aussie rules

I start kicking rolled up socks around the backyard at two. Why? Perhaps it’s genetic. Later my mother stuffs the socks and sews them up so they don’t come apart.  

My father tells me he supported South—Warrnambool, that is. Like South Melbourne they wear red and white. My father doesn’t attend games or talk about football, though one day we watch South play at Cobden.

My only vivid memory of football in Warrnambool is standing behind the southern goal at the Reid Oval. The Warrnambool full-forward looks like an old man to me. He doesn’t budge from the goal square until the footy is close, then he leaps forward, gathers it, and without turning kicks it over his left shoulder, over the goal umpire, over me, for a goal.  

The Warrnambool Football Club owns the house next door to ours, June and Leo Turner and their infant son Michael our neighbours. Leo coaches Warrnambool because for ex-VFL stars in the 50s that’s where the money is. Leo played on the wing in the Geelong 1951 and 1952 premiership team that still holds the record for the longest winning streak—23 games. To me Geelong is the biggest town we drive through to see grandparents in Melbourne, the VFL unknown.

At age six I get my first pair of footy boots, high above the ankles, black leather, pristine white laces that wrap around the top of the boot through a tab at the back. I hate getting those laces dirty, whiten them with the white sandshoe cleaner we put on canvas tennis shoes.

My first game is for Glenhuntly State School, the only grade 4 boy good enough to play in the school team with the grade 5 and 6 boys. We pile onto the local bus in our itchy woollen long-sleeved brown jumpers with a red and a green hoop with Mr Huron for the trip to a neighbouring state school. We eat pies for lunch at the bus stop, carry our boots in our hands.

Those games are free-for-alls, getting a kick our only object. Next year I play in the under 10s at Caulfield Grammar. From under 10s to under 14s I dominate games. Football is my passion, the one thing I do better than all my peers. I go to footy ovals on my own and kick goals from all angles. Most of all I like to gather it like the Warrnambool full-forward and snap it over my left shoulder.

My black boots are mirrors, the smell of leather intoxicates me. I am fast and big and strong. I burst through packs of weaker opponents, my will for the ball unstoppable, unquenchable. The game and its traditions beguile me: I know every VFL premier, every Brownlow medallist. I love the spirit of the game; fairest and best means something. I’m good enough not to need to play any other way.

My team-mates elect me captain of the best under 15 team in the state: we beat every opponent and the champion government school and the champion Catholic school. At Xavier I kick four goals in a quarter and an Essendon scout asks my father if I will sign with them. He refuses; I’m too young.

I think nothing can stop me, but I’m wrong. Genetics get me. My eyesight deteriorates rapidly. I can no longer see the ball in flight, judge the trajectory, get where it will land first, anticipate where it will bounce with the prescience that made me so good at this. I am undone. 

units

Things are pretty quiet here at Number 96. Unit 4 is on the market. New tenants are in at Unit 3. The cold, wet and windy season has driven Dan indoors at Unit 2. I’m so busy that just being here feels like a privilege.

In January and February our owners corporation is trying to decide how to conduct its affairs. Eventually we settle on running our own show and sack our paid property manager.

Bullyboy Jim, owner of Unit 3, is neutered by research and diplomacy. I learn all about owners corporations and Jim can’t bluff us any more. I also keep our antagonists—Dan and Jim hate each other—apart.

Feo and Alvena in Unit 4 have a son a little over two years old. He’s been in China with grandparents for almost a year. Alvena is pregnant again, about seven months. I haven’t seen her in the driveway for months. Sightings of Feo are few. I see him this morning for the first time in months.

Dan has told me many times—he tells me many things, many times, most unreliable—how hard Feo and Alvena work, how their shopping centre coffee and patisserie franchise is struggling. So I’m surprised when Feo tells me they’re looking at more expensive units closer to work.

Dan and Joyce have a huge DVD movie library. I guess the DVD player is getting a pounding. I can see Dan nodding off in his chair—he’s 82—so why not? Joyce must be cooking because English-style winter cooking smells waft over the fence most afternoons.

Jim has axed the Liberians in Unit 3, gave them notice to quit in May. The black teenage daughters no longer laugh in the driveway, the long line of extended family and friends no longer troop up and down it. Chester and his missus no longer rumble up and down in their tinted-windowed four-wheel drives. The new tenants are a young couple. I’ve yet to encounter them.

Every couple of weeks I fire up the owners corporation lawnmower, clip the two little triangles in front of Units 2 and 4, suck up the weeds, leaves and loose gravel that’s our nature strip. I pay our owners corp insurance and electricity bills online. We have a cheque-book, a debit credit card, and a small surplus in our bank account.

Twelve years after their erection the units show signs of deterioration. The front fence, my responsibility, needs painting. My house, our face to the world, needs painting too.   

I reckon I’ll be out of here in five years. But where to?

Rock on. 

belair

Early June 1979. Rock’s partner Kate chucks me out of our communal house at Littlehampton. Marilyn has retreated to Melbourne for the sake of our baby, due 9 or 10 July. We have planned a home birth but have no home.

I am builder’s labouring for Stuart and pregnant Vivienne, their home birth due a month before ours. Marilyn returns and we stay in their barn while Stuart and Vivienne visit family in NSW. When they return we move into an empty tin shed at the top of their 19 acres. Our situation is desperate.

Muni, a Rajneeshi and lab technician at Vivienne’s university, rents us a large downstairs room in his house at Belair, perched on the edge of the Adelaide Hills. A huge window overlooks the city below. Adelaide lights the night sky.

Stuart and Vivienne’s home birth ends in Adelaide’s Flinders Medical Centre after complications. Marilyn and I ferry macrobiotic meals to them in the family unit. First Vivienne then Stuart lose their minds to major psychoses. Vivienne goes home to their barn, throws their possessions into the dam.

