Sunday, December 13, 2009

The mid point of the wheel

Tomorrow I leave for the Blue Mountains. For five days solid I hope to write. I hope to lose myself so deeply in my writing that for this short time I will transcend the usual humdrum of my daily writing and get to somewhere I have not been before, ‘wheeled and soared and swung through footless halls air’. These words come to me from a poem I met as a child , ‘High Flying’ by Walter Magee. It begins, ‘Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter silvered wings, Sunwards I’ve climbed and chased the sunless mirth of sun split clouds and done a thousand things you have not dreamed of, wheeled and soared and swung my eager craft through footless falls of air...
and while with silent trembling heart, I've trod...put out my hand and touched the face of God’. (I have muddled these words. If I were a worthy soul I would Google them for you and correct them, but it's late and I must be away early, so if you are interested, you will need to search for yourself, or accept them as they are here, a muddle from my memory.)

I have started to pack, at least in my mind. It’s an easy thing to pack for one. After all the years when the girls were little and I needed to pack for them as well. I need also to put out five shirts for Bill who is colour blind and cannot select his own shirts and ties without disastrous consequences, at least he will worry that the consequences will be disastrous. He lacks confidence in his own taste, at least in colour. For the rest he is artistic, with excellent sense of shape and texture. Sometimes he gets to work in non-matching socks.

Tomorrow morning I will get up at 4 am and leave the house fifteen minutes later. I will drive my own car and leave it in long-term car parking to the airport. The cost of a weeks parking is the equivalent of one taxi fare, so I save money this way. Although I have discussed the matter of my getting to the airport with various members of my family and all express the wish to drive me to the airport, it seems to me, it’s too ridiculous a time, Monday morning at 4.15 am to inflict on any of them. Therefore I should be the only one inconvenienced by this trip – I should drive myself there and back seven days later.

I am a nervous traveler. Whenever I rehearse the experience in my mind I panic a little. I can see myself getting lost, or misreading signs and missing my plane or in this instance my train, first from Sydney airport where I will arrive at 7.00am during peak hour and then on to Central station. From Central station I need to make a three-hour train trip to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. I look forward to this leg of the journey. Three hours on a rocking train, three hours where I will still be on land but moving swiftly through space, three hours during which I can doze, read, or look out through the window at a new landscape.

I feel the need to write a brief farewell blog, a farewell for one week only. A bit like the dinner my husband wants to share tonight to mark my absence for a week. Not too special a dinner – I’m not going away for long – but to mark the occasion nevertheless.

We mark absences and returns in our household with fervour. No one can sneak away unnoticed, not like one of my brothers did on his eighteenth birthday many years ago, or Maggie May’s sister. She writes about this in a blog that eats at you with its poignancy. No, we mark our farewells and hellos.

It’s worse when I go because I am the ‘mother’, and mothers, not always but perhaps more often than not, are the mid point of the wheel around which all the spokes circle.

I wear the weight of my responsibility seriously and I am troubled at this end by my planned absence.

Someone needs to worry incessantly about the dog, as there will be a man here to help install a new gate and the gate will inevitably be left ajar from time to time. Someone will need to keep the dog in mind for the times when the gate man is here. The under pinners are also coming on Monday to help us to rectify the enormous cracks that have erupted in the front walls of our house.

They will work outside but one day at least my husband will need to take time off work to watch as they hoist the house up on jacks before they pour concrete into the huge holes they will have dug beneath the perimeter of the house to force it back in place. Hopefully this will help to rejoin the cracks.

I can put five shirts and ties for my colour blind husband in advance, one for each working day of the week I am away. I can make sure there is enough milk in the fridge to last the week and enough toilet paper. For the rest, my children, the ones living at home are old enough by far to look after themselves, as is my husband. Still I worry about them.

I worry about all the little things that they can take for granted, though taking people for granted is a dangerous pastime and one none of us should ever indulge in for too long, myself included. When we take others for granted, as Art Durkee has written elsewhere in relation to the business of expectation, we will inevitably trip up, not to mention the pain we cause the other person who is taken for granted.

