Will I ever feel normal again? My back aches and the desire for sleep, even after a full fourteen hours of sleep overnight seems so close. I feel as if I could sleep forever. States of mind like this make me wonder whether all this traveling is worthwhile. Not only do you lose time in travel, you also lose time in recovery. It would not be so bad if we had a week or so to get over the disorientation but we do not.
Bill lost his glasses in Singapore, in Changi airport, terminal two, somewhere near the E gate exit where we came off the plane from Munich. By then we had only been traveling for some fourteen hours and waiting around for the next plane to fly us to Melbourne. The time difference between France and Singapore is nine hours, between France and Australia it is ten hours, hence the disorientation.
We came back from our trip overseas on Friday, arriving in Melbourne at 4.45 am. Although I had aimed to stay awake all day that day in order to overcome the jetlag, I could not. I had to sleep for a few hours in the morning. Finally we went to bed that night at ten in the evening and I did not get out of bed until eleven am. I could have slept longer. I scarcely struggled with jet lag at all when I had arrived in Italy over two weeks ago now, after one very long night’s sleep from 10 pm to 11 am the next day I was fine, but it is worse arriving home.
I find the business of travelling so stressful. From the moment I set foot in the airport I go into a sort of trance like state in readiness for all the waiting that goes on. You wait in queues to book in your luggage and get your seat allocation. You wait in queues to get onto the plane. Throughout the flight itself you wait for the trolley to arrive at your seat with a serving of the most awful food, only because it’s a way of killing time, and the business of eating aeroplane food is a way of distracting yourself from the inability to get comfortable. I can never sleep on a plane. I only ever doze at best.
We left Paris proper at 4pm to catch a flight that was due to leave at 7.10pm. The flight was delayed until after eight, which caused us to panic. We feared we would miss our connecting flight to Singapore. As it was we two and another woman traveling to Singapore were rushed off the plane as soon as it landed in Munich and led across the airport at breakneck speed by an assistant in order to catch our plane from Munich to Singapore on time. This plane then left Munich around 9.40 pm and arrived in Singapore at 3.20 pm the next day, Thursday. We sat on the plane for twelve and a half hours but somehow during that flight we lost all the time that exists as we crossed the International Date Line.
I do not understand these things, nor does my body. It’s like being stretched brain wise and body wise. You no longer feel hungry. You eat out of some sense that you should be hungry. During the long trip the aeroplane attendants offer two meals, of sorts, breakfast and dinner, then while waiting in the airports we might eat something else, mostly a bread roll or some such thing that generally costs as much as a three course meal in a normal restaurant. I exaggerate, but it’s true, for some reason food in the airports tastes terrible by and large and costs a huge amount relative to what you would normally pay elsewhere. A dried out chicken wrap that has been sitting in a bain Marie all day can cost as much as eight dollars when it’s not worth much more than two. A cup of coffee costs around five dollars, a bottle of water the same. I think it has to do with the hours the airport cafes keep. They need to stay open for flying public, I imagine, so staff costs must be high and also they have a captive market. Once you are in the airport there’s nowhere else you can eat. It is like the cost of buying sweets and popcorn at picture theatres.
My brain is not working properly, hence all the boring details from the business of traveling. It hardly seems worth it, when you are in transit and in the days recovering from jet lag. Of course it does have its advantages but most of them get lost on me. I do enjoy seeing the places I have read about in books, French architecture, the green shutters on the windows in Italy, these are just a couple of things that come to mind, but for me nothing compares with the familiarity of home, even in the freezing cold of winter. I am such a creature of habit. Often I felt disappointed in things like the taste coffee, like the absence of vegetables with my meals in Paris and the general dirtiness of the streets. Dog shit everywhere.
I am ashamed of my difficulties with travel, with my wish to stay at home. I should be more like others, more like Bill who longs to see other lands, who longs to savour other tastes, to experience all things foreign. While I was away I read Maria Tumarkin’s book called Courage. Like Tumarkin, I know something of the foreignness of my upbringing, what it felt like at school to be a stranger in a strange land, not so much the oddity of the contents of my lunch box – I never had a lunch box – but the messy clothes, the unkempt hair, the feeling of not belonging at school, of not fitting in with the other children in the classroom, my memories of primary school, my longing to be at home with my sisters and brothers, with all things familiar, where we could play uninterrupted for hours. Though by secondary school it had all turned around – Vaucluse became the place I longed to be and home, the enemy territory.
Here in Italy, in the town centre, they have a necropoli, a notice board where they include names and details of the local recently dead. I wanted to take a photo of someone by the name of Giuseppe who died at 37 years, and of Fulvio who died at 77. Forty years between them, one a young man, the other old. What stories could they tell?
We stayed in Italy in a place called Teolo. On my first morning there I slept late till 11.15 am, overwhelmed with jet lag but thereafter every morning I was the first to wake. This proved a small problem for me. Every morning when I woke up I left the room that Bill and I shared in a separate section of the complex and walked around to the main house where the others slept only to find it locked, green shutters drawn. I could not get inside the main house even to get a cup of tea. The frustration of being locked out was all part of the group experience, I reasoned. It was hard to have a holiday with a group of eight and sometimes nine people, if you include little Leo, ten, when only one of the group, our daughter Tessa, we knew well enough to be ourselves. It must have been hard on Tim’s family too, his parents, his brother Jorn and Jorn’s girlfriend, Olga. Jorn liked to practise his English with us. He had spent a year in Canada, but the others had to work hard to communicate with us, and we with them, despite all ur goodwill towards one another.