Marilyn and I nest in our winter sunlit room. I read Lord of the rings to her and our unborn child. We drive down the hill in the Kombi, buy macrobiotic staples, spend hour after hour in Muni’s kitchen exploring a new way to cook and eat.

Rajneeshis are known as Orange People. Muni’s clothes are orange, his lab coat, washing machine, toilet seat, all orange. His two-storey stone house has a spiral staircase to his upstairs quarters. Weird clay figurines Muni has crafted lurk in the garden under ivy and rambling shrubs.

On the evening of 9 July we entertain a friend of Marilyn’s. They did midwifery together during their nursing studies. As if the baby knows a midwife is in the house, the first contraction happens at ten o’clock. The longest night of my life begins.

Mid-morning on 10 July our real midwife and her apprentice arrive, then our doctor. After a 19-hour labour our son is born in the late afternoon, the cat Mister Id on one windowsill, Grogan the dog peering through the window on the other side. Muni lights a candle in a darkened stairwell.

For six weeks we live in that room in Belair. Marilyn’s mother comes for a week from NSW, then my mother from Melbourne. I finish reading Lord of the rings to Marilyn and the baby. My twenty-eighth birthday passes. A subdued Rock comes to tea one night. He and Kate have split. Mister Id disappears.

Slowly we pack the Kombi with all our possessions ready to quit South Australia after six months. Only one thing good has come of our stay here: a son.

A friend offers us refuge in a spacious old farmhouse at Greta in north-east Victoria. Adieu Adelaide.  

Rock on. 

sandwiched

An article in today’s big paper tells me I’m doing the nation a great service, helping us save $53 billion. Bully for me! I’m doing this just  by being a Baby Boomer and hence the meat—I’ll settle for cheese—in a generational sandwich. A perfect storm of sociological synchronicity is squeezing me, my ageing parents needing my care, my offspring needing my money.

At this point a confession: I’m not pulling my weight here because I’m not good at either of these things. I also think the burden falls heaviest on later boomers, aged 48 to 55, than on me at 60.

These days adult children connect better with parents than previous generations, stay in (expensive) education longer, delay earning, and are too financially savvy to quit the comfort of the parental home. Meanwhile boomers’ parents need part- or full-time nursing.

I’d like to help my adult children with deposits on houses, but as a lifelong pauper relative to my boomer counterparts, I’ve got no cash to spare. They saw the writing on the wall early and support themselves. Always have. My son has earned, and never asked for a dollar, since he was 16. My daughter was a dish-pig for five years to support herself during tertiary education.

The previous generation, my parents, edge closer to care, no longer robustly healthy. At 87 my father might not endure too long, but he’s ambulant and sentient. My mother will be active a while yet. My sister moves house in a fortnight: she’ll be 20 minutes away from them instead of an hour.

My time, money and care remain unburdened, my contribution to that $53b minute. I’ll try not to spend the kids’ inheritance; it won’t be theirs during my lifetime. For my parents I’ll contribute in kind: paperwork, shopping, delivery to appointments, housework. This will begin soon.

My good woman is 52 and unlikely to see the backs of her children for years, the prospect of us living together distant. The free tertiary education I got—thanks Gough—and the affordable education my children got will elude her two. Three cars will never be in her drive; she now shares her car with her daughter; three will share come October.

Social research says we are more a product of our generation than of our parents. Taken from birth, a generation used to be 20 years, now it’s close to thirty.

From a cultural perspective, a generation is now about five years. Your average 19 year-old has no hope of seeing the world from a 14 year-old’s viewpoint. But that’s a story for another time.

Rock on. 

taxman

Some days I’d rather do anything than the task at hand. Today I should be studying and titivating PowerPoint slides for our professional development session in Bendigo on Monday. Instead I organise documentation for the taxman.

Most years I have one group certificate, two if there’s been an election and I spend a day working for the electoral commission. This year two employers and Centrelink send certificates, and I earn enough from my business to really complicate things.

I collect receipts assiduously this financial year: books for my professional library, desk and electrical work for my home office, IT components to run my business better. For the first time in ages I don’t know if the taxman owes me, or me him. It’s a worry.

For years my father does my tax return. He’s an accountant and my tax affairs take about five minutes to sort out. But he lets his knowledge of taxation slip the longer he is retired. I report online until my tax knowledge proves inadequate. I hire my former de fact step-daughter to put my finances in order for the tax office, then she decides her job is too demanding to have private clients.

Up in Bendigo I let things slip till I spook myself about late fees. I ask my manager at work if she can recommend a local tax agent. She tells me she goes to H & R Block. I hate this company. Their ads on television drive me nuts. But I accept her recommendation and make an appointment.

The bloke who does my tax is personable and we get on well. The whole business is quickly sorted and I get a nice refund. Same thing the following year. Third time round, different agent, a woman, and a  smaller refund.

Back in Croydon I go to the local office. My finances are more complex, their fee larger, my refund much less. And this year is a mystery. I’ll be happy so long as I don’t owe.

Rock on. 

geelong

One of two alarms goes off at 4:48. I climb down from the loft bed, no lie-in, contemplating the day ahead. I must be out the door at 5:29 to catch the 5:43. The dog gets plonked out into the dark in his padded jacket to brave the elements for the next 14 hours; the cat curls up again on a chair.

A couple of wonky lights illuminate Platform One supplemented by the citrus glow of tradies’ lemon, lime and orange fluoro jackets, some fleeced, some nylon, some immaculate, some grimed with brick-dust, trench-dirt. A plumber’s apprentice scoots up the platform on his long-board, a weedy young bloke arrives on his BMX. 

