Finding the Light

Today a friend of mine is having surgery.  She has cervical cancer.  It was treated, it went away and at the end of last year it came back. Today she will undergo a rather radical procedure - quite a lot of her insides will be removed.
            It is difficult for her and for her family. She has a husband and two beautiful children - a boy proud of his missing front teeth, and a girl with an urchin grin and the largest curls a small child can reasonably carry on her head.
            It is difficult, and she finds consolation in what she phrases as "finding the light" - the light of a dinner with friends, a helicopter trip over Niagara, a son in second grade and a daughter old enough to imitate grownups and be useful - even if that useful is scrubbing down the bathroom when she can't reach the taps on the sink. The water in the toilet solves that problem, and the hysterical laughter that goes along with a hasty shower for a kid and a Clorox scrub for all bathroom surfaces under 4 feet high is about as much light as a human body can stand.

Today she reckons she can use all the light she can get.
            I find my lights in the endlessly variable dimensions of human imagination. Like your daughter, my friend, we dream, and when we have dreamed - then, we simply can't help ourselves. We make it. We tinker and fix and because we did this one thing, we make the dreams bigger and bigger until - to take an example that is not mine - "we find ourselves playing complicated instruments while marching in complicated patterns in lockstep with half a hundred other humans, all of us wearing funny hats" and the result of what is, considered soberly, a rather odd collaboration, sets a million watchers on fire, screaming for joy.
            Sometimes those million people, building and tinkering, iteration by iteration, adjusting and learning and loving, find themselves coming together in a different sort of dance - their million labors condensed into a dozen people with dozen complicated tools each, dressed in masks and silly gowns, moving in unison beneath a circle of bright surgical lights and making life.
            And it is exhilarating. For this to happen, someone dreamed.

You got this, my friend.  You're gonna come out flying.

Among Friends.

Daniela and Mike have a deep-pile shag rug on their living room floor.
            I was sitting on the rug.
            My earring fell off.
            My big, bright, sparkly, knuckle-dusting Christmas Eve earring - as hard to miss as a Christmas cracker.
            We found two almonds, three crackers, half a walnut and a raisin before we found that earring.
            Mike reckoned that if we expanded the search beyond the immediate area where I was sitting, we might have enough to serve up to his sister's new boyfriend when he came for Christmas day lunch.
            Mike is a composer and a singer. A very good singer. The boyfriend came into money five years ago, bought a guitar and collected a band of like-minded two-chord enthusiasts. As he layered raisins and cracker crumbs on a plate, Mike played us a recording of the boyfriend's latest, and it was a very special recording - like the last Karaoke song of the night before the bar closes and the microphone is pried away from the leftover lush.  We felt for him, and suggested a vacuum cleaner with a stocking tied over the hose. To dig up the good stuff.

Popo de Elefante

At the end of October we invited a few friends around for a light spot of Halloween cheer.  We even had a theme - worst nightmares in food and dress.
            Unfortunately for us, my "agoraphobia" costume suffered a fatal structural failure half an hour before the party started (the damned pigeon fell off my head), and on a warm October night, Mr "Arachnophobia" Tabubil flatly refused to wear 6 inches of fiberfill around his chest. To show willing, he hot glued a few wads of stuffing and a couple of spiders to and old t-shirt.  He looked a nightmare all right - a nightmare of last-minute design, and he lost his temper along with his stuffing.
            That's sort of how the evening went. Our friend Sal - rather a man's man - had found the food something of a stretch.  He's not a natural cook, so I set him a simple quiche - eggs, cheese and icky food coloring in a pre-made bought pastry shell.  Half an hour before the party (right when I was wrestling pigeons) he  called from the supermarket in a panic - the recipe had been in imperial measurements and he'd converted everything to grams to eight decimal places, but he was having trouble figuring out what sort of eggs he should buy - vitamin fortified?  Omega 3?  Grade AA?  Grade A?  Did he need to buy a baking dish?
            He arrived at the party 45 minutes late, looking cross and flustered.  He handed me a bag of chips and a jar of salsa.
            "The whole afternoon's been a horror show." He said sourly.  "I hate supermarkets. Why didn't you tell me that a quiche has too cook for an hour? Believe me, the chips count."*

*Speaking of horror shows, you wouldn't believe what a little pulverized walnut does to the look of  guacamole.  It's unspeakable.  Five stars and two hearty thumbs up. I recommend it for all your holiday parties.

