Friday 27 February 2015

A momentous day.

The 27th of February 2006 will go down in (my) history as a particularly momentous day. The reasons for this are two-fold. 

1. It's my boy's birthday.

2. It's the day we met.

Like any good love story, ours starts with booze.

One of my best friends, whom I’ll call CC, told me about this party she was going to. Her boyfriend (now husband) had these friends who lived up the road and it was one of their birthdays. (My boy’s birthday.) They were having a big house party.

You should come, she said.

Nah, I don’t want to crash someone’s party. I don’t know them.

They won’t care. They want to meet you. And (my boy’s) brother works for the Herald Sun. He might be able to get you a job.

Yeah, maybe.

A couple of months earlier I’d got back from London, where I’d been living for the previous three years. I was job hunting and the pickings were slim. This was a tempting prospect.

That night I turned up at CC’s house, where her and a couple of our other friends were having a pre-party party. I was late, so we quickly downed a couple of shots and got a taxi to the party (five minutes up the road).

CC and I went straight to the kitchen to put our drinks in the fridge, moving the milk to the fridge door to make room for our wine. The door’s shelf dropped to the floor and milk splashed across the tiles. CC and I quickly mopped up the milk, hoping no one would notice (or want weetbix for breakfast).

CC introduced me to the boys and I talked with the few people I knew there, before my boy and I drifted off from the rest of the crowd to talk among ourselves for the rest of the night. As he led me out from the kitchen into the garden where the rest of the party was, a voice in my head spoke clearly through the vodka–wine haze.

Pay attention, it said. This one is important

(I guess it sometimes pays to listen to those voices in your head.)

When it was time for me to go, he asked me for my number. I said no. 

Now, I’d been seeing someone in England and it wasn’t completely over, although I’d moved back to Melbourne for good. So it didn't quite feel right to give my number to a guy. But I didn’t intervene when I overheard my boy asking CC for my number while I waited outside for her.

He called a day or two later and we went to the Sydney Road Festival, where we ate Hare Krishna balls and drank sangria and beer. I made our friends come along, so it wasn't a ‘date date’. He walked me home, and when I hugged him goodbye, I squeezed him so tightly that I broke the sunglasses that were hanging from his collar.

We hung out a few more times, but things were still up in the air with the English guy and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with myself. Career prospects were limited in Melbourne compared with London, and Australia felt so remote, so parochial. So alien. I needed to move again.

Fast forward a year and a bit and I had decided to move back to London for good, to work and clear my head. The English guy was history, and my boy and I had been on and off for some time. As I cried my way through security at Tullamarine Airport and onto the plane, my boy broke his promise to make a grand, romantic comedy-esque gesture. He didn’t show up at the gate, Hugh Grant style, begging me to stay. I’d told him I wanted to go alone and he did as I asked (this is the first and only time he has done this).

Not long after I moved back to England, my boy went incommunicado with me. It was make or break time.

I got in touch with him and we exchanged letters, emails, phone calls and text messages. I booked my ticket home.

When one of my English cousins (who’d wrangled a work trip to Melbourne) and I walked through the arrivals door at Tullamarine, my boy was standing there in his best press stud check shirt. He'd shaved and was drinking a take-away coffee. 

And beside him stood my parents.

I was expecting to see my parents there too. They driven three hours especially to collect my cousin and take most of my belongings back to their house. I just wasn’t expecting to see them standing with my boy, you know, considering they’d never met before and everything.

Apparently my boy had been looking for my parents among the crowd. He’d seen a woman standing the same way I do and thought he had nothing to lose. He walked over to her and asked if she was my mum. Luckily she was.

Mum told me later that she’d been eyeing off the men there that night. The drongos and derros, she said. They’d looked rough and dirty. She was happy to see that this one was wearing a nice shirt, was clean shaven and polite. He’d approached her, so he must have balls, she thought.

We moved in together about a month later. I got a good job, the kind I’d wanted for years. We rented a nice unit in a pretty street in a great part of town (not far from where CC and her boy lived). We bought our first major white good appliance – a washing machine that was half price, no less! We got a kitten. I started studying a course I’d wanted to do for more than 10 years. We travelled.

Nine years after that momentous day, we are married with two cats, a baby and a mortgage. I am six months away from finishing that course. The fridge with the dodgy door is still going relatively strongly and is at home in the corner of our kitchen. (It has also seen the end of a couple of bottles of wine and tubs of yoghurt over these years.)

Every now and then we joke and ask if either of us imagined that night where we’d be today. 

