Three

Spent a weekend in the country with Andrea and my friend Lynne.

years have sculpted our faces into barely recognizable mirror images of us
coffee kickstarts our days into deep conversations and shared memories
lunches herald an afternoon nap longer than seems reasonable
an energising evening walk up steep slopes amid tall trees
a glass of wine focuses the palate on evening hues
mushroom risotto accompanies evening silence
till yawning from a day full of nothing
we slip off to firm beds to dream
of island holidays
once shared
by us
3.

That Ordinary House 16 Lunch

It’s two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. It’s summer. It’s still and it’s stifling. There is no air conditioner, no fan, no breeze. Christmas is approaching.

The necessities for a Saturday lunch are in place. My father stands silently at the back door. His gaze is distant. The heat shimmers off the burnt-off lawn of the backyard.

Stephen. Michael. My mother calls our names. We’re downstairs playing under the house – the only possible escape from the oppressive heat.

Stephen. Michael. We hear our names again. There’s an edge to my mother’s voice that alerts me to danger. There’s something going on. It’s bubbling. The pressure cooker is getting ready to blow.

The table is set. A floral plastic tablecloth with mock embroidered edges covers the pine table. Four plates are set. China plates with a floral pattern which fights against the floral tablecloth. The plates mark the limits of the table. They surround the Saturday meal – cold corned meat, sliced tomato, tinned beetroot, iceberg lettuce, slices of block coon cheese and, for my father, slivers of raw onion. Every other space on the table is crowded with condiments and options from the fridge – bright yellow pickles, salt, pepper, fresh bread, a bottle of vinegar, mayonnaise, and a large jar of home-made pickled onions – my father’s only link to his Italian heritage. And in the wings – cake.

My mother has typically catered for all possibilities. Catering for her men is her forte. Over catering, her vice. Year’s later, family picnics became logistical nightmares where the venue was chosen to accommodate the team of pack horses required to ferry food from the car to the picnic blanket, where the limits of tables gave way to the acreage of picnics in parklands. Quiches, olives, ham and corned beef and occasionally a home made brawn fought for space beside bread and bread rolls, butter and margarine, scones and butter cake, tea and coffee.

Back in the kitchen it’s not just the weather which is bearing down on us. The atmosphere is thick with foreboding. Silence.

There is nothing more painful than a silent meal.

That Ordinary House 15 The Kitchen Again

We're in the kitchen. The men's footsteps are climbing towards us up the back steps. We will soon be six in this room designed for two. We've bypassed the second bedroom. My bedroom.

The pressure's mounting but this room is already too full . The carving knife, the fridge, my father in his Bond's Y fronts, feet up on the table greeting Mrs Hebley, the next door neighbour who's dropped in to get a cup of sugar on a Sunday morning, the pig's head, the family meals, the arguments, the love, the suppressed anger, the accusations, the reconciliations.

My history is in my head. My head is dealing with overlapping memories and our guests want to talk about real estate. I want to know more about that carving knife. Real estate will have to wait.

That Ordinary House 14 Secrets

For continuity purposes you'll need to go back to June 2009 for episodes 11, 12, 13 of 'This Ordinary House' - the story of a simple abode and the tale of two sons selling the family home.

14 Secrets

Standing there with my brother and two strangers felt odd. The room was empty. I was sure the four of us were seeing different things. There was no point in describing the once present furniture to the invaders. They were already filling it with new items, removing the Venetian blinds, repainting the walls in colours more a part of their world than that of my parents.

All I could see and smell was my childhood and the musky smell of my mother’s foundation. The secrets were safe. Safe with my mother and father, taken to the grave, converted to ashes. I could only guess.

And yet. I was still curious. I suspected that there were aspects of my family and my parents’ lives that I had no knowledge of. Conversations I had never been privy to. Tensions I had been protected from. Stories never shared.

To my friends our family was near perfect. A handsome caring and loyal husband married to a devoted wife. A family which was discrete but not secretive, open but not carelessly so, friendly without desperation. To my mother, especially, family was all important. For her family, there were no limits to her love. Friendships were, however, restrained. There was a reserve in her level of commitment; in the level of trust she invested in friends.

My father on the other hand was naturally gregarious. His great skill was his ability to listen. He drew people to him, both men and women. He was quiet, calm, focused and charming. A charming extroverted man married to a family focused and, at some level, shy woman. I suspected that here lay the germs of a secret life. Here lay the tension. My forensic tendencies scanned their fifty years of married life for clues.

My mother did not trust other women. What was that about I wondered? The mother of two boys, she was the lone woman in her household. Strangely, she had embraced the arrival of the young women her sons brought home as they grew older.. These young women were girls who had been educated through the prism of the feminism of the 60s and 70s. Family gatherings were joyful plain-sailing events until the topic of women’s rights was raised - as it was at every gathering through the 70s.