And then there was the dessert.  Mr Tabubil and I own a recipe for chocolate mousse.  I may have mentioned it once or twice before, in passing. To do it right, you soak raisins in rum for an entire week beforehand and you use rather a lot of heavy cream  - 
           A triple batch of it makes a rather nice bowl of popo de elephante (elephant poop.): a voluptuous tureen of turds, studded with oozing alcoholic raisins, the heavy smell of rum rising up like drunken heat in summer* from the swirl of well-set soup -

*I might have used two full cups of rum in the raisins, and I might have tipped what was left in the bottle into the bowl as I stirred. Waste is a terrible thing.

After a couple of hours staring at the guacamole, our guests ate lots of it. With a pleasantly buzzy fruit drink on the side.  The blood-red ice hand floating in the punch bowl was a nifty touch. They giggled. And drank some more.  And ate a second helpings of the mousse  -
            Not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of our guests got pished.
            One young lady had three glasses before we caught her.  She giggled, climbed carefully onto the sofa and closed her eyes -  right next to Sal - who is Bermudan and treats his relationship with rum like a religion, but who was lying with his head on the back of his chair and his feet up on hers, sort of snoring, and cradling his third bowl of elephant poop.

Post-script:
We really had radically overestimated how much mousse we'd need for a party of 12, and the next morning we still had a couple of liters of the stuff.  
            We gave it to our neighbors. They brought the bowl back the very next day - licked clean.
            Looking at us sort of anxiously, "That was the best dessert" they said "that we have ever had in our lives - would you like a plant?" 
            And they thrust a potted fern at our chests.

It must have been some seriously good mousse.

Alice of Wonderland, Scourge of Cobwebs, Despoiler of Halloweens Everywhere

I began sewing this dress a couple of years ago for an Alice of Wonderland party, but I never finished it. I was dressing as the titular Alice - a rather bashy, brutal sort of Alice, with a contract out on the head (complete with frozen glass eyes and a zipper to make a purse) of the Cheshire Cat. On the morning of the party, before the final seams were sewn, Zoe, the party's hostess, called in floods of tears.  She'd found her beloved cat Horse lying in the back garden, dead from a snake-bite.
            We were all shattered. My costume stayed unfinished. There are some things that nice people just don't do. 
           Three years later, Alice of Wonderland, Cheshire Cat Hunter, received her last stitch.  And she was a most appropriately Halloween-y sort of costume - absolutely loaded with horror and dread, and the day after the party, in the cold light of morning, what fifteen assorted people cannot understand is how European Civilization survived half a millennium of hoopskirts. 
            I couldn't pass a decorative cobweb without trying to take it away with me on my pink petticoat - as well as whatever the cobweb had been attached to, which was usually a chair, which meant that whoever was sitting on the chair came too.  I nearly took down the buffet when I leaned gingerly in for a pineapple kebab - the hostess had cleverly swapped out the tablecloth for more cobwebs, and when three people reached out to catch me, i found that the pork platter and a bowl of punch were strung out on a cobweb lead line, teetering on the brink of total party disaster.   
            I was banned from the living room the second time I passed the coffee table - my swinging skirts were setting glasses of punch flying. That second pass had taken out the refills of the ruins of the first, and as I fled, disgraced, the conversation turned from how the hostess had illegally given herself a bye into the semi-finals of the Pictionary tournament, and moved onto candles and farthingales and pocket-hoops and how on earth the Victorians had managed to survive the bustle.  Those inventive Victorians had lit their houses with kerosene lamp and gas burners at the ends of clumsy rubber hoses. Swinging hoops are bad enough, but a bustle you can't see coming or going - the mind shudders.
            I had hoped that the other guests would thank heaven for small mercies and call me back, but instead I was banished to the corner of the dining room and set counting the votes for the costume contest. The seal on my funk was set when I found that people had been writing opinions in the margins of their ballots - my Alice dress had narrowly missed out on the prize for "most genuinely frightening costume" because people were worried that someone would have to present that prize to me in person.

And the evening's true ignominy? The final seal and funk? 
Reader - it was my party.

Alba and the Carbon

(the telephone rings.)
            "Tabubilgirl! Quick!  What's activated charcoal?"            "Isn't that the stuff they put in Britta filters?  Alba?  Is that you?"            "You're right!  I have those!  I can take one apart!"            "Why?"            "No time to talk!  I'll call you when it's all over, all right?"
(call ends.)

