Category Archives: writing

lunch time write

Posted on by
6

No one tells you that one day you are going to walk through a door and life as your know will cease to exist. If they had there is a good chance I may have chosen to not open that door to find my husband in bed with his best friend, and I may have not accepted the job that my husband’s best friend had offered me two years before and that obviously I had to leave after finding the two in a naked romp in our marital bed.
Did I mention that my husband’s best friend was named Douglas? Douglas, not in the way Americans name their daughters Sydney which is a boy’s name everywhere else in the world, and even a city in Australia, but used as a girl’s name in the good old USA, the land where anything is possible. Douglas as in a six foot, dark haired male Adonis that every female in the world swooned over, and now, as I was shortly after informed by my husband, was the love of his life.
“Our marriage was a mistake” he said, already putting it and me into the past.

Mistake – muh-staky. Noun. 1. Incorrect idea or opinion; thing incorrectly done or thought. 2. Error of judgment. Verb. Choose wrongly; in error.

“I was mistaken”.

Mistaken / muh-stay-kuhn. Adjective. 1. Wrong in opinion or judgement

I had been called a mistake once before in my life. My mother had met up with a friend that she hadn’t seen for many years one day when we were shopping and she descried me as her “happy little mistake”. At the time, being only seven I wasn’t sure what she meant, but as she rubbed the back of my neck as she spoke as she always did when she was being affectionate I somehow managed to understand that it, or rather I, was not considered a bad thing. Later, as I grew I understood the meaning more, especially when the large age gaps between myself and older brother and sister drew understanding. I had been unplanned, my birth a “happy mistake”, but my mother never stood in front of me naked and told me she would prefer never to see me again.
It was all one long out of body experience after that. I walked out the front door, then walked back in, only to see my husband being embraced by Douglas as if he was the one that just had his heart ripped from his chest like one of those actors in some B grade sci-fi movie that are always on at two in the morning when you can’t sleep and the only alternative is the shopping channel and you know that you don’t have the strength to resist buying some over priced magic dusting rag that you would never use anyway and so you watch the damn alien hand slice into someone’s chest and draw out the heart, squishing it between greedy fingers.
I digress, if such a thing is possible when your life becomes a B grade movie in its own right.
I walked back in and spoke to Douglas. He had shorts on now. Why was I feeling embarrassed when he was the one cavorting naked in my bed with my husband? “I want the keys to your cabin.” Douglas owned a cabin surrounded by trees on the side of some lake I had never remembered the name of. “You can have my husband if you give me your cabin.” Somewhat of a successful high flyer Douglas had more to lose then I did, I just had husband who made a mistake, and so a cabin to silence me would be a cheap payment.
“The keys are on my car key ring” Douglas replied gesturing to where his trousers lay on the floor.
If he thought I was going to rummage through his pockets as if searching for loose change he was crazy. I put my hand out and waited for him to retrieve the key from the key ring and place it in my waiting palm. If his hand had touched mine he would have felt my hand starting to sweat. It was quite possible that at any moment I was going to hyperventilate due to a panic attack.
“You two get out of here while I pack my things. Then I never want to see either of you again.”
They didn’t argue. I would like to think that they had the decency to know that I needed peace and solitude to work through the bomb blast that had just blown my fairy tale life to smithereens, but even then I knew that they just wanted down with me and in the easiest way possible.
I waited until I heard the car turn out of the drive and into the street before I screamed abuse at their retreating backs.

Anguish /ˈaNGgwiSH/ Noun. 1. excruciating of agonising pain of either body of mind, acute suffering or distress: the anguish of grief. 2. to affect with or suffer anguish.
Synonyms. Noun. agony – pain – torment – distress – torture – misery
Verb. agonise

