tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62907194969674564432024-02-07T10:09:57.834-08:00Sailor Lily sleeps and dreamsSailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-43468145256793345042019-09-12T00:10:00.000-07:002019-09-12T00:10:00.208-07:00A boy's brain at night poised for fight<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Dear Finn, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Your brilliant
human mind is much older than you are!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
is as old as all human time. It is designed for you still to be cave dweller,
ready for action to protect yourself and the whole human species.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A bird starts
calling out. But it is night time. Birds are not meant to call out at night
time, unless…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Unless there
is danger!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A bird at night will call
when there is danger or great disturbance!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You are asleep.
The bird calls and keep calling. It is worried because there are extreme winds,
and those winds even carry a whiff of smoke from fires up North.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You wake,
and your clever brilliant body and mind gets ready for action. You wake in a
way that is fully energised and ready to fight a danger or run from it. The
bird calling has told you of possible danger.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Then your
modern brain does a check around and there is nothing in your room to fight.
But that energy has to go somewhere.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You yell and
yell, and the bird keeps you awake and ready to fight. So you fight your bed,
your pillow, tossing and turning and full of that energy which has to go somewhere.
It’s angry now, that energy. More yelling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is
natural. It’s the clever part of your ancient brain. It made your body ready to
fight or run. It also wanted to sleep!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As you grow
up, the modern part of your brain will get better at really knowing when it’s
just a bird outside worried about the strong wind and smell of smoke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will get faster at working out what you
really need to do.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When you came
to me for help, at first the headphones didn’t work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I gave you two pillows to block out the sound
though, you even got back to sleep. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That was
your modern brain working it all out and getting help. Humans are also designed
to work together to fix problems and face a danger.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is OK
that your ancient brain woke up raging, you were ready for danger, because
birds don’t call out at night for no reason!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Come and get
help too, as each time you do this you let your modern brain get really smart as
well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Love, Mum<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-22451639245304844562019-02-28T17:19:00.000-08:002019-02-28T17:19:47.602-08:00Art, Autumn.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thirty-nine degrees yesterday, then thirty-four at 9pm. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I swam and floated the mauve line of sea under animal clouds
and grapefruit segments of sunset. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Still hot.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m sitting with music-man as he frowns his new arrangements,
and I’m reading Anais Nin, sucking juice from the words and spitting out pips. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He is stabbing at the song like sex, calling and string-hitting
so fast I can’t type in time, and this thing we call a process is<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>not a process but an attack on our arts; I see
a dartboard that we each throw at, blind drunk, faster and faster, soon something
will hit and hook and be that big score, the word, the note. But in the meantime,
it’s a calling out blindly. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is an atmospheric pressure, the jostling of seasons
colliding; it is it furiously hot for Autumn’s first day, and in a month we’ll all
be windscreen wipers batting back water, we will be drenched gardens and
rotting leaves.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But today, oh today. The burn of the air, the jostling wind,
shoving out Summer for Autumn just as Autumn will rot out to Winter and Winter
will lie still even as we sleep cold and dream richly, all of it underground,
all of it subliminal, cold and wet silently fecund.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He sings tremulous half-notes that will soon be sustained
and pure, I type blindly, as staccato as he sings, blind and blind on our keys,
we are frantic exhalations. Breathe, try, breathe, pant then later, slower, softer,
when the drift and eddy can happen and thought twining in the leaves and sheaves,
a sifting sorting time for the gold, the copper, the veins, the proteins. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But for now, the art as impulsive action, motor
skills not enough - not brain to hand, but psyche to air, and the mechanisms we
have in our bodies are striving and struggling to hammer it out.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Oh this season of jostle, Autumn the best time always,
reading Rilke at 3am, reading prose and thrumming out poetics, and seeing it
all as if the scales have been lifted from my eyes: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this season, this love, this music, these
words, the art that is here and here we are - humble and hopeless in our
straight pure love that wants only to arrow out and cloud-shoot for dreams.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-12034446948411199672019-02-16T11:07:00.001-08:002019-02-16T11:17:16.013-08:00Aloha from Aloha street<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hop shuffle click – a soft stutter and coo as pigeons dance
in the tan-bark garden made hopeful with potted plants trailing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the clothes line hang two feeder trays. I
put seeds in. The birds come and come, flagrant in their desire to have a soft
slow eve, no foraging, just a take-away dinner of treats in the tray, like a fish
and chips summer supper in shiny paper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In a quiet moment I relax and realise that I sow: home,
seeds, gardens, ideas and love.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Well not so quiet a moment really, I have Samantha Brown
playing, that late eighties blonded jazzy red-lipped siren. She sings: ‘I saw a
bit of silver lying in a puddle, I went to pick it up, but I didn’t want to get
my hands muddy.’<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I got my hands muddy for the silver, then all muddied I began
to garden. I sowed a seed in the office of my Lisa, my psychologist, seeded the
plants that could have wilted or rotted, sowed the seeds of separating and
leaving my long marriage.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I did not know if it would grow. I had so much fear. But I
feared even more a future with who he had become, and me.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I daily grieved the house I would leave, that of the first
clothes-line of pinned baby clothes size ‘00000’. Oooh, those little grow-suits
waiving on the line!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh, the painting
and fixing, the joy of cracks to be filled, plaster and dust, night ghosts and the
morning garden, and my dad a-jingle with advice and tools.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have a little house now. My Aloha, my welcome, to myself
and all who come.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I water, the butterflies are seduced, diving into the
smaller sprays. With lavender and rosemary, the bees come too, and on the
hottest days they crawled into the dish of honey-water and sipped and slipped
and I had to tease one out on the fine point of a stick.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The washing whips and flutters; I share plants with my neighbour,
I pay bills and keep passwords and details like a Mother. I book the lawyer,
the plumber, the candlestick maker. I do it all because I can, and that
realisation is like sapphires glinting, that my mind so sharp at work can do
this love-building, this making of place and time and space. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Little altars abound, here the photos, tendrils green from
plants, and my dad’s ashes. He is proud, it sings in my bones and muscles as I
make and heft. Here the book-nook, the typewriter, the toys, the record player.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will sing, I will play.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And such songs, art and weaving, cooking and feeding. Phone
calls long overdue now long and late; the thrumming harmonics of old friendships
re-found abound, tree-high new foliage that’s root-deep in trust. Muddy at
times as we churn old earth over, then green glinted gold, as leaf-blooms of
voice curl and unfurl through the long and lavender night. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I feel the stars get closer, an optimism sharp as light, a
tumbling cascade of dreams and plans, a meteor shower of glimmering things,
soft rain of light, soft rain.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-87702962604994101242018-12-28T13:49:00.000-08:002018-12-28T13:49:28.586-08:00how to rebirth oneself? Maybe hereGood morning. I can hear the birds at their feeder: slim pigeon, fat pigeon and the Sparrows with names like Icarus and Shaula and Savannah and Little Stevie.<br />
<br />
I can hear my son on the couch playing Youtube videos. He has told me to go back to bed. I have wept all night and he knows and he is being kind and also self-serving, because Youtube culcha is naughty funny grimy slinky.<br />
<br />
So this me, now, separated, living in a little house in Aloha street. Welcome! But how to begin again here, in this blog that was begun when I was a (mostly) happy wife, building the dream home within the old home's walls, with a man I sometimes referred to as this ship's Captain?<br />
<br />
I left him two months ago. Tired, too tired of being the lone hand on the big boat. Tired, so tired of being lonely in a marriage with a man who who had grown complacent, entitled, and small of spirit.<br />
<br />
So I built a smaller boat to better fit my solo hands and it has been fine, even grand at times. My son my first mate, and on we go, rough riding but oh such views. And I thought my love and care could carry every one, and that I could cope.<br />
<br />
In here are old blogs about the building years. I am glad to have them. I have been out of the home for two months. I left it because my ex cannot afford to move and still keep a part time roof over our son. I have left him there so that he could still be a Dad as he tries to get more work to support himself. Two months and yesterday I found he'd ensconced a woman in for a little love-nesting while I had care of our son.<br />
<br />
<br />
letter to my ex:<br />
<br />
I didn’t go looking, and even when I found it my head
grasped all these other ideas: oh that’s my red silk scarf and those lanyards
from Tracy and my birthday party. I picked them up, but they were wrong. I saw a
red shoe and picked it up thinking these things were mine, foundlings you had
put together to give me. But the shoe was wrong too. Then the bra, my fingers finding
this satin greasy feeling. Wrong again. Then it began to dawn on me, ‘not mine’,
as I found the dress.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And in moments something clicked. Your assumption you would
leave our boy with me for 5 days until new years day, and your rage when I
countered that. You planned for her to be around a few days. A few pairs of
undies in the basket in the study I once loved. Sleeping together. Cocooned in. The intimacy of that speaks of long build.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have cried all evening and night. Not your concern but I
will have to get my bro to help me look after our boy today, I'm tapped out. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What you’ve done is smashed every positive memory I have in
the home I left when I left you.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wrecked it. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, I hope for you that it worked. That in fucking her there,
and having her stay, it exorcised me fully and fast.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I hope that when you lie in the bed we bought with wedding
money, in the room we painted surrounded by the pictures I framed, under the
chandelier that has my childhood memories, all you see is her reflected in
those crystals and the gold. Her body, not mine. I hope you can see Diane by Klimt and not remember
Windsor. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I hope that when you walk the hall along the wallpaper I chose
and the pictures I filmed and framed, you see it now only as she did, that the
house is quirky and that the mum and baby photo is nice.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I hope that when you sit in the backroom now you hear her
voice not mine, and that the making of the shelves with my dad is eradicated by
the presence of her. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I hope that the bath now is soaked in her image, a picture
there of a woman drinking the coffee you made her, lapping away at your little love
offering. So intimate. I hope when you sit along our son there you don’t, any more, remember
him and I in that bath with bubbles and toys. Just her. No back-story any more
of finding the tub on the roadside. No image of my Dad up to his knees in floorboards,
or me pregnant on the toilet.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And I hope that the veranda is the same, clear of me, clear
of Max, and the pear tree is no longer a story of triumph but something she just looked
at.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So yes, since you fucked her and made intimate moments in
the home we built and that you live in with our son I hope it worked to serve
you well. I truly do. You chose exactly that. So that is what you now have. You
chose to make intimacy there and I hope it resonates sweetly for you. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That house now is nothing to me, only a roof over our boy's head. Handovers at the door. I’ll return the house key so you can feel free to
keep making new memories to eradicate the old ones, the ones you made with your
ex and her family.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s a good bridge out, to exorcise the young excited couple
from the home, the new parents from the home, the Max from the home. It will make
selling up easier.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
***</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So there is my rancour and oh it feels good to pour it here. It is freeing. I am free, I am going to rebuild, for I am my Mum and Dad's bright strong girl with hands and shoulders for making, and love big enough to billow out the sails.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-36248149007323053942017-03-16T17:47:00.002-07:002017-03-16T18:01:13.519-07:00there is love<i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This post is half a year old, written before my dad died and when we had a view of his prognosis that was more optimistic. Yet I still wanted to publish it, because I like to honour my son's evolution, and mark where he learns and grows...</span></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Finn, you still seem so little.