Leo at twenty months, his second trip to Europe, the first when he was three months old, was unwell too, with Tonsillitis that he first seemed to get over on antibiotics. But he hated to take his medication. He hated to share his parents it seemed with all the extra people. He carried the stress for all of us. All of us in this foreign land where not too many people spoke English or German. So it was an intellectual exercise much of the time, having to think hard about what words to use.
The landscape had its compensations. The green of the fruit trees, already bearing fruit, mulberry, plums and apples, conventional fruits, the grey green leaves of the olive trees, the chestnuts and walnuts that surrounded the country villa and the green grass everywhere. The days were hot, around 30 degrees at the height of the day with a light breeze that seemed to be with us constantly, and humidity was high. Again European heat is different from Australian heat.
On these mornings as I sat outside at the table and longed for a cup of tea, I read and wrote. The locked shutters seemed a very Italian concept – to block out the noise, the light, the mosquitoes. It was effective but once sealed the villa was like a fortress and all those on the outside, thieves and honest people, were locked out.
I am trying so hard to resist the desire to go back to sleep. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and I want nothing more than sleep, but I must resist. This jet lag is dreadful. I resent the way I feel, the tiredness, the inability to concentrate, the boring quality of this writing. It’s like a long mantra of regrets. Why can’t I sleep when I want to sleep and be awake when I want wakefulness? This is jet lag. I resent it; I resent the whole business of traveling overseas when it takes so long to recover. I feel as if some part of my life has been stolen from me.
Even now as I write the tiredness engulfs me but I force myself on. I want my brain back. I feel so ill tempered, ready to snap at any minute.
The dog is chewing at a cardboard box underneath my desk. I could kick him.
‘Ralph. Stop. Stop.’ He ignores me and keeps on chewing. It’s an old cardboard shoebox and holds the contents of last years tax details. At least he doesn’t chew on them, but the edge of the cardboard box itself is already chewed to shreds.
“Ralph. Get away.’ Still he ignores me. Enough of my complaining.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Airports, hellos and goodbyes
This is my last morning at home, my last full morning before a full day before I travel off overseas.
Trips to the airport always fill me with a peculiar sense of excitement and nostalgia. The air is electric with the buzz of hellos and goodbyes. At the exit gate even more so because here there are only good-byes. Every time one of my children, or in some instances these days my husband, pass through those silver teeth-like snapping doors I am left with the same sad sense of loss. We who are left behind move off back to our cars, back to our homes, back to our ordinary lives while those who have passed through to the other side stand in queues, hand over their passports for examination and finally board planes for far away destinations.
My childhood was marked by visits to airports, at least once a year when some beloved relatives would come, from many places in Europe, from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia and then eventually go after a short visit. Every time they left, we hugged and my mother cried. I sensed her sadness at another goodbye. My childhood was marked by the sadness of my mother’s longing for her childhood home, such that in my mind I turned her home into a wonderland while our home here felt like dross.
I will be going away as of tomorrow for two weeks and as ever I am fearful of the plane dropping from the sky, of the authorities holding me in quarantine for seven days because I or someone else on my plane is seen to be suffering the effects of the dreaded swine flu. I am fearful of getting sick. Last year when we went to Byron Bay I became sick. I was sick before we even left. I’d lost my voice and my voicelessness became a virus and I felt miserable and fearful for a couple of days.
I am not a good patient when it comes to physical illness. My immune system stands me in good stead, but when it lets me down as it inevitably does from time to time, I imagine the worst. I must be dying. I have cancer of the lip I imagine because there is some dry skin that occasionally gets red. Skin cancer I imagine.
I do not think of myself as a hypochondriac but there are times when it seems a distinct possibility. Talk to anyone who is sick, particularly anyone over the age of sixty and their health becomes an absorbing and abiding concern. My mother in hospital these last two weeks after knee surgery is nearly ninety. Every time I arrived to visit, she offered an account of her bowels, whether too loose or constipated, an account of her knee, how much more she could lift it, her walking and on top of this she liked to outline the ailments of the two women whose beds were near to hers, divided only by jutting walls and thin curtains.
It is also difficult leaving Australia because I am concerned for the well being of my children left behind, especially the youngest, Ella, who will be at the beck and call of her two older sisters, both of whom threaten to be particularly militant. I hope they are kind to each other, look out for each other and do not allow their natural rivalries to turn them into brutes towards one another.
My mother hopes for the same with her children. Even now she hopes that all her children will attend her ninetieth birthday party in October. This seems unlikely. It looks like one will not attend. This brother whom my mother has now labeled as 'so like his father' did not come to her 85th either.
The boys cop it every time. They can be like their father, whereas we girls, well we are not all considered to be like our mother, though I know my mother considers that I am like her. She does not suggest that any of her girls could be like their father. Oh no. That’s not possible in her eyes. Either we are like her or we are ourselves like ourselves, unlike any other. Whereas the boys, they are like their father or they are strangers. If they are good to her, then they can be forgiven their resemblance to their father but if they are cruel and at times, they all have been, then they are 'like their father'. But we girls have sometimes been cruel to our mother too. She tends to overlook that.