It wasn't all right.  Not even vaguely.  A question like that needs proper answers. After waiting very patiently for three whole minutes, I called Alba back, on account of how I really really wanted to know why she was taking a britta filter apart to get at the charcoal.
            The answer was pretty good, actually. In between sounds of breaking plastic, Alba explained that she'd cooked pasta for lunch and after eating her way through most of a bowl of it, she'd scraped the leftovers out of the saucepan into a tupperware container and noticed that the lower levels of pasta in the saucepan were evidencing a phenomenon possibly unique in pasta circles -
            The pasta company had put a free gift - a magnet advertising an upcoming animated film release - into the bag along with the pasta.  She hadn't noticed it when she was pouring the pasta into the saucepan, and it appeared that the painted plastic layer of the magnet had melted and boiled off.  The pasta in the lower reaches of the  pot were sort of technicolor swirly, with long, dragging plastic tails, and she was freaking out.
            Alba is good at that.  "On the internet I saw that if you eat like a tablespoon of activated charcoal, you can help cleanse your system. I've already made myself throw up the pasta I ate but what if all the horrible toxic paint - and god knows what it has in it -  has been absorbed into my body already?!   I need to filter it out.  From the inside.  That should work, right?"
            I wasn't so sure.  If the pasta hadn't actually burned going down her throat, it was pretty much inert - sort of like accidentally swallowing a bit of cling-wrap or a scrap of plastic bag.  And even if it wasn't purely neutral, that sort of poisoning generally requires cumulative and repeated exposure to do real damage-
            "I'm not arguing"  Alba said, but she was still making herself a nice cup of activated charcoal tea.  With maple syrup to help it go down.
            "You DO realize that the way activated charcoal works is that it makes you throw up?  You've already done that.  It doesn't actually filter your system from the inside."
             "But not everyone throws up.  I read on the internet that it's like 60% of people.  Tops.  And I'm not really the throwing up sort.  It took a lot of effort last time when I got all that pasta up.  I mean - wow, tickling the back of your throat sure is effective, but boy does it take work.  And even if I do throw up again, well, that's good right?  It means that it's working.  I mean - I mean…. uuuuuuurp.  I gotta go!"
            She hung up.  And five minutes later I got a text saying that activated charcoal really does work that fast.
            The things you learn on a Wednesday afternoon.  In other news, our regular mid-week sketching circle didn't happen yesterday on account of the hostess suffering a bout of self-induced stomach flu.

Slapstick

Slapstick is a state of mind – like zen, you embrace it and follower wherever it runs.
            This morning I woke to the sound of howling.  I followed and found a two-year-old with no pants staring down the toilet bowl and screaming his two-year-old head off.  His mother was bent over him-

            “It’s gone!" She shouted, trying to be heard over the din. "It’s gone and there’s no point looking! It’s not coming back!” 

            I loitered in the doorway of the bathroom and cleared my throat. “Um," I said. "Shouldn't he be used to this part of the proceedings by now?

            Little Laurie turned toward the door.  His face was screwed up into an expression of truly piteous distress.  

 “It’s his dummy.”* Sarah said. She was rather red and rumpled herself. “He threw it down the toilet when I flushed, and then he got angry and pulled my hair elastic off my ponytail and sent that down too!”

          Laurie’s face crumpled even further, cabbage-like, and he turned his face up toward the ceiling and screamed. Sarah threw up her hands. 

             “Oh, don’t even try!" She yelled. "She can’t help you! It doesn't matter what she does! It’s not going to come back!”
             “No kidding.”  Miles wandered into the bathroom with a toothbrush in his hand. “We lose a lot more stuff down there than we did before he came along. You had your breakfast yet? There’s a cup of tea in the kitchen if you want it.”

            I did want it.

Right now that same toddler is melting down all over our living room because he doesn't want to put on his blue socks.  Poor little soul. 
            Sarah, Miles and Laurie fly home to Australia tonight. We are going to miss them enormously. Life contains a certain extra zest and dynamism when a two-year-old is around!**

*pacifier.

** except when you’re trying to leave the apartment. Then it goes like toffee in a deep-freezer. 

The Dynamics of Baa Baa Black Sheep

Life has been dynamic and exciting in all sorts of forceful and vigorous ways for the past couple of months. Our Australian friends Sarah and Miles have been with us for four weeks, and they have brought their two year old son along with them.  
            When we last saw little Laurie, he was all of two weeks old, and not up to much beyond squeaking occasionally, crying lots, and keeping his mother and father up at night.  All this still makes up a reasonable part of his repertoire, but he’s mostly a rambunctious font of cuddles and enthusiastically splashy bath-times.  And balloon-popping. We really like balloons in this house at the moment. The louder, the better.

            Miles just came out of Laurie’s bedroom, and said “Hey! If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, I have a tip for you. Start by rolling over and over, like a seal. Switch the head and feet end of your bed at least a dozen times, and while you're rolling, say the names of every single thing you did and saw and heard and smelled and touched over the last couple of days. Then pile all your blankets and stuffed animals underneath you, and sing Baa Baa Black Sheep fifty times in succession. Over and over and over and over and over-"

            "Is he still at it?"

