You sweep ideas from the floor like so much left-over rubbish.

 

As part of training, we made weekend trips interstate and met with other candidates in Sydney and from Adelaide. We flew to Sydney on the Saturday morning and arrived home late Sunday. 

On one such return my husband met me at the airport bustling with weekend returnees, each shop bright and shining like the cosmetics counter at Myer. It’s a joke in my family. I do like travel, to go too far from home for too long but the smell and bustle of airports thrills me with an indescribable longing. It is enough for me to drive to the airport and hang about with people who are queuing up to leave or to wait in the arrivals lounge for international travellers and watch as weary people emerge through the sliding doors of customs loaded with cases and pushing heavy trolleys and scanning the crowd for a loved one or anyone they might recognise to ferry them home. 

It’s always home I imagine, though many people arrive here for holidays. The holidays makers are obvious and don’t attract my attention the way family reunions release tears from the back of my eyes. 

It must have to do with those early visits to Essendon airport when I was a child. The silver plane taxied onto the tarmac, and we watched from inside as travellers straggled along the tarmac. Among them my grandfather, my aunt and her new husband, her children. Another uncle who had spent years first in the Belgian Congo then in Indonesia on rubber plantations. They arrived in Australia for six weeks once every few years and created an atmosphere of such joy, especially for my mother.

 I associated their arrival with aeroplanes and airports. Equally the day they left and returned home and my mother’s abjection, especially when her father flew off that last time, and she knew she would never see him again. 

Airports are like this, replete with human triumphs of connection and despair. The despair that comes of loss and disconnection. 

We had been to Sydney for a weekend of seminars and while there my husband rang to tell me one of our colleagues told us her husband had reported her children had picked up lice at school. 

In the arrivals lounge people milled around. Her daughter ran to hug her, but she pushed her aside. How heartless to treat her daughter as though she had leprosy and could not be touched. 

A week later we discovered our daughters also had lice. A common enough occurrence in the transition between winter and summer and its reverse. The nit nurse arrived at school to check the heads of girls to make sure each child’s parents complied with the protocol of nit removal. 

Kp7, a foul-smelling petroleum-based lotion to fumigate the head, left on for ten minutes, a good rinse out then the arduous comb through with a fine-tooth metal nit comb. Under a bright light to avoid missing any. 

We hated the process, parents, and children alike, but it became routine. One I described to my analyst Mrs Milanova in a session the following week. It was a Monday after a weekend of nit removal which I told her about in detail. 

The next day I came and saw she had put an extra pillowcase on top of the pillow where I usually rested my head.

I was incensed. Didn’t she know I had treated my hair and my husband’s hair along with our children’s as we were advised? Didn’t she know my husband had checked my hair and I his to be sure neither had nits? Didn’t she know I was vigilant and continually assessing the state of my daughters’ hair to be sure they were free of nits? And here she was treating me as though I might have them.

‘It’s a precaution,’ she said, after I objected to the extra pillowcase. And I knew she was thinking of the others, the ones who came before and after me and I hated her for it. I hated them for it. I wanted to be the only one, or at least not to be reminded so blatantly that I was the infected one, the one she needed to protect others from. 

In retrospect I can see the overreaction of my feelings. But my sensitivity to anything coming my way from Mrs Milanova’s words or hands left me prone to fits of shame so vast, you could fill a room.  Nits were nothing. 

To Catch the Moon

‘The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.’ Mary Oliver

Years ago, in a novel writing class conducted within one of the half-renovated rooms of the then Council for Adult Education in Degraves Street, Melbourne, our teacher, the late Olga Lorenzo asked, ‘What would you have people write on your gravestone? She kept a tidy house, or she wrote a good book?’ We were all in agreement, ten women – the two men less so. The alternative did not fit their expectations – the book came first. 

Mary Oliver’s words resonate here: those sad souls, the ones who neglected their creative urges, whether through fear or necessity, are now filled with regret. How many of the gazillion souls floating above the universe were unable to give expression to the creative urges that first arose in childhood with mudpie making, cubby house construction, or chalk scribbles on concrete, only to find they could not sustain their imaginations throughout the rigours of daily life? 

Some tried to turn to it in their twilight years when the burdens of family and work had shifted, but all too late. Their joints were rusty, their thought patterns sluggish and the whimsy of childhood was over. How much can we ascribe these failures to address our creative energies throughout our lives to the critic within?

Patricia Hampl tells the story of travelling in a crowded bus when she heard a woman’s voice spill over the crowd: ‘I could tell you stories.’ She was filled with the urgency of wanting to let others know about a world unknown to them.

In Hampl’s mind, however admirable the oral tradition, the sharing of stories by word of mouth, is different from putting words on the page. The impulse to write has a distinct energy. It requires different parts of our brain, the opposite to that part we use to form judgments. Which is why when we write, we must not listen to the critical voice which tells us repeatedly: This is crap. This is boring. And asks questions. Who would want to read this? 

Then insists, There’s nothing new here. It’s already been said. It’s too wordy. Too vacuous, too full of fluff. 

The writer might stop in their tracks, then. Or decide not to begin in the first place.

When I settled down to write this morning I had no idea where it might take me. It is one of those days when I’m under pressure. To prepare for a family birthday breakfast. To tidy my kitchen. Forgive me, Olga Lorenzo, whose gravestone most clearly does not include the words: she kept a tidy house, and she certainly wrote more than one good book. 

Olga, my dear writing teacher of many years ago had a habit when she took us for lessons on how to deal with dialogue, how to workshop writing, how to get to the heart of a story. She described arguing with her husband as they walked along the sand on the beach near her home. She piled on detail after detail: the bad sex, the uneven parenting and housework, the money worries, the usual stress of many a mid-ranking couple in Melbourne, Australia during the early 1990s, when one of our class members piped up: 

‘Too much information, Olga.’ 

We tittered, but Olga was undeterred. Just as I remain convinced the information and detail of our daily lives, as prosaic as it might seem to some, is the stuff of the stories we tell.

So the writer’s voice can turn the repetitive and daily dross of life into something wondrous. The lambchopdom, as the writer Gillian Mears once described her life when constrained by home and family, is still the background to our lives, whether in a grass hut, a tree top shanty or a palatial palace. The ‘little boxes’ of Pete Seeger’s suburban landscape, ‘all made out of ticky tacky’ and all looking just the same, comprise a million variations in the unique interior housed by the many different people who go through the front door each night and leave in the morning. 

The uniqueness of the individual, of their internal worlds, of their thoughts and feelings, the experiences that make them tick. The stereotypical shells they occupy, whether white skinned or black, bodies whose shape and function fits the ideal or is misshapen, too big or too small, too acne scarred or with perfect alabaster skin that can only crease over time. All these elements comprise the outer skin that encases the inner workings of each one of us. 

The writer’s task is to get to the heart of story, which I have failed to do here, on my soap box of memory and understanding, but I shall now tell you the story of a small boy who sat with me the other day and looked upwards towards the soon-to-be night sky. 

‘Look at the moon,’ he said, and above I saw a sliver of white. 

The boy reached up his hand. ‘I want to catch the moon,’ he said his arm flailing. ‘Why can’t I get it?’ He swiped again and again. 

‘It’s too far away,’ I said, as if this explanation alone might suffice. 

Still the boy was determined to drag down the moon. He whipped a curved soup ladle from the contents of his child size kitchen and swung upwards. 

‘Even if it crashes down and smashes us to smithereens?’ I asked. 

In this place of imagination and unreality lies the source of our creativity.

The boy did not stop trying until his mother called him inside for dinner and bed. Still resolute, one day he’d catch the moon.