I am off to a foreign land. Italy beckons. Italy the land of Lombardy poplars, my favorite trees, but we will not go near Lombardy, I imagine. We will have adventures and the odd mishap. We will see things anew and our world will be broadened but how much I have resisted going. Now I have no choice. I hope I survive.
Trips to the airport always fill me with a peculiar sense of excitement and nostalgia. The air is electric with the buzz of hellos and goodbyes. At the exit gate even more so because here there are only good-byes. Every time one of my children, or in some instances these days my husband, pass through those silver teeth-like snapping doors I am left with the same sad sense of loss. We who are left behind move off back to our cars, back to our homes, back to our ordinary lives while those who have passed through to the other side stand in queues, hand over their passports for examination and finally board planes for far away destinations.
My childhood was marked by visits to airports, at least once a year when some beloved relatives would come, from many places in Europe, from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia and then eventually go after a short visit. Every time they left, we hugged and my mother cried. I sensed her sadness at another goodbye. My childhood was marked by the sadness of my mother’s longing for her childhood home, such that in my mind I turned her home into a wonderland while our home here felt like dross.
I will be going away as of tomorrow for two weeks and as ever I am fearful of the plane dropping from the sky, of the authorities holding me in quarantine for seven days because I or someone else on my plane is seen to be suffering the effects of the dreaded swine flu. I am fearful of getting sick. Last year when we went to Byron Bay I became sick. I was sick before we even left. I’d lost my voice and my voicelessness became a virus and I felt miserable and fearful for a couple of days.
I am not a good patient when it comes to physical illness. My immune system stands me in good stead, but when it lets me down as it inevitably does from time to time, I imagine the worst. I must be dying. I have cancer of the lip I imagine because there is some dry skin that occasionally gets red. Skin cancer I imagine.
I do not think of myself as a hypochondriac but there are times when it seems a distinct possibility. Talk to anyone who is sick, particularly anyone over the age of sixty and their health becomes an absorbing and abiding concern. My mother in hospital these last two weeks after knee surgery is nearly ninety. Every time I arrived to visit, she offered an account of her bowels, whether too loose or constipated, an account of her knee, how much more she could lift it, her walking and on top of this she liked to outline the ailments of the two women whose beds were near to hers, divided only by jutting walls and thin curtains.
It is also difficult leaving Australia because I am concerned for the well being of my children left behind, especially the youngest, Ella, who will be at the beck and call of her two older sisters, both of whom threaten to be particularly militant. I hope they are kind to each other, look out for each other and do not allow their natural rivalries to turn them into brutes towards one another.
My mother hopes for the same with her children. Even now she hopes that all her children will attend her ninetieth birthday party in October. This seems unlikely. It looks like one will not attend. This brother whom my mother has now labeled as 'so like his father' did not come to her 85th either.
The boys cop it every time. They can be like their father, whereas we girls, well we are not all considered to be like our mother, though I know my mother considers that I am like her. She does not suggest that any of her girls could be like their father. Oh no. That’s not possible in her eyes. Either we are like her or we are ourselves like ourselves, unlike any other. Whereas the boys, they are like their father or they are strangers. If they are good to her, then they can be forgiven their resemblance to their father but if they are cruel and at times, they all have been, then they are 'like their father'. But we girls have sometimes been cruel to our mother too. She tends to overlook that.
I am off to a foreign land. Italy beckons. Italy the land of Lombardy poplars, my favorite trees, but we will not go near Lombardy, I imagine. We will have adventures and the odd mishap. We will see things anew and our world will be broadened but how much I have resisted going. Now I have no choice. I hope I survive.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
More dog and a couple of frogs
We need to build a gate in the back yard. This is a difficulty. Bill started building a side gate when Ella was a baby. For complicated reasons he never finished it and given that Ella, like her sisters before her, was not a wanderer, it never became a problem not to have one.
The plan is to use the nearly completed gate, that stands against one wall in Bill’s workshop. But to install the gate, which needs additional pickets down either side, we need to dig ditches for the foundations of the gateposts and to paint the whole thing once completed.
Bill never does things by halves. He has so little time. Most weekends he’s so tired he only wants to potter, so I worry that this gate might not happen, though something has to happen. Without a gate the dog cannot live in the back yard. Without a gate for the backyard, the dog has to live indoors.
We lock him up at night or when no one’s home in the small bathroom upstairs but he cannot live forever in an upstairs bathroom. The rest of the day when someone is there to supervise him, he runs around the house chewing up computer cords, socks and shoes and whatever else he can get his jaws around. We need to get him outdoors.
Millie and Nick began to build Ralph a kennel but that too seems to have stalled. My suspicion is that Ralph will live indoors for too long and that in time it will become almost too difficult to get him to live outside.