            "Yep. Ninety minutes so far, and going strong." 

            "Is he ever going to fall asleep?"

            "Search me. He didn't even notice when i left.  He was too busy singing..."

Three Years and the Night After

Three weeks ago we celebrated the sixth wedding anniversary of our friends  Marja and Claudio.  We went out to a very nice restaurant and toasted them in glasses of French champagne and Chilean wine-

        "To love - "

        "To a lifetime -"

        "To memories of happy days and happy nights - "

 Claudio leaned back in his chair and looked at his wife and sighed mistily.

        "Six years ago today, Marja, I carried you across the threshold of our first apartment -"

        "After we'd walked up five flights of stairs - "

        "There was no elevator and our apartment was on a narrow landing -"

        "With only a railing over the stairwell, and you had to be very careful not to tip me over the edge as you picked me up and swung me around to get through the door!"

        "And then" Claudio smiled slyly,  "I carried you inside for a night of wild nuptial bliss!"

Marja and Claudio looked at each other fondly and held hands under the table.  But they didn't meet my eyes.  I narrowed mine, and leaned forward.

        "May I ask a question?"

        "Absolutely!"  Claudio waved expansively, and poured himself another glass of wine.

        "DID you have a night of wild nuptial bliss?" I said. "I don't know of a single couple who, in real life, on their actual wedding night, actually did.  A wedding is mostly this huge, stressy, organized-to-the-walls THING, and even if it isn't stressy or messy, the party afterwards is generally pretty epic, and by the time you've escaped from the guests and gotten back to your room, any reasonable person just wants to go to SLEEP.  I reckon that there isn't actually a single wedded couple  - at least, any a couple that isn't required to produce proof of consummation in the morning, or isn't 18 and invincibly horny - who DOES consummate their marriage on their wedding night!"  I sat back and took a deep breath.  "There."  I said.  "A speech."

Marja and Claudio looked at each other.  They looked at me.

        "To answer your question," Claudio said slowly, "We did NOT.  To be honest, I didn't even carry her very far over the threshold."

        "About three steps." Marja giggled.  "Then he fell over. It was two o'clock in the morning when we got upstairs, and it had been a  LONG day!"

        "First I picked her up at her parents house - at noon -"

        "And then we went to the courthouse -"

        "And then the church -"

        "And then we had a party -"

        "A REALLY good party- "

        "And after THAT, lifting her up to carry her across the threshold almost floored me. We sort of OOOZED across, with her feet about an inch above the floor -"

        "And then we went to sleep."  Marja grinned.  "But the day afterward - THAT was another story."

Mr Tabubil and I were married at ten o'clock in the morning, barefoot, on a beach.  We were married out of a small hotel in Titikaveka on the Island of Rarotonga, and after the ceremony, we and our few beloved guests repaired to the hotel's little restaurant for a truly EPIC wedding breakfast.  The weather was tropical hot and  tropical sticky, and when the party floated to a finish, Mr Tabubil and I, drowning in our splendid wedding togs, dribbled upstairs to our room, throwing promises behind us to see everyone again on the beach, in an hour - just enough time for a shower and a change of clothes and the briefest of restorative shut-eyes- that's all -

In our room we barely had the strength to close the door and slip off the dress and the suit before we fell face-down on the bed and fell asleep, his hand on mine, clasped together over our fine new rings.

We woke up three hours later to the sound of laughter and splashing below our window.  We slipped into swimsuits and went down to join our guests and only came out of the water when the sky had turned red and the sun was setting over the reef. 

Upstairs again, we discovered that while we were down in the water, the housekeeper of the hotel had crept up into our room and laid out a wedding tableaux.  Two cane chairs had been dragged over to the window and turned so that they faced the sea.  A small table had been placed laid between them, and laid with my wedding flowers, a candle and a box of matches and a bottle of champagne.  Over the back of the chair she had draped a brand new pareo, in the same shades of blue and purple as the water outside.  The bed had been turned down for sleep, and as a final touch, the housekeeper had gone into the closet and found a lacy little bit of nothing that I had brought with me in my suitcase, and she had smoothed it flat and laid it out across my pillow.

It was perfect.

But this wasn't an evening for romance.  We were new-married in paradise, but we were also in the middle of a one-week window where we had the north American friends that we loved best in the same place as ourselves, so we dried ourselves  off and walked across the road to a little cottage where our Canadian friends were staying, and a rather splendid after-party burst into the black tropical night like a catherine wheel.