So my absence shall be a good thing, painful for those at home to some extent only. The days will pass quickly enough and apart from my youngest who needs me more for transport and a general holding in mind function, the others will do just fine. And so will I.

13 comments:

Aleks said...

Just do your thing,you need the time for your self,and the world will not stop turning in one week and even if it does try to take it as it comes,no panic.I whish you good writing,good luck and bon voiage,Aleksandra :O)

Bonnie Zieman, M.Ed. said...

What a healthful gift to give yourself Elisabeth. I hope the time away is inspiring and ultimately invigorating.

I usually feel the same way when about to leave the family for a while. I have to admit that when I return to discover that everyone continued to thrive in my absence it is a blow to my narcissistic, surely-I-am-the-indispensable-mother self! That discovery is an important part of the going-away process. To realize that I am not indispensable - that my children have learned to do just fine without me is a good thing to know - once past the initial shock!

I will miss your posts and comments, but wish you an enriching time alone with your heart, mind and pen (lap-top?).

The Weaver of Grass said...

Hope you have an interesting and fruitful week away. I smiled when I read of your worries - if I ever holiday alone my thoughts go along similar lines - what if I get on the wrong plane? what if there is nobody there to meet me? Finally I have to talk sternly to myself and ask "do you really want to go?" If I answer "yes" then I firmly tellmyself to shut up.

Jane Moxey said...

In the words of the old World War 1 song" What's the use of worrying, it never was worthwhile..."
You're probably already on your journey. I wish you a lovely creative time and look forward to hearing about it all upon your return.
We do "last suppers" etc in our family!

christopher said...

You write so well. It was an effortless ride through your life.

Kirk said...

I can identify with your dog worries, though in my case it's a cat. About a month ago, management of my apartment building sent me a note telling me that they had to check the smoke detector. It said I didn't have to be there, they had a key and would let themselves in. I called the management and told them I have a cat and was worried it might escape when they were there. They told me not to worry, they hadn't lost a cat yet. I stayed home until they showed up, anyway.

Jim Murdoch said...

You'll probably be gone by now so at least you'll know when you get back that I was thinking about you and hoping that you had a good week. It's hard I find planning to write like this. When Carrie went to America a few weeks back I had hoped that I'd make a stab at getting back into my current novel - the head is full of ideas but nothing on paper - and I did sit down to start but nothing happened; indeed I just moped for the best part of the first week by which time I had left myself only a week to write four blogs and that was all the excuse I needed not to work on my book.

I'm taking two weeks off over Xmas and New Year. Everyone is so busy with their own things at that time of year that I don't see the point in burdening them with lengthy blogs they won't have the time to read. Again I intend to work on my book. Now Carrie's here and so I should have a better chance - I hope.

I'll still be reading my favourite blogs but I intend keeping commenting to a minimum. I'm also so behind on my reading it's not true plus I've brought home research from the library to get through.

Busy, busy, busy . . . and I wouldn't want it any other way.

Conda Douglas said...

A trip to live your passion is always a wondrous idea.

Conda Douglas said...

A trip to live your passion is always a wondrous idea.

Mim said...

Wishing you a good time away. Are you like me? As soon as I start my trip I leave everything behind, but then I no longer have a young child.

quin browne said...

thank you for the very kind words you left on my little bit of the blogverse... i'm so glad you did, as i've now found your very well done piece of it... and have linked it on mine.

others need to read your words. they are poetry.

Elisabeth said...

Thanks to everyone for your good wishes.

I came back from my brilliant writing week away today and I'm too exhausted to say more than thank you, here now.

But I shall blog again, if not tomorrow then in the next few days and respond to your blogs as well, if the rush towards Christmas doesn't get me first.

Come Back Brighter said...

I do not doubt that you will do just fine, not for one moment. It's interesting to me that you write you can see yourself getting lost -- I'd like it if you would dismiss that mental image, push it farther away, make it distant, without colour, and instead replace it with a bright, bold image of you making all connections, almost without effort.

I hope you enjoy your trip, however brief -- I imagine the blue montains as lovely, although I have only seen them in pictures.

And I hope your return in a week is marked with a small celebration :)