And then today, having lunch with a fairly new, but I hope will become, a firm friend, and talking about blogs, I was prompted to look at my very first attempts at blogging, that I abandoned when too many people in my real life (particularly my workplace) were reading readily, and I felt I had to censor myself, and I realised there were somethings there that I’m very pleased of, that I’d like to think others might like to read, one of which is the post below, about my Dad, written exactly 3 years ago, on what would have been his 71st birthday.    He would have been 74 today, if he’d lived… and while I can read these bittersweet reflections on my life with him, I find myself 3 years later, being much more understanding and tolerant of the two very different sides to his nature.

Today, would have been my Dad’s 71st birthday, if he was still with us. I have been thinking a lot of trying to put down on paper my father’s story. But I realise, I never really knew him. I knew the stories he told, but it’s sometimes difficult to determine what was fact or fiction. But I have memories, mental snapshots, and I wonder whether it is his story or my own that I need to write about…

Sitting outside of the old mansion in St Kilda, converted into apartments, that was home. My brother, Dad and I sitting on the front verandah watching the world go by, Dad telling funny stories about the people passing. And my yelling “there’s Father Christmas, Daddy, there’s Father Christmas” and wondering why he tried to shush me, as a heavily bearded man, in a black suit and a big hat walked down the street. It’s only now looking back I realise why he was so embarrassed, the man was an Orthodox Jew walking to the synagogue and here was I calling him Santa!

Dad yelling at us, cause we’d brought home a kitten found in a derelict house, that we wanted to keep. “There will be no animals in this house” he roared, and then we found the kitten asleep on his lap that night. He cried when he buried Dirty Dora in the backyard years later. And for every animal we had, we’d hear the same roar, and then he’d love them and they him.

Driving in the furniture truck with Mum and my baby sister, with my brother and Dad on the back to the new house in Thomastown, only to arrive and find the house has no walls or windows, and the builder’s done a bunk with our money and we are homeless.

Curled up on his lap, watching Little Women, and the two of us sobbing, as Beth dies.

Telling me to shut up or I’d be sorry, while I sobbed quietly lying on the top bunk of the room I shared with my sister, not understanding why I’d been sent to bed in the middle of the afternoon in punishment for some unknown misdemeanor. And then crying even more, as he closed the door and said to my brother and sister, who wants an icecream?

Sitting on his shoulders at a grown up fancy dress party, when I’d sneaked out of bed to see every one’s costumes, and him insisting I be allowed to stay up, much to my mother’s disgust. He was dressed up as Herman Munster, and he kept losing the bolt of his neck so he araldited it to his head, and it took weeks before it fell off.

Hiding under the covers, with my hands pressed to my ears, as he crawled drunkenly along the hallway, crying for his mother, after an alcoholic binge that lasted days.

Screaming through the hallways and alleyways around the apartments we lived in on a hot summers night, while Dad and the other grown ups threw buckets of water at us, as we raced around in our summer pj’s.

Being bundled into my parents bed in the wee small hours of the night by a neighbour, and seeing the flash of the ambulance lights against the windows, while we were told that Daddy’s had an accident, and has cut himself shaving… and my brother whispering to me, I saw him, why would Dad be shaving his wrists?

Watching a neverending stream of boys pile in or out of his Volkswagen Beetle as he drove them to football practice… the only father on the block with a car. He was also the defacto ambulance when we had an emergency, when Brian upstairs fell and broke his arm, or my friend Karen set her skirt alight while jumping over a bonfire.

Dancing around in his underwear, singing I’m So Pretty, oh so Pretty… and hamming it up for the camera.

Sitting at the kitchen table the night of my sister’s wedding, and reaching out to pinch me at every opportunity, until a friend asked him why he was being so mean, and him saying “Cause I hate her”

Walking up to wait for me to finish work at the local gift shop on a Friday night, and sweeping up and helping out while he waited, and then holding my hand all the way home and telling me how proud he was and how much he loved me.

Terrorising the teachers, and amusing all my classmates at every parent/teacher night he ever went to. One of the boys said “You’re Dad is so cool, you are so lucky” and I said “You can have him if you like!”

Am spending a bit of time writing on that other channel… http://zenofneedle.wordpress.com.. but will warn you if you’re not remotely interesting in needle and thread and major fabric fondling, you’ll be disappointed.

Probably an indication of how boring my life is at present, though there has been some blogging on my other channel!

Mum was given a digital photoframe for Christmas, and we are slowly digitizing some old photo’s for her… so here is one of Mum and Dad – don’t you just love his taxi-door ears?

Overhead on the tram home yesterday, sleazy guy in a wrinkled tan suit, with a tie with jockeys and racehorses on it and Bono style fly sunglasses… in a hoarse whisper…

“There are so many beautiful women on this tram I can’t cross my legs”

Everyone, all together now… euwwww….. yuck!

Discovering that my new house is the exact opposite to my old i.e. bedroom to the right of the front door not the left, laundry sink on the opposite wall, toilet roll holder on the opposite side, even the orientation of the driver side door to the front door and boundary wall…

So it’s thrown me a little and as a consequence I’m even clumsier than usual and makes me understand how people who have suffered slow loss of brain function like dementia and Alzheimer’s patients are often only diagnosed after they move into unfamiliar environments.