 

On the train the elder tradies nod off, the young blokes game on their smartphones, the middle-aged look at the photos in the small paper. Tradie reading is a broadsheet-free zone. An hour from now the 6:42 will be a tradie-free zone, all suits and skirts.

At 6:42 I’m in an empty carriage heading through the dark to Newport. My MM colleague Sasha picks me up at seven. Our Adelaide colleague Cathy occupies the front passenger seat. We’re on our way to the Geelong Conference Centre. Cathy will present an MM focus module while Sasha and I observe, assist, notate. On Monday we fly this module solo as a duet in Bendigo.

The conference centre hides in a still hollow of Geelong’s huge Eastern Park. I’ve been here 21 ago as principal of Berengarra at its two-day staff conference. My lover Carol sneaks into my room late at night; we skinny-dip in the courtyard pool, fuck riotously. She’s gone at dawn.

After the show Cathy goes direct to the airport, Sasha and I to MM’s Collingwood office. Gridlocked for an hour on Elliot Avenue through Royal Park, I see her feisty for the first time. At the office we assemble the electronic wherewithal to do our Bendigo gig, load the hire car. Sasha drives home.

In the dark at the other end of a long day I trudge up Peel Street. Despair as two 86 trams roll by along Smith Street. A third is not far behind, but I run onto Parliament’s Platform 4 to see the arse-end of the 6:27 Lilydale. The wind gushes up the tunnel when the 6:41 arrives, but I’ve had the wind up for a while now. I’m dead hungry.

Finally I’m home at a quarter to eight. A long day ends with the discovery of dinner in a chilly bag at my front door. My good woman has left a tuna and rice curry for me during the day. She’s an angel.

Rock on. 

silcock

The Silcock is our local park, cradled in the lowest and wettest part of Croydon. It’s two cricket fields in summer, four soccer pitches in winter, populated by a variety of pooches and hounds most Sunday mornings, red-coated instructors from the Croydon and District Obedience Dog Club marshalling the dog-owners.

The JRT has walked, played, run, fought, rolled in shit and dead creatures, and hunted ball here his entire life, Miss Meg with him till she died. Going on twelve, the JRT’s happy now to trot beside me some days, but his favourite occupation is still nose down, bum up, tail flailing as he burrows into long grass or a dense shrub tracking down his ball.

At nine every weekday whatever the weather a group of retirees gathers under the pavilion awning in winter, out on the northern cricket pitch in summer. They escort up to fifteen dogs, short-legged moppets, grizzled and paunchy bitzers, sometimes a spritely newcomer.

Dogs and owners circle like flocking birds. Bums are sniffed, yesterday’s events retold. A group of dogs bursts off like gas flaring off the sun before shrinking back to the milling mob. Around ten they toddle off and the Silcock is a green desert till late-morning mothers arrive with prams and toddlers.

Surrey Road borders the Silcock’s southern end, back fences the west and north sides. The north end is referred to as the rough end, spotted with big trees, a gravel path meandering through. Young Karen and Chin men, refugees, have carved a volleyball court in the clay between the trees. They hop the fence from the cheap housing estate, cross the tracks, play here in the late afternoons.

Curving along the eastern border is the railway line to Lilydale, unfenced until a month ago. In no time up go the steel mesh panels, each two and a half metres wide, two high. Suicide by train might justify the expense, but a serious attempter would need fifteen seconds to scale the mesh and rest a neck on a rail.

The young brown men from Burma’s route is cut off now; they must take the long route via the pedestrian crossing at the bottom of Surrey Road where a disabled bloke’s wheelchair once stalled on the tracks and a city-bound train cleaned him up.

I’m going down late one afternoon. I hope to see the young brown Burmese scrabbling up and over the railway lines and that mesh fence like Christmas Island crabs.  

Rock on. 

pining

My good woman has done amazingly well to learn English from nothing in 18 years. She asks me what is the difference between pining and yearning. I know there’s a subtle difference but have never tried to put it in words a non-native speaker might understand. I give it my best.

I’ve been pining myself over the past three weeks, for France, to stand on a mountain roadside with thousands of enthusiasts as the peloton whooshes past. I’d go every year if I had the time and money. It’s not the race so much as the event, and the great metaphor, the struggle to overcome insuperable odds, to ride a bicycle where no bicycle should go.

Despite the pining, I give this year’s Tour de France less attention than I have for 12 years. I don’t stay up late, watch only two stages to their conclusions. Some days I miss the half-hour highlights on SBS because my job absorbs my time and energy, gets me home long after dark.

This year’s race lacks all the charisma of the 2011 edition. It’s over before it begins, Wiggins a Monty to win the GC, Cadel little chance of repeating last year’s heroics. No great battles are fought, the British Sky team snuffs every challenge before it takes hold. They are clinical, efficient, and boring.

Great rivalries capture the imagination—Armstrong and Ulrich, Armstrong and Belocki—but none eventuates here. The green jersey competition fizzles early. Opportunists win stages because they pose no threat to any contender. Half-hearted champions save their energy for the Olympic road race a week away.

Yet I want to be there. Perhaps not riding the Tourmalet, the Peyresourde, the Aspin, the Galibier. They’re behind me. Maybe one last tilt at the great climbs is left in me. I fancy a crack at the Madeleine, perhaps the Tourmalet from the east, Mont Ventoux. Mostly I want to sit next to my bike in towns like Arreau, Argelès-Gazost, Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Luchon.

I want to wander round Paris with my good woman, speed through the green in a TGV, buy cheese at an intermarché. I want to eat petit déjeuner at 7 Résidence Lestival in Langeac as I did twelve months ago, pump up my tyres and pedal off into the French countryside.  