It helps to have a sister who is a lawyer. Whilst not a divorce lawyer, sister knew lawyers who knew lawyers and so within days the divorce ball was rolling. I really didn’t have to see the husband ever again if I chose not to, and I certainly chose not too.
Not surprisingly it took me more than a night to pack my things. In fact, that first night I did nothing constructive, well not from a moving sense anyway. A therapist might have considered what I did as very constructive. After I exhausted my lungs and made my throat raw screaming abuse at the back of the closed double front door (did the size of the door mean I could vent more anger? It was a very large double panel door; maybe that symbolised a door for each betrayer) I saw in the hall mirror that my eyes were puffy and I had produced a red rosacea nose that needed wiping. I cried ugly obviously, but hey there was no one here to see so who gave a damn?
If my life had been a chick lit book at that moment I would have opened a bottle of the husband’s finest and drank myself into delirium, except it wasn’t a chick lit book, and I don’t really drink. Well, just a glass or two. One glass makes me happy and I laugh and laugh; the second glass sends me to sleep. A two pot screamer in the old language. Instead I made a pot of tea and sat in the kitchen in my pyjamas and just tried to breathe.

“The nose of the Bulldog has been slanted backwards so that he can breathe without letting go.” Winston Churchill.

The next day, after I sobbed on the phone to my sister, my brother, but not my parents, my siblings roared into revenge and sorted my life out. My sister organised a lawyer for me. My brother called a removalist. The house would be divided between us, but the contents were going with me, it seems. Professionals neatly and with great care packed my life into a number of cardboard boxes which they then deposited into a long moving van and drove to their storage warehouse until I summoned them to reverse their task and unpack the boxes to fit into my new life.
New life.
That was going to be the not so easy bit; mainly because I had to do that for myself. A tiny weeny bit impossible when all I wanted to do was sit in the corner of the room. The tea cup clutched in my hand was the only thing stopping me from curling up into the foetal position permanently.

For ever and ever amen.
No husband, no marriage, no home, no job. All I needed was a fatal disease and I would have the jackpot.
In the cold light of morning I realised that going to Douglas’ cabin was maybe not the best place to lick my wounds and blossom as an unemployed divorcee. The idea of a house in the woods on a lake still sounded right though. Somewhere where I didn’t know anyone and they didn’t know me. No questions, no replies required, no stares or knowing looks behind my back. I could be Eden the woman who lives in the cabin on the edge of the forest near the lake and not the ex-Mrs husband who had been too blind to see what was happening right in front of her face until it was lying naked before her.
So, the only thing I did for myself in those first few days was to phone a realtor and locate a cabin of my own. I mentally christened it Lake Woebegotten and loading my Honda Civic to the roof with basic necessities I headed out of town and into what was to be…
I got lost on the way. It was the sat nav’s fault. Recent road works had change onramps and off ramps and so female voice giving the direction kept recalculating until in the end I stopped to buy fuel and a map. Recalculating. If only I could recalculate the last fourteen years of my life. B.H. Before Husband.

“Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid… well, they’ve started to give me a little pang or something – not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret… I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: “I’m sorry, I’ve let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.” ― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

 

copyright logo

About these ads

self indulgent prose

Posted on by
2

Her arrival was unannounced. One morning the old man had opened his apartment door to walk downstairs to buy a coffee at the corner coffee shop, his one self indulgence each day and she had been in the hallway. He had heard no sound, but she must have been at work for some time as already there was an oil sheet covering the floor, and she had opened a can of white paint and was painting over the tired salmon coloured hall way wall behind which the old man lived.

She was young, perhaps no more than twenty three or twenty four, he surmised. Dressed in jeans and a long sleeve white tee shirt, her long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, she smiled at him as he stepped through his doorway and turned, a little stunned at finding a young woman on his threshold, before edging his way around the paint can that blocked his path.

“Oh sorry,” she said, bending forward and moving the paint can out of his way.

“What are you doing?” he asked, though it was obvious that she was painting the wall.

She smiled as though she knew something he didn’t, but was quite happy for him to take his time in learning what it was. “I’m here to make a few changes; to paint the hallways, brighten the place up a little.”

“What?” He gestured towards the area that had already been painted white. “Is that the colour?” He wasn’t sure if he didn’t prefer the salmon, despite its depressing hue over the sterile hospital white.

“Not your colour of choice?” she laughed, rolling more paint on the wall. “What colour would you prefer?”