But big things abound. Your hero’s journey enters its dark night; you rush on
with footballs and pause to lay car-tracks. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It’s Father’s day and your Grandpa is dying; for my Dad now there is a timeline and a prognosis. Six months,
twelve months, maybe more but who knows? We all love him so, and your love for him is so big it spills out in tears and fear. But off we go for hugs and snags
and play. You have some words like cancer and chemo, but we don’t use them this
day; time enough for that when hospital begins. I talk to you about it, that there are weeds in the garden of
my big Father’s body. That there is a treatment like weedkiller that will make him feel bad because it kills good things in his body-garden too. That it is not his fault, and it it is not contagious.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You sense my worry and feel your worry, despite our shelter that curves over you like a bull-nosed veranda. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Coming home from the visit we all
just needed rest. It had been a big day with Na and Pa, and I felt tetchy and tired. And then bad things happened
around a good little girl, and just like that you fostered her and cared. All your
tired green shoots of love and the gruff stuff of big brothering, wrapped
around a little girl; and you gave her the gift of normalcy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; tab-stops: 361.5pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">YELL>
THUMP> BANG! Bad monsters. Ugly hard sounds of shatter from next door. Screams.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">When the police came because neighbor
J had called them I got them chairs to sit in our front yard. J could wait for
her daughter to be dropped home there, and talk to the police about how her
ex-partner had become violent on her and her little home next door. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Finn, you were so curious about
the police being out in our yard with her. You peered at them out of the front
window. You were worried about the daughter, A, a sweetly smart little redhead of three years that you’d been friends with for her whole life. When she came home, she came straight in with us for a play, as J was still making her statement. You were so kind with her. She was worried, intuitive, wanting her Mum but also wanting your assurances and company. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But why were the
police there? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Why? Because it was a safe space
for J. Because she had just been physically attacked, because I heard it, for yet
another time. Because she knew she could bang on our door for help, as she had done before. Because we can
welcome her lovely girl for a play with a boy who who adores her, and he can be her sheltering veranda, a little
space that’s warm and safe. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">She’s a strawberry of a girl, she
admires you and plays to your level and calls you 'Faann', and in turn you get to be
a big brother. You and she played, and peeped at the
police. I told you they were helping A’s mum find ‘stolen house keys’. It helped A understand why she wasn’t in her
usual home next door, which had been trashed by the ex. Finn, I think you knew that it was more than that, yet you
played, you made fun, and you shared your eve and your telly and your parents and your pizza. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Later on I told you the truth. That sometimes men think its OK to hit and kick and throw things, when its never OK, no matter how bad a tantrum is going on. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So on one of our own hard days I was
reminded of my privilege: a ‘throw me in the air’ Dad, a safe childhood and safe home. And of my NORMS that
aren’t privilege, that should be the given: I’ve never been hit, kicked or choked by the one I call my love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But back to you, my Finn. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You can be mighty,
you can be naughty, you can buzz like a bee, you can drive my heart wild with
it, but today you fostered. You gave of your good life to a little girl who was your friend, and you did it with grace and empathy. I saw your care and I fell even more deeply in proud-Mama-love with you. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My sweet sun, you are as juicy
with love as an orange-half. Let it flow, little one, it's your superpower.</span><o:p></o:p><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">* J and her daughter moved away a month later, to a big house with the Sister/Aunt. We've lost touch but I like to think they are safe and thriving. Finn misses A, which is OK. One day some random chance will have them meet!</span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-72763556459187934562016-10-13T19:31:00.004-07:002016-10-13T19:31:42.852-07:00My Dad died. Here is why I loved him and thought him my sun.<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">I love you
Dad for so many reasons, but mostly because you took me seriously. I wasn’t a
girlie girl, I was a tomboy, and you let me be that, and you enjoyed it
too. From the moment we moved to Vermont
I was always down in your tool-shed alongside you. So you taught me- how to use
tools, clean them, and put them away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">You showed
me how to make a box. We had to measure up, with a ruler. I think that was the
only time I saw you measure with anything other than your hands and a pencil! I
had to saw the wood, make it all fit, glue it and nail it. You said if I could
make a box I could make anything. Then you
gave me scrap wood to extend a tree house in the paddock next door. I made it
awesome and spent many times there, bombing Dean and his mates with pinecones.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Because of
you I know how to hang wallpaper and that it only sticks of you swear at it and
stomp on it. I read a famous five on my
bed as you hung the wattle-flower wallpaper. I know you hung it the right way
round, despite the ongoing tease from us all that it was upside down. You did good,
Dad, and the swearing kept it firmly stuck for years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">You taught
me how to change a car tire, clean battery points, top up my oil and water, and
we even re-sprayed my first car together, a hideous shade of safety yellow so
everyone could see me and my Volvo coming. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">One night outside KATEES nightclub Jenny
Aitken and I changed a tire while drunken guys catcalled. I felt so proud.
Thanks for that Dad.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">When I was little
and asked for a toolkit for Christmas, you didn’t laugh, or encourage me to get
a doll. Somehow you found one- a miniature set in a wooden carry box. And they
were real tools, with weight and purpose and red handles- a hammer, saw,
screwdriver and more, all to fit my small hand.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;"> I used some of the nails from it to hammer
extra planks onto my cubby walls. The planks turned out to be walnut, and
destined for the kitchen as shelves. You
were so angry when you realized what I’d done. But you also praised my straight
nailing!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Other parts
of being your tomboy girl were riding the old postie motorbike around the
paddock, feeding apples to the horses next door, and climbing. I was about nine
when I climbed to the top of the pine tree in our yard. Then I looked down and
freaked! And yelled out a VERY bad swear
word little girls shouldn’t say. You
didn’t rescue me. You came partway up and talked me down. I could feel proud, even as I got a bum-smack
for the swearing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Thanks Dad,
for teaching me to shake hands properly. You taught Dean and me that your handshake is
your word, so when you give it you must see the thing through and do it
right. Because you hated ‘gonna-do-ers’ I grew up believing in doing,
in taking action on dreams to make them real. It’s a good life lesson, thanks Dad.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Some other
life lessons I got from you Dad: the world is not straight, so measure it by
eye and hand. Cracks will always come back. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix
them each time they do. Be useful. Don’t wallow. When you feel blue go for a drive
out into the country, or find something to fix. Climb the tree, don’t be
scared. Someone will be there to talk you back down.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Dad, all
these things you left me with help me feel sound, and useful, and like I’m
meant to be here, and that’s such a lovely thing you gave to me. You used to thrown me in the air until the
sky touched my head, and you made me feel so loved. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;"> I need to give you something back and so it’s
this. You are in the warmth. There are
droplets drying from your skin because you have just swum. The heat is rising,
and the sun is straight above you. You have no work to do, nothing to fix. You are drifting in an out of a dream, sitting
in your chair, basking like a lizard in the sun. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-37755084116168500292016-04-02T22:18:00.002-07:002016-04-02T22:18:31.699-07:00Happy Birthday my Big Boy!<div class="MsoNormal">
Dear Finn,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You are seven, you are my big boy, you are loved. You just had your birthday and we’ve
celebrated by road-tripping, first to Murchison then looping around beautiful
coastlines. In Murchison you played hard
with Gilbert and Hermione, nestled in a bean bag with Spencer the red-haired cat,
slept once again in your bubble-van bedroom, in the part that curves over you
like a pale gold cave and has all the little windows. You picked up eggs from Bipp’s hutch, you
bounced on a net-less trampoline, you ate rye bread without noticing it was
‘brown’ and you picked up an acorn from the road and admired its tender green smell. I love to watch you in flow in the country;
you have it in you gut deep, just like me.
