caught my attention first, beyond the sparkle of her eyes and a strange look of familiarity, although as far as I know I have never seen Isabel in real life not even in pictures on her blog.

Later, she asked if I had recognised her from her blog profile, a painting. Her profile features an abstract portrait and to be sure I could not recognise anyone from it, but after the event I could see similarities, something about the colours in the portrait and the lines.

They take in the dark of Isabel’s short wavy hair and the colour that seems to surround her pale skin, her bright cheeks, a white top and for me some sense of vermilion in the air, like sparks, or a fuchsia pink, maybe, the colour of her floppy hat.

I am not so good at recounting physical details, as I am at remembering her words and voice. We talked at length about Isabel’s accent, her ‘ou’ vowels that she told me her daughter, who is into linguistics, reckons gives her away. There’s something of her Canadian experience, something of her British background and something Australian all rolled up in one.

For some reasons accent matters to me. The sound of Isabel’s voice was charming. I could only apologise for my own broad Australian nasal twang. Long has it troubled me.

For the next two hours and twenty minutes we talked – as you do – about her life, about mine, details of which do not belong on a blog.

We were interrupted after a time by Isabel’s husband and son. They were on a mission to exchange the shirts that Isabel’s husband had bought the day before, but which were not quite the right fit.

Isabel’s son had come along for driving experience. They, too, father and son, had jokingly worried about their wife and mother being spirited away.

The idea is that it is dangerous to encounter people you meet online in person. It has become the new mantra, akin to the ‘don’t talk to strangers’ we learned as children.

I am wary but my instincts told me all would be well with Isabel, and it was. It was such a privilege to meet her and share something of our lives, our thoughts, our ideas, and our writing.

Isabel lives far from here and for this reason we will not meet except perhaps occasionally.

My time with Isabel reminds me of some of the lovely encounters I have made with women I have met at conferences. They walk into my life and then out again and we lose contact.

But at least Isabel and I have an ongoing hand shake through our respective blogs to keep our connection alive. A writer in exile who to my mind came out of exile briefly to share time with me and for this I am grateful.

We made a connection.

The optimist sees the doughnut and the pessimist sees the hole

I’ve been working on a short story for which I cannot find an ending. Why am I so bad at endings? I tend to wrap them up too neatly or leave the story dangling in mid space as if I have left it off half dressed.

I don’t like endings of any sort. I want things to be left in such a way that they can always be resumed at a later date. So for me the idea of riding off into the sunset or happily ever after does not sit well.

I suppose the ultimate ending is death and I don’t want to talk about death again, at least not for the moment. I’ve been on about death too much of late, or at least in my head I have.

My mother told me on New Years Eve that she had said a little prayer to herself, asking that she might last out 2012.
‘I can’t see why it’s not possible. I feel well. The doctor says I’m well. There’s nothing wrong with me except my heart, so there’s no reason why I can’t go on.’

My mother then proceeded to tell me the story of a woman who had lived nearby in the units at her retirement village. This woman came to see my mother one day and told her about a recent visit to the doctor. The doctor had told the woman that she was in the best of health. The woman was delighted at this news and told my mother as much. The next morning her husband found the woman dead in their bed.

‘It just goes to show,’ my mother said. ‘You can never know. The doctors can’t always get it right.’

And here I am talking about death again or am I talking about something more, about the wish for certainty perhaps?

Those who visit clairvoyants and the like, are they looking for some sort of certainty? It’s rather like reading your horoscope. The horoscope says today you’ll have a great day; make lots of money; meet someone fascinating; and so it goes.

We want to believe the best that’s on offer. We tend to downplay the worst, or at least many of us do. And of course, there are those others who focus on the negative.

This was always the contrast between my parents: my father’s negativity and my mother’s optimism.
‘The optimist sees the doughnut and pessimist sees the hole.’ This maxim I learned early in my life and it has stayed with me.

Everyone of our children is away at the moment, overseas or house-sitting or interstate and it is quiet for once in a way that I find unsettling. Perhaps that is why in my dream last night I went back in time to my life before I had children, to when I was much younger, a university student all over again and looking for accommodation.

My house is far less cluttered than it was, now after my annual Christmas clean up, but in my dream the house I occupied was full of clutter and signs of renovation.

That has to be a good sign, I think. Renovation. Hopefully I’ll go on renovating until I die, if not literally, then at least metaphorically.

It is change I look forward to and change that terrifies me. Change is the one great certainty besides death.

Nothing stands still and yet I sometimes want it to. This house for instance. It is over one hundred years old and my present family has lived in it for just over thirty. We moved into this house in 1980. We have twice renovated it and although our daughters say it’s time for another I am past such massive house renovations. The next step will be to sell it and to move into a smaller place.

Last night as I stood brushing my teeth and contemplating the silence of the place without the usual noisy clatter of other people and lights burning at all hours, I thought this place is too big for the two of us.

One day I will want to move out. Not now, not for several years, not until our youngest is past her university days and well onto a career of some sort, but relatively speaking one day, sooner in the scale of time than later.

What a task that will be, to shift out of this house that has seen so much of our lives. My children say we must never sell this house. We must always keep it, and pass it on to them, but that is unlikely to happen for all sorts of reasons, financial among them, but also, I suspect, our children will need to make homes and lives of their own.

They will have this house in their memories just as I have the houses of my childhood in my memory.

I remember the house on Wentworth Avenue best of all and my mother remembers her house on the Marnixplein. From the perspective of our memories, it no longer matters to us what happens to these houses, it matters most, for us at least, that we can remember them.

The house of my mother’s memory from the inside.

My mother’s room today.

Memory enables us to avoid the ending because we can repeat the scenarios over and again in our minds for as long as we like, and usually they shift closer to how we would like them to be.