Trolleys in the wild

And life went on

Found this scrap of diary from twenty years ago which makes me laugh. Your dad features in the first line, making a kind remark, as is his wont.
Here I was at the time, with some kind of Amy Winehouse beehive going on. And I remember those sunglasses. I loved those sunglasses!

The hills are alive...

Of all the postcards you've sent me, I think these two are my favourites. Just the intricacy and the colours (which these photos sadly don't do justice to).
















Akrura Takes Krishna from Vrindavana - by B.G. Sharma

























Manjushree - S.I.E. Jhochhen Kathmandu

And you wrote, "Today the birds are singing and it is sunny. Really, without sounding like a scene from The Sound of Music, I am in the mountains of Darjeeling and the hills are alive with something."

1982

With Joker and the hula hoop...




...and digging the foundations for our mudbrick cubby house.

Feeling myself again

lately. You?

Shaking our booty

I found this postcard, written and addressed to you but not sent.
It must have been in 1992 because that's when I was travelling through Southeast Asia with Jamie. On the back I wrote,
Thought you'd like this postcard of you and me at Metropolis nightclub.
God, remember Metropolis in North Sydney? Remember the night we went there after we got our tattoos, how we pissed ourselves laughing?
(The painting, called "Legong Dancers", is by I Gusti Ketut Suandi.)

Before John Howard gave rats a bad name

In 1999 you wrote to me, From one Rat to another, wishing you an inspirational coming spring on the road to the golden cheese.
You doodled a road leading up to a piece of Swiss cheese, and added Mmmm, so tasty!.
I can't remember but maybe 1999 was the Year of the Rat?
(Illustration--what's left of it after removal of old Blu-Tac and stickytape and dogears--by Binny Hobbs.)

Faith for atheists

Dear Jen,
Thank-you for the gorgeous ecobag. I love the mandala pattern on it and the extra-wide strap is so comfy. And if I'm going to walk around proclaiming adherence to any religion, it might as well be the Dalai's....
My religion is kindness.. Thanks, too, for sending the parcel wrapped in your mum. It was good to see her, bustling with happiness at my door. (Yes, we are still living in Drugless Avenue, as it is ironically known among locals. No plans to move as yet.).
I'll take a better picture but my camera batteries have just run out. Are you taking any photos as you wander about your city cave, I wonder? You could post them here.
I'll have much more soon, as I'm working away behind the scenes to get a lot of material finalised, for all the various online outlets. I often think 'my blog is like a duck'--by all appearances just coasting along, but there's a helluva lot of thrashing around going on below the surface. So til then, much love.

If city boys dress like thisI'm staying in the country

Stop laughing, this is high fashion. OK, the stylist was high.

This fashion spread in last week's Sunday Life is like Big Brother's gay farmer Dave crossed with Andre 3000. And look, it only costs A$640 to look this ridiculous. I could've got 'em a seven dollar bag from Vinnies with a better result.

Playdates

Such a lovely day. First with his good mate Ruby at the lake...





















Then at the folks' place. Here, standing on the woodfire pizza oven my dad's building.
(Mmmm....I can smell them already. Once it's up and running, I wouldn't mind trying to recreate the best pizza I ever had, in Venice, which involved walnuts and Camembert....sounds iffy but was heavenly.)

Cheesecake

I've been meaning to post the cheesecake recipe mentioned earlier, in case you want to try it. I substitute limes for oranges, add sugar, and use ricotta instead of cottage cheese (I'm no fan of those lumps).