Now paint colour had not been something on his mind that day, or any of the many proceeding days for a very long time, so he had to think a moment before he replied. A long forgotten memory suddenly came back to life and provided him with an answer, “My grandfather was a beekeeper and when I was old enough to stand still and work quietly with the hives, he would take me along to collect the honey.” His words brought the smell of the smoker used to dull the fury of the bees at being robbed back to his senses and he breathed deeply as though he could indeed smell the essence of that smoke right there, in the hall way, right then. “The honey was the most delicious golden colour, it was rich and deep…it was, it was the colour of…” his voice trailed away as he sought the exact description of the smooth sweet honey that flowed at the hands of his grandfather

“Um, honey?” she supplied. Honey coloured walls; that was a new one, especially from a man. Usually they wanted red like some racing car they dreamed about owning one day, or the green of a golf course; all very pedestrian and mundane, but no, not this one, this one wanted honey. Well, at least the job was looking up at last, this one had a bit of imagination, and she guessed was a little something of the romantic too.

The old man snapped back into the moment and laughed. “Don’t listen to the ramblings of an old man,’ he said. “White is fine. I don’t suppose at my age I should worry about the colour of walls anyway, I should just be content to be live long enough to see the paint dry!” He walked to the stair landing before stopping and turning back to the girl. “I’m Ordell” he said, surprised that he wanted her to know his name.

“Hello Ordell, I’m Marigold.”

“Would you like a coffee?” he surprised himself by asking. “I was just going to go and buy one, and I could bring one back for you if you like.” He expected her to say no, only too happy to be rid of an old man, but something deep inside of him made him want to reach out to her.

“That would be lovely, thank you Ordell. I must say that a flat white is one of my earthly pleasures!”

The woman who had been making his daily cup of coffee for the past nine years couldn’t mask her surprise when Ordell not only ordered two coffees, but ordered them to take away. Why, every morning he would come in, order his mug of black coffee and then wander over to the table near the window where he would take up his position and watch the world walk by as he drank his brew. He never lingered passed the last sip and he never ordered another mug, or any food, just one coffee that he drank in silence before walking back home. Today was a stunner, two coffees and take away at that! Well, old dogs and new tricks! She wondered if this was the start of something new as she placed the two lidded cups in front of the old man.

“There you go,” she announced. “Got a hot date?” she couldn’t help teasing him.

He took a cup in each hand and made to walk to the door without answering, but he stopped and smiled, “A young woman who reminds me of honey!” His answer only mystified the woman more, but he halted any chance of further questions by walking out of the café.

When he returned to the hall way outside his apartment, Marigold had finished painting the wall with white paint and had in fact another three or four more pots of paint standing near her feet. They were smaller than the pot of white paint, but Ordell couldn’t see what colour they were. Except for one which Marigold had already popped open and was now bending over stirring with a short piece of doweling. It was the colour of honey.

“That’s the colour,” Ordell exclaimed, shaking his head in disbelief.

“What colour?” she asked as though she had no recollection of their earlier conversation.

“The colour of Grandfather’s honey!”

“Really?” she smiled, reaching out to take a cup from Ordell’s hand. She was playing with him, she had known all along exactly what colour it was. “Who would have thought?” She bent down and clamped the lid on the white paint tin with one hand, thumped it with a closed fist and then moved it to the facing wall, still salmon pink. She gestured towards it, indicating that Ordell should use it as a seat, as she sank to the floor, crossing her legs and took a sip of her coffee. “You must have loved your Grandfather very much.”

“My father died when I was a baby, so I never really knew him. My mother and I went to live with my grandparents. Mother worked as a domestic and so it was often left to Grandfather to see to me. Mostly I just followed him about as he did his chores, tended his vegetable patch, feed the chickens. I reckon he just about fed the family on what he grew in the back yard. Kept a few ducks too.” He was no longer with Marigold, for his memory had taken him back through the years to his boyhood.

She sat quietly, leaving him to his revelry as she sipped her coffee. Not the best cup of coffee she had ever had; the milk had been overheated so that it had a scalded taste. Marigold was a recent convert to coffee drinking and in a very short time had grown quite addicted to it, to the extent that she had quickly developed into somewhat of a connoisseur of the various beans and roasts, and was now quite particular about her coffee. She had found that a good cup of coffee was one of life’s little pleasures and she enjoyed it very much.

A couple of nights previously she had watched an advertisement on the television in which a well known movie star was spared a sudden death by handing over the coffee machine that he had just purchased, along with his favourite brand of coffee, and it had set Marigold to thinking if such a thing were possible. Would God bargain for a good cup of coffee?

