Saturday Morning
A bewildered yelp
followed by silence
everyone rushes out of shops
a man walks solemnly, dog in arms
people point the way to the vet
and murmur confirmation to each other
(yes, a dog
yes, a young man
yes, the vet)
we were shoppers
now, suddenly,
we are a community
What's in a name?
A friend gave me a CD
by an artist he admired
The artist's name on the CD cover
is JOAN.
When I saw that, I thought to myself,
"What an interesting way to spell Joanne. J-O-A-N.
JO-AN instead of Jo-anne!
Maybe she is Spanish.
Or Canadian."
...
...
The next day I looked again at the CD cover and saw straight away that the artist's name
is Joan.
And Joan is the perfectly natural and regular way to spell ... Joan.
A moment of intriguing linguistic transposing?
Or will I one day look back and see this moment as the
beginning
(early onset, what's that word, starts with A, it's what old people get)
of the end
?
Tightrope
There is a small box.
Inside the box there is a tightrope.
Balanced on the tightrope is a creature.
The creature is soft and has wide eyes.
It is my job to keep the creature balanced on the tightrope.
I keep the box in the top pocket of my denim jacket.
I wear the jacket when I visit my niece.
In the kitchen, spontaneously, my niece takes my hand and puts it in my sister's hand.
She holds our other hands in her own tiny mitts.
She has just learned Ring a Ring a Rosy.
It gives her - and us - an almost indescribable amount of joy.
...
One day, she might take two people's hands to re-create this joy, to share this joy, to re-live this joy, and those two people might refuse.
They may even say that they hate Ring a Ring a Rosy, that it is for babies.
I want put my niece into the box, to keep her close to my heart, to keep her safe from the people who might reject her incredible joy.
At this moment, the creature falls off the tightrope.
...
...
I wonder if it is dead.
...
Or just temporarily wounded.
The helpful world of hairdressing
A woman with short hair road tests a new hairdresser. Her favourite hairdresser has disappeared from the salon and queries as to his whereabouts provoke awkward and mumbled responses. He clearly did not leave on good terms.
The woman decides to be generous and give the new, young, short haired slightly bored looking hairdresser now standing behind her a chance.
'One thing I sometimes find, with short hair, is that's hard to know what to do for events. How to make it look special for weddings, dinners, that kind of thing.'
'Yeah, I know,' replies the young hairdresser with genuine concern and a glance at her own short hair.
And that is it.
The end of the helpful consultation.
The woman wishes she had thought to get the mobile phone number of her favourite hairdresser BEFORE he disappeared in such mysterious, mumbled and awkward circumstances.
Lazy Autumn hope
Extreme weather patterns aside, the first days and weeks of Autumn in Melbourne bring a particular joy to the city.
The light drops its summer glare and sinks into a lazy state.
People smile and sniff the air that holds auburn and musk and ground coffee and coats and hours spent reading a book or remembering that bakery where your mum used to buy you Neenish tarts after school on a Friday afternoon.
Summer was for the brilliant and those who can bash their way through.
Winter approaches and it is blue fingers, heads down and black, so much black.
Spring holds promise but it is jittery and precarious and makes you itch.
Autumn encourages
lolling
lingering
lazing.
It is cheeky. It flirts warm and cool.
It smells like hope.
Why is the sky leaking?
When we were little we walked places in the rain all the time. We wore raincoats and gumboots and we got wet. A lot.
My Few Words this week come via a friend, whose colleague was worried about her 10 year old son walking home from school in Melbourne during the week.
Not because he'd never walked home on his own before, but because he'd never walked home alone IN THE RAIN before (born into a lifetime of landscape in drought), and she was worried that he wouldn't know what to do ...
Mum?
Why is the sky leaking?
High Achievers
The large sign out the front of the school
proclaims:
High Achievers
It is inspiring
it is awesome
it pulls me in
I pull over in my car and get out
I walk over to the sign
The letters are BIG
powerful
uncompromising
and then I see them
in teeny tiny print way down in the bottom right corner of the gigantic proclamation
Dr J Healy
Consulting Psychiatrist
For all personality disorders, specialising in narcissistic, delusional, deep seated dissatisfaction and inconsolable depression
And a phone number
Someone has been thinking ahead.
The beginning
The Strawberry Tree is a slow growing plant.
Some days I'd love to be a speedy snap dragon, a vase of gerberas, a dozen long stemmed red roses.
But maybe there's something to be said for being a big old tree, not found everywhere, that takes a long time to grow and might surprise people with unexpected beauty in the middle of a park on a summer afternoon.