Rock on. 

bibliomania

The Black Saturday bushfire burns my daughter’s house in Bendigo to the ground on 7 February 2009. She and her partner lose everything but their dog and the clothes they wear. Hundreds of books about Australian flora and fauna, their passion, gone. They accept their loss with grace.

Not long after the fire I read an article about clutter. It suggests that if you haven’t used something for a year, you might consider getting rid of it. I look at my library of books and start to wonder. I estimate that I might read about ten per cent of my books a second time. The rest are furniture.

I’ve heard vaguely of ‘liberated’ books, left by the reader where they can be found and read by others. I consider leaving one at a time on the Bendigo train after each journey, at the fish and chip shop, on people’s desks at work, wherever a book can be left and discovered. Instead I resolve to give them to friends by whim.

I give 83 of the best books I won’t read again to my good woman’s daughter, classics, one-off rippers, deep and meaningful gems. She is delighted. Batches of six go to my dog-sitter Julie who likes my taste in literature and laughs at anything I utter.

In 1978 I sell hundreds of books in an uncluttering fury before moving interstate. I regret it. But in 2009 I begin again lightening the load on my bookshelves. I pack six boxes. Five go to Book Now, my favourite second-hand bookshop in Bendigo. They cherry-pick about one book in five, give me $160. Most return and sit in my passageway. Later I donate them to a charity book swap program.

I still have hundreds of books on my shelves, my ‘professional’ library on words and language, reference books, the ten percenters I might read again, those I haven’t read yet. The fiction is gone.

I love books, the aesthetic, the feel and smell of books. A new book is still a thing of wonder. I love them for the ideas they contain, the characters and the stories. I love books set in places I’ll never get to: Newfoundland (The shipping news), Puget Sound (Snow falling on cedars), rural France in the 1860s (Zola’s Earth).

Books rock. 

dozing

Dreams are seriously weird shit, last night’s more than most.

My good woman often asks if I dreamed last night. A psychologist would do, wouldn’t she? Mostly the answer is no, occasionally yes, but I don’t remember anything, and on blue-moon occasions I remember them vividly.

I don’t see dreams as windows into the soul or anything else, not prophesies or premonitions. Sometimes they give pause for thought.

The new cat wakes me at 5:59, ploughing my armpit with his tongue, bashing his cat skull into my nose, purring like a diesel. He’s reliable, punctual: I’m sure he reads the clock. We all rise and piss, then I climb back up to the loft-bed to try for more sleep. And in the fitful dozing comes this surreal mélange of image and emotion.

I’m in a strange city, known to the dreaming me but not the real me. I have to park a car and visit a building for some purpose. I return and catch a bus, destination undetermined. The bus morphs into a mobile veterinary unit. The cat is being examined by a nice vet. He sticks a finger up the cat’s arse.

Suddenly my son is with me, aged maybe four, the blond hair, the child’s pure smile. I feel I haven’t seen him for 29 years because he’s just turned 33. I don’t retain vivid memories of my kids as kids, so I rejoice just to see him again, my gorgeous boy. I delight to think that I will have the opportunity to bring him up again, this time using the wisdom I have at 60, not 31.

The brief intensity of the emotions is beyond words. I hug him to me, and almost as I do, he is gone.

Again I’m with the cat, in a national park where no cat is allowed. A ranger is coming. What to do? Pretend the cat is under voice command. The cat climbs a cliff, won’t respond to my calls. The ranger smiles, at the cat’s antics or at the prospect of a hefty fine? I can’t tell.

I wake again, the cat beside me on the doona, the JRT jelly-beaning on the floor. My son is 40 kilometres away, but I hugged him last night, and feel much better for it.

Rock on. 

weeding

Since I start work at MM I barely set foot in the garden. The wettest, coldest autumn and winter doesn’t help. The soil settles, crusts, sprouts weeds and the weeds rampage. The kaffir lime drops its jaundiced fruit, moss smears the brick paths, dog shit mounds in selected drop zones.

Morning fog inches higher, burns off, the palest sun lighting the day as so few days for weeks. By late morning the garden is the place to be. The JRT, the new cat and their master venture out. Yesterday, after eight days staring through flywire, the new cat makes his first foray outside in two quarter-hour stints.

He susses out every corner, under the house, escape routes up trees. Go roars up the native hibiscus, realises he’s gone too high, turns to come down, loses the fight with gravity, free-falls through four metres of space, crushes a wire plant protector, looks startled, sits and licks himself, the standard cat defence when embarrassed.

Today, with second-day confidence, he runs through the garden beds, digs holes and lies in them, cat behaviour unfamiliar to me. Meanwhile I pull the weeds from every corner and crevice, every pot and patch of dirt. I harvest the last two spindly capsicums, pull the last of the carrots, three more skinny leeks, and a dozen golf-ball sized beetroots.

By day’s end I’ve two-thirds filled a compost bin, my fingers raw, grained with black, the back garden re-emerging. The spoiled limes and the dog shit is gone, trellises of withered bean stalks extracted and rolled, bluestones, bricks and rocks shifted, the next stage of my backyard adventure exposed.

The garden slopes gently but the lower path floods after heavy rain. I’ve stared long and hard at it but found no solution. Late this afternoon as the last of the weeds disappears a way ahead with the sunken path forms in my mind. I’ll need half a yard of sand, dirty knees and a sore back. The cat will amuse himself, the JRT will watch from his bed.

Gardens, like relationships, need constant tending or they’re apt to get away. Sometimes they need remodelling, rebuilding. They are always about new beginnings.

Rock on. 

toffee

After a work meeting in Boronia I drive the extra couple of kilometres to Ferntree Gully. On the seat beside me is a purchase contract for a new car. Weeks of discussion, mostly internal, brings me to the inevitable: Boyle’s Law of Gases. It applies equally to so-called lifestyle, which expands to fill the container of one’s income.  