How we have changed. The first cat this family ever owned, a cat for Tessa when she was seven, a cat we named Tillie, became what we then called an outside cat. None of your pets indoors, in those days. Now they all live indoors. They sleep on beds, in hallways and over heat vents, on freshly folded washing. I'm sick of picking their fur off black clothes. But isn't that the way of it, with aging we mellow. Our old standards subside. Besides I cannot see so well these days, without glasses. So the mess becomes a blur and our priorities shift.
Yesterday Millie took Ralph unexpectedly to the vet. He had lept off the bed when he first caught sight of her in the evening and fell heavily on one side. He started to yelp and limped around. By the time Millie reached the vet , Ralph was fine. No broken bones, just a fright and maybe some bruising. The vet then took the opportunity to go through the list of pets they have included in their registry. Some six rabbits - Fern, CCS, Huggle Pots to name a few, as well as Tillie. All are now long gone. Millie said she felt like a murderer or a negligent pet owner as she declared that each in turn was dead.
I once wrote a story about our pets, focusing on the two frogs, Doris and Picasso.
Here's an early draft:
The frog’s name is Picasso. He’s a boy. We used to have a girl named Doris but she died. Tragically. One day she produced a long line of eggs, little jelly eyes, that somehow stuck to her rear end instead of dropping onto the surface of the water below for hatching. At first I’d thought the eggs were frog poo, all mixed up with bits of gravel from the base of the tank. I was wrong.
Over the next few weeks Doris lost her shiny green complexion. She no longer leapt high to catch the crickets we tipped live into the tank each evening. She lost weight.
We took her to a vet who specialises in reptiles.
“It’s not frog shit,” he said. “It’s her reproductive organs. She’s a sick frog.” He was pulling at the sticky stuff at Doris’ rear end. “There’s nothing I can do. She’s too far gone. We’ll have to euthenase her.” I watched as the vet drew up a needle longer than Doris’s tiny body and injected a thin stream of liquid. Her body caved in on itself and instantly she shrunk. I took the lifeless frog home for burial.
“It’s the kindest way,” the vet had said. He’s a reptilian specialist. He can operate on lizards no longer than a finger. “But I’ve never yet managed to anaesthetize a frog.”
A year later I bring Picasso to the vet. We adopted him to replace Doris. No more girl frogs. We figured with two boys there’d be no possibility of reproductive backfire.
But now Picasso’s sick. He’s been getting thinner. The fine bone at the end of his spine is jutting out in a way it never did before and there are dark raised spots along his skin. He’s lost his bright green sparkle and turned into a darker green. Frogs change colour to reflect their temperature, the darker the green, the colder they are. Picasso’s cold all the time now even on the few 40 degree days we’ve been having lately.
Picasso is a green tree frog from the rain tree forests in Queensland. Here in Melbourne we need a special home, a glass fish tank lined with gravel, a heat mat attached below to keep the temperature tropical and a UV light to emulate the sun’s rays. Finally we need a frog licence from Fisheries and Wildlife that costs $35.00 a year, a fee that increases regularly because green tree frogs are protected.
The vet diagnoses a severe case of gravel ingestion. It seems whenever Picasso swallows a cricket, he takes in a piece of gravel with it, and for some reason he hasn’t managed to shit the stones out. Now he has a belly full. At least a third of his body weight in stones, like the wolf in one version of Red Riding Hood. The Hunter cuts him open, frees Grandma and Red Riding Hood then replaces her with large round stones from the riverbed. Then he restitches Mr Wolf who wakes up to the most awful bellyache.
The vet prescribes a dose of laxative, caramel flavoured. He’s convinced that frogs love the taste. At least Picasso takes it in. He has no choice really. The vet has his mouth prised open with a metal stick and is shovelling in the stuff, brown and gluey, much like melted caramel.
“As long as he doesn’t vomit it back up, the laxative might help to shift the gravel.” It’s our only hope,” the vet says. “Put him in a separate container tonight otherwise you won’t know whether or not he’s passed any stones.” He hands back the frog and his assistant hands me the bill.
I don’t mean to harp on money but tree frogs in captivity are expensive, at least the ones you buy here in Melbourne. They fetch at least $150.00 from specialist pet shops plus the annual licence fee and all the bits and pieces. It has been suggested to me more than once that I should announce on the status sheet that we send to the Department of Fisheries and Wild life each year that both frogs have died. I don’t suppose they expect you to keep up your licence fee for dead frogs. Still I’m too honest for that.
All in all you have to be responsible to keep frogs. And the vet will tell you as he tells me in no uncertain terms how bad I am at handling frogs. I put Doris in a shoe box. Frogs don’t travel well in cardboard boxes. “Cardboard burns their skin,” the vet says, in a way that suggests I should have known all along. An ice-cream tub would be better. “Always wet your hands first and leave them wet when handling your frog’” the vet tells me wetting his own hands under the tap. “Otherwise frogs are surprisingly strong.” “We’ve had one of ours for four years,” I tell the vet. I don’t want him thinking I’m a complete incompetent. After all we’ve managed to keep them this long. But all the while I’m trying to think back. How long is it since I last cleaned out the tank. And the sight of the burden of keeping the animals clean I’m afraid I can’t distinguish one from the other. At least I couldn’t before Picasso got sick. Now it’s easy. He’s the skinny one.
All of this happened some five or more years ago. Life rolls on, for some of us at least.
Long live Ralph, the dog.