Murchison is our good family tradition, many years now doing the Easter
egg hunt or the New Year’s Eve party, the winter bonfire and the long and
lovely meals together with your ‘country cousins’. You know you have big mob out in the world,
your non-blood family who have laid their tracks beyond the Melbourne where
they were first my friends. Now they are
your friends, lighthouses dotted around the state, beacons of love for you. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And now
you have just covered more country, with me, on our first Mum and Son road
trip. The map showed you how far we
drove. Way past Geelong, which you know so well from car-shows with your Dad, across
a place called Winchelsea, and into Colac where we stopped at the RSL for
crunchy salty chips and you kept swapping your raspberry for my coke! Down we wiggled, through a place called
Simpson, and then there we were at the house in Coorimungle. Two days of ‘Aunty’ Tracy and her husband
Luke, and five working dogs. Oh heaven. You befriended the littlest of their border
collies, Uda, and tried to contain your excitement and learn some dog handling techniques
from Luke who is an expert trainer and handler.
We ate junk, then apples, and broke rules then you’d re-find the ones
that actually serve you, hopping off your device to go outside and run with the
dogs. You flopped on a couch with Uda
alongside you, got filthy, had your first outdoor loo-poo and your first
experience sleeping with me in a big double bed where we woke to the perfection
of sunrise seen from a hilltop: orange bands deepening into violet-brown beneath sea-coloured sky. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At Port
Campbell you didn’t care when your toy boat didn’t start up; you ran into the
waves and chased their frills over and over, soaking your sneakers which we had
to pop into the dryer later on. At the Twelve
Apostles your clever Tracy explained plants to you, and different scat that we
found, and how the fat penguins enjoyed their protected beach. Not every boy
has the Park Ranger’s coordinator as their guide! In Timboon the tatey cakes
were ‘so crunchy, Mum.’ And you crunched through two, your appetite made sharp
by the cool apple-crispness of the air.
You walked barefoot through Timboon, your shoes a soggy heap in the car.
I teased you that people would think I was a bad Mum. ‘We’re in the country
Mum; it doesn’t matter.’<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You always
amaze me, my gorgeous boy, but I have learned new things about you: your
generosity of spirit, your spontaneity, your ease and confidence around new
people, and how readily you can flow into new views and terrains. Just when I’d worry you might get bored you’d
find a beauty and exclaim in your piping voice, ‘Mum!’ (The silkiness of Uda’s coat, the orange and
brown birds on the water tank, a sky with an ocean- tide of curling spumey
clouds.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I tumble into yet a deeper level of loving you. Finn, you are seven. You are my son. You are loved. <o:p></o:p></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-33886373597284893282016-01-11T01:16:00.000-08:002016-01-19T02:44:34.779-08:00Rainy days and Arthur Mee and ‘Things to Make and Do’…From my seventies suburban childhood some aspects, objects and books still cavort in my mind, taking succour from thin after dinner mint chocolates and the recalled smell of ‘Le Jardin’ perfume.<br />
There was the avocado-coloured bath, the pine kitchen table with yellow vinyl seats, the olive and taupe floral wallpaper in my room, then those special books:<br />
The ‘How and Why Wonder Books’ kept me informed and titillated with art and history, chemistry and anatomy. I loved the way each double-page spread in ‘Anatomy’ delved one layer further at a time, like a fleshy striptease, from skin and hair, to muscle and ligament, to bone, to internal organs, culminating in the weirdness of a forming foetus in the wildly curious and curiously addictive ‘Human Reproduction’ chapter.<br />
<br />
My ‘Illustrated Children’s Bible’ shocked and intrigued with it’s provocative breast-of-Salome exposed amidst a flirt of jewel-hued veils; turn the page and John’s head bled like an uncooked corned-beef on a gilded tray held in her talonned hand! There was David peeping at Bathsheeba and YOU COULD SEE a little watercolour furriness above her thighs…<br />
<br />
But best of all was the inherited set of ‘Arthur Mees Children’s Encyclopaedia’.<br />
For a reclusive kid seemingly everything could be learned from those soft burgundy tomes from art, to wise thoughts, to natural wonders, great men and women of history and even French! But the very best and for purely the reason of what it’s title denotes was the ‘Things to Make and Do’ section in every volume from two through to ten.<br />
<br />
I still have the complete set of ‘Arthur Mees’ (mine are circa 1951-1954) and recently trailed loving fingers through them. Yes! Those ‘Make and Do’ sections (usually three per volume) were as good as I recall. They put the ‘Dangerous Books’ for girls and boys into the mediocre-shame bin they deserve.<br />
<br />
In the world of Arthur Mees’ children there are tooth-decaying recipes for toffee apples where no ‘get Mum to boil the sugar’ is required. There are lab experiments involving sulphur, naked flames and mercury. You can learn how to make a high speed Billy-cart with laughable ‘brakes’, how to light a fire, make a firecracker, make a battery then make a light. How to sharpen your pocketknife with sand or how to semograph that there are spies in your village. In Arthur’s world kids don’t just run with scissors, they learn how to engineer a working guillotine from Daddy’s spare razor.<br />
<br />
And the loveliest part? Despite all of Arthur Mee’s epochal love of the English as the God-blessed race and the English Child as the Superlative Human, through every book and every tale of art, science, philosophy or things to make and do- girls were there. They were depicted alongside little boys in apple-catchers making the toffee or waving the semograph flag, they were depicted as women building short-wave radio or leading an army, discovering a bacteria or writing a literary classic, and oh, there they were again making a model-plane on a rainy afternoon, while the eggs and custard boiled for their ‘nursery tea’.<br />
<br />
Later, fully into the fifties and away from that second war that saw all hands and brains in use this would not have happened. Arthur, for all his faults, depicted his times, an era where (albeit briefly) strength and knowledge were both required and cultivated in all. <br />
<br />
He can cop a lot these days, but for us fans the books are beloved treasures, smelling of silverfish and early adventures on rainy days. I’m digging through them again; it’s time my little one learned how to toffee an apple and make a waxed-paper sailboat. <br />
<br />
The explosives section can wait until he can read it himself.Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-65330799834085529642015-12-08T14:57:00.000-08:002016-01-19T02:28:47.364-08:00eventually, insomnia, my love.<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In my golden memories of late-childhood I recall sleeping. I
slept the deep bone-sleep of the child who spent days perfecting handstands between
eating rounds of white-bread sandwiches washed down with milo. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I slept listening to 3XY radio and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I slept with the dropped book squished
somewhere against my hot little body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Then in the mornings, once I’d been good and earned my
reading-rights by getting up for breakfast, washing myself and doing a
house-work job like dusting with an old singlet of Dad’s, I’d be allowed to go
back to my room, to sleep-read, which is possibly the most delicious sensation
I know—pages are read, face drops onto arm or pillow, wake, read more, drop off
dreaming the next part of the story…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I don’t sleep like that now, not with that heavy sense of ease
and rightfulness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These days I doubt
sleep, and perhaps knowing this sleep in turn is skittish with me, thin like
the meanness of dieting, jumpy like a new love, uncertain and fleet of foot.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">And yet, and yet… my body gets tired but I love what night-wakefulness
can do If I let it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no fight
sometimes against 3am, no fight and no hope-for-sleep and no anything so
sometimes I simply mediate a huge blue flower across the dark expanse of my forehead. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes I get up from the kicked sheets and
beaten pillow, and these times are sublime.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There is the night being washed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who is
doing this washing, how does it happen always this way?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The utter clarity in the chill air, my toes scrunching
on the warmer greyed-wood of the deck, and the possums have stilled in my
presence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Night-flower-scent, delicate,
moreso than under the sun of daytime. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jasmine
and honeysuckle and the gorgeous sexiness of orange roses.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Or 5am, my mind yearning towards coffee and the sharpening
into day, perhaps I do some words or read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I go again to the back veranda to sail in a brief dream-burst upon tiny
wooden boats silhouetted on a sky that is striated pink-- a mobile that takes me
briefly into fantasies of the spice isles, where I lurch against rigging as my
grin splits my face in two and my lips catch salt-spume.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Eventually, in insomnia, I wonder why I would sleep when
there are waking dreams?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-59153735661894800842015-10-06T03:03:00.000-07:002016-01-19T02:29:44.655-08:00come shrug with me<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Parents used to have more social time with friends in the
sixties, seventies and eighties than parents do now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">As kids we ate a yellow TV dinner whilst they entertained
with tinned things on ritz crackers, BenEan wine (or if you were classy,
Mateusse), Neil Diamond on the record player and a blue haze of Stuveysent
smoke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They laughed and ignored us, we
survived it. Mothers and Fathers, hear my Call to Arms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Come and hang out. I will not cook from
Nigella nor entertain your kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will
wear lipstick and I may make lewd innuendo in front of your darlings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ring the doorbell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You might get a ritz cracker with a tinned
oyster while our kids hunt for snails in the garden. When there is whining or
dobbing we’ll ignore them, and They Will Survive.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Ok, so in truth MY mum and Dad did a bit of the above,
though the meal would have been a cooked one for us kids…but yellow, like maybe fish fingers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">But I recall them entertaining. Be it a drop in from
neighbour Margaret that lasted for three hours and a packet of mint slices, or
the more posh dinners, or the family arvo teas or BBQs, the house often had
people in it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any kids present were left
to their own devices. We got up to some mischief, got bored, whined, dobbed,
but weren’te given the huge amount of air-time that prevents ‘grown-ups’ from
