Author: Elisabeth

Misfortunes run in threes.

My computer mouse disappeared last night somewhere between
six pm when I left home for a party and returned at 11 pm.  Its disappearance has left me with an odd sense of
dislocation.  
I could not begin to
use my computer until I had access to its insides.  
And then this morning when I woke to make my first cup of
tea, I found the pantry had been invaded overnight by ants.
I put these two events together as though they are linked,
as though I have been jinxed; and I start to look for a third mishap to make the picture complete.  So far I
cannot find one. 
I had feared this party last night, as one arranged by
good friends but filled with people who belong to a particular group of
old friends from the advertising world.  They tend to gang together and exclude outsiders.  
Last night, I was determined not to be left
out.  I was determined to gate
crash my way into any conversation that looked inviting.  
As it turned out, this became
unnecessary.  We wound up at a
small table on the periphery with a couple of friends outside the advertising group who go back many years
and a new couple with fascinating stories to tell.
 
It became a night of nostalgia about the day each of the
three couples met the other half of the couple for the first time.
 
One couple had been together for over forty years. My
husband and I for thirty six, and the third couple have been together –
unmarried, the woman hastened to add – for seventeen years.  
The third couple’s story seemed by far
the more glamorous in that they had met in Pakistan and lived an extraordinary
life before the roof blew off the halcyon structures of the nineties and no one
could live like that any more, even those in advertising.
 
At one point, there was a generalised complaint around the table about
the new world order:  It was so
much better in days gone by – education better, recourses better, thoughtfulness
better.
I don’t buy this line.  There are things that might be ‘better’ today and other
things far worse.  It depends on
your perspective. 
Maybe the third miserable event for me for the day can be the
weather.  
We are expecting
temperatures to rise again to the near forties, Celsius that is, another
scorcher.
 
All the leaves are brown, but the sky is blue.  Bright blue with a blazing sun and the
leaves have lost their green through sun burn, so the words of the song, which I presume were written to apply to autumn, do not apply so well here.  
Brown leaves and with a northern
orientation you’d expect to hear of the space before winter, but here it can
signify a hot summer.  
The burned leaves tend to be on the exotics, those plants that are not indigenous.  The cherry tree in our backyard is
stone dead.  The one in our front
garden survives, but with no green leaves left to cheer us over the summer.
 
The leaves on the star magnolia have dropped in distress but
there are still flower buds waiting to burst, so it might survive.  
We cannot use too much water and we
cannot wrap the entire garden in shade cloth.  One scorching day is enough to burn leaves to a crisp.  They will not revive till next
season. 
You, who live on the other side of the world, have other struggles
in the cold.  I do not wish to be
you.  I’m happy enough in my heat,
only sometimes, like most others here, I wish it were not quite so intense.

Finish your shit

‘Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in
disguise.’ 
I heard these words on the radio recently.  Someone was describing a book shop in France, called
Shakespeare and Co, and these words among others are inscribed on one of its walls. 
The gist of the quote may have had its origins in the
bible; I can’t say for sure, but the meaning captures me. For one thing the
level of compassion called for – be not inhospitable – hooks onto a degree of self interest,
self interest that’s hinted at in the words ‘lest they be angels in disguise’.
 
Is it that we do well not to harm angels because they look after us or
because they can become avenging angels?
I had a guardian angel as a child.  She hovered behind me whenever I became
aware of myself. 
There was a laneway over the street in Wentworth Avenue that
ran along the back of a line of shops on Canterbury Road.  In my memory my guardian angel appears along this lane way – for no other reason than I associate people with places.  And this is the place that pops into my mind when I think of my angel.  
My guardian
angel belongs to the blue cobblestone secrecy of a lane that backed onto
concreted driveways where shopkeepers kept their cars and their bicycles.  
The back of the shops looked to me then
as they appear today like the rear end of people, not something we spend too
long admiring.  The rear view is never so appealing as the front view with its shop windows and inviting
façade. 
This laneway also provided what seemed like a short cut to
the park that filled the dip of Canterbury Road beside the bridge and between
the railway tracks and the station.  
In this park as a small child I encountered many a paedophile, only I
did not think of them as paedophiles then.  To me and my younger sister they were simply ‘dirty old men’, somewhat harmless to my mind then and not always old, whom we did our best to
avoid. 
Fear was not part of the equation in the outside world;
fear belonged at home. 
I have been searching for a new theme to preoccupy my
mind.  A new approach to the world
that will sweep me up in much the way I have been preoccupied these past
ten years with the concerns of my earlier life.  
Nothing comes. 
I keep drawing a blank. 
There are too many incidentals, too many possible leads.  I cannot go in any one direction
without something else calling me over. 
Recently, I read a list of advice for writers.  There is so much advice for writers on
the Internet, but this one appealed because the writer emphasised the need to
follow your own ideas first and foremost. 
What works for one will not necessarily work for you.  
Towards the end of the list the writer
included these words over and over:
‘Finish your shit.  Finish your shit.  Finish your shit.’
These words have haunted me since.  
I’ve posted this image before, a gargoyle from the Shillington schoolhouse in England.  He seems to be urging some sort of response.  
I am a master of unfinished
business.  I can rationalize that
this is the nature of life; everything remains essentially unfinished until you
are dead and even then memories live on in others. 
Events from your life leach into the lives of
others, the next generation ad infinitum, and the cycle keeps repeating
itself. 
But I cannot get far with such rationalizations, for I know
I have a tendency to begin and then to abandon.  I have the greatest difficulty of all with endings.  I can begin a story and move along
comfortably until a plea for closure, or a call for some sort of epiphany pulls
me up.
 
You must find a reason for what you are saying.  There must be a point to this story, a
reason for the telling, subtle perhaps, subtle preferably, but nevertheless
obvious enough to offer satisfaction.
 
And as in all my stories, as in all my blogposts, I wind
up almost mid sentence, lost for words.