Happy birthday, my boy. 

Thursday 19 February 2015

Travelling is all in the mind.

Do you ever forget where you are for a second? I’m not talking about the experience of being in a foreign bed and waking with a start in the middle of the night, trying to find a patch of light so you can identify a cupboard or picture that reminds you that you’re staying in a hotel or your Aunt’s spare room.

I mean the feeling where the scenery, smells, sounds, light, temperature and hundreds of other various subtle elements combine to remind you of a place you’ve visited or lived in before. These instances can be so detailed and complete that you sometimes think you’re there, even if just for a second.

I love this feeling. I embrace and nurture it. I want it to linger. (Especially now that the type of travel I enjoyed in my 20s and early 30s is on hold until I can convince my boy it’s safe to take Little Red to India, Nepal, Patagonia, Jordan, Tunisia, Estonia, Latvia, Tibet and Guatamala. And that she’d love to go down the Amazon in a boat, or visit the Mayan ruins or any other place I have on my very long list.)

So often now I am reminded of somewhere I’ve visited, be it the tropics in South East Asia and the Pacific, the jungle and forests in South America, or the suburban streets of England and America.

Early some mornings I stand out on the deck and take a moment. I listen to the neighbours’ chickens stirring. The air is still cool, but a little muggy, with the promise of the heat to come. The haze in the sky dulls the light, and there are threads of mist in the trees. It’s mostly quiet, with the occasional hum of a car or voice or the cicadas’ call.

These things remind me of India and I feel a pang of longing. Each morning of my stay in Makaibari, I’d get up early with my host family. The eldest daughter would bring me hot, sweet local tea, sometimes laced with ginger, knocking softly on my bedroom door and leaving it on the coffee table. I’d go outside and stand on the porch of their home to drink it, rugged up in my hoodie and trousers, warming my hands on their best cup (that had a lid!) and inhaling the steam. The air was still quite cool from the night, but there was a hint of the humid warmth that would make the afternoon’s home clinic visits in surrounding villages hot work. The air smelt of dust and dirt and leaves, spices and incense, and sometimes a hint of rain.

My host family lived half way up the hill upon which the village stood. From their porch, I had clear views into their neighbours’ yards, and on clear days, I could see past the prayer flags that flicked and flapped in the wind, into the valley and across to the blue-grey mountains in the distance.

I loved watching and listening to the village as it started its day. People washed themselves and their dishes in pots with the precious water their children had carried up from the spring in old plastic oil, petrol and soft drink containers. Some ate breakfast on the concrete steps outside their doors. They fed their dogs and cats scraps, absent-mindedly throwing food onto the ground at their feet. Chickens ran free in the yards, bathing themselves in dust and dirty water, and chattering happily among themselves. Some people checked the tufts of green that filled their small vegetable plots, tugging at strings that fastened stems to sticks in the ground.

The sky had a constant haze, which gave the morning light a pearl grey tinge. By lunch time, and with the aid of a breeze, this haze rose a little to allow more sunlight and warmth through. But it was always there – as it was across all of the India I’ve seen. Sadly this is indicative of the pollution that plagues the country (and leaves visitors with a perpetually blocked nose and sinuses).

Behind me, in the corridor inside the home, the family’s grandfather would say his morning prayers. At dawn he lit incense and waved it around the doors, mumbling what I imagined to be his hopes and wishes, and giving gratitude. He spoke no English, but always gave me a warm smile and nod as I passed him on his way to and from the village temple or his vegetable garden.

I miss the peace of those mornings (and having someone bring me tea as soon as I wake). Standing on the deck at home, with that certain light and cool, listening to the chickens chatter and coo to one another, reminds me of that simple, quiet time, the pause before the day busied and warmed.

Sometimes I walk around our neighbourhood and am reminded of the suburbs in London in Spring. The slow, gentle warming of the ground, still cool from winter. The dense, leafy gardens shading heavy-set red brick homes, fence lines dotted with rose bushes drooping slightly with the weight of their flowers. Daffodils popping up randomly in the grass.

When I swim laps at my local pool, I am taken back to the President Hotel in La Paz. My boy and I holed up there for a day or two when one of our flights was cancelled. To try to even out the plentiful Pisco Sours and Ecuadorean chocolate I consumed, I did 100 laps of the 10-metre hotel pool, covered by a filthy glass roof, where pigeons perched on the edge overlooking the city and rain pitted the grime. Palms stood tall, browning, in pots in the corners of the room. The tiles around the pool were cracked and their style so dated it was almost new again. I can smell the thick chlorine and feel my annoyance with the hairy-backed, big-bellied man who let his two boys jump and splash around us without any consideration.

