last post

The last of 366 daily posts brings relief. I’m glad not to write another word of this blog. I ran out of things to say, if indeed I ever had anything worth saying, long ago.

At the beginning I was plotting the course of an intriguing year, navigating between the hazards of unemployment, Centrelink and making my business do the plain talking. Instead I stumbled into my ‘dream’ job only to have it turn into a nightmare.

In the second half of the year I suffered days and weeks with nothing positive to write. My mental health sank into Bunyan’s slough of despond. Better to be silent, I thought, but couldn’t be. Many apologies.

I can, however, report that I’ve learned much, a good thing at 61. My friend Carey says in his blog that 2012 defeated him on points. This year defeated me by TKO. But I'm standing again, groggily. More surprising still, I’m girding myself to fight again. A little more craftily, perhaps, in 2013. 

The thought of returning to my job on 8 January is surreal, not at all welcome. I start the year on probation again, with three months to prove my worth to my employers. I will. Nonetheless, I must remember that we work to live, not live to work. This year I will get that right.

Carey says all he wants is a bit of peace and quiet. I share his sentiment. And I am having it now. It’s doing me a power of good. And I have seven more days of it, most to be spent painting the front rooms of my house. Cathartic stuff.

I begin 2013 with two jobs—well, a job and a small business. The job will be better this year. Comrade S kept telling me that we would never work harder than we did in those first eight months. She’s right.

I begin the year owning two houses: the novelty of moving into a solid brick art deco in Carnegie will relieve some of the pain of leaving my beautiful and freshly painted cottage here at the foot of the Dandenongs.

I begin 2013 with two parents and two healthy young adult children in the primes of their lives, one pregnant, the other sure to become a father in the not too distant. I’ll be a grandfather of two in May.

I begin 2013 with two cars and two lots of two bicycles stashed under the loft bed and maybe a bit more time to throw a leg over each of them.

I begin 2013 with one good woman, though she’s twice the woman to me. We nearly fucked it up in 2012, but we got our act together after two months apart. We fornicated as the fireworks went off last New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t ring in the year of fornication promised by a Serbian proverb.

Second chance tonight. Better luck this time.

Rock on. 

number 96

Things are changing here at number 96. I’m moving out in four months, have begun preparing the house for tenants. Dan and Joyce have put their unit on the market. Joyce popped in the other day to ask if I’d prepare an owners corporation certificate as I’m the current chair of our small body.

Dan has been down to 45 kilograms, had all kinds of tests on lungs and stomach, nothing found. Now he’s back to 48 kgs. The smell of Joyce’s Christmas roast leaps the back fence at a single bound. She seems to have done a Boxing Day roast too, trying to fatten Dan up. Dan brings an empty bin down the driveway; he may have put on three kilos but he’s still a shambling cadaver.

Michelle has settled into unit 4. Daughter Shelby sticks the L-plates to the front and rear windows of their silver car and away they go. A bloke in a red Corolla parks in front of her garage; he has the air of a ‘boyfriend’ and a parcel in his hand. Michelle is not at home. He knocks again and again, them pulls out his mobile.

Bullyboy Jim, owner of unit 3, rings my bell recently. He’s almost affable these days, seems to have accepted that we are self-managing and not using a property manager as he would prefer. He’s trimmed all the shrubs along the drive as his contribution to keeping things ‘legal’. The rest of us would call it keeping things tidy.

I drag the Masport, our only common property, from under the house, fire it up in the driveway. It takes about seven minutes to mow the lawns in front of units 2 and 4, ten to do the nature strip. I unlock the electricity box by the front gate, reset the timer for the lights down the drive.

When next I encounter Michelle I’ll put it to her that she should be the next chair of the owners corporation. I’ll still be part of it as I’ll still own unit 1, but the chair should live on site and I won’t any longer.

I’ve been thinking about how to attract good tenants. Teachers at the local Steiner school are possible tenants. My house should appeal to alternative types who want a garden and would look after one.