This is my last chance to purchase a vehicle; insufficient retirement income will preclude future transaction.

Petrolheads identify themselves with Holden or Ford. As an anti-petrolhead I don’t identify with cars. But I am brand-loyal: it’s Honda or Volkswagen for me. I had five Honda motorbikes, love my little Honda Jazz; only the Volkswagen Caddy tempts me to consider anything else.

The Caddy is a strange vehicle: commercial small van without seats, people mover with seats, five or seven. It’s tall enough in the back to step into and long enough—with rear seats removed—for bikes without need to remove wheels or pedals.

Five years ago when I buy the Jazz I draw columns and boxes on a sheet of A4 to compare the Jazz and five other small hatchbacks for pros and cons, fuel consumption, prices. The Honda wins as I hope and expect. No need for comparisons this time. The Caddy has commercial but no people-moving equivalent. Less expensive, less practical cars are possible, but I want German know-how.

I prefer manuals to automatics but consider the auto this time. My good woman learned to drive a  manual in Serbia but has not driven one for 20 years. She will be my co-driver on long trips—if I get an automatic. I decide to stay manual.

I ask a few people what colour car? My good woman likes Salsa Red. I fancy Primavera Green. I look at car colours when walking the JRT or hunting lunch in Collingwood. The Primavera is dismissed in favour of the darker Venetian Green. Candy White, Reflex Silver and Blackberry are available for delivery in ten days. For other colours the wait is 12 to 14 weeks.

At the dealer’s desk, pen in hand, I opt for Toffee Brown. My good woman approves.

So I must wait for three months while the factory produces one Toffee Brown manual Caddy Trendline TDI250 for me. I like the idea of a car being made especially for me. The only better thing would be a top-end bicycle.

     

Rock on. 

accident

I’m in a lunchtime meeting. My mobile goes off, my father’s dial on the screen. He and my mother have had a car accident on the Monbulk-Lilydale Road at the back of Mt Evelyn. Can I help? I’m in Collingwood and dependent on public transport; the answer is no.

He assures me they are unharmed. My mother also assures me they are only shaken, not hurt. She’s annoyed: she told my father to ring me at home, but not at work. I call a couple of times during the afternoon to check their progress getting home via tow truck, insurer and taxi.

I guess not to ring and tell my sister without knowing why; intuition. On my way home I ring again from Parliament Station. My mother asks if I’ve told my sister. No. Good, she says, but I can only guess why she’s happy that I didn’t call.

This morning I call my parents. They’re grumpy with each other. I call my sister. She says my parents are generally unhappy with each other. It’s not the first time she’s told me. My mother snaps at my father. Well, he does try the patience. I think this, don’t say it.

Our mother is active physically and intellectually, but my sister says she sees signs of dementia. Her own mother lost her mind in her eighties. There’s no history of dementia in my father’s family, but his physical decrepitude gathers momentum: he looks older every time I see him. He’s boring and bothersome. She’s heard his every story fifty times, no longer funny, no longer resembling the truth.

My mother impresses on me how pleased she is by my new job, that my father retired too soon, forsook his accountancy skills, supermarket specials his only interest for 25 years. She’s resentful that he’s had no purpose in life for so long. I think she’s been bitter since they married—his drinking, neglect of her with two small children, the friends she didn’t like, not one.

The companionship she might have expected in old age has presence without real substance.

Sixty-four years married. My sister says my mother bullies our father. He’s always provided, looked after her financially; she’s never worked. Since the drinking stopped he’s tried to please her, travels all over to find the books she loves. She reads literature, he reads rubbish. He pays the bills, does the shopping, organises all the practical external aspects of their life.

My good woman rings them to offer support. My mother admits to her that she bullies my father, her exact words. She won’t learn how to pay bills, get money from an ATM. It’s his purpose and it keeps him alive. She’s bullying him into staying alive as long as she can.

Whatever their wisdom, the aged become like children, but they are not children, can’t be told what to do, how to behave. My good woman thinks my mother has it right. My sister thinks my mother is making two people unhappy at the end of a long marriage. I don’t know what to make of it all, what’s right or wrong, what might or should be done or not done.

My good woman thinks they are lucky to have a son and daughter who will do their best to get it right. We might not get it right, but we will do our best. I think the time is now.  

commerce

The 8:07 pulls out of Croydon on time, plenty of seats available in the lead carriage. A woman in her fifties sits opposite at Ringwood East, cigarette pack poking out of her handbag, long dark hair with a silly fringe falling over her forehead.

She works her phone’s keyboard, fingers trembling, not nerves but infirmity. Reminds me of Carol, lupus sufferer, former lover. We were a good fit; twenty-two years of on-off fun and heady fucking, marriage not in our natures. I remember good moments, forget the bad, feel a wave of gratitude to her. Half a dozen former lovers measure my life, memories of all cherished. Human commerce.

As we approach the underground loop the driver announces we’ll go direct to Flinders Street: a sick passenger and a train are stranded at Parliament. Our packed but silent train remains wordless, as it has all the way from the outer east, no rustle of surprise, protest, or disappointment. It’s the sound of hundreds of people psyching up for the day ahead.

Everyone exits at Flinders Street, engages plan B, moves off on new trajectories. I hop a 19 tram up Elizabeth to Bourke. Two young Indian men sit next to me. They speak Hindi, rapid-fire syllables. Some deal is going down. One shows the other the reverse side of his gold credit card, points at the metallic strip. They laugh.

I gaze out the window, commerce all about. Everything going on out there is human commerce, thousands of human interactions about to begin or resume as people settle into their offices, meet on trams, over coffee, breakfast, lunch, moving individual agendas forward, making and breaking deals and alliances, another day’s lectures, meetings, texting.