Other times, the heavy humidity after a summer storm makes me think of the tropics, of Thailand or Fiji or even the Amazon. The air smells moist and earthy, sweet and floral. Droplets of water cling to the trees and bushes, and birds chirp happily now the storm has passed, shaking water from their feathers. There’s a strange feel of newness, of excitement and anticipation. It’s cooler, but ever so sticky. And you start to perspire at the mere thought of walking. Light filters through the clouds that are starting to break apart, and all of a sudden you’re caught in a bright, warm ray that burns. And it’s hot.

These moments keep me going when my feet get that familiar itchiness, when I get restless and irritable, and my next trip seems so far in the future. They remind me that I’m lucky to have these memories at all, to know what it’s like to have been in those places and experienced those things. They remind me to be grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, and the ones I will have in the future. Because I’m sure there will be many more to come (just as soon as I convince my boy that Little Red will love to travel as much as her mum does).

Friday 6 February 2015

Taking stock: February 2015.

We’re one month and a bit into 2015. I’ve been enjoying a week of sunshine (and rain) in Byron Bay with my boy and Little Red. What better time to take stock again?

  • Making: More time to write. (That’s one of my goals for this year anyway. So far it’s a slow starter.)
  • Cooking: Not a lot because we’re away. Salad and cups of tea is really the extent of it.
  • Drinking: Cocktails. I was 32 weeks’ up the duff when I was here last time, so my indulgence extended to a few special mocktails, smoothies and herbal tea. This time around, I’m splashing out on pisco sours, lychee martinis, lychee caipirinhas and wine. (And smoothies and herbal tea.)
  • Reading: Heroic Australian Women in War (it was smaller to fit in my bag than Buddhism for mothers, which I’m still reading, oh so very slowly). And Diggers’ Club magazines that have been piling up on my coffee table for the past 18 months.
  • Wanting: More time here to read and write (and a nanny to look after Little Red so I can do these things).
  • Looking: Forward to some kind of routine again when I go back to uni. I’m a creature of habit, what can I say?
  • Playing: Where’s Little Red? This is similar to peek-a-boo, except that Little Red pulls something (book, toy, sheet, clothes) over her face to hide from me, then drops it and looks at me with a gummy grin.
  • Deciding: What to have for breakfast. Vegan chocolate mousse cake is winning so far.
  • Wishing: I had better self control when it comes to food! (See ‘Thinking’ and ‘Snacking’ below.)
  • Enjoying: My cup of vanilla chai and some quiet while Little Red naps (hopefully for longer than 30 minutes this time).
  • Waiting: For my reiki appointment. It’s been years since I had a treatment. I’m a bit excited.
  • Liking: Early morning strolls along the beach.
  • Wondering: How many vegan chocolate cakes/balls/slices I can fit into my bag to take home.
  • Loving: How lovely everyone is here – they are all so relaxed, friendly and kind. Yesterday I was on the way back to the apartment with Little Red, who was screaming up a storm in her stroller. A hippy surfer guy in his 20s walked past, dreads, old threads, stretched ear lobes, guitar in hand. A walking sterotype. He saw Little Red’s tears and immediately started playing some music to distract and cheer her as he walked by. What a beautiful, thoughtful man! Similarly, the staff in a bottle shop whipped out a toy for Little Red during another episode, and ran outside after her to give it to her as my boy wheeled her away so she didn’t scare off the other customers. I didn’t even mind that it was an NFL football covered in the Wild Turkey logo. It immediately stopped her tears. What a lovely gesture!
  • Pondering: This question. I’ve seriously been stuck on it for hours and have come up with nothing that I’ve been or am pondering. Except this question.
  • Considering: A self-imposed Facebook and internet limit per day. Or maybe whole days without them each week. I seem to have developed a wee addiction and spend far too much time online. That time could be far more wisely spent.
  • Watching: Two parents by the pool with their six-month-old son. We chatted with them two days ago when we were there swimming with Little Red and they’d just arrived. Their son is blind (and I think may have other disabilities). But he is absolutely gorgeous and his parents absolutely adore him and dote on him. It’s like they’re surrounded by a bubble of love, warmth, gentleness and beauty. It radiates out from them and draws you in.
  • Hoping: The house sitters have weeded the garden for me. It was getting a bit out of hand. They said they were enjoying pottering in the garden while we were away. Pottering = weeding, yes?