The odds are that I’ll not live here a third time, but who can say what vicissitudes life has in store for us. I’ve poured my heart and soul into this house and garden. Twice. I love this little house, will leave it in good condition, and can’t bear the thought of it populated by people I neither know nor approve of.

Rock on. 

recuperation

The last Saturday of 2012 is the sort of day I enjoy most. Saturday’s paper, abridged for the holidays, is still the best of the week. I sit at the island bench in a sunny kitchen, read the book reviews, a lovely piece by novelist Cate Kennedy about a trip to Cairns in her car that wouldn’t die. Then I sit and finish Sonya Hartnett’s brilliant novel Butterfly.

About half after ten I step into the garden. I pick a few green beans to go with the big bag already in the fridge. I’m turning them into spicy beans later for my good woman and me to have for tea. A nice cucumber pokes its nose out from under an eggplant. Cabbage moths flit about with no cabbages to alight on.

The gentle sun encourages the newly planted spring onions and the next batch of green and brown mignonettes. Eight celery plants erupt from the milk cartons surrounding them. Lemons like jaundiced teardrops hang from the tree and the kaffir lime scents the whole place.

I get down on my knees and pull weeds from between the pavers under the clothesline and along the ragged brick path to the front yard and carport. I water, weed and wander among the plants.

My empty front room calls but I’m not keen to go in there yet. A drop-sheeted table covered in tools, spakfilla and paint awaits. Instead I sit on the couch and begin a new novel from my sister for Christmas, a crime thriller set in Norway with an 82 year-old protagonist. By page 40 I’m hooked.

I cruise up to Chirnside Park. I hate shopping centres but this one has a greengrocery that sells every imaginable vegetable. At eight on a Saturday morning you can’t move. It’s frustrating and fantastic. A bunch of coriander in the supermarket is $2.48 compared to 79 cents at the greengrocer. I buy cherries, mushrooms, oranges, the coriander, and strawberries for my good woman.

The JRT and I take a mid-afternoon stroll, no destination, no timeframe. He’s old enough to feel the heat, though it’s only warm this afternoon, and he lags behind. I stop and wait for him a few times. Back home I prepare the spicy beans.

My good woman comes over after six. We sit on the back step and look at the garden. I get my sixth grade reader and read Louise Mack’s Sunrise in the Blue Mountains to her. I have vivid memories of it from grade six but haven’t read it since. I read her Lawson’s The loaded dog as well.

Then together we peel the rippled paper off the crumpled front wall of the front room for an hour. She gives me my painting instructions and timetable. I tell her I’ll set my own timetable and certainly won’t be rushed into anything.

We eat the spicy beans—a bit too spicy for my good woman—and do a bit more in the front room. By half nine we’re heading for bed. My good woman lies quietly as I read her the novel we started the other day. Not long after ten we retire.

I’m recuperating from a bad year. Today is a good day for a recuperating spirit.

Rock on. 

forest

Some time in the 1990s I start writing film reviews. Without seeing the films. Every Thursday for years I consult the papers for movie reviews, and I review the reviews, sometimes up to four opinions on the one film. And so I précis a film’s merits or otherwise in half a dozen lines. The original reviewer’s initials after each précis tell me whose opinion I’m noting.

Ostensibly this ever-expanding document is the place to go to see if a movie is worth bringing home when I go to a video rental outlet, but I never consult it beforehand. Was there any point to this endless chronicling of the movies of the day?

Looking back, I see no motivation beyond the need to write something, anything, regularly. I write creative, funny, acerbic or flattering summaries. I review movies in haiku, trying to catch the essence of each.

As December moves through the days, and now with only four posts to write before my contract with myself is met, I keep asking myself what this blog has been about. Is it just a need to write, something, anything, regularly? Certainly the imposed discipline to write each day achieves that, albeit that it has grown to be a chore.

