accountants

I come from a family of accountants. My father, BCC, is an accountant, long retired. His father, ECC, was an accountant, long dead. His brother, OCC, also long dead, was an accountant. My mother’s father was an accountant. He died of pneumonia in 1933. My sister married and had three children with an accountant, now long divorced.

It’s entirely appropriate that three generations of my family celebrate their births on the first day of the financial year. Today we gather in Rainy Hill Road, Cockatoo, for my father’s eighty-seventh birthday, my sister’s fifty-ninth, and her son’s thirty-third, albeit that tomorrow is the day, the first of July.

Present are my mother and father, my sister and her second husband, two of her three adult children, me, my good woman and my two adult children, my nephew’s partner who has prepared lunch for twelve of us, and my grand-daughter.

My daughter and grand-daughter are unexpected guests, a surprise. Bendigo is a long journey. It’s not her birthday, but Nerri is the star of the show, my parents’ only great-grandchild, the only child of five cousins.

We come together in Rainy Hill Road because my nephew has bought 16 acres and a mud-brick house here, moved in a month ago, and wants us all to see it. We’ve all seen the real estate photos but want to feel the walls, sit on the bio-loo, climb up to the mezzanine. It rains, of course, and we huddle round the fire and a large circular dining table while 16 acres of bush goes unexplored.

Prue serves vegetarian lasagne, Syrian chicken, spiced beef roll, steamed green beans, a huge green salad, cous cous, tomato, cheese and onion pie, pumpkin and spinach leaves with slivered almonds. We eat and talk and laugh. No politics, religion, or skeletons from the family cupboard divide us.

My good woman gives gifts to the three birthday people; they are not her family. I don’t give presents, but everyone is used to that. They joke that I’ll get my comeuppance on my birthday when no one gives me anything. I bring good books I’ve read and give them to whoever would like them.

I ask my good woman on the drive home why we don’t come to grief as so many families do when they mass for annual rituals. “You are normal,” she says, explaining that we respect each other, and no money or inheritance issues drag us apart.

Perhaps it is no more than my mother says: we are nice people. Nice could be a synonym for bland, for the stereotypical view of accountants, and the sons and daughters of accountants.

But I don’t think so.

Rock on.