On it goes, every day, ceaseless, implacable human commerce. No war or natural disaster stops the human desire to trade in money, power, sex, love, a flux of restless hearts and minds jostling their way through each day, week, month, year.

I am a mere mote in the cosmos of human commerce. And I should not forget my place.

Rock on. 

diy

This morning I meet Maryanne. I expect an older woman from her phone voice. She’s mid to late thirties, tall, pinched nose, moderate make-up, black stockings, miniskirt, the complete corporate businesswoman. She’s come to take me through some salary packaging options. She drives a yellow RACV company car and lives in Collingwood.

I’m armed with two packaging quotes she’s emailed me for a new car, a rival quote from my car dealer, a payslip, statements from my two super schemes. I start by admitting my ignorance about money systems and processes. She says nothing. I tell her that on reflection I think it better to package super than a car, but ask her to lead me through the quotes anyway.

The quotes include operating costs—fuel, maintenance, tyres, rego—and the big one, novated lease cost: $10+k per annum. I ask what novated means. She hasn’t a clue. The dictionary is no help; the closest word is novation, the replacement of an old contract with a new one.

Maryanne guides me through a forest of figures, agrees with the bank’s advice that I’m better off to redraw on my home loan to buy a car, admits I’m better off to salary package into super direct from my employer rather than through her company. I agree with her that I shouldn't just accept her or the bank’s opinion, but get an independent opinion too.

She leaves me more confused than ever. Tonight I reconsider the figures, work the calculator. The figures don’t add up. One column contains a grand mistake, easily made, huge nonetheless, obvious even to a financial nuf-nuf like me.

I conclude that neither the bank nor the salary packager is going to save me money. What they really offer is expertise and convenience: they buy the car, pay the associated costs, set up the salary package, organise the transition to retirement pension. I'd be paying for the convenience. At considerable cost. They serve themselves, not me.

I decide to set these things up myself. The cost will be a month’s running around and some inconvenience. But I will pay no novated lease cost, no administrative fee, no service fee to the bank’s financial planner.

I’ve always done it—whatever it is—myself. Why would I think of doing it any other way?   

Rock on. 

sabotage

I yawn. My head aches. I’ve stayed up late two consecutive nights to watch Le Tour. Cadel strives to find the opportunity to sneak away, to gain lost minutes. It doesn’t happen, isn’t going to happen. He punctures three times. Thirty riders puncture near the summit of the Mur de Peguere near Foix. Tacks are found on the road.

It’s been done before. Tacks on the course, a precedent. In 1904 every other outrage occurs as well. Four masked men leap from a car and attack Maurice Garin and Lucien Pothier as they ride away from the field. Rider Chevallier spends 45 minutes in a car; others hop on trains. This is stage one.

On stage two Antoine Fauré leads close to his home town. Two hundred fanatical Fauré supporters prevent the field getting through. Paul Gerbi is knocked out. On stage three fans throw rocks at riders and barricade the road, nails and broken glass strewn on the course. Race officials intervene, fire shots in the air.

Fifth-placed Henri Cornet is declared winner after the first four place-getters are disqualified. Nothing is new at Le Tour. Who are the retrospective winners from 1999 to 2005 if Lance is scrubbed? Will we get down to a fifth place-getter, a rider who hasn’t doped?

I’m sabotaged every day as an ordinary old cyclist: cars cut me off deliberately, drive too close in order to intimidate, passengers fire obscenities like bullets at close range. I’ve been struck with a bread roll wielded like a baseball bat, lined up on a long straight on Ferntree Gully Road.

Bike lanes end in the middle of nowhere. Bureaucratic sabotage. The Victorian government budgets nothing for bike infrastructure this year. Political sabotage. The Bureau predict rain every weekend from now until eternity. Meteorological sabotage.

In the end there’s nothing for it but to throw a leg over the top bar and ride, ride fast, ride clever, ride everywhere.

Rock on. 

littlehampton

On 3 February 1979 I drive the Kombi out of Childers in the Strzelecki Ranges for the last time. School resumes but I’m no longer employed by the Victorian Education Department, after three years teaching my resignation effective from 1 February.

The Kombi is pregnant with worldly goods, a pregnant woman, two dogs and a cat, and tows a trailer with goat, milking stand and bags of goat fodder. We drive to Adelaide in 42 degree heat that kills the Kombi.

Rock and Kate, formerly of Bemboka Road, live in a large old house on what is now the old Princes Highway at Littlehampton, behind the Adelaide Hills. We plan to make a little commune, live off our wits and talents. I set up two trestle tables under the eastern verandah where I make leather bags and sandals. Marilyn prepares to have a baby.

Almost on the day we arrive, Rock gets a contract teaching job at Gilles Plains. Kate’s two boys attend the local primary school. She waitresses evenings in a dirndl at The Old Mill in Hahndorf. The commune concept is dead before delivery.

My super payout buys a new engine for the Kombi. I drive to Summertown each day to be a builder’s labourer for a hippy couple. Vivienne lectures in astrology, herbalism and the occult at Adelaide University; Stuart, master mathematician, makes mud-bricks and constructs a dodecagonal  zodiac house, the slab a twelve-slice pizza of geometric art.

Each afternoon Marilyn and I bake bread for the six hungry mouths in our communal house. Rock and I start pre-season training at Mt Barker footy club. Kate might or might not be having an affair with Werner, an ugly little waiter at the Mill.

Eccentric people populate Littlehampton. Thommo unzips and pisses at the men’s urinals in the local pub: interesting young woman. Eckermann smokes wads of dope, breaks into houses, has a coffee, does the housework, leaves nice notes. His domestic philanthropy doesn’t amuse local police.