The original blog about being unemployed at sixty became something else: exactly what, I have no idea. I may keep to the daily discipline, but no other discipline applies. I write about anything that comes to mind on any day. If themes emerge, they are accidental, unintended, fortuitous.

I am sure only that like everything I write, I’m looking for the essence of something, each paragraph, each day, and over the course of a year. The essence of what, though? How to write a good paragraph? Good writing itself? What it is to be me? What it is to exist—what a life is about? Has it been to prove that Seinfeld is right—it’s all about nothing.

What this blog amounts to escapes me because it’s trees and forest stuff. I’ve been planting trees—366 of them—but what sort of forest they constitute is a mystery to me. All I see is today’s tree.

I intend reading my blog, in toto, sometime after March, to see what sort of forest I have here. Some ragged thing replete with vines and sycophants, maybe. Not serried rows of pines, I hope.

A native thing would be nice—some rugged ironbarks, some lemon-scented, white-trunked beauties reaching into clear sky, and plenty of mallee scrub too.

    

Rock on. 

painting

At Bunnings I buy a DIY book titled Paint techniques: great value at $6.98. I read the important parts before making a second trip. This time I stand before hundreds of paintbrushes,  consider bristles, widths and prices, finally commit to three. I purchase a paint pot, drop sheet, roller and tray, a scraper and replacement blades, three six-litre cans of ceiling white.

Today I move rooms. My current bedroom at the front of the house is where I’ll begin painting. It’s the biggest room, has the poorest walls—rippled paper, saggy plaster, holes, cracks, lumps. I make space in other rooms, carry every piece of furniture out of the front room.

I clear the hall. From the ‘third bedroom’ next to the kitchen I clear the huge dining table, turn it on its side, wrestle it out the door, up the hall, into the empty front room. The ‘third bedroom’—it’s not been a bedroom in the twelve years I’ve owned this house—now becomes my bedroom.

I cover the floor of the front room with a huge drop sheet, place an old mattress protector on the table, cover it with a smaller drop sheet, haul all the painting gear from the shed to the front room, array it on the table.

If I can ‘fix’ this room, I can fix anything in this house. This is where I begin. As I move from room to room over coming weeks  I must categorise stuff. Some things will be offered when I hold a garage sale, things like the brand new motorbike helmet I never wore, furniture I won’t need at Carnegie—the loft bed, a red chair, a desk stool.

In the cupboards are clothes I will bag and drop at the op shop. I will box those books I don’t use for reference for my work, stow them in the revamped front room.

A couple of bigger tasks need doing—replacing the bathroom vanity, a missing quadrant of carpet in the lounge, a piece of door frame cut off to accommodate a built-in bookshelf.

The good thing is that I’m happiest at home doing exactly these things. I can’t spend enough time in the garden, or shuffling furniture, or up a ladder. What I won’t do is rush.

Today I spend all day quietly, patiently, methodically moving things. It all works with a bit of thought: this thing first, from here to here, then this, and this.

Tonight I sleep in a new bedroom. Tomorrow I prepare to paint.  

Rock on. 

well-being

Most of my life I consider myself the sanest person I know. Neither right in everything, nor righteous (well, just a wee bit), but ever so stable mentally and physically. They go together, of course.

On a teachers’ college drama tour in 1975 a now well-known playwright tells me she thought I was the sanest person she had met, then recants, but doesn’t tell me why. I still don’t know why she even saw fit to say anything about my mental health.

While laying bricks in the extension we build on Carol’s mud-brick house in 1985 she tells me she suffers depression. I’ve been living with her for a year, but I’m shocked to hear it, both naïve and inquisitive enough to ask exactly what that means. I am 34 and have no idea about depression.

It’s not really until studying for a graduate diploma in adolescent health in 1997 that I first acquire a formal knowledge about mental health and well-being. Even then, it’s sketchy, has no practical application, and based in no real-life experience, albeit that I teach a kid with OCD, girls with eating disorders, one who suffers panic attacks.