It was in these conversations that my mother’s inner life leaked through. She was of another generation, one which valued traditional values, where roles were clearly defined; where everyone knew their place; where women supported their husbands, no questions asked. The daughters in law to be, challenged her long held stable view of the world.

It was not that she resented their choices – to live in de facto relationships with her sons, to want to be mothers and have careers; she delighted in that. There was something deeper that she had never come to terms with. It gnawed at her.

She did not trust her own gender. There was reason for her to suspect other women’s motives. Her husband was unusually handsome; her husband was charming. And being my father’s son I recognised myself in him. My father was a flirt. But he was blameless. It was the women who were not to be trusted.

There were clues. There was the episode in my teenage years when the wife of one of my father’s work colleagues made certain claims about his relationship with her. This was the only time this secret part of their lives played out in my presence.
The scars on the cream enamel of the Kelvinator bore testament to this explosive episode.

That Ordinary House

It's been a long time but I'm going back to see how those brothers are faring in selling the family home. Last time I was there we were in the main bedroom and my head was spinning with flashbacks spanning fifty years of history from that Secret Room.
Tomorrow.

Big Fish, Big Ocean, Big Julian Pepperell

Julian Pepperell (Jules/Big Julie/Jaws/Big Fish) is in print. Again.
His new Book is Fishes of the Open Ocean. 266 pages of magnificent colour illustrations, scholarly information about hundreds of BIG Fish (accessible to the average joe/jill or non game fisherman/person - its exhausting being politically correct). It's coffee table size and ten years in the making - about how long it would take me to make a coffee table.

What's in it? Fish. Big fish of the game fishing type and of the predatory type. My daughter particularly enjoyed the shark section. Jess is 27 and has a fascination with the idea of swimming with the big ones one day. For mine I am convinced I could walk on water if ever i find myself in the same ocean as a man eater. Man eater - it's not a subtle tag.

The shark section is one of seven in the book. I thought I'd share a couple of thoughts about them rather than do the whole book.
SHARKS
1. There are lots of them
2. Many of them have very big teeth, jaws, appetites
3. They have cute names which are a dead (did I say DEAD?) giveaway to their personality types Tiger, Thresher, Hammerhead, Bull, Cookiecutter
4. Some prefer to keep a low profile with names like Silk, Salmon, Blue, Dusky, Basking Shark.
5. The largest (Whale Shark) is a filter feeding shark which gives me some hope. I'm looking to be part of what gets filtered out.
6. Many are threatened as they are slow to mature and thus breed and are victims of long line fishing and other by-catch processes of the large industrial fishing industry.

The one which unnerves me the most is the Bull Shark. It is one of the three most dangerous fish on the planet says Julian and it frequents rivers and estuaries.
As I sail on the Brisbane River (so does my daughter) and they have been sighted (and had a nibble on people) as far upstream as Ipswich (probably 40 km from the mouth) I am always a litt;le nervous on Saturdays. Moreover, visibility in the Brisbane River is about 20 cm on a good day so there is no way of having any warning of their presence. Perhaps this explains why the sailors of the South Brisbane Sailing Club are renowned for their ability to right their crafts in record time following a capsize.

Julian gives some comfort to victims and potential victims by saying: 'its attacks on humans are thought to be random and accidental' . Reassuring!

So if you're into Sharks, Rays, Billfish, Tuna, Mackeral etc etc this is the book for you. It's beautiful and a beauty.







I highly recommend it.

Wry Cooder

Wry Cooder. Who is Wry Cooder? Sadly I have had to clumsily explain to a number of people old enough to be my children who this Ry Cooder dude is.

So I went to a concert on Saturday night where a man in his prime spent an hour and forty five minutes visiting his back catalogue of never-were hit songs. This man who plays slide guitar like no one else; a man who leaves out so many notes it's like a meditation on the unspoken, the invisible, the insubstantial; a man who plays his guitar much better than he communicates in the spoken form - shut up Ry and just play.

How do you explain to people who were't born in the 70s, the significance of a musician who never had a hit; who is better known for his collaborations with Cuban musicians and African guitar maestros like Ali Farka Toure (love saying that name); thirty somethings who haven't heard of the Buena Vista Social Club and for whom Cuba only conjures up images of over proof rum, Bill Clinton's unusual habits with cigars and, well, it's part of America isn't it? ; who've never heard of Castro or the Cuban missile crisis or perhaps even JFK; who ask where Paris Texas is, assuming I've become very confused about my geography.

Am I getting old?