The plan is to use the nearly completed gate, that stands against one wall in Bill’s workshop. But to install the gate, which needs additional pickets down either side, we need to dig ditches for the foundations of the gateposts and to paint the whole thing once completed.
Bill never does things by halves. He has so little time. Most weekends he’s so tired he only wants to potter, so I worry that this gate might not happen, though something has to happen. Without a gate the dog cannot live in the back yard. Without a gate for the backyard, the dog has to live indoors.
We lock him up at night or when no one’s home in the small bathroom upstairs but he cannot live forever in an upstairs bathroom. The rest of the day when someone is there to supervise him, he runs around the house chewing up computer cords, socks and shoes and whatever else he can get his jaws around. We need to get him outdoors.
Millie and Nick began to build Ralph a kennel but that too seems to have stalled. My suspicion is that Ralph will live indoors for too long and that in time it will become almost too difficult to get him to live outside.
How we have changed. The first cat this family ever owned, a cat for Tessa when she was seven, a cat we named Tillie, became what we then called an outside cat. None of your pets indoors, in those days. Now they all live indoors. They sleep on beds, in hallways and over heat vents, on freshly folded washing. I'm sick of picking their fur off black clothes. But isn't that the way of it, with aging we mellow. Our old standards subside. Besides I cannot see so well these days, without glasses. So the mess becomes a blur and our priorities shift.
Yesterday Millie took Ralph unexpectedly to the vet. He had lept off the bed when he first caught sight of her in the evening and fell heavily on one side. He started to yelp and limped around. By the time Millie reached the vet , Ralph was fine. No broken bones, just a fright and maybe some bruising. The vet then took the opportunity to go through the list of pets they have included in their registry. Some six rabbits - Fern, CCS, Huggle Pots to name a few, as well as Tillie. All are now long gone. Millie said she felt like a murderer or a negligent pet owner as she declared that each in turn was dead.
I once wrote a story about our pets, focusing on the two frogs, Doris and Picasso.
Here's an early draft:
The frog’s name is Picasso. He’s a boy. We used to have a girl named Doris but she died. Tragically. One day she produced a long line of eggs, little jelly eyes, that somehow stuck to her rear end instead of dropping onto the surface of the water below for hatching. At first I’d thought the eggs were frog poo, all mixed up with bits of gravel from the base of the tank. I was wrong.
Over the next few weeks Doris lost her shiny green complexion. She no longer leapt high to catch the crickets we tipped live into the tank each evening. She lost weight.
We took her to a vet who specialises in reptiles.
“It’s not frog shit,” he said. “It’s her reproductive organs. She’s a sick frog.” He was pulling at the sticky stuff at Doris’ rear end. “There’s nothing I can do. She’s too far gone. We’ll have to euthenase her.” I watched as the vet drew up a needle longer than Doris’s tiny body and injected a thin stream of liquid. Her body caved in on itself and instantly she shrunk. I took the lifeless frog home for burial.
“It’s the kindest way,” the vet had said. He’s a reptilian specialist. He can operate on lizards no longer than a finger. “But I’ve never yet managed to anaesthetize a frog.”
A year later I bring Picasso to the vet. We adopted him to replace Doris. No more girl frogs. We figured with two boys there’d be no possibility of reproductive backfire.
But now Picasso’s sick. He’s been getting thinner. The fine bone at the end of his spine is jutting out in a way it never did before and there are dark raised spots along his skin. He’s lost his bright green sparkle and turned into a darker green. Frogs change colour to reflect their temperature, the darker the green, the colder they are. Picasso’s cold all the time now even on the few 40 degree days we’ve been having lately.
Picasso is a green tree frog from the rain tree forests in Queensland. Here in Melbourne we need a special home, a glass fish tank lined with gravel, a heat mat attached below to keep the temperature tropical and a UV light to emulate the sun’s rays. Finally we need a frog licence from Fisheries and Wildlife that costs $35.00 a year, a fee that increases regularly because green tree frogs are protected.
The vet diagnoses a severe case of gravel ingestion. It seems whenever Picasso swallows a cricket, he takes in a piece of gravel with it, and for some reason he hasn’t managed to shit the stones out. Now he has a belly full. At least a third of his body weight in stones, like the wolf in one version of Red Riding Hood. The Hunter cuts him open, frees Grandma and Red Riding Hood then replaces her with large round stones from the riverbed. Then he restitches Mr Wolf who wakes up to the most awful bellyache.
The vet prescribes a dose of laxative, caramel flavoured. He’s convinced that frogs love the taste. At least Picasso takes it in. He has no choice really. The vet has his mouth prised open with a metal stick and is shovelling in the stuff, brown and gluey, much like melted caramel.
“As long as he doesn’t vomit it back up, the laxative might help to shift the gravel.” It’s our only hope,” the vet says. “Put him in a separate container tonight otherwise you won’t know whether or not he’s passed any stones.” He hands back the frog and his assistant hands me the bill.
I don’t mean to harp on money but tree frogs in captivity are expensive, at least the ones you buy here in Melbourne. They fetch at least $150.00 from specialist pet shops plus the annual licence fee and all the bits and pieces. It has been suggested to me more than once that I should announce on the status sheet that we send to the Department of Fisheries and Wild life each year that both frogs have died. I don’t suppose they expect you to keep up your licence fee for dead frogs. Still I’m too honest for that.