having a bloody life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I have decided to become a big supporter of Childhood
Boredom, something I’m learning to instil finally (hopefully not late) in my
son who as an only child has ruled the bloody roost for too long!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The best gift my Mum gave me as a kid was boredom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s an interesting person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But she didn’t load me up with pre-set interesting
play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t go to Kindergarten, I
dagged around behind her doing bits of housework.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I got bored. I found things to do. I was
eager when schooling started. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Later I
learned to make things, draw, colour, hook rugs, tapestry, annoy my brother,
have a fight, survive it etc.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So yeah, forget waiting for an invite for some posh
nosh.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Forget me setting up a fun
learning activity for the kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Come
over. We’ll talk in the kitchen and let them work it out. I won’t ignore them
if they damage themselves, but unless they’re bleeding, murdering or setting
fires I’m going to take a deep breath (and a deeper slug from the wine-glass) and
then I’m going to shrug.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Don’t you think
it’s time we all learned to shrug again?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ahh, the shrug, that lovely loose physical manifestation of ‘care
factor?’ and ‘I dunno!’…<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-41599240928977555192015-09-17T00:54:00.000-07:002016-01-19T02:36:13.444-08:00On re-reading the journals of Anais Nin<div class="MsoNormal">
Recently I was scanning my bookshelves and found an old 1964 edition of the ‘1931-1934 Journal of Anais Nin’.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The last time I attempted to read some of her journals was about 17 years ago. I had graduated with a literature major, knew I wanted to stay at university longer and do an honors thesis in literature, and was tossing up between attempting something on Nin or something on the poetry of Coleridge.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Neither won. Broke and sick of the struggle, I gave up the attempts to stay in academia and went out to get a job. I continued reading the Anais Nin journals, and continued my personal war with her.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At 23 my moral certitude was high and I railed against her even as I begrudgingly admired her. I was too young to know I could admire her but not want to be her. So I seethed at the lies of omission in her journals, how she fails to cite her husband Hugo as the patron of her lifestyle, the source of the income she passes on to an increasing friendship circle of hungry writers and artists.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now I’m finding it a joy to read this journal. Maybe my moral certitudes have been softened by my observance of life. People’s marriages are complex and interior worlds, everyone is fallible, and an individual struggling to be heard as an artist to me now has a ‘moral’ right to grow their creative flow as much as to protect another person.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The journal I’m reading covers one of the most fecund times in literary history, a period between the great wars and more specifically a period in France where the communication of psychology, the relative ease of writers banding together to print their works, and political tensions combined to create strong opinions and heady thoughts. This was café society at its purest, and amongst her friends Anais counted Antonin Artuad, Henry Miller and Otto Rank. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is the conversations between Henry and Anais that I am now finding so rich and fulfilling to re-hear. Reading these is awakening the critic and the feminist and the writer within who have been dormant for a while out of necessity. Their conversation is a distillation of ideologies emerging at the time about how men write, and how women write. Henry is the almost caricatured male: active, vulgar, sexual, pugilistic, drawn to the ugly, writing the male orgasm in all its linear trajectory. Anais is the archetypal female, writing her unconscious, immersed in sensual observation, artifice, and writing narrative that expands like ripples on a pond. Their arguments and friendship reflect at times the misogynist talking to the feminist, at other times the duality of a whole and healthy psyche, the male and female at one.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
During the time she wrote this journal she begins her first novel that will be published (‘A spy in the House of Love'). Henry is writing his famous novel ‘Tropic of Capricorn’.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Both of these novels are their attempts to write June Miller, Henry’s wife, out of their systems, to write until she is understood and in some way therefore diminished. That both love her and are sexually fascinated and repulsed by her underpins their own explosive sexual and literary affair over these years.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
During this journal Anais also undergoes analysis, first with a Dr Allendy, then with Otto Rank, a student of Sigmund Freud. Her aptitude for psychology as an analysand leads her into a study of it under Dr Rank, and her work from this time draws heavily on Jungian symbolism and is nourished by early psychoanalytic theory. I believe it leaves a legacy that female writers have followed down the twentieth century and beyond.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Reading the journals again, and feeling this time such pleasure in her strengthening personal self, her burgeoning intellect, her crystallization as a writer of something very fine, I am happy to feel compassion for a woman of her times, a woman writing herself into an existence out of the ordinary, out of what was given her by men in a still-tightly bound society.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In reading the journals again I have been able to reflect on my own shifts since those first attempts years ago. It is good to realize you have changed; it’s so incremental a process that it can be easily left unseen.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-37812437602762693002015-07-31T16:41:00.000-07:002016-01-19T02:52:46.358-08:00The train, the rain, and ‘Pomes Penyeach’<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWedX5No3gS0B2zIDkUnUi3Ts6ed3spegHeaqVFDBq5Ga5GlL0FOqWyOllr_OniU9fvKOe28cVUKZFCgcHDaw5kV2Ty-pUi2OPDhxCPBr0CJc5LZ1BKdHubUdFXPXDvC9XIuu9gNyEp9w/s1600/penyeach.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5527682166676458386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWedX5No3gS0B2zIDkUnUi3Ts6ed3spegHeaqVFDBq5Ga5GlL0FOqWyOllr_OniU9fvKOe28cVUKZFCgcHDaw5kV2Ty-pUi2OPDhxCPBr0CJc5LZ1BKdHubUdFXPXDvC9XIuu9gNyEp9w/s200/penyeach.JPG" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 150px;" /></a><br />
I love train travel. Even the morning commute across two trains from West to East I used to love. I love the sway of them, the rumble of them, the narrowness of them forcing all these bodies together as a reminder that in each separate skull exists a universe of memories, ancestry and experiences. I don’t even mind that sometimes people on them are strange or smelly.<br />
<br />
I have a train-affectation others might find strange. On train trips, long or short, I always have that arts-student staple: a ‘slim volume of poetry’. I started collecting battered old ‘slim volumes’ when I was in my late teens, often buying them from the Lake Bookhouse in Daylesford, and usually buying ones with loving inscriptions in the front leaves. The inscriptions could sway me to buy something more than knowledge of the poet. I loved that people used to give each other slim volumes of poetry and write messages in them too.<br />
<br />
When I was in my late teens and early twenties I also fell very romantically in love (and with a surprising subtlety of inaction) with a man in his (very) late forties. He would perform at a place I often went, and scatter poetry recitation between music making with a glib and puckish sense of mischief. I adored him and knew nothing would or could ever happen, so I didn’t feel the need to test my developing wiliness on him! He must have known of my crush, and he always treated me respectfully, coming over at breaks to chat about books and music.<br />
<br />
When I turned 21 he gave me a used 1960’s copy of James Joyce’s ‘Pomes Penyeach’. On the third page in and in a broad stroke of ink he’d written, 'To A, with love,...'<br />
<br />
The book though old was entirely unmarked save on thing: A single page had its corner folded. On that page was an asterix above the poem title. And the final word of the poem was underlined. To this day I wonder if he was telling me something, or if the notation was inherited with the second-hand book. The wondering was always OK and still is. On trains, reading the poem again, my heart feels warm and pleased with the gift he gave my young and chaotic self.<br />
<br />
Alone <br />
<br />
Thee moon’s greygolden meshes make<br />
All night a veil,<br />
The shorelamps in the sleeping lake<br />
Laburnum tendrils trail.<br />
<br />
The sly reeds whisper to the night<br />
A name- her name-<br />
And all my soul is a delight<br />
A swoon of shame<br />
<br />
(James Joyce, Zurich, 1916)Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-4567051237355040292015-04-30T01:36:00.000-07:002016-01-19T02:39:47.236-08:00reading Rilke at 3amas I battle the dreaded insomnia again, and again, and again in its usual cycle of (hopefully) around three months, I find myself crashing in my blue-room, a kind of study-come-boudoir with a very comfy couch bed and a the ever-present pattern of leaves on the window from a large tree outside. At 3am, or 4am, I'll creep in, too restless to inflict my twitchy feet on Husband, but clearly also too restless to attempt sleep.<br />
With the light on soft and a dim view of the street, I again, as always come Autumn, pick up poetry. Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us that all is sacred, can be sublime. That he does this with reference to a God he knows but has no secular faith in, that he does this as merely a conduit to the sensual and only then the sublime, is why I must return. He knew secular faith but could not feel it, he felt the sensual world and mastered a prose that steps back from being a knowing guide - it is his observance alone that takes us freely to our own realizations, Yes, that is so, just like that- YES!<br />
<br />
I am stunned, always, by the modernity of him, and yet how well he fits an epoch of deep introspection, critical thought and a tradition of intellectual questioning.<br />
<br />
All that nestled in the sheer beauty and familiarity of his prose, so new, so sure, so skin-felt and heart-drummed. To be so taken up, out and through by words still quite stuns me.<br />
I can imagine no better antidote to 3am restlessness. If you haven't, please do.Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-47654256397772050472015-03-10T00:48:00.000-07:002016-01-19T02:21:28.730-08:00Twintown drinking<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: calibri;">It’s the same old pub in the same old town. He can smell the
fryers out the back doing their turnover of bacon, burgers and parmas. Late
arvo light shafts in and shines on the trophies and pictures of local footy
players that adorn the walls. Kids are playing a desultory game of pool on the
torn up table. His mouthful of fish and chips taste sharp with salt and lemon
and the glass he’s holding, has stuck, hilariously he thinks, to its tacky coaster.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Fortune’s
Legacy’ won today and everything is good because he’s going to leave, live