Not this time.

 Flamingo Dancer 2012

Saturday morning in the park with Freud

Posted on by
8

My dream started with a composting toilet.

It was a large square wooden pedestal, or more accurately “thunderbox” in the Australian vernacular, but exquisitely crafter from Nordic pine. It appeared to be sited into a grassy knoll in the cubicle. (I must have been channeling the London Olympics opening ceremony with its meadows and hills). There was moss and flowering nasturtium clustered around the wooden base.

And it was in the middle of New York.

It was in a public restroom/ toilets. I waited my turn patiently, but I was a little anxious that men kept coming into the restroom, and they appeared oblivious when I pointed out the females only sign.

I soon resigned myself to their presence and took my turn in the cubicle, but it appeared that people kept popping their heads over the top and giving their opinions about everything.

I announced myself as a first time Australian in New York and walked out to use the basins. This was five stars with toothbrushes and warm towels for my use. It was then that I noticed a female attendant, and started to become anxious about how to tip her; or rather how much to tip her, and explained that I was Australian and we don’t tip. I wanted to give her five dollars, but she insisted on a dollar, and I could keep the toothbrush as I appeared to have forgotten my own. I resisted and gave her five dollars, which she ripped into pieces.

This upset me, as ripping it up meant that neither of us had the five dollars, so she picked the pieces up again and I left with the toothbrush.

When I walked outside, there was a long queue to an Indie outdoor concert where my sister was waiting. My sister was not my real sister, may I add, and I was not really me. We were both very pretty, happy twenty somethings.

By now, I felt like I was in a Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movie; especially when I walked along the queue and was joined by a tall handsome young man and his friend, who chose to sit with my sister and I. We were soon laughing and romance was obviously in the air.

My brain was telling me that I had the plot for a romantic comedy, that I was on the road to replace the lately departed Nora Ephron, and having some fun along the way when Mr FD’s voice broke though and he started rambling on about snakes.

His dream ended my dream. I wonder what Professor Freud would make of that!

Wendy the witch proves her smarts

Posted on by
9

Wendy was a witch; not a great witch, or a famous witch. It would have been difficult to be either considering how many witches were named Wendy. They would have needed a system to discern first the good Wendys from the bad Wendys, as well as the mediocre Wendys , which is the group Wendy considered herself to be centred within: neither good nor bad; brilliant nor non-brilliant. She chose not to use words such as stupid or dumb, for no one was really stupid or dumb; everyone had something they could do, if only in a mediocre way, so non-brilliant was the word to use. After all Wendy was a politically correct witch, if nothing else.

It wasn’t easy to be politically correct in these modern times, with gender debates abounding. Do wizards have higher IQs then witches?, had filled most of the special supplement in the latest issue of Spellbound, the industry journal for the magical professional. Recent research had shown that once that might have been true, when witches had been kept barefoot and pregnant next to the cauldron, motherhood and domestic duties keeping them from going about in the world and pursuing academic endeavours or career paths, but now that witches had more choices in life their IQs had not only grown equal to wizards ,but in fact had surpassed them -not that Wendy hadn’t known that all along!

Just one look into any family coven and the multitasking that a witch performed in the course of her daily life showed that witches had to be superior to wizards. A wizard concentrating on a brew could be easily distracted by the sight of a scantily clad fairy in the magic mirror and the whole brew could be spoiled as he added too much of this, not enough of that. No witch would allow such a thing to happen! Great Uncle Gough had totally lost his plot one midsummer night when he was given a crystal ball that showed the entire stable of the next year’s Pinup Witches of the Month in PlayWitch and had not been able to return to his spell work until the year was up.

A rumour had circulated that the crystal ball had in fact been given to him by his wife, Great Aunt Gough, who knew not only how distracted Great Uncle Gough could be by shiny things, balls, but by any female under forty; just to give herself some peace and quiet so she could get on with completing her PhD in witchcraft, and to Wendy this proved beyond doubt that witches were indeed smarted than wizards, for a witch would never allow herself to be distracted by the mere picture of something. A witch was more realistic and concrete in her thinking. She knew how to multitask to perfection.