All in all you have to be responsible to keep frogs. And the vet will tell you as he tells me in no uncertain terms how bad I am at handling frogs. I put Doris in a shoe box. Frogs don’t travel well in cardboard boxes. “Cardboard burns their skin,” the vet says, in a way that suggests I should have known all along. An ice-cream tub would be better. “Always wet your hands first and leave them wet when handling your frog’” the vet tells me wetting his own hands under the tap. “Otherwise frogs are surprisingly strong.” “We’ve had one of ours for four years,” I tell the vet. I don’t want him thinking I’m a complete incompetent. After all we’ve managed to keep them this long. But all the while I’m trying to think back. How long is it since I last cleaned out the tank. And the sight of the burden of keeping the animals clean I’m afraid I can’t distinguish one from the other. At least I couldn’t before Picasso got sick. Now it’s easy. He’s the skinny one.
All of this happened some five or more years ago. Life rolls on, for some of us at least.
Long live Ralph, the dog.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Towser
The cats are unsettled. They do not understand this strange new creature in the house. So far Ralph has managed, it would seem, not to notice them, though yesterday when he went over to the cat bowls, no cats in sight, he must have caught a whiff of them. Sniff, sniff on the floor around the bowls and Ralph let out a few puppy dog growls rearing back from the empty bowls.
It must be instinctive. I think of all the cartoons and stories about the antipathy between cats and dogs; cats and dogs, like siblings, like brothers and sisters. They fight like cats and dogs, we say. I think it was one of my mother’s expressions.
It is as if we have a new baby in the house. Bill is still not convinced of the dog's name. He wants to call him Towser. To Bill, all dogs are Towsers. I find the uncertainty of naming the puppy unsettling. I am reminded of those parents who are unable to decide upon a name for their babies, months after the birth. It seems to me it must impact on your personality, your sense of your self, your ultimate identity for the rest of your life. As if your parents in the first instance could not decide for themselves basic things about you. As if perhaps they were looking for the perfect name, to name the perfect baby, who of course does not exist.
If all dogs are Towsers, then our dog deserves a name of his own. Still, I too would like to call him Towser, though Ralph suits just fine. After all we once called a cat Pickles and another Tillie. We once called our rabbits, Muncheros and CCs after particular brands of corn chips and another the obvious, Peter. We once called our mice, Flora and Alexander and that's only the beginning. We once called a green tree frog, Picasso.
These animals once belonged to individual daughter's but over the passage of time they have blended in to become part of the folklore of this family. Our memories of them reflect the changes we've made. Once our cats were not even allowed inside, now they share our beds. Even our little dog has made it inside, at least for the time.
How much more tolerant we have become with age.
It must be instinctive. I think of all the cartoons and stories about the antipathy between cats and dogs; cats and dogs, like siblings, like brothers and sisters. They fight like cats and dogs, we say. I think it was one of my mother’s expressions.
It is as if we have a new baby in the house. Bill is still not convinced of the dog's name. He wants to call him Towser. To Bill, all dogs are Towsers. I find the uncertainty of naming the puppy unsettling. I am reminded of those parents who are unable to decide upon a name for their babies, months after the birth. It seems to me it must impact on your personality, your sense of your self, your ultimate identity for the rest of your life. As if your parents in the first instance could not decide for themselves basic things about you. As if perhaps they were looking for the perfect name, to name the perfect baby, who of course does not exist.
If all dogs are Towsers, then our dog deserves a name of his own. Still, I too would like to call him Towser, though Ralph suits just fine. After all we once called a cat Pickles and another Tillie. We once called our rabbits, Muncheros and CCs after particular brands of corn chips and another the obvious, Peter. We once called our mice, Flora and Alexander and that's only the beginning. We once called a green tree frog, Picasso.
These animals once belonged to individual daughter's but over the passage of time they have blended in to become part of the folklore of this family. Our memories of them reflect the changes we've made. Once our cats were not even allowed inside, now they share our beds. Even our little dog has made it inside, at least for the time.
How much more tolerant we have become with age.
Friday, May 08, 2009
What's his name?
Against their parent’s wishes, our daughters have brought home a dog. At this stage his name is Ralph. Yesterday it was Alfie, short for Alfred. I did not want a dog, I kept telling Millie and Ella because I am fearful that the responsibility for this dog will eventually fall to me and I have enough on my plate.
It’s been going on for weeks now. Bill and I refused to cooperate, so eventually Millie took it upon herself. She used some of the money from Mr Rudd’s stimulus package to invest in this little blighter, who is a cross between a Springer spaniel, a King Charles and a Maltese terrier, I think. He’s only eight weeks old and gorgeous but I don’t think Millie slept well last night. He shared her bedroom.
Already my heart bleeds for Ralph. He cries in the night presumably for his mother and siblings. I do not want to have my heart bleed over any other creatures, but what can I do? He’s here now and as I’ve said before, life will go on. Our three cats so far seem oblivious to Ralph’s presence. Bill is convinced that Anoushka will leave home once she twigs. Who knows? She might adjust. It’s this sort of angsting that I resent. As if we do not already have enough worries. But I’ll get over it.