Our communal togetherness spirals downhill from March into June. One morning Kate and Marilyn stir rival porridge pots on rival gas rings. Things erupt. Marilyn retreats to Melbourne for the sake of the baby due soon. I look for somewhere for us to live, find nothing, know despair for the first time.

A truculent Kate can’t abide my rational responses to her verbal attacks on me. She turns me out of the house. I pedal away at midnight in an overcoat, sleeping bag under one arm. Eckermann provides floor space and a commiseration joint.

Stuart and Vivienne rescue us by taking an end-of-semester Sydney holiday to see family. Marilyn and I move into their octagonal mud-brick barn for a week and set about mastering macrobiotics.

Rock on.

piss-taking

piss-take: an offensive term for a parody, especially one that involves mockery or ridicule. So says my Encarta Concise English Dictionary. Two points here. First, I begin reading an article in this morning’s big paper wondering if it’s a piss-take. It’s not. Second, I want to say that the OED or the Australian Macquarie are my favourite dictionaries, but the Encarta is better.

I know enuresis: bed-wetting, or as Encarta delicately puts it, involuntary discharge of urine. Paruresis is its opposite: the inability to voluntarily discharge. Put another way, stage-fright, the inability to piss in public places, like the marvellous curving tiled urinal at the Rivoli.

The article surprises me because I’ve heard neither the word paruresis nor of the syndrome. But I suffer it, along with an estimated 1.5 million Aussie blokes who stand and wait. The article’s author, a major sufferer, describes it as like having a bloke inside your brain telling you that everyone’s watching you not pee, which ensures that you never do. I know this weirdness only too well.

It’s serious weirdness for some men, who can’t attend events that outlast their ability to delay pissing. The mere threat of someone entering the empty toilet where they stand, unzipped, dying to relieve themselves, is too much. Cubicles are usually OK, but not always. Agoraphobia is the result in extreme cases: these blokes can only piss at home, so they never leave home. 

My own paruresis is inconsistent, only striking on occasion, Most of the time I’m fine, feel no need to join the International Paruresis Society, nor to have a piss buddy who goes with me to public toilets. The piss buddy stands off but over time comes ever closer as you master pissing in company.

The silliness and embarrassment of standing with nothing happening can be acute. In my head I hear little boys asking their fathers, “Daddy, why is that man just standing there? He’s not doing anything.” They’ll think I’m a pervert, a frequenter of public toilets for no good reason.

If I’m at an individual basin when not-pissing happens, I edge closer so no one can see me not-pissing. I stare at the wall as if in satisfaction. But there’s no faking it at an extended urinal. Standing there with nothing happening is so-o-o-o-o obvious. Public announcements—“Bugger! It’s gone away”—are unconvincing.

Public pissing can be a great joy. One night in Bendigo Rock, the JRT and I all retire to the backyard and end up pissing simultaneously. Two of us roar laughing. The JRT seems to be smiling too.

Rock on. 

friggatriskaidekaphobia

No such word. Wrong. Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number 13 and friggatriskaidekaphobia is fear of Friday the thirteenth. It is such a Friday and I’m off to the dentist. Were I not an arch-sceptic, I might fear the worst.

I break a tooth four days ago. What better time for a tooth to succumb than just before a scheduled visit made weeks ago, to check the progress of my adjusted denture? The surgery rings to remind me of my visit. I report my broken tooth. My appointment duration is insufficient to deal with it. They ring back. The appointment following mine cancelled. My luck is in.

Marzena wags her finger at me when I tell her a nut broke my tooth. “You cannot eat nuts.”

“I know. I forgot. Forgive me. I won’t do it again.”

“Lie down in the chair and I will see what I can do.”

What she can do is rip out the cracked wreckage in there—the tooth already has ten pins in it, she says (surely an exaggeration)—and replace the pins and build another sort-of tooth. Clamps and wedges are involved. The ramming of the wedges hurts like buggery.

“You are practising your deep breathing,” she observes. “I can numb it up for you.”

“N-nn, n-nn.” If I could speak, I would tell her I’m a cyclist, so I know and relish pain. The clamp falls off and she has to reseat the wedges. Murder.

As I depart she promises me pain and maybe follow-up infection or toothache. “I had to go very deep,” she says, “near the nerve. Don’t eat anything for two hours.” The final indignity. Pain and starvation.

“I will see you in a fortnight.” This is a dentist’s joke at the expense of those of us who never make it to the next scheduled appointment without some dental disaster. The receptionist relieves me of $286.50 for a five-surface filling.

Later I reflect on my good fortune: none of the predicted pain happens, the JRT and the new cat are pleased to see me when I get home, the emailed quote for the new car I’m considering is cheaper than anticipated.

On the radio I hear that this particular July has five Fridays, five Saturdays and five Sundays. This last occurred 823 years ago. Surely not.

I survive friggatriskaidekaphobia till 7:35pm. The Blues run out on the park, get walloped, their finals aspirations consigned to history with eight miserable matches still to play.

    

Rock on. 

bank

I have an appointment at the bank—which bank?—at twelve on the twelfth. They send me a letter to say my home loan is nearly paid off and I can have a free financial health check. It’s code for: “We want you to extend your loan by remortgaging your house and buying something you don’t need, like a world cruise, a second storey or a yellow Lamborghini.”

Two out of three ain’t bad. I’ll pass on the holiday till next year and hope it won’t take a loan to get to France. The house needs serious renovations but I’m not going there. Ah, the car! I’m planning on doing that via salary packaging.

SR, the financial planner assigned for my health check, is a young bloke, small, natty, affable. I explain that money matters disappear into a black hole in my brain and wish him luck in conveying anything meaningful to me. He draws boxes and arrows, labels them with percentages. He talks me through taxes, pensions, and superannuation.