As a left hander life is always a bit more fraught – the world is not designed for us, and our brains have to quickly process and adjust things constantly in order to survive – hence the reason why left-handers are considered clumsier. It’s not that we are clumsy – just that sometimes the time it takes to look at something, and then reconfigure it to how our brains would expect it to be doesn’t always happen fast enough – hence the occasional walk into door frames and closing doors on fingers etc. Why doors? ‘Cause the handles should be on the other side for us, try opening a door with your left hand sometime and see where your body is in relation to the door jamb!

One of things that I’ve noticed about myself that has freaked me out a lot is when I use the bathroom at work. I keep using the same cubicle!

Why is that?

I only really became conscious of it at my brief stint at my last job, with 4 female toilet cubicles; I always used the one on the end. How did I notice this? Because my Team Leader, also always used the one at the end – and when we both did the semi-cross-legged race for the loo after long meetings it would annoy the hell out of me to discover she was in MY cubicle!

But in thinking about it then, I realised I always headed for the middle of 3 cubicles at my last job and only a few weeks into my new job I’ve discovered I’ve adopted cubicle number 2! I don’t think I’ve seen the inside of any of the others to date.

And even now I have noticed, I don’t seem to be able to stop myself from heading straight to the same cubicle every time…. Argh…

My kingdom for an empty cubicle!

Frou

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

And so here’s the list, complete with the following instructions:

* Look at the list and embolden those you have read.
* Italicise those you intend to read.
* Underline the books you LOVE.
* Reprint this list in your own blog.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (read this at school and hated it!)
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (sort of – dip in and out of it at will)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (I love this book!)
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (Gotta love Pooh!)
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I would buy this house just for the luxury of a fireplace in the bathroom!

Though it’s in a great area, and the rest of the house is pretty cute too… a Victorian terrace house that has been updated but keeping the lovely old bits, like fireplaces – there are fireplaces in each bedroom too! Only $900k+ – what a bargain… sigh…

There were three concerts, and I sang in both the Saturday and Sunday evening shows.

There were about 250 of us on stage, a range of ages and races, the same as last year, way more females than males. All singing the songs selected by our Choir Directors, Valanga and Andrea Khoza.

Why was it joyous?

The opportunity to sing - I am not a singer, while I may have the soul of an artist, I have the talent of a tone-deaf frog… but it didn’t matter. Though those around me might think differently. This choir is perfect for me, and this year, the songs too were perfect. Told from the beginning not to get too caught up in the sheet music but to listen to the feel and phrasing – I was in heaven.

The music – a mix of African songs, some slow and beautiful, sang in a whisper, some lively and exciting, sang with a shout. Did it matter that apart from a broad translation, I didn’t know what I was singing? No – it was the sound that 250+ people make together that makes it so perfect.

The Choir Directors – spending 10 weeks with Valanga and Andy Khoza was a live affirming experience. Not only is it obvious that these two people love music, I suspect Valanga has musical dreams – but it was also obvious that they love each other. So it was a privilege to watch them and to learn from them, and to observe the power and delight learning and singing amid much laughter and love can have on the wider community, and my Sundays will be a bit bereft for a couple of weeks I suspect.

On Sunday evening as the audience raised to their feet to applaud us, I found myself crying. One of those moments in time that are unexpected, and all the more precious because of their unexpectedness. I had a strong sense of my father, who died almost 4 years ago, and how his own love of music has been passed on down through the generations.

For one brief moment, I imagined him there, in that wildly clapping and shouting crowd, and even though the music is far from what he enjoyed (he was a fan of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter and the Gershwins) I know that he would have enjoyed the sight of me up there singing my not so little butt off… and so I cried… and then cried again when I tried to explain how I felt at the time, and even now as I write this, the tears well…

How wonderful that music, regardless of its genre, has the power to invoke the memory of people and a time and place so vividly and the power of emotions that transcend language and culture.

Guess who’s signing up again for next year?

Frou

It was 12 years ago this December, on our first date, that we discussed birthdays for the first time.

BB: I know something about you; you don’t know I know…

FF: Really… what?

BB: Your birthday is March 10

FF: How do you know that?

BB: You wrote it down on a form a couple of weeks ago and I remembered

FF: OH! (smile)

FF: Well, I know something about you; you don’t know I know…

BB: What?

FF: Your birthday is July 24

BB: (laughing) How?

FF: Ditto!

And since that time, birthdays have played a significant part in our often twisty, confusing relationship, with one or both of us remembering each other on those days.

Sending him a bunch of balloons to his workplace to celebrate his birthday 9 years ago resulted in what is referred to as the ‘Famous F*off letter’ – a note left under my windscreen so poisonous that it did the unthinkable – it made me walk away with a finality that surprised us both.*

* Always used to say to him when he’d step back – which he did regularly – ‘All you have to do is say the word, and I’m gone” – he finally said it, so I went!

And my complete silence in the following 2 year period, particularly my lack of well wishes on his birthday that prompted his finally reconnecting with me.