Margaret Fulton's Orange Curacao Cheesecake

60g butter
1/3 cup brown sugar
185g Granita biscuits, crushed
250g packet cream cheese
250g cottage cheese
2 eggs, separated
2/3 cup sour cream
2 tbsp caster sugar
grated rind and juice of 1 orange
1 envelope gelatine, dissolved in 2 tbsp water
2-3 tbsp Orange Curacao
To decorate:
2/3 cup whipped cream
1/2 orange, sliced

Melt the butter and stir in the brown sugar and biscuit crumbs.
Press onto the base of a 23cm loose-bottomed flan tin.
Chill until firm.
Mix together the cheeses in a mixing bowl, then beat in the egg yolks, sour cream and caster sugar. Stir in the orange rind and juice, dissolved gelatine, and Curacao. Leave until just on the point of setting, then fold in the stiffly whisked egg whites.
Pour onto the biscuit base and chill until firm. Decorate with piped whipped cream and orange slices.

Pretty bloody delish.

The three amigos

I hate Tony Blair! He has a ridiculously difficult face. I drew him twenty times today and couldn't nail it. I had intended to finish off my political cartoons today (for my other site) but instead, have decided to find a better Blair photo online--you see, it's the photo I'm using that's crap, not my drawing ability, of course--and hold off until I draw something that at least looks a bit like him.

My dad took a quick look at this drawing and said, "Howard--fine. Blair--way too old, Bush--too young, and way too handsome." Well, I did use as my reference the the photo emblazoned across the official White House website, so that might explain the flattering and youthful expression...

Actioning words

I did a writing practice from Natalie Goldberg tonight, out of the chapter The Action of a Sentence. You write down any ten nouns, then think of an occupation and write down ten verbs relating to it. I looked around for ten nouns and wrote sunhat, gumboots, kitty litter, colander, coloured chalk, thongs, holepuncher, book, scissors, mug. I chose 'gardener' and put digs, shovels, scatters, weeds, rakes, trims, sprays, hoses, waters, mows. Then you combine them:

His gumboots scatter the gravel. He digs at the concrete with his chalk. The sunhat trims off his ears. Her thongs shovel through the sand. The mug waters her mouth. The holepuncher sprays out paper circles. Water rakes through the colander. The scissors mow through the newspaper. She weeds the lumps out of the kitty litter. Her book hoses her down.

The terminal abode

I like that expression. It comes from my Natalie Goldberg book, Writing Down the Bones (Shambala, 1986), from the chapter called Use Loneliness:

When I was separated from my husband, Katagiri Roshi said to me, "You should live alone. You should learn about that. It is the terminal abode."
"Roshi, will I get used to loneliness?"
"No, you don't get used to it. I take a cold shower every morning and every morning it shocks me, but I continue to stand up in the shower. Loneliness has a bite, but learn to stand up in it and not be tossed away."

So where are you on this cold night, I wonder? Haven't heard from you in a while. Will you write to our blog again at some point? I will go on alone for now. Come back anytime. I miss your poems and your photos and your paintings. I miss you.
I remember there have been times when you have imposed a media blackout on yourself, cutting yourself off from newspapers, telly and internet. I wonder if as part of your Buddhist studies you are cutting yourself off from all the noise again? But I feel sure you'll return.
Well, I don't know where you are tonight but I know that in 1995 you were here:


















You wrote, "Really great to be here and be alive."
Meanwhile, I was here, thinking the same thing...

blue

I continue to persevere with lime cheesecake (see earlier post) but there was a week when we didn't have much cash--those cheeses really add up--so I had to buy a three dollar blueberry muffin mix instead.
I was quite taken by the tin of canned blueberries included in the box, having expected only a stingy sachet of dried ones.
The tin reminds me of something out of The Shipping News, for some reason. Or like something we would eat if there were a war at home.
And look, they are wild ones. I would've thought they would use the tame variety for commercial muffin mixes. Easier to catch, haha.

black and white and red all over

You know those word paintings I do for meditation, Jen? This one's called Guantanamo Love. It used to be in my office, broken in half,















but now it adorns our very spartan loo. Food for thought excretion...