Monday, May 04, 2009
Optimism
All will be well, I tell myself. All will be well. I believe it too.
I’ve been around for long enough to know that something good usually happens, something comes along to lift us out of our difficulties, but in the meantime I do worry. I imagine all sorts of terrible scenarios from the minor inconvenience to the greatest of tragedies. Even as a child I worried about this. Then I worried about my mother and my siblings.
Grade five and six composite classroom. I am sitting on the side closest to the windows. I can see the roses that line the paths alongside the church. There is a storm brewing. A fierce storm with flashes of lightning and booms of thunder. Every time the sharp crack across the classroom interrupts Mother Mary John’s speaking I try to trace on my fingertips the whereabouts of all my brothers and sisters. I worry that they will be okay, that they will not be okay. If they are outside in this weather then they are in danger of electrocution or drenching. They may get carried away in a rushing drainpipe of water. This applies particularly to the two little boys, Michael and Frank.
Sometimes I go with them to explore underground pipes that run below the street level. There is a large metal sheet like a trap door next door to the boy’s school on Mont Albert road. Together the two boys are strong enough to lift it high enough for one of us to slip into the hole beneath and then crawl through the dark and sticky drainpipe all the way underneath Mont Albert Road to the other end, where the drain pipe leads out into daylight. The trap door lid at the other end is broken. Never once as I crawled through this drainpipe did I imagine myself to be in danger. Granted, we only made the trip on dry days when the sun shone, but as an adult now I shudder at the dangers we put ourselves through.
I’ve been around for long enough to know that something good usually happens, something comes along to lift us out of our difficulties, but in the meantime I do worry. I imagine all sorts of terrible scenarios from the minor inconvenience to the greatest of tragedies. Even as a child I worried about this. Then I worried about my mother and my siblings.
Grade five and six composite classroom. I am sitting on the side closest to the windows. I can see the roses that line the paths alongside the church. There is a storm brewing. A fierce storm with flashes of lightning and booms of thunder. Every time the sharp crack across the classroom interrupts Mother Mary John’s speaking I try to trace on my fingertips the whereabouts of all my brothers and sisters. I worry that they will be okay, that they will not be okay. If they are outside in this weather then they are in danger of electrocution or drenching. They may get carried away in a rushing drainpipe of water. This applies particularly to the two little boys, Michael and Frank.
Sometimes I go with them to explore underground pipes that run below the street level. There is a large metal sheet like a trap door next door to the boy’s school on Mont Albert road. Together the two boys are strong enough to lift it high enough for one of us to slip into the hole beneath and then crawl through the dark and sticky drainpipe all the way underneath Mont Albert Road to the other end, where the drain pipe leads out into daylight. The trap door lid at the other end is broken. Never once as I crawled through this drainpipe did I imagine myself to be in danger. Granted, we only made the trip on dry days when the sun shone, but as an adult now I shudder at the dangers we put ourselves through.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Memory
I am reading into memory, Jeffrey Olick, Douwe Draaisma, Annette Kuhn, Susannah Radstone. I am collecting names like footnotes to add to my store of knowledge to protect myself from feeling ‘under theorised’.
Whenever I write, I dip into my memories, both recent and from the past. I rarely write about the present unless I am actually describing the process of the experience of writing at that point of time. Most times I write about the past.
Whenever I sit down to write it is the more recent past that comes to me first. Most often as I write first thing in the morning, it is the memory of a dream, a snippet of a dream, a fragmentary image from a dream from the night before, and then it becomes a thought about my most recent preoccupations. This morning I find myself thinking about the story someone told me recently about a film she had seen. A French film, she did not say the title, about a woman who dies and leaves her inheritance, her estate to her children.
This woman has left a beautiful country house filled with antiques and valuable artifacts to her children. She has tended to and cared for this house for a long time and would like her children to preserve the house as it stands. The children have other ideas. They have busy lives; their interests are otherwise. Somehow during the course of the film we come to realise why the woman wanted to preserve this house and its furnishings. It has something to do with a relationship she had with some man. It is the memory of this relationship she wanted to preserve. The memory of him, maybe because when they were alive, their relationship was not an open one. I do not know the details of this relationship. I am reading between the lines.
The children sell the contents of the house or give them away to museums. There are two memorable scenes: the final scenes in which the grandchildren - adolescents and young adults - are having a party, a wild party in the empty shell of the house, presumably cleared out ready for sale. Their grandmother, as the saying goes, might turn in her grave. The other scene: a group on a tour are taken through the Musee D’Orsay. They walk past a beautiful dining table that had once been in the dead grandmother’s house. The group of visitors walk by distractedly. They do not know anything about the history of this table. It holds no special meaning for them. One of the group takes a call on his mobile. We hear him say to the person on the other end, ‘We’re in furniture’. This table, this beautiful object that had once meant so much to its now dead owner has become what is in fact, simply a piece of furniture.
I think of the kitchen table here, a twelve-seater made of jarrah,and handmade for us by the man from McKay’s joinery many years ago. It was relatively inexpensive at the time. A Nicholas Dattner table would have cost around $3000.00 then. Ours cost around $1000.00.