like a king, maybe go to Sydney and buy an apartment and be close to his daughter
and grandkids.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Everything
in the pub looks different now, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>haloed
with an aura of sentimentality that blooms from his chest, making his beer taste
like heaven and the weathered faces around seem very dear.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>His heart
fills fit to bust and his glance slides along the twinkling row of bottles on the
top shelf, rainbow coloured spirits and liqueurs, the sea blue of Curacao like
the sea near his daughter’s home, tawny Scotch as welcoming as those soft leather
armchairs in posh lobbies, Vodka that glints like diamonds!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘My
shout!’ he yells out deliriously, and waves his arm towards these riches of colour.
‘My shout! Anything you bloody want, me horse won the race!’<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: calibri;"><b> ***</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: calibri;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The fryer gives off a greasy smoke than always stinks up the
pub with fug that smells like rancid fish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s late arvo and dirty sepia light pushes past the small windows,
showing the grime of a million cigarettes smoked over a hundred years. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Million- yeah right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> He was meant to win one.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>His
parma is cold, the cheese congealed and the sauce a hard crust like blood on an
old wound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He reckons it was yesterdays,
reheated under the Baine Marie, they do that here. Over and over the same food,
the same songs on the jukebox.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Same group
of kids, just different versions of them, always playing pool and
drinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now he’ll never bloody leave.
He stares into his beer, annoyed by the smug faces around him with their same beaten
look and their same stupid stories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
reckons he might just have enough for another pint, and filches around his
pocket, where the ticket is. Stupid fucking horse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has three bucks in loose change left, not
enough even for a pot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dark walls,
smoke and stink close in and the clatter of voices merry with drink makes him
angrier by the moment. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Time to go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-52439835982880938732015-02-26T01:07:00.002-08:002016-01-19T02:22:52.808-08:00The Source<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">You were a sunny child, into tree houses and throwing pinecomb bombs, part of the rough and tumble mix of neighbourhood life. Loud,
scabby-kneed, natural. Then something happened which you now realize was a catalyst
in changing your shape, your personality, towards something more inclined to
sit always outside the circle; you became introverted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In 1976 when you were five you got Scarlet Fever. It must
have been bad because as Dad took you ino the local doctors you left your
body and saw him carrying you, small and slumped in your flame red dressing
gown. You saw the shocked faces in the waiting room and how the receptionist
rushed you straight into Dr Glassspole’s office. Your face! Suppurating red
sores where only an hour before your freckled skin had been.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">During the six week recovery you saw the EverReady Bunny
come through your pink and orange floral wallpaper, quite a few times. You saw
an angel that looked like Glenda from the Wizard of OZ. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sores popped pus into your ears and you got an
ear infection. Trolls gambolled beneath your bed; fever and shakes; you rode
life-sized My Pretty Ponies, shakes and fever.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">From then on your ears were vulnerable to tinnitus, a low
whining that made you feel as though a mosquito was trapped in your head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You also had a form of synaesthesia, that weird
little crossing of neurological pathways and misfired synapses: words could
have tastes so viscerally real it made you pull faces and salivate. Once
someone said ‘due diligence’ in a meeting and you gagged on the taste of Coca Cola
syrup, so strong and present it was as if you had sucked Cola laybacks from the
post-mix gun behind a bar.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So now you have this aural sensitivity that makes sound,
especially voices, a tangle of threads to be unpicked. Chatter spools all over
the floor like old ladies crochet yarns. You understand conversations better from
outside the circle. You hear better from the front of the room. It got you
labelled Geek years ago, something you cultivated with talk of seeing angels,
demons and ghosts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they weren’t. They were people. Doing
things that looked real. It just took you til adulthood to figure it out. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The first time you helped the police you tried to do it
anonymously, but you were so naive about the perfect accuracy of your ‘tip’ you
became a suspect. Oh irony, it has a salty sweet taste but it will always smell
like brackish water. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">You had slept and you had followed a woman, through brush, who seemed
to be following a grey metal lock-box held out in front of her. You saw the
grey van with its bong-smokers parked on the gravel in-road. You saw its
license plate number. You saw the signage on an old warehouse nearby. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">You saw
the slick sepia river, the tree stump at its edge. You saw a beautiful woman in
heels being led by a lock-box that yearned towards the water.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Then, a week later, her face and shining hair were on the news.</span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-34045923220203041482015-02-24T02:05:00.001-08:002016-01-19T02:24:17.933-08:00The Source dreams<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">A prologue<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Come with me, walk carefully and quietly. Stay back! We
follow a woman as she steps carefully in high heels through the mud and
undergrowth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is in the wrong shoes
for this job, but it’s her lunch break and the only time unaccounted for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The water smells brackish, shallow and mineral-rich.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Will it be deep enough beneath that surface that
is slick with oily stains? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Watch your step;
there is so much rubbish, detritus of trysts and parties: cans, glass and
condoms. Follow her. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Watch her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You may need to remember this moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her hair is sable-brown and neatly rolled in
a French pleat. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A man is dead, and
there is a box to remove from the world, a grey metal lock-box she holds out in
front carefully, like a tray of canapés being proffered. Stories trail behind
her, little lost and secret stories. They cling to her pencil skirt and whine
for attention. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No time for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not now. Her heart beat is a bass-heavy thump
but in her head is a crazed jazz treble: logistics, logins, passwords, email
accounts. Another box, this time in a bank. Two PO boxes in two towns, and at the
huge hospital on Broad street one body. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">One beloved, known, mapped by her fingers body. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A man is dead and the box must disappear.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Watch her. Follow her. You may need to remember this moment…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-63564104628381598502015-02-02T02:46:00.000-08:002016-01-19T02:31:09.451-08:00Little Boy HanselIt is full dark and the trees whip and whisper. Way up, up high, the orange street lights try to hold back the sky. There is no-one about--is there? No squares of warmth and voice fall beyond the darkened window panes that sit behind long and low front yards. <br />
He is 107 centimetres tall and not yet six years old. <br />
<br />
In his t-shirt pocket is a little plastic bag of coins. He waves the blue arc of torch-beam like a light- saber through the cold night, the dark night, the excited night. In response it asks: 'Little boy, little little-little boy, can you remember the rules?'<br />
He toes the kerb, looks left and right, then bolts across the road, a river of risk, and leaps onto the safety of the kerb (embankment), punching the air with his beam, legs pumping along the path, one house, two house three house, four!<br />
<br />
In his head his Mum's mantra: 'careful in the car-park, ask the staff for help, any treat you choose, my big boy...'<br />
<br />
She stands in the shadows under a tree and lights a cigarette, able to see him nearly all of the way. Prouder than she'll be when he starts school or performs a solo. Remembering, as she puffs her mum-blues out into the cold air, her own adventures in creeks (Rivers and Dams!) and tunnels (Secret Caves of Treasure), but remembering too that just short years older than him and the adult world had proved itself capable of a darkness worse than storm-drains.<br />
<br />
Puff. Risk. Managed. Puff. But. Still. <br />
<br />
The air stills, her neighbours pull away in their heavy-duty car and she imagines him suddenly mangled beneath it. <br />
<br />
The beams trail away, replaced by a swinging solid line of blue. Here he comes, whistling on his lollypop, pleased and proud. Whistle-Toot and in he tumbles, back to TV and bath-time and all the overblown baby-rituals of coddling.<br />
<br />
So many risks ahead, most of them unmanageable. This his first. <br />
Whistle-toot!<br />
<br />
Puff.Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-77583127935434894002014-04-11T19:35:00.000-07:002016-01-19T02:25:45.000-08:00Pull up a chair, grief.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I sat in a park alone. Let the wheel turn as it would. All
went silver into nothing. Then the view again. Silver. View.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found that finally I was crying, the tears
thick, oozing gently past my lower lids and onto my cheeks, immediately effaced
by the wind that was mildly warm but gusty. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After ten or fifteen minutes the view took
more colours. I realized I was crying not for my Uncle who just died, but for
myself and his children. That I was crying because I know and fear that when my
Dad dies I will be infantile with grief, an utter child again, railing and
flailing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I understood too that that
though I will cry for when my Mum dies it won’t be so outraged. I hold her too close
inside, she’ll always be in me chattering away, whereas the loss of my Dad will
come with a fear that he is indeed lost…He lives not in the world of talk which
can resonate inside, but in the world of activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will see him in the repairs of my home, in
my own tendency to not let myself be picked over in a fight, my straight and
sound work, in some of the charm he transmitted through genes or all the living.