The cremation

One morning soon after Keith's death I stepped outside and saw my elderly neighbor Maria hanging her washing out. When she noticed me she stopped. She had news for me.
"He gets done two o'clock Monday."
"His funeral?"
"Where they get burnt? Behind the little curtain?"
"He's being cremated?"
"Yeah, that's it."
Keith went behind his little curtain in the company of about ten of his neighbors. I got a lift with Grace, a lady who lives across from me. He had been fixing her screen door the week he died. We got there an hour early and there were only two or three of Keith's friends there. Someone said, apparently a young man was going in before Keith, and no-one had come to see him off. This made me feel very sad for the young man. I wondered if it had been a drug overdose, whether he had so alienated his family that even his own mother had not come.
Nearby there was a large refreshment centre under construction. The idea of eating lunch at a crematorium quite repulses me, but I guess the old folk do like their tea and scones. I wondered how it would feel to be old, and face the regular funerals of your mates. I remembered that the week before he died, Keith had driven Gordon to a friend's funeral at the very same place.
I looked at the beautifully kept gardens and thought Keith would've certainly appreciated them. The sky was peacock blue and in the sun it was . I wandered around reading the inscriptions on the headstones. Some dusty toy RAAF planes were askew on a young man's grave, beside a dead bunch of flowers. "Still flying", the inscription said.
A young couple drove up in a small car and parked. They walked arm in arm over to a headstone. After they drove away I wandered over to inspect the headstone. I thought they must have lost a baby, but it seemed that one of them had probably lost their sister. A glossy photo of a wide-mouthed girl was embedded in the stone, and she seemed to laugh at the whole idea that she could be dead.
After the eulogy the funeral director, who had seemed to be reading from a standard script ("[blank]" was a wonderful man, loved by all...") asked if anyone wanted to speak about Keith. No-one spoke. In the row in front of me his best friend Gordon ignored a few nudges and low murmurs from his family. He did not want to speak. And Keith would've understood, I thought. There was nothing to say, anyway. We all had our relationship with Keith, and we all would remember him differently and feel his loss in a different way. It did not actually interest me to know how the others in the room remembered him and I suspected others felt the same.
The funeral director cleared his throat.
"Fine, then we'll just say the lord's prayer and then we'll have the committal."
As everyone started to murmur I found myself first chiming in, then mouthing the words, then looking at my lap, feeling guilty, saying nothing. Surely it would be hypocritcal to even mouth a prayer when both Keith and I were atheists.
Two dark red velvet curtains cranked towards his coffin from both sides, and his coffin disappeared.
After the funeral we were all a bit happier, especially his mate Gordon who had been clearly suffering over the time it took to get him sent off. Keith had lain in a morgue for twelve days, as they tried to trace his family, though there was none and we could've told them that for free.
I know he would've enjoyed the Indian summer we've had lately.
I have some more thoughts about Keith but they are still percolating, so more another time.

Mung beans not included

Hey, I bumped into your parents outside Woolworths yesterday. They both looked radiantly well. They said you were helping the Dalai Llama with his Melbourne visit. Maybe that explains why you have gone quiet on the email front. Are you still reading our blog?

alotta ricotta

I am trying to master cheesecake. I thought I should learn a 'signature dish' and, given that we always have lots of eggs and limes in the house thanks to my parents, I thought lime cheesecake would fit the bill. Plus, I love limes to death.
I'm adapting a recipe from a Margaret Fulton cookbook from the 1970s called "Cooking with Eggs". Her unbaked cheesecake recipe is made with oranges and orange Curacao liqueur. First time I made it I forgot that oranges are sweeter than limes and I didn't add any sugar to the cheeses mix, so the resulting cake was very sour though I must say, still quite delicious thanks to the crushed Granita base (tres vintage!).
I've since tried it two more times with greater success, though working with gelatine is proving a novelty and a challenge. I managed to take a photo of the process the other day, but keep forgetting to take a photo of the finished product before it gets scoffed.

Is there anything more delicious than lime cheesecake? Hmm, wonder what a vodka and lime cheesecake would be like?
(And yes, I am filling my love-shaped hole with food and alcohol...)

