Author: Elisabeth

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.

The first day of the year

The Arts spire caught alight last night during the fireworks. I did not notice at the time and only realised when I read about it in the newspaper today. It seems it was not such a spectacular event but from my perch at the top of the hill overlooking the city we managed an excellent view of the fireworks as we do every year at midnight. From this distance I did not notice the flames.

We came out onto the street in the nick of time to greet our neighbours, as we do every year and this time they had company among them, one of whom Pandora introduced herself. She greeted me as sixthinline. My neighbour who follows Face Book and the like presumably alerted her to the connection.

What a surprise to greet a fellow blogger at midnight on New years Eve and she a friend of Kath’s, another blogger who has recently written about her experience of meeting a fellow blogger in person in Geneva of all places.

‘Pandora’ and I chatted briefly and then made our ways back into our respective lives, but for me at that moment half groggy with sleep – I had not been able to stay awake till midnight and had collapsed on the bed. My husband woke me minutes before the witching hour – I felt as if I had climbed into a still life painting on the wall or into a online version of the Sims game, which my daughters used to play in a bid to create imaginary lives.

And to think that next Saturday I shall meet another blogger, Isabel, in the flesh as it were, too spooky for words.

There are a couple of boggers I have known in real life before they started blogging and to me their identities are different. To me it’s as if they have dual identities, even so I learn more about them online than I would ever know through our shared lives.

There is a greater intimacy made possible in the blogosphere, however constructed, and for me it is as if I am reading a novel, only the characters are essentially ‘real’.

Later today my husband will collect our youngest daughter from her overnight party at Rye. I hope she is well enough. I dare not ring her yet. It is too early for young folks who must surely be sleeping in. She has just turned eighteen and has hit the world running.

Every Tuesday night many of the young folk around here go off to one of several of the local hotels and bars to drink and dance and converse and otherwise have what they consider to be a fun time.

I tend to wait up, and even after I’ve gone to bed I cannot sleep. I try not to worry but I do. Not until I hear the turning of the doorhandle and my daughter materialises do I stop my worrying.

You would think I’d be over if by now, after four such daughters, but somehow the worry only gets worse with my youngest. She seems more carefree than her older sisters who all behaved sensibly most of the time. As does my youngest, but just sometimes, the enthusiasm of her so-called freedom seems to get the better of her.

I remember myself at eighteen. I was the proverbial frump, or at least I saw myself that way. Though there was one night when I went to Canberra for my oldest brother’s wedding and at the reception met one of his friends who danced with me at the reception and then offered to give me a lift back to the caravan park where I had been staying over night with the rest of my family.

This brother, I might add, is ten years older than me. His friend was old in my mind, but ever so dashing and kind and attentive. He drove me to the top of Black mountain and we looked over the city lights. He dared not touch me, he told me then, out of resect for his friend, my brother, but he was tempted, or so he said, and for five minutes I fell in love.

All the way home to Melbourne driving down the dusty Hume Highway my heart throbbed for the love of him. I never saw the man again and have often wondered what became of him.

My brother’s marriage lasted little more than a year and he formed a new relationship. There are stories there, which are for others to tell.

My life is woven into the lives of my sisters and brothers, my early life that is, and these days it is woven into that of my children. Strangely, I feel freer by far telling the stories of my siblings than I do that of my children.

Born into such a crowd it is not surprising there are many stories to tell.

My children’s lives are in the here and now. I must respect their privacy. My siblings’ lives, or at least the ones I could describe, are in the distant past, built on memory and therefore to a large extent constructed.

I can bear to mention those. My husband is off limits too, which is why I refer to him as such and do not offer even a name.

All this disguise to protect the identities of those we love. It is necessary I suppose but there are days when I wish I could write more feely and yet in a strange way there is a freedom to this more obscure writing too, though not entirely fictional it has that quality. To me at least.

There are people like Kath, whom I mentioned earlier, who refers to her husband as ‘Love Chunks’ and gives her daughter the pseudonym, ‘Sapphire’. I suspect she does so for privacy too, but Kath writes in the here and now, with authenticity and therefore presumably in honesty.

She tempers everything with her marvellous and to me Australian sense of humour, made even more hilarious at the moment because the family have decamped to Geneva and no longer live in the suburbs of Melbourne.

How do others deal with this intractable problem within the blogosphere, I wonder, with this need to reveal and simultaneously to conceal?

Today is the first day of the year and I am determined not to let the year get the better of me. I have been so grumpy of late, I must revert to my usual tolerant and cheerful ways. Grumpiness has no inherent merit and it feeds on itself.

I have three quarters filled a skip with household rubbish collected over the past thirty years, stuff that is no longer useful to anyone, and useful stuff I have shipped off to St Vinnies and the Salvos.

It’s time for a space in my mind for my writing, once I’ve finished the tax preparations which may take me days.

From my seat here it seems to have been a quiet and understated New Years Eve, apart from the spire catching alight. I hope it is so for everyone. New Years Eve can be such a manic time.

I tend to imagine dreadful things happening with all the mad partying, so that when the day arrives, the first day of the year, there is a lull and a sense of relief that no one has died and nothing too dreadful has happened.

At least I hope so. I’ve yet to hear. And then the phone rings.