“Did you understand that?” he asks. I look at the sheet of paper. A long pause.

“Not really. Could you run that past me again?” Second time through my grip on it improves marginally. I figure a third go will make little difference.

“All right. OK,” I nod. “So you can set this up for me, the transition to retirement pension?” I understand that it’s tax-free at my age, will top up the income I sacrifice in salary packaging for a new car, and I can pay it back into my superannuation. Sounds like a fiddle, but SR assures me it’s kosher.

“Does the bank provide this as a service to me for my 55 years as a loyal customer or is there a fee for service?” He tells me the fee, ignores my loyalty. He records details from my super fund statements, asks me to email him the salary packaging quote I haven’t read yet.

He promises his own quote in about three weeks, tells me to ring with any questions in the meantime. Finally he runs me through seven pages of the Financial Services Guide, compulsory for him, meaningless to me. I wander dazed from the bank just after one.

I like SR. I trust him. I believe he’s given me good advice.

During dog-walking reflection in coming days, and as the brain ticks over in the troubled pre-dawn slumber of the fiscally-challenged, questions will emerge. I must write them down.

   

Rock on. 

personalities

Professional reading—journals, research articles, erudite books by psychologists and human nature boffins—is part of my job. It doesn’t come naturally, journals with titles like The New England Journal of Epistomological Theory, research full of algebraic symbols indicating significance and deviation, psychologists who write like shit.

My MM colleagues revel in this stuff. Bully for them. I settle for potted reports overheard from the back seat as we drive upcountry. They’re into Martin Seligman’s authentic happiness and positive psychology. My good woman, a Serbian psychologist, screws up her face at the mention of positive psychology. The Serbs can be a melancholy lot.

I borrow Sasha’s Authentic Happiness. She understands my travails, says, “Just read chapter one.” Chapter one is a merciful eleven pages only, the writing indulgent in typical American fashion. Some of it makes good sense. She whacks a pink post-it on the cover with the website where I can do a medley of authentic happiness assessments.

I’ve tested a few times over the years: Myers-Briggs 20 years ago, an online IQ test eight years ago, and a right-brain left-brain analysis about the same time. Today I fire up the interweb and complete a 240-question survey to ascertain my top strengths and virtues from the 24 on offer. Here’s what all the testing reveals.

According to Myers-Briggs, my introversion far outweighs my extraversion, and I think rather than feel. I’m judging more than perceptive, but equally sensing and intuitive. This means I’m serious and quiet with an original mind. I’m sceptical, critical and independent, practical, orderly, matter-of-fact, realistic and dependable.

The Brain Works evaluation pins me as left-hemisphere dominant with a preference for visual learning, although I can learn in an active, simultaneous, multidimensional fashion. Whatever. I’m organised, logical and detail-oriented, acknowledge the bigger picture but focus on the details, expecting the bigger picture to emerge as a result.

I should be good at engineering, architecture or computer graphics. Wrong.

  

The IQ test—score 133—says I’m a Visionary Philosopher, highly intelligent with a powerful mix of skills and insight. My verbal skills make me adept at explaining things to others. Correct on the last item. I’m too mean to pay for the 15-page detailed report, though this is not revealed by the test.

The authentic happiness survey indicates my top five strengths as judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness first; second is creativity, ingenuity, and originality; third comes perspective (wisdom); fourth is curiosity and interest in the world; and fifth honesty, authenticity, and genuineness.

My twenty-fourth strongest feature is diligence and perseverance. I’m a quitter.

Rock on. 

son

My son is 33 today. My mother still thinks of me as a child, despite my nearly 61 years. I barely remember my son as a child because he hasn’t been one for a long time. He’s supported himself since he was 16, as a farm trainee, a storeman, a tree lopper, and putting up signs.

I drive through the rain to have tea with him and his partner at Carrum Downs.

If you’re a couple renting cheap, working in Dandenong and Knox, then Carrum Downs is your default compromise. It’s no place I’d choose to live. The JRT and I splash through the front lawn to the door. I rap on the narrow windowpane beside it, get no answer. I rap harder, pull my mobile from my pocket and dial. He’s a minute away.

Katie’s small car mounts the kerb, sinks into the grass. I fear it will never leave. Mo’s work vehicle, a VW Transporter dual-cab ute, shiny aluminium toolboxes welded in, hunkers in the dark.

Inside a fire slumbers behind the glass door of the wood heater. We confabulate over the Thai takeaway menu, Katie’s Kiwi accent broader than ever. She calls my son Olmo, his birth name. Unheard of.

The JRT goes out the back to piss and Sid comes in. The two shared my house for two months, but this is Sid’s pad and he’s not keen to share it with the JRT. Sid seems bigger, wider, heavier, even his tail. I think of the cat I’m about to introduce into my house: Red Ned McLintock. Or Idji. Or maybe some name not yet thought up.

I like my son, a lot, but seldom see him. He works long and hard, shares no interests of mine. He left home too soon, the bonds of early adolescence broken, with no chance to heal and morph into something new and stronger, as happened between me and his sister.

For fifteen years I struggle to reconnect, unsure if he wants to, can’t be bothered, or doesn’t know how either. For fifteen years we’ve connected better, conversed, in the presence of third parties, Rock, his sister, now Katie.

He sometimes works for my sister at weekends, demolishing before she renovates, now building paths and moving soil before she rents out her Hampton house. He is a one hundred per cent honest labourer. She tells me how wonderful he is. I don’t doubt her for a second. When I tell him my various plans to fix up my house he volunteers to help. He’s naturally generous.

He washes the dishes, cooks, keeps a house reasonably clean. Everyone likes him. He’s a fine man, his humility and lack of confidence hiding a golden light. Clever Katie to see what others could not. 

Rock on.