In 2000 I’m one of a team of four who devises a program, SKIPS, for primary school teachers and grade 5/6 students abound kids who live a parent with mental illness. I begin to expand my knowledge of mental health and illness. I listen to the stories told by our guest speakers, people with schizophrenia, bipolar, depression and anxiety.

Until 2006 I still think I’m the sanest person on Earth. I now have a fine working knowledge of mental health and well-being. One day I walk out of a school with my SKIPS co-presenter Julie, having just elicited the elements of good mental health from a bunch of grade 5/6 students, and realise my mental health is rat-shit.

I have some minor symptoms of depression and anxiety; I’m stressed by my job, burnt out. I attend four counselling sessions, listen hard, figure out a plan to regain my emotional well-being, execute it, and recover very nicely, thank you. It takes a couple of months.

In the six years since I’ve come to believe that mental health, like physical health, is less robust as one ages. Stressors are less welcome, less easily accommodated or overcome. Physical deterioration, especially for someone used to physical prowess, contributes to a less robust self-regard.

My mental health deteriorates this year. Now, finally, with time away from work, a little space to consider the bigger picture, I see the causal factors. I can see the things I need to do, as I did after a bit of cerebration in 2006, to put things right.

It’s a big thing to admit that you are not well, mentally. Time, rest and care will put things right.

Rock on. 

daughters

We gather at my sister’s house. We are not a tribe, or clan; just a family. My sister has said she thinks the family she and I grew up in to be dysfunctional. I can’t think why she feels that way. We weren’t perfect, but not in any way dysfunctional. That said, we were not a close or loving family, placed no emphasis on ‘family values’.

We have grown to four generations. And here we all are on Christmas Day: my sister and second husband Tom; me, my good woman and her daughter, joining us for the first time; my daughter, her partner Richie and little Nerri; my mother and father; my son and partner Katie; my nephew Callan and partner Prue; my niece Elise and fiancé Carlos. Elise’s twin Melina and her partner Mick are working.

No one has organised who is to bring what. Mo and Katie produce dips, chips and antipasto; three salads appear—green, beetroot, and potato; my mother’s cheese and tomato pie and my good woman’s mushroom pie occupy the table’s centre along with a chicken inside a turkey from Prue; a huge plate of roast potatoes, pumpkin and carrots come from my sister’s oven; dessert is chocolate meringues, a Christmas pudding and a Christmas cake; a ginger and treacle cake, rum balls, custard, cream and brandy sauce.

At one point all sixteen of us seem to be in the kitchen; at other times it’s just the women, me and my nephew. My son is out fixing the pool filter, the other males and Elise huddled round the dips. Small parties wander into the garden, an acre plus of it full of heritage-listed trees. The new Caddy is inspected and admired.

The stealers of the show are the daughters. My mother’s daughter, my sister, hosts a great show: crockery, cutlery, immaculate table, house all in order. My daughter, pregnant again: what pregnant woman isn’t a centre of attention? My daughter’s daughter, Nerri, two years and four months, talking as she’s not talked before. Someone remarks that she’s not a small child but a small person. My good woman’s daughter Sasha meets at least ten people for the first time, greets everyone as if she’s always known them, is genuinely pleased to see them. It’s more than I can say for myself.

Prue is someone’s daughter, but I don’t know whose. She’s a recent addition to us; my nephew’s partner, sixteen years his senior. In three years she has embraced us and we seem to be embracing her.

Later I sit quietly thinking how pleased my mother must be near the end of her life to look down the table at us all, her legacy, four generations. No arguments or fights break out. No animosities lie hidden or dormant. We don’t all love each other, but we treat each other with respect for who we are and what we are collectively. My mother would call us ‘nice’ people.

The implication is that it is quite sufficient to be nice people. She’s dead right.

Rock on.