...maybe here?

Where do people go when they just go

Hey, do you ever go here by mistake? I sometimes do. I get a little shock.

"My truck sits in the driveway, its alternator to tired to keep the battery charged. The lumber racks have cobwebs from sitting for just six weeks."

I think, since when does Jen have a truck? But for a few seconds I see you in the truck. You have a grin. You're wearing a red shirt and your blonde fringe sticks out under your truckers cap. Just as I'm wondering why your truck has been off the road for six weeks, I realise it's not our site.
I've been a bit reflective the past week. My neighbour died suddenly, and we'd had a sort of friendship for a year. I'm trying to find the right way to mourn. I think 'grieve' is too strong a word for what we had. I did have a few days when I got a little teary every time I opened my front door (his house faces mine).
Even a week later I still don't want to sing in my kitchen because I feel like I'm dancing on his grave or something. His old mate Gordon also lives in our group of houses--they'd been friends for five years, so he's lost.
I sometimes feel sad when I look at his red bougainvillea, which he had trained into a heart shape on the front of his house, facing the street, always making me think of a bower bird. Now, I worry who will look after it for him. How long will it take for his garden to die, too?
I was ambivalent about Keith. He was a lonely man, eager for company and we often chatted beside our jacaranda. It wasn't the kind of relationship where I would invite him in the house for tea which occasionally made him surly. Once, I arrived home to find him sitting on his bench, holding a longneck, staring past me.
"I haven't seen you in a week," he said. There followed a short tense conversation and after that, things were a bit awkward for a while.
I last saw him Tuesday night and to be honest I did think he looked grey, older than usual. He had been drinking at the club and had walked home with two bottles in a plastic bag. We were unlocking our doors and I was teasing him about his love-life, which he had always done to me.
"Isn't it time you got yourself a lady friend, Keith," I joked, after we discussed how he'd be celebrating his birthday the next day.
"Don't worry, I get plenty of--", and he paused abruptly as the sixteen-year-old girl from next door shuffled past.
"--opportunity, I can assure you," he said. After a moment, he turned away and muttered,
"But I don't care, anyway. I'm checking out."
I remember pausing either because of an unusual tone or because I felt I hadn't heard him properly.
"Tanked out?" I clarified, thinking he meant he was drunk.
"I'm checking out," he repeated softly and went into his house. I turned away, thinking he must have meant he was checking out of the bowling club scene, or something. Then, quite strangely, he came back out, bent down to my child and said--in a stagey way, I remember thinking at the time--"Bye, H.," and went back inside without a glance at me.
The next morning when I went outside I saw two policemen talking to Gordon and his wife.
My son burst out our gate behind me as Gordon, with a strange look on his face, came and told me quietly that Keith had died the night before.
Gordon had woken to find Keith's car parked on the verge and the front door opened, and had called the police who had found the body.
I looked at his big red heart vine, and in front of it, the policemen and my son in pyjamas, weaving in and out of them brandishing his blue ukelele.
You big bastard, Keith, I thought. Checking out like that.
See, my first thoughts were that he had committed suicide. It was his birthday, Anzac Day. But later we all learnt the doctor had confirmed it had been a massive heart attack. I spent a week feeling guilty as hell about the way I'd put distance between us in recent months. At first I was relieved to hear it had been natural causes, but then I felt guilty again when I realised that I had probably still somehow contributed to his death by letting him mow our lawns when he was clearly no longer as fit as he thought he was.
It's a strange feeling to mourn someone you didn't even know that well, but who was nevertheless a daily fixture in your life. He tended our front garden, mowed the lawn, gave us lifts in a downpour. He left his morning Herald on my doorstep before seven every morning when he returned from his swim in the ocean (and wherever he is, he'd be laughing at how I'm missing that paper every day). And there he always was when we opened our front door, pinning his large maroon undies to the line opposite, or standing on Gordon and Maria's roof fussing with a broken arial, or wheeling his bin out a full day early, and gossiping with someone about someone else. A few days before he died he made sure I knew our new neighbours down the back were gamblers.
He was sixty-nine.
Since he died I've really felt like getting things done, that's all I can really say. I suddenly remember something about seizing the day. Here today, gone tomorrow, just like that.
Well, love to you. What have you been doing, I wonder? Your emails are so brief, just a fleeting smile down the wires, like the image of you in your truck.
Write soon.