I should trust I will have him close, yet somehow it his death I fear more
greatly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The wheel turns, the warmish wind blows, it is autumn,
thinning of the veils.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And there!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Colour again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A shed so blue it is sky. Its trim is the burnished brown-red of olives.
The taste almost on me, of olives on a day hung cerulean blue. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Death-thoughts subside in the moment of that
shed’s painting, all the confluent story of someone choosing those colours,
dreaming that scheme; then two little girls emerge from the shed on hot-pink
bikes. I remember being six or seven and going to Dad’s work, the excitement of
it, the great warehouse where I rode a big purple woman's bike round and round the
empty concrete floors. Hot chocolate in the dark wood office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just another childhood Saturday.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">And now I build those childhood Saturdays for another, good
reason, sensible loving reason, to have held down on grief and mortal fears.
Good reason to go now, away from the salty words and into the sweet of my son
and his little limbs sprawled on the couch. But I know too I’m not done crying,
that in the mix of life and the days there is so much salt ahead, salt enough
to make a statue of a wife, or salt enough to buoy a ship. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Which will it be?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-16343585808172096332014-03-08T18:05:00.000-08:002016-01-19T02:49:15.989-08:00A silent moment in the music<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It’s a glaring autumn day and I am pleasantly mellow from a
new sleeping pill I tried last night. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I was in bed, hazing and fluttering to the wind and creaking
house, and felt as though I was back in the era of coming down from a night of hard
dancing and partying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I recalled a wild time. I had been with the usual crowd of
about fifteen friends and it was a surprisingly small club and a winter gig.
The DJs were from Detroit and the crowd worshipped their mix of dropping in
Motown to high NRG beats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I left
everyone in a moment of clarity and certainty that I wanted to observe and
absorb the undulating crowd of arms in the air.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Upstairs I prowled the mezzanine then bumped into an old
friend that I had dropped for his ruthless wildness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was still elfin, delicate looking,
shave-headed, his homosexuality projecting from him like a prowling beam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We fell into each other’s arms and grinned
ecstatically. “I want to hang out with you.” “ Yes, let’s go NUTS.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He offered me cocaine, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>e, speed…patting his cargo-pants pockets and
beaming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But even with the gleeful
daemons wanting to play I had a ‘one elixir' rule and my choice was drink…”NO,
let’s do shots!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">We sank shots and then champagne from the mezzanine bar then
drifted down to the floor, soon in the middle, riding high on the wave of sound
and people-pleasure, dancing like gleeful imps and air punching. I forgot the
old ruthlessness he could show and swam with him instead in the moments of
being beautiful and glorious. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He was my age, and at over thirty we were older than many in the
crowd, so we busted out tricky moves from the early eighties house-music days
and soon had a circle of dancing ‘fans.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">We danced for hours, leaving only for more champagne and
toilet breaks; him coming into the ladies and using the make-up of many passing
girls…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">At dawn I still liked him, a lovely thing, and we parted to
go to separate recovery-days, mine at a small club where the flavour was trance
and jazz and fusion, him off to an outdoors day-rave.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It was years until I saw him again; he was skipping lightly
arm in arm with beautiful young queers through a park I was in with my
son.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He beamed at me and nodded at my
boy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I smiled and clasped my child’s
hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A flicking moment where we
acknowledged a passionate past friendship and respected the gulf between our
now-lives. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had forgiven each other; <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>me for his diamond-hard- core, him for my
casting him adrift when he broke one too many times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Forgiven each other through a communion of wild
dance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Would I want him in my life again?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But how I love that memory of our dancing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another jewel in my
box of pretty things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-28871102451760337032013-11-26T10:40:00.001-08:002016-01-19T02:26:16.383-08:00morning prayer for Uncle Jeff<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Do we all know how to pray? Do I know how to pray if I want
to?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Long ago in childhood in sweet soft faith I could pray
easily to God to bless my family then hop into bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A faith that I lost in early adolescence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once that kind of faith is lost I don’t think
we can get it back.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Yet this morning I find myself wanting to say a simple
prayer. Perhaps just to the sky, which is softly striated green and grey with dawn.
