Author: Elisabeth

The contagion of dogs, siblings, and a mind that wanders

My daughter bought a dog pram online.  Akin to a baby’s pram, but it’s far more lightweight with minimal suspension but good enough for our dog.

The dog can still walk but long trips are problematic, so we put him in the pram, wheel him around for the best part of the journey, and then let him out once we reach the leash-free park for several minutes’ freedom before returning him to the pram and the homeward journey. 

The first time I took him out I felt a fool. A crazy dog person. It’s amazing the novelty value of a dog in a pram. People in cars slow down and stare. People walking past stop and comment. 

It feels strangely decadent, like the wealthy folk taking their dog’s needs to extremes.

The dog has a problem with his cruciate ligament that is temporarily aided by regular three monthly injections and some other concoction for his arthritis but when the medication wears off he begins to limp and in time refuses to put any weight on his left hind leg. It’s grown thin and wasted through lack of use.

I do not want to write about dogs per se, but dogs are a conduit to other feelings and thoughts. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons people admire them so. Dogs offer access to ourselves, to raw emotions we might prefer to ignore.

Dogs also cop our projections. 

When people use the term, ‘a dog’s life’, it carries two connotations.

One a life of leisure, always being cared for, never having to fend for themselves except maybe in the park in the presence of other dogs in play, but otherwise a life of bliss. 

The other connotation is that of servitude. A life treated as a lesser being, made to do whatever your owner requires of you. A life dripping with other people’s needs, expectations and desires. 

In two week’s time, I will risk a weekend plane trip to Newcastle to stay overnight with at least six of my siblings on what we now call our annual family reunion. The ordinary risks of flying are exacerbated by the presence of the coronavirus in our community and beyond if I am to believe all the hype in the newspapers.

It’s not the virus that stirs me so much as the thought of time spent with my siblings. Such time recreates something of the sensation of my childhood, something of the helplessness I felt when I was small surrounded by so many bigger brothers and a sister, and at the head of the three youngest.

I grew up in both worlds, a big person, as the oldest of the last four, and a little one, the youngest of five. 

I learned how to live in the company of these people, my siblings, many of them strangers to me now beyond our annual get together. We rarely speak and the idea of each one as we once were years ago as children, gets stuck in my mind, as I imagine I do in theirs. 

I have a photograph on my desktop of the nine of us taken the last time we were all together, on that very first family reunion ten years ago in Griffith New South Wales.

We try to meet in places between Melbourne and Queensland to make it equally difficult for everyone to get there so that no one is favoured by the ease of travel.

Rather like people meeting in cafes rather than on each other’s home turf to minimise the possibility of power imbalances. Or that’s my take on it. 

Newcastle. A long way to travel for dinner. But still. We do these things in honour of connection.

I had so looked forward to this morning knowing that there would be no one else in the house and only one dog left behind. My children took the younger dog away overnight and my husband is out walking with a friend. 

It’s quiet and I’m free to write as I please. But my mind’s a jumble of disparate thoughts and every road I travel down leads to cul de sacs of inconsequence, so I start again.

A friend pinned the picture of a dignitary from the military on the inside door of the toilet in their shared house in Fermanagh Road where my husband once lived. In the days before I met him. 

They reckoned it was a dead ringer for him. I could see the resemblance too when I first used the toilet, the steady eyes but by the time I first met him, my husband had shaved off his moustache. I prefer my men clean haven. Not that he took it off for me. 

It’s another image I keep on my desk, a reminder of days gone by when my husband had ambitions to become a senior public servant, a title that to him spelled dignity and promise.

My mind fell on the word ‘servant’ and I could think of nothing worse. But my husband was a man of action, a man who liked order and certainty. The public service in those days suited him, but that was before the politics of the day and the politics of personality crammed in and he changed his course in a commercial direction that left him less prey to politics but still subject to the demands of capitalism and greed, which took its toll in a large corporate law office that gave him a heart attack in his fifty-fifth year.

I find myself skimming over surfaces, reducing events to grand gestures, into writing that leaves me wondering why I am writing any of it. 

My heart is not in these words. I’m trying to find a spark of interest but my head is too full of present concerns. And as well, the deodorant I put on yesterday, the one that advertised itself as free from aluminium, has worn off. 

Until I have a shower I can smell myself in a way that leaves me unsettled, as if I am a wet dog in need of a bath. 

Milk, addictions and money

It’s quiet here at 326 on a Sunday morning and I’m having the usual weird thoughts that flit from one subject to the next.

If you use Oat milk you are more helpful to the environment. Oat Milk uses far less water in its production than stock standard cow’s milk, almond milk and others. 

One of my daughters feels guilty every time she orders a latte and the waiter asks her preference. ‘Dairy,’ she says, ashamed. 

Another daughter drinks only oat milk. It began for her because of a lactose intolerance but now her boyfriend has joined her in drinking said milk. ‘Because of the environment,’ he tells me.

Even though it’s twice the cost of cow’s milk and the particular brand, the only brand my oat milk-drinking daughter enjoys is hard to come by. You’ll find it at Woolworths, not Coles, and more often than not they’re out of stock. All for something as basic as milk, which has undergone many transformations throughout my lifetime. 

When I visited Holland in 1980, I remember my shock at the shelves piled high with several varieties of milk from low-fat to no-fat to full cream to extra creamy. Now we have these varieties here and we all take the choice for granted. 

Everything changes. 

We’re introducing the new National Broadband into our household now that they’ve allegedly finished installing it in our neighbourhood. The cheaper less effective version because our government did not want to spend the extra. 

I’ve heard so many horror stories about how much worse the system is than the original and I live in fear. Fear of losing my online connection to the world. 

Sounds pathetic. 

Years ago before the mid 1990s, I would have wondered what all the fuss was about. In those days I valued the computer for its word processing capacities. I scarcely used Google and I still read books at twice the rate or even three times the rate I do today. Today I read a huge amount online but fast and mostly articles and essays. 

It’s just not the same as a good book. I feel more guilty about my reading habits than I do about my dairy drinking habits. 

The same way I came to feel guilty about smoking cigarettes. It was the shame that took me off them in the long run. The shame of being seen to be a desperado who needed a cigarette and could not care less about inflicting her stale cigarette smoke on everyone else. I couldn’t bear to hear the occasional advertisement or discussion opposed to smoking. I knew it was bad for you but then I imagined I might live forever.

In the years when I smoked and sat under the bright sun.

Banking has changed too. It’s all now online and increasingly less mysterious. To me at least. Now that I know my way around the system and can see how easy it is to shift money from here to there. To transfer debts owed, to set up accounts and to take them down. 

I keep an eagle eye on these events now in a way I could not bear to know years ago when life was hectic and full of the needs of children growing up, a husband who worked long and intense hours, my own daily analysis and the demands of my work. 

All of it left me feeling the best I could do was talk to folks from the bank from time to time and watch as our debts rose. We earned large incomes, we had reasonable assets mainly in the form of our family home and so we were able to borrow and in the heady eighties and nineties and even beyond when the banks tossed money at you, it was easy to borrow. No questions asked. 

Unlike the first time I went to the CBA Bank in Glenhuntly Road and spoke to the manager about our chances of getting a home loan. He wanted first to speak to my husband. Before I married, I had taken out a small loan as a single woman to buy my first car. I paid it off in the required time. I was a good risk, but my older brother needed to get the loan approved by doing all the talking because I was a single woman. 

Yesterday, when I sat at the bank with a less than manager type, a youngish man trying to help me set up a new business account, I considered how much things have changed. But at least he was prepared to talk to me and did not ask to see my husband.