  • Marvelling: At how much Little Red is growing. I know it’s incredibly annoying and dull when parents say this sort of stuff about their kids, and I’m not usually one for sentiment or soppiness, but she’s growing so fast and it’s amazing to watch her learn things. In a matter of weeks she’s started clapping, pointing, waving, stretching, saying Dad (and other syllables) and drinking from a straw. She also says Ta (in a distinctly Darth Vader-esque voice) as she passes you something or you give her something. She’s almost crawling and pulling herself up on things. And she quite likes pulling you close and giving you big, sloppy, open-mouth kisses on whatever part of you she can reach and hold. This old ice heart of mine is melting.
  • Needing: More sleep (some things never change). We are all sharing a room here. Little Red has taken to waking any time after 4 am. After her initial grizzling, she sometimes naps again til about 5.30 am, then it’s tears til one of us gets her up and changes her and I feed her in bed with me. After milk, she starts laughing and yabbering “dad dad dad dad”, which wakes up Chris, and we all get up and walk down to the beach to watch the early birds swimming and surfing. We have to do this before getting our coffee/tea, because we’re out and about BEFORE the coffee/tea places open. I kid you not. Little Red is also not entirely partial to napping for long periods here. I, on the other hand, would love a sleep in and a long nap. Several sleep ins and long naps, actually.
  • Smelling: A sun shower. I love rain.
  • Wearing: Floaty summer dresses. Pretty turquoise sandals I bought in Sucre, Bolivia. Big, dangly seashell earrings. Sunnies.
  • Following: The predicted leadership spill being discussed in the media.
  • Noticing: How young and relaxed the backpackers here seem. There are SO MANY travellers here. Responsibility free, fancy free, mortgage free, study free, baby free. I used to be a backpacker/traveller. Sigh.
  • Knowing: That even though I look longingly at said backpackers/travellers/those who are younger and more free than me, I wouldn’t trade where I am or who I am now for anything. (Most of the time.)
  • Thinking: I really should stop buying vegan cakes ‘just because I can’. I just ate another piece of cake (technically a chocolate fudge slice – it was delicious). And I have two and a half bliss balls, two and a half pieces of cake, and three packets of chocolate in the fridge. And I will probably buy more cake tomorrow before we leave.
  • Admiring: Is it wrong to say I admire those parents with their boy down by the pool? I could be wrong, but I imagine it’d be pretty hard raising a child with a disability, no matter how gorgeous he is. They seem to be doing it with such grace.
  • Sorting: The past few weeks I have actually been sorting out notes for uni. I am no where near finished mind you, but I’m hoping that my teachers see my (attempt at) preparation and organization and add at least 10% to my final grade ‘for effort’.
  • Buying: Pretty much everything in stock at Naked Treaties – and then some. I think my annual visits here keep the store in business for the intervening months.
  • Getting: A little nervous about going back to uni and seeing real, live patients. Eek! Any volunteers?
  • Bookmarking: Recipes from Wholefoods Simply. The food looks so simple, but so delicious.
  • Disliking: Mosquitoes. One just bit my shoulder and forehead. The feeling apparently is not mutual – mosquitos love munching on me.
  • Opening: A nice bottle of red later, to share with my boy.
  • Giggling: Mostly at Little Red. She’s pretty cute. She waves at everyone and everything, crosses her legs at the ankles and sits back like a lady (when she isn’t sitting legs spread-eagled in her stroller), babbles incessantly but most seriously, laughs when we laugh, and gives beautiful kisses. And you can’t help but smile in confusion at her bizarre husky, breathy, growly ‘Ta’.
  • Feeling: Pretty relaxed after a lovely massage at Relax Haven.
  • Snacking: Wow. What isn’t there for me to snack on in Byron? All sorts of fruity, nutty, chocolatey balls. Vegan cakes, slices, cheesecake and chocolates. Dips, corn chips, olives, dolmades.
  • Coveting: Holiday houses. I’d love to be rich enough to own one or two. But then I guess you’d tied into going to the same place each holiday, and that might get boring.
  • Wishing: Time would slow down, just a wee bit. Week one of February 2015 is almost done and I still feel like it’s June 2008.
  • Helping: An old man down the stairs after a movie last week. He was a bit bashful about accepting my proffered arm, but seemed grateful. We both agreed that The Water Diviner is quite a good film. After seeing it, I want to dig out my CD of Whirling Dervish music.
  • Hearing: The waves breaking on the beach about 100 metres away from our apartment, and the birds chattering in the bushes and trees all around. Bliss.