Perhaps to the birds that are bright with trilling, chattering arcs and falls
of song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ok then, I will pray to nature
in the way of my women.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Take my Uncle Jeff softly back to yourself. Once he was a
white-haired boy-child with all the sparky attitude of a younger son loved hard
and ready by his big brothers, loved by his parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You were his parent too, and now he has died
and you may bring him home to you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
body to blaze briefly like a star, his ash to fall and mingle with earth and
water. He is yours again, an elemental and beautiful thing, atoms borne aloft, ready
to become his star again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I don’t know how to pray, but I bless him into rest, away
from pain. I bless him with love. I knew his story not nearly enough, but I
always felt his wonder and love at the family and children around him, his
pride to be part of it all. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Great mother and father, take this loving man and enfold him into love. Blessed be.<o:p></o:p></span>Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-60615810016207793422013-11-13T19:37:00.000-08:002016-01-19T02:26:47.786-08:00Who is Finn?<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He is my son, my moon, my boy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is four years old. He is goofy,
articulate, with far too many words up his sleeve. It can make people feel he’s
older (when he pulls out such perfectly parsed sentences) despite that he is
smaller for his age than many around him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He is himself, and deeply so, with a constant internal
battle between wanting to do the right thing and be praised, and wanting to be a
Puckish little mischief-ratbag-bugger who can’t sustain goodness for too long without
bursting out with tests, challenges, comedy and drama.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He can be absorbed for a long-time by intricacy: drawing
perfect cars with spoilers, hemmies, bug-catchers, twin-exhaust systems et
al.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His kindy teacher wants him to draw
people more often. Why? People are fine! But ‘classic restos’ are much more fun
to draw!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He likes to eat sausages and rice and cruskits and cheese,
pizzas with anchovies and olives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
likes baths with colours he can mix to make ‘Shrek-coloured’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has a deep and abiding love-affair with ‘Lolita
the lollie jar’ who will only make her appearance when he is being good and eating
all of his fruit.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He likes bum-smacks, little cheeky ones, when he is naked
post-bath. Then we do chasey with Zombie-Mummy sucking out his brains…but only because he is constantly killing me...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He is proud of learning to swim, proud of his pictures,
proud he can sing ‘twinkle twinke’ and ‘Incy wincy spider’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has the sense of humour of Chris and I,
dark at times but also tickled by sheer whimsy and slapstick.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Alone, he will make leggo cars, draw, do craft or spend a
long time softy patting our more friendly cat Whisky.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">With his Dad he likes to get mechanical and intricate with making
hot-wheels tracks and leggo cars. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
go to car-shows too with our restored sixties Valiant and meet all the other
classics and their fun owners.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">With me he likes to submerge into story, be it ‘pretends’, movies,
books, or making up stories together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
can’t resist teaching him of the ‘heroic journey’ and ‘three act plays’ and ‘beat
sheets for film’ that I am learning this year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So now he knows that a montage is fun-and-games to music, but next there
will be a ‘dark night of the soul’, some action, and a happy ending.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When we story-weave together he always
ensures that after the action and excitement the characters all get lemonade and
ice-cream by the end!<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He is without night-fears, because as parents we story them right away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When ‘monsters’ rate a mention he learns that
‘Mrs Blossom the Lovely Possum’ who lives in our roof catches them to make
monster-stew for her and her possum-son Finneka.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Finneka the possum lives in Finn’s ‘top-bunk’,
in the roof over Finn's bed, and is usually making all those night-noises
(that could be scary) because he’s up there living a wonderful life with his
possum-toys while Finn sleeps.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">We draw around him a mix of music, myth, morals, story and
structures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> We believe in good as a way to live without harsh judgement, with an ear to the backstory of all those we meet, and that community starts with listening for difference. </span>As parents we’re not
perfect. We lose it and get cross, teach him words for those <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>feelings, then try to do better and have fun and
cuddles and apologies all round. And in this environment he becomes
increasingly himself, taking up the offered threads but mixing in his own magic
and mischief and ideas.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">When he is wilful (because being good all the time is hard
work) he is given numbers: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">One! (Mind yourself there buddy) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Two! (You’re on notice mate)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Three! (To your room now and don’t even think of whining…)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It can work most times, but not every time, for Finn is,
thankfully and marvellously, himself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I have utter faith in him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-3194527294652908352013-07-07T02:02:00.000-07:002016-01-19T02:32:22.321-08:00three chairs<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My son Finn is four years old. Today he seems to be the
perfect size to fit the white chair. But he seemed the right size at age two,
and I know without a doubt that he will fit the chair at eight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He just called out to me ‘that is great music mum, what’s it
about?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘It’s
about three chairs love, three chairs before the fire. ‘<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Our
chairs?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Yes my little love, our chairs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am in the one scrounged from the side of
the road. One scrounged because it was a perfect <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>though slightly smaller version <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of the one we’ve had for ten years, that was
built by my Grandpa Ken in the early nineteen-fifties before living out its
mid-life with my parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both of these
chairs have that simple modern design of a leaning back, tightly padded <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>seat under velvet, then arms of curved timber
that roll in big semi-circles before falling <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>gracefully to the floor to become legs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The third chair?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well
it was made by Grandpa Ken in about 1969, for my brother Dean who is oversees
now having travelled away for his 46<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> birthday.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The white chair was always there. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a perfect little man’s chair, like a
leather office chair with a tall back, side panels with curl-over for arms, and
a neat and modern shape. It is made of nineteen- sixties marble-white vinyl,
and has those teak legs like inverted cones that end in gold caps. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I used to watch my brother as a boy rock on this chair in
front of the telly, shows like ‘Matlock Police’ or ‘The Sullivans’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For years it was covered in ‘3XY’ or ‘EON FM’
radio stickers. Or a Bombers scarf. Or Dean’s footy duffel-coat adorned with
the numbers of players for Essendon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">And now so many years later it lives in my son’s room,
cleaned up enough to look new, dragged into the kitchen-lounge for open-fire
days.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">When we lit the fire today Finn got excited and clamorous,
climbing the chair. I wanted to say ‘be careful’ but checked myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This chair was well-made for little guys and
it had balance built in. It’s almost un-topple-able, just as it seems
unstoppable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I sit, fire blazing, in amongst this triptych of chairs. I
sit in their story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My Grandpa. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My brother as a boy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My boy as a boy seated in his history and
family narrative. The addition of the chair found by me and my husband adding
its own newer story-thread. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In the settling fire potatoes cook in foil. My husband and
son make a Leggo ‘super-monster-truck’ that has a lot of spoilers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Later we will scoop out the soft inner potato and pop in
butter and salt. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Riches enough, good things aplenty for a cold
Melbourne day…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-13521713825239408002013-07-05T03:01:00.001-07:002016-01-19T02:33:18.385-08:00Woman to Man<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Woman To Man<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Judith
Wright)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The eyeless labourer in the night,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">the selfless, shapeless seed I hold,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">builds for its resurrection day---<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">silent and swift and deep from sight<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">foresees the unimagined light.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This is no child with a child's face;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">this has no name to name it by;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">yet you and I have known it well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This is our hunter and our chase,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">the third who lay in our embrace.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This is the strength that your arm knows,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">the arc of flesh that is my breast,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">the precise crystals of our eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This is the blood's wild tree that grows<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">the intricate and folded rose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This is the maker and the made;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">this is the question and reply;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">the blind head butting at the dark,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">the blaze of light along the blade.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Oh hold me, for I am afraid. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></o:p><span style="font-family: "calibri";">This poem by Judith Wright has been with me all my adult
life. ‘Woman to Man’ is possibly my favourite poem; it is certainly the one I
have most used, for learning, to feel another’s empathy, to be comforted by. It
is a poem that to me has always had a kind of grace, and it has bestowed that
grace on me many times.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I came across Woman to Man when I was seventeen and studied
it with one of those rarely gifted teachers. We talked in class at length about
the abundant sexuality and sensuality, with the female teacher discussing her
own awareness of the sex-act that had conceived her son.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We got graphic and spoke of the ‘intricate
and folded rose’ of the vulva and the womb. We knew the ‘blaze of light along
the blade’ to be both ejaculation, and the cutting of the umbilical cord. That ‘the blind
head butting at the dark’ was both the penis during sex, and its ultimate
outcome, the blind head of the babe in the darkness of the womb. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It was a relevant age to find this poem, as it resonated
through my early sex exploration. It helped explain why and how my body was designed,
that in fact pleasure is part of the great design, and that the great design
seeks only to replicate life over and over. It made me feel my body was quite
sacred and that my pleasure was part of the design of life, even if I wasn’t
ready or desirous at the time to bring forth that life. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I watched a documentary once that showed the cervix
up-close during female orgasm, how it gulped like a little mouth to draw in the
sperm, so functional and effectively designed. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Years later I read the poem again and again as I and my
partner faced conception. The first time- not wanted and terminated in a
hospital procedure when we were young and powerless. Then the other times of
conception, two, three and four, when all we wanted was for that embryonic
potential to survive yet it did not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That is when the line ‘oh hold me for I am afraid’ took on different
meaning, where sex <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was for life-creation
and it promised hope or the despair of miscarriage. Then the conception that