A witch wouldn’t just settle for looking at something, no, she would summon it up! If those Pinup witches had been wearing a pair of shoes that she liked in a bippity bippity boo, she would wave her magic stick wand, and materialise them; then it would be back to work for that modern witch. She certainly wouldn’t spend an entire year with glazed eyes lusting after something, doing nothing else. Why Great Uncle Gough had needed special meals to be prepared just to be prompted to eat,  while Great Aunt Gough ran around accomplishing so much!

In fact, Great Aunt Gough had completed her PhD with honours, stored a whole year’s supply of pickled newt, completely repainted the coven, babysat for her daughter three days a week, took care of her ageing mother who refused to leave her tree house and move into a care facility, and maintained a blog for aspiring witches and wizards, while her husband gazed at that crystal ball of Pinup Witches. Who was the smarter, ay?

Wendy blinked. Who was the smartest?

creations of poets and people

Posted on by
13

I’ve been reading Jeanne Darst’s memoir, Fiction Ruined My Family, a book that makes me alternate between laughter and  sadness. I am only to page 165 of this 303 page book, but I wanted to share with you an excerpt in which Darst explains her relationship with language and in turn with her father.

I was under the impression clichés could ruin you, ruin your life, your hopes and  dreams, bring down your whole operation if you didn’t watch it. They were gateway language, leading straight to a business major, a golfy marriage, needlepoint pillows that said things about your golf game, and a self-inflicted gunshot to the head that your family called a heart attack in your alma mater announcements. Character suicide. Language was important, sexy, fun, alive, extremely personal, it was like food, you wouldn’t just pop anything into your mouth, why would you pop out that hadn’t been considered and prepared for someone to enjoy? To ignore language was akin to ignoring the very person you were speaking to, rude, uncaring, unfeeling, cold. It was a way to connect and also to woo, to charm, to manipulate; it was a tool for love, for survival. Your words were you… (p76)

Jeanne Darst, Fiction Ruined My Family

In particular : Language was important, sexy, fun, alive, extremely personal, it was like food, you wouldn’t just pop anything into your mouth, why would you pop out that hadn’t been considered and prepared for someone to enjoy?

Isn’t that so utterly, undeniably true? My undergraduate arts degree taught me the power of language, of the importance of the individual word, and blogging has taught me how important it is not only to the individual to communicate, but how the written word can have so many different meanings, to so many people.

The importance of the chosen word cannot be underestimated. I think this is why I get so annoyed when the f word, fuck, fuck, FUCK, is used so easily and liberally, something that even Darst does more often than she probably really needs too. It is such a poor excuse for vocabulary; for communication.

It honours no one. Not the speaker, nor the listener. Sure, it may be an accepted part of our everyday culture, and sure, maybe it is an issue that shows my maturity, but really, in a moment of excitement, happiness, anger, celebration or sadness, can all the human mind, after thousands of years of building, shaping,  sharing and blending language; can all this sophisticated creation of evolution and culture that we each are,  come up with is a generic four letter word?

Maybe we do deserve that ” golfy marriage, needlepoint pillows that said things about your golf game, and a self-inflicted gunshot to the head that your family called a heart attack”, as we willingly and thoughtlessly participate in our dumbing down.

Your words are you.

old friends

Posted on by
10

Fred is a river rock that I found one Sunday afternoon when we went for a family drive and stopped beside a country creek. I found Fred and he made no protest when I picked him up and took him back to the car with me.

My sister had been married just weeks before, which meant that I no longer had to share a bedroom. To celebrate I had nagged my parents into allowing my brother to paint what was now my bedroom. In a day, the room had gone from a mix of pink, blue and yellow to white and orange. What paint was left over, I used on Fred. I can only add that Fred looked good as an orange rock, it brought out his best features.

“There you go, Fred. Home Sweet Home.” I said to Fred, placing Fred atop of a pile of books in the middle of my freshly decorated room.

Now, don’t get all silly on me and think that I imagine full conversations with Fred. In all our years together, I was thirteen when I found Fred and I am fifty-three now, so that means forty years, Fred has never once spoken to me, and I know he never will. Fred is after all a river rock. However, I can speak to Fred if such is my want, and it is – frequently.

It is one of the better relationships in my life