We have loved this table. So many memories of meals. The ghosts of times past are etched into its surface varnish. A lived table. No need for French polishing. No need to protect its surface from hot objects. People have polished their shoes on this table, cut out patterns for quilts, ate meals, drunk wine, read books, held arguments, broken cups, plates and glasses (by accident) on this table.
Soon the history will be gone and it will take on another after Bill and I are gone. One of our children, presumably the one with the biggest house, the one most able and willing to take on this elephant, will add it to their store of memories. Our children might well fight over this table. It has not always been with us. It is older than Ella, though not many years older. Already it begins to feel ancient.
Memories. They are the stuff of our reveries and waking thoughts. Memories that feed directly into our future plans. What we are doing now and what we will do in the future is predicated on this notion of the past. The past informs the present. How often in conversation do we find ourselves saying these two words, 'I remember'. I remember a time when... I remember a time when we did such and such... a time when as Bill jokes, ‘pies were threepence and we used to swim in dams’. The past we remember is often a simpler past, at what seems a simpler time, when even if things were difficult, problematic, even traumatic, they seem simpler in retrospect. Why is this?
Is it because in remembering, we take up only the salient images, the most pressing thoughts about the time? Our awareness does not extend across the details of a crowded room. We tend to focus on some specific detail within that room – conversation, a feeling, an incident. All the rest becomes incidental and in describing it we might simply say the room was crowded or cluttered or some other adjectival description that takes away the complexity of what it was actually like to be in such a room at such a time, in this foreign country of the past. We can never recapture it exactly as it was and every time we revisit it again, our images and reflections shift and change.
Whenever I write, I dip into my memories, both recent and from the past. I rarely write about the present unless I am actually describing the process of the experience of writing at that point of time. Most times I write about the past.
Whenever I sit down to write it is the more recent past that comes to me first. Most often as I write first thing in the morning, it is the memory of a dream, a snippet of a dream, a fragmentary image from a dream from the night before, and then it becomes a thought about my most recent preoccupations. This morning I find myself thinking about the story someone told me recently about a film she had seen. A French film, she did not say the title, about a woman who dies and leaves her inheritance, her estate to her children.
This woman has left a beautiful country house filled with antiques and valuable artifacts to her children. She has tended to and cared for this house for a long time and would like her children to preserve the house as it stands. The children have other ideas. They have busy lives; their interests are otherwise. Somehow during the course of the film we come to realise why the woman wanted to preserve this house and its furnishings. It has something to do with a relationship she had with some man. It is the memory of this relationship she wanted to preserve. The memory of him, maybe because when they were alive, their relationship was not an open one. I do not know the details of this relationship. I am reading between the lines.
The children sell the contents of the house or give them away to museums. There are two memorable scenes: the final scenes in which the grandchildren - adolescents and young adults - are having a party, a wild party in the empty shell of the house, presumably cleared out ready for sale. Their grandmother, as the saying goes, might turn in her grave. The other scene: a group on a tour are taken through the Musee D’Orsay. They walk past a beautiful dining table that had once been in the dead grandmother’s house. The group of visitors walk by distractedly. They do not know anything about the history of this table. It holds no special meaning for them. One of the group takes a call on his mobile. We hear him say to the person on the other end, ‘We’re in furniture’. This table, this beautiful object that had once meant so much to its now dead owner has become what is in fact, simply a piece of furniture.
I think of the kitchen table here, a twelve-seater made of jarrah,and handmade for us by the man from McKay’s joinery many years ago. It was relatively inexpensive at the time. A Nicholas Dattner table would have cost around $3000.00 then. Ours cost around $1000.00.
We have loved this table. So many memories of meals. The ghosts of times past are etched into its surface varnish. A lived table. No need for French polishing. No need to protect its surface from hot objects. People have polished their shoes on this table, cut out patterns for quilts, ate meals, drunk wine, read books, held arguments, broken cups, plates and glasses (by accident) on this table.
Soon the history will be gone and it will take on another after Bill and I are gone. One of our children, presumably the one with the biggest house, the one most able and willing to take on this elephant, will add it to their store of memories. Our children might well fight over this table. It has not always been with us. It is older than Ella, though not many years older. Already it begins to feel ancient.
Memories. They are the stuff of our reveries and waking thoughts. Memories that feed directly into our future plans. What we are doing now and what we will do in the future is predicated on this notion of the past. The past informs the present. How often in conversation do we find ourselves saying these two words, 'I remember'. I remember a time when... I remember a time when we did such and such... a time when as Bill jokes, ‘pies were threepence and we used to swim in dams’. The past we remember is often a simpler past, at what seems a simpler time, when even if things were difficult, problematic, even traumatic, they seem simpler in retrospect. Why is this?
Is it because in remembering, we take up only the salient images, the most pressing thoughts about the time? Our awareness does not extend across the details of a crowded room. We tend to focus on some specific detail within that room – conversation, a feeling, an incident. All the rest becomes incidental and in describing it we might simply say the room was crowded or cluttered or some other adjectival description that takes away the complexity of what it was actually like to be in such a room at such a time, in this foreign country of the past. We can never recapture it exactly as it was and every time we revisit it again, our images and reflections shift and change.
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