accomplishment

My daughter and grand-daughter are asleep when I leave the house at seven. I swap cars at my good woman’s place. She’s asleep too. It’s Sunday morning, after all.

Yesterday I pick up a hire car at a rental firm’s Mitcham outlet, less than a kilometre from my good woman’s place. All MM travel up the country is done in rentals. I drive down the freeway to the MM office in Collingwood to pick up materials I need for the hour-long presentation I’m about to do.

Without an e-tag I take Glenlyon, Melville and Bell to clear the northern suburbs before joining the Calder. The weather’s cold and grey, heavy rain predicted later. Above 500 metres around Woodend the mist and thick drizzle set in. I exit at the Lancefield-Carlsruhe exit and head west to Campaspe Downs Resort where Deakin University’s pre-service teachers are conferencing.

The long driveway is a mix of broken bitumen, gravel, speed humps and potholes. Unattractive cack-brown buildings squat in the khaki bush around what looks like an artificial lake. Blue canoes poke their prows out of a lakeside shed.

I park the hire car, change into conference clothes—a collar, odd socks, thick jumper—and push through the drizzle between dormitory-style buildings toward a likely-looking hall. I encounter three young people bent-walking against the cold and wet. I ask where I might register and discover that the lanky bloke is the person who’s been emailing me about arrangements.

The ‘resort’ resembles school camps I remember from the 1960s—wet, wooden floors, cheap couches in smelly lounge rooms, kitchens of chill stainless steel, chipped polystyrene cups, tables with wonky legs.

Activity Room One is a long hike around the lake and over a rise. I run an activity and deliver my MM spiel between emptying my belligerent bladder in the piss-stink of an ancient laminated toilet at the end of the block.

Morning tea is cold rubbery pikelets and red jam that probably came out of a 44-gallon drum. I stuff the usual thank-you bottle of plonk in my bag and hightail it out onto the blacktop and back down the freeway to the city.

My daughter and Nerri are having lunch with my good woman who has kept them captive till I get back to her place. I know my daughter and my good woman have had a deep and meaningful.      

After Nerri and her mother leave the emotion almost spills. My daughter is a great mother. Yesterday I watch my son with his niece and know (as I always have) that he will be a great father when his time comes. I tell my good woman that my job is done. She agrees.

Rock on.