closed a loop, righted the universe in my womb and put life and light back in to
bring forth ‘the third who lay in our embrace.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The poem has been with me all my life as a signpost to that
which is erotic, spiritual, romantic, biological and paradoxical between Woman
and Man- that even as we are drawn to the embrace and its potential, we fear
it. ‘Oh hold me for I am afraid.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-35259658322288585822013-04-04T03:09:00.001-07:002016-01-19T02:48:42.496-08:00Bath to bed<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There is a soft sweet connection with my Grandpa calling me
his gingerbread-girl and the Scrappy Girl I now find myself to be in mid-life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One that’s wholly different in its tone to
anything else in my big rock-pool of relationships but resonant
nonetheless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Let me tell you about crucial memories of childhood- about
dinner, bath and bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This triptych of the family album still takes up much of my
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I used to be a part of it, now I
orchestrate it. Now for me and us in my home it’s a ritual of early dinner,
dessert offered to the sprog while the bath runs, into the tub with toys and
tall tales, then a mad final dash of little limbs, squeals, monster-tickles
then coercion into the bedroom for a final half-hour of three stories and
certain things said: “ I love you all the way to the moon and back, my good
boy, go to sleep my good boy, goodnight, goodnight.”<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Here are my Scrappy girl’s memories of:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Dinner<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The kitchen had a big pine table with yellow vinyl chairs to
match the yellow vinyl benches. The room had the warm 70s glow of brickwork and
wood-panelled walls, of dark vinyl floors and the crocheted brown owl on the
walls. And yeah we had those two-toned orange-and-brown biscuit barrels and the set of canisters
labelled ‘rice’, ‘flour’, ‘sugar’ and ‘tea’ with the little gold knobs on
top.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mum cooked plainly-well and to a
cycle (Oh no its chop day!) with roasts, snags, cutlets, chops and mash all
featuring in with her early attempts at curries and pasta sauces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mum grew a chilli plant on the balcony in
1978, and nearly killed us all with her first ever ‘chilli-con-carne’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Back then she was a plain good cook. But even
then were nights when bro and I would be sent to bed at 7.30 despite the
incredible excitement of Dad preparing the drinks-trolley with small bottles of
colour and tall bottles of spirits, with ice buckets, tongs and an array of
garnishes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I recall Mum wearing a floor
length Grecian gown of the most beautiful powdery deep blue. It had a wide
rhinestone belt to hug her slim waist and it draped off one pale shoulder. Her
dark hair with auburn lights would be teased up all 70s, and she would let me
watch her put on perfume from a bottle with a puffer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Dad had sideburns and a wide silver tie against a dark
shirt. They were a couple being glamorous and entertaining ‘the boss and his
wife and some work-people’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My bro and I
would eventually sleep (having helped serve nibblies in our PJs- so CUTE) to
the sound of giggly drunken adult-hum and the smell of Cigars and
Stuyvesants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in the morning we would
wake and find those tiny square ‘after dinner mints’ on our pillows where Mum had
popped them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For those times she cooked
lavish concoctions involving shrimp entrees<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>and beef wellington mains. She was bloody good at it all. She looked
gorgeous, made cocktails, cooked and served all whilst doing a flirty
banter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was a child of the 40s who
was taught her womanhood in the 50s who discovered her own kind of feminism in
the late 70s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the 80s she was telling
Dad “to take them out for Chinese!”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
I love my memories of their glamour…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">At the main table though, on most days, I recall
arguing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both parents trying to talk to
both kids, but just too much heat and tension between them because she was a
Thinking Housewife in her mould and he was a Cocky Provider in his mould
too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would eat half of my food,
secretly pass half<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to our Jack-Russell
pup, then skiv off to hide in my room with kids-own-adventure books like ‘Famous
Five’, ‘Trixie Belden’, then later as the years passed and décor changed,
‘Sweet Dreams’ high school- romances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
don’t think I read anything serious until about age 13, and then it was the
discovery of poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All the classic and
literary stuff. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found it through my
Grandpa Ken, the Scotts one, who would read Robbie Burns and Henry Lawson,
Banjo Patterson but also Percy Shelley, Judith Wright and Robert Lowell.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Looking back he read from popular anthologies of the
Romantics, Renaissance and 20th century; they were his bents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I got my first reading of ‘The Wasteland’
at his side, nodding off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He read
magnificently. He was tall with a full quiff of white hair. He didn’t have the
burr of Scot but he had that depth of voice and he took real pleasure in
reading. I was spoiled. He was a bit posh, looking back. Or old-school educated
at least, with a learning that covered the classics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Years later in my mid-teens he<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>would play me opera only after <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he’d told me the story many times so I could
enjoy it: ‘Rigoletto’, ‘Il Traviatore’, ‘ La Traviata’, and ‘Carmen’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">But I’m digressing (aint it grand to digress?).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dinner at home was good food and bloody foul
company from which I wanted only to escape. Here perhaps is where a love of
aloneness began, and in its ‘tent-and-torch-reading’ where the writer began.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Phew!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bath and Bed
may have to wait for next time…<o:p></o:p></span>Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6290719496967456443.post-84769924556846252572013-03-05T01:27:00.001-08:002013-03-05T01:27:19.154-08:00Paul the sauasage-maker (alert- not for vegetarian or vegan reading) I wrote this one after attending an intimate local evening that involved beers, snags and some intriguing character observation...<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">‑Paul the sausage maker</span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Paul wasn’t an old man, but he was a tired man and a lonely
man. His postie job had left his legs bowed as if always on an old motorbike.
His early hours meant he went to bed early, too early for evening movies and
dinners out with friends. And who were his friends anyway?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So Paul was middle aged, tired, lonely and a bit sad. But
God could he make sausages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He made
sausages from scratch and doing it right was his passion. He ate sausages from
every butcher he found. He researched the making of sausages. He experimented.
He tested. From the moments his rounds finished until his supper time and into
the early evening he chopped and sautéed, simmered and stirred, then packed his
concoctions into the machine and turned a handle to stuff the skins. Mild lamb
with parsley and sage he grew in pots. Comfit of duck with oranges steeped in aged
brandy. Robust lamb with Moroccan seven-spice and olives. Peppered rabbit and
celery.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And as dusk became eve and all good pets should be home with
their owners they would instead begin to come, drawn by the delicious savoury
aromas. Dogs of all kind: from plump Labradors to skinny terriers. Cats both
well-groomed and feral. And in an odd-looking ensemble they would all line up
at the back door of Paul the postie, who at night became their hero, Paul the
sausage man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And each night, Paul would pick one furry creature to come
inside, share his plate of sausage and watch TV. And for a night he would know
the comfort of touch and company as he scratched the ears of his newest friend.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Until a dreadful night when no animals came. You see, Mrs
Betsy had gotten sick of calling her cat to a bowl of crunchies that never got
eaten. Yet her cat had become fat, something Mrs Betsy with her super-tanned and
taut limbs would not tolerate. So Mrs Betsy had followed little Shmoo-Shmoo her
Persian Blue, and seen her welcomed into Paul the postie’s house with a
plateful of sausages. Sausages! Ugh, how…fattening. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So Mrs Betsy started a campaign of whispers amongst the
neighbourhood pet-people, and soon they were all shutting in their animals by
5pm, before the first eddies of delicious aroma teased the dusk breezes. Small
children heard some adult whispering too, and in that way that small children
do turned them into black gold, a sinister thing, the urban legend of the man
who took people into his home then minced them for his sausage machine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Paul was shunned now by animals and children too. He grew a
little more bowed, a fair bit tireder, and a lot sadder. Yet he continued to
make sausages; what else could he do?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">One evening he wrapped some sausages in the local paper to
take to the local vicar. Paul wasn’t religious but the vicar herded a group of
church women who ran a Sunday sausage sizzle to generate funds for community
groups. He was lovingly wrapping a mixed two dozen when he saw the world
‘sausage’ on the paper. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was an advert
that went:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">‘Do you make sausages?’Do you like to eat sausages and drink
beer? If you like either then come to the Princess Hotel, May 1 st, for our
annual sausage makers competition. Enter your best 2 dozen, or be part of the judging
crowd! No charge for entrants, eaters just $5.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">On the night he went he felt nervous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But at the hotel courtyard he was greeted
warmly by the publican and his wife who was a chef. ‘Ooh these look GOOD’ said
Roberta. ‘Do you trust me to grill them? The judges are getting pretty eager’
and she held his arm and steered him into a small crowd of friendly faces.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And ‘grab a beer mate’, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>said Simon. ‘First one’s free for
entrants.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Simon stood close beside him
and said ‘So tell me about your snags mate’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Soon Paul’s face was grin-split as he talked to ‘Jacqeline
but call me Jack’, a plumply pretty English cook who wanted to know about his
knife technique for fine-mincing and what cut of lamb did he use for that one?’
Then two Sicilian brothers Agnostino and Angelo pulled him into a conversation
about cereals and spice-blends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paul had
three beers and was holding a sausage dripping its good grease into a crusty
bread-roll. Paul was happy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As he
watched the judging begin as people in the crowd were handed sausages and score
cards he became anxious. He knew his tasted good and had good texture too, but
what was the ‘presentation’ factor?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
asked Angelo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">‘Mate they just want to see you make a nice-shaped snag, the
right size for how much punch it packs’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ahh.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The three men and Jack
watched in silence as first tastes were taken.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They saw heads nod and lips get licked. It was OK. The eaters kept
smiling, nothing was spat out. All around them other sausage-makers exhaled,
the music went on, and more beers were bought.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">After he won second prize, wedged comfortably between Jack’s
first and the Brother’s third, Paul was still a middle-aged man, but he was not
a tired man or a lonely man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the pretence
of planning to murder him for his spiced lamb sausage recipe, Agnostino dragged
him into the wildness of Italian family life most weekends. When his kids had
birthday festas Paul was there with sausages, as new bubs heads were wet with
wine and blessed with song, Paul shyly bought his old guitar and joined
in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Roberta and Simon celebrated a
year of running the little pub, Paul was there cheering them on from the warm
local community they’d helped to build.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And Jack was there too. As their head chef she was proud, rounded and
sated with good food and love. Paul was so good to her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">One night he was wrapping their four dozen sausages for the
church ladies while Jack was cleaning up from their cook-fest. He saw the word
‘sausage’ on the local paper he was using.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>‘Hey love’ he called out, ‘the Butcher in Willi is looking for a sausage
maker; reckon its time I quit the post?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Life was good, like that classic trio of onion, celery and
leek where the salt brings out the sugar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sailor Lilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04001263373577461764noreply@blogger.com1