It's all ova

This morning I spent about half an hour sanding down that little wooden egg you once gave me. As I gently polished I thought of you. I wondered where you are. It's nice to hear from you by email sometimes and good to know you are somewhere in Melbourne and not Timbuktu.
Over the years my little child has enjoyed rolling this particular wooden egg around. Future football player perhaps? I sanded off a few years worth of dirt and scuff marks (though a few deep nicks remain). Holding the egg I started humming that song, "She's got the whole world, in her hands..."

Cards you have sent me

The other side is blank, so I can't credit the artist unfortunately. I had trimmed away the other half of the card and filed it with your letters. Anyway I am enjoying going through old postcards and thought I would upload ones from you for our renewed enjoyment.

Hope you are well, my lovely.

Teatime at the Dead Letter Office?

Since my parcel missed your leaving Sydney I thought I'd try and recall its contents for you.
I remember there was a handmade blueberry candle from the tourist store in the main street. I think there may have been a bundle of incense of some unusual aroma. There were healthy chocolate biscuits from the healthy foods aisle; perhaps organic teabags as well, but don't quote me on that. Oh yeah, and I threw in a pack some of my favorite cheap supermarket teatowels, the ones that come in purple and white. And I wrote some waffle on a piece of paper that had a gold heart embossed on the top. Think the envelope was gold.
Well, I hope you would've liked your extremely belated gift, my lovely. Happy Whatever it was meant to celebrate.

I always bump into your dad outside McDonalds

It's funny, because just a few weeks ago I bumped into your mum at the supermarket. Not in, but near the natural foods aisle. She was wan and missing you. I inspected her trolley with friendly approval as we talked: there were green things from the vegie section, healthy looking paper parcels. Perhaps she had just come from the natural foods aisle.
Then today, after I nearly got myself run down trying to sneak across the roundabout, I happened to bump into your dad. He told me he was going to McDonalds. This made me laugh in confusion, thinking suddenly of his banana sandwiches and his dabblings in breatharianism. I did not think he was a Big Mac kind of guy.
He smiled and told me he had to change his catheter (or something, I am vague on precise medical details) every six hours and he chose McDonalds for the nice bathrooms. At least I think that's what he said amid the traffic and my panic to collect my boy from preschool and rush us to the library in time to meet Grandma. I told him I gathered it was to do with his kidneys and he agreed.
We said we had last heard you were in Melbourne. Are you still?
He looked well and we both smiled as we walked our different ways.

"Calling all poets!!"

I saw this in the paper. The deadline's a bit close, but here it is anyway.

"FREE Poetry Competition - 1st Prize is $2,000
2006 Annual Open Competition
Closing date - 31 August 2006
Include postal details with poem
Poem must be no longer than 25 lines
Only ONE entry per person
Galaxy Poetry Association
e-mail: galaxypoetry@bigpond.com
Mail: PO Box 1628, CAPALABA (no, I've never heard of it either), QLD, 4157
Fax: (07) 3823 2783
www.galaxypoetry.com"

Listen...they are calling you.
*
By the way, wildoat-2, this blog isn't supposed to be competitive, between you and me, I mean. Just something to read on that porch when we are eighty. I feel eighty today. (Day 28, y'see...)

I always think of you in the natural foods aisle

You send me sunflower seeds, pepitos, pine nuts and organic yoghurt clusters, making me pine for you my pepito seedling.
I send you love too, but you can't eat it.