Both his and my birthdays have measured the healthiness or otherwise of our relationship and our feelings for each other ever since.

From one extreme …

What – you hate me so much, that you can’t even wish me a happy birthday (BB via sms after months of drama, because he was busy planning a wedding but still telling me on a regular basis how much he cared for me, that resulted in my threatening to send someone around to kneecap him if he didn’t leave me alone and when that didn’t work, threatening worse – I would go and tell his mother! That did work!!!)

To now…

A brief but lovely conversation about his birthday, getting old and what we’ve both been up to over the last 12 months. He’s been a busy boy – he is now the father of 3 – all under 2 years of age!

Why do I continue to do it each year? There are people who believe when a relationship ends that walking away and not looking back is the healthiest thing to do.

I’d challenge that belief – at least for me – because in staying the distance, and setting parameters around the relationship, and seeing it through I’ve discovered an enormous amount about myself and him, and what are the core things that attracted us to each other in the first place and to treasure them for the gifts that they are.

In some ways it’s a test – how do I feel, how does he make me feel. But mostly, it’s just about connecting. This man played a significant role in my life on and off for a decade, and for a long time was the person against whom everyone else was measured.

Yesterday, there was a slight pang about the road not taken, when he talked about the babies but my overwhelming feeling is one of pleasure and some relief – that life is good for him, and that he’s happy with the choices he’s made.

Is it wrong that it pleased me that after 12 months he still recognised my voice, and that his own voice warmed as we spoke?

Is it wrong to be pleased that he was chuffed to able to talk ‘to me’ about how his life is going and he was generally interested in what I have been doing and how I was, when the one thing I never doubted about our relationship was the importance he placed on our ability to communicate, for the first time in his life he trusted another person enough to not hide himself and his feelings with someone else.

It was strange though… and unexpected…

That while I could still feel a strong swell of tenderness and warmth for the goofy man-child he is with his dirty cackle of a laugh and sense of the absurd that I did not feel a single iota of lust in my panty region!

It was like we are two different people, and it was funny to look back on our previous history and the drama and angst and basic stupidity of us battling so hard to maintain something that was never going to make either of us happy in the long term.

It reminded me of T saying to me once when we discussed our own dramatic and angst ridden beginning 25 years ago:

“We were friends who complicated things with sex and alcohol and when we let that go we were able to become the people we were always meant to be with each other”**

And so, every year I will make that call – just check in and say hi, how’s it going – until the day comes when no-one will answer or I will wake up a week later and realise – oops I forgot!

I may be a hopeless romantic in some respects but I have long given up the notion that at some future point BB and I will be together. What is more likely, like the plot of ‘Same Time, Next Year’ we will connect on an annual basis (but without the rumpy pumpy) for however long we need to. In the film, this married-to-others couple meet each year for 20 years, and then on year 21 he announces that his wife had died the year before and he’s now remarried – which effectively ends the relationship.

I predicted the same with BB years ago – to an impassioned declaration of “If things don’t work out it’s your door I will be coming to” to which I replied – “Yeah right – you’d disappear and only reappear once you’d
hooked up with someone else, cause then you’d be safe, and anyway what makes you think if you came knocking at my door I’d let you in?”

**There is a pattern here – that I’ve been aware of for a while, and may explore some more. I am the girl they love (and I don’t doubt they have/ do love me) from whom they learn and share and grow into different people because of the experiences we share together – but they always pick someone else to spend their life with. That’s not a bad contribution to have made, to help those who are struggling to find their path to happiness – but gee it’d be nice if just once, that path might actually involve picking me to travel that path with them!!!

Well… once upon a time there was this more than 40something, undomesticated goddess who had a blog that some people seemed to enjoy.

She clocked up around 130 posts and then, with a whimper not a bang, disappeared into the ether otherwise known as the blogosphere in February 2008. She didn’t write, she didn’t call…

Why? You may well ask…

• She got distracted…
• She discovered that lots of people in the ‘real world’ had access to her blog, so she found herself having to censor herself, whereas before she’d felt free to explore her own voice in relative freedom… (bit hard to talk about how horny you are in the week before you menstruate when your boss may be reading)
• She was grumpy and mopey and unhappy, and didn’t want every damn blog post to be a ‘woe is me, aren’t I pitiful’ rant…

So she decided to have a short break, that turned into something slightly longer… not intentionally, she just didn’t want to post anything negative… so it tells you what her life has been like that she hasn’t posted since February… sigh…

So she’s starting again… will let those who love her and don’t care that she likes to share the most amazingly frank things about herself know that she’s here and will just let this beast grow organically.

So what has she been doing? Well you may ask…

• She changed jobs … twice! In 2 months!!!
• She moved house… at the same time she changed jobs the first time
• She got sick, as did everyone else in her immediate family, including all the animals, all in the same 10 day period
• She refocused on the things that were important to her including writing, and is actively trying to do more of the things that feed her soul
• AND… she started singing again… and this is probably not a good thing for anyone in the immediate vicinity, but has been wonderful for that feeding the soul bit!
• She’s been living her life… in all its mundane and ordinariness

And now she’s back…Frou