We crept home again at three in the morning, and slipped into bed and fell straight asleep.

When we woke the sun was high in the sky, and looking around the room at the untouched wedding tableaux, we felt a terrible remorse.  The housekeeper had spent such time and shown such kindness setting up the perfect nuptial night, and there we were, the unspoken wedding cliché, and all her efforts wasted.

So we stepped into the breach.

Mr Tabubil dragged the chairs around to face each other and lit the candle to blacken the wick and blew it out again, and dropped the spent match on the table.  I wadded the freshly pressed pareo into a ball to crease it, and pulled it straight again, and dragged it across the floor half-way to the bed and left it there.  While Mr Tabubil twisted our bedsheets and pillows into a perfect storm of acrobatic disarray, I took the lacy bit of nothing and wadded it up and shoved it underneath one of the pillows - and considered it, and took it by the corner and dragged it out again and left it hanging artistically half-way down to the floor.

We looked at the chaos and smiled.  We'd said thank you.  In the best possible way - with a tableaux to match her own. 

And Mr Tabubil took my hand and we went down to breakfast.

Happy anniversary, Mr Tabubil.  It's been three wonderful years.  Here's to another three, to match Marja and Claudio's six, and three more after that and three score times three -

Here's to happy days and happy nights -

To love and to a lifetime.

Welcome to the Top End

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy!

Before we flew across the Pacific to Chile, we had an important engagement in Darwin with Theadora -a school friend of mine from California, and her Hungarian husband Sandor, her mother Pippa, and her year old baby-  to be known hereafter as the Sproglet.*  Together we had planned a week's holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End. 

            The Top End is the northern part of Northern Australia - the half a million square kilometers, more or less, of land pressed up into a bulge at the top of the continent.  The Gulf of Carpentaria is its eastern border, and the Indian Ocean lies to the west.  To the south, it peters out into the arid stretches of the red center - but between the sea and the desert is Australia's monsoon country.  And the gateway to the Top End is Darwin.

            The climate is tropical bichromatic: there is a dry season - hot and parched and baking and eventually hot and thick and humid, and just when everything is flat and drooping and suicide rates have peaked under the pressure of the flat white sky - the monsoon hits and six months of water drops in a week. Then the sky settles down and there's a wet season.  It rains steadily for six months; the rivers fill, the wetlands south of the city flood, and everything is peaches and cream and bush tucker for everyone.

            We were there in the dry - one week too early for the Darwin Festival (with which  the top-enders stave off the suicidal peak of the dry blahs) but just in time for the Darwin Cup, and next to that, the dry season looked like a picnic.

            We flew into Darwin in the afternoon, booked into a hotel on backpacker row and wandered out into the street to watch the world go by - the parts of it that were under 25 and deeply, madly, falling-down toasted.  There's a double standard to Australian fashions that bewilders me.  Men get baggier and girls get tighter.  There were twenty thousand people out at the racetrack, and back in town, the pubs were full, stacked three deep at the bar with strapping young men smart in their tropical formal shorts and singlets.   Behind them, perched precariously on tall stools around cocktail tables,  drinking things with sticky umbrellas clinging damply to the glasses, were gaggles of  desperately drunk young women, wearing cocktail dresses that had been too short at both ends before the night even got going - by now they were shrieking sideways down the street with their fascinators tilted over their eyes and falling out of their clothes sideways.

            It was a wild town that night.  About how it used to be once upon a time, one reckons, if one wants to wax poetic, back when it was a real frontier town.  It still IS a real frontier town.  But 95% of the would-be-crocodile hunters staggering down the sidewalks had flown in from out of state for the occasion, staggering sideways and singing old school songs (the versions with the ruder words) imagining that their drunkenness meant; meant anything - romance and excitement and really wild things - a poke in the eye to someone - who remembers and who cares?  20 000 conformists non conforming to rule.  

            Theadora and her family flew in by a later plane, just before sunset.  Thea is long and blonde and teaches high school science.  Pippa is long and blonde and drove a Mustang and danced to the Beach Boys back when they were both the latest thing.  Sandor teaches history and smiles with white teeth through a neat brown beard.  The baby had committed no sins beyond having learned to walk and growing seven teeth. (Eight, as of that evening.  We dined exclusively on ice cubes.)  It was Sandor's first visit to Australia.  He was desperately disappointed not to find the streets of Darwin awash with saltwater crocodiles, but settled for a roasted haunch of same - served civilized fashion, medium-rare, with french fries.   And Chardonnay.

* Sprog = Australian for child.  In Australia, you're a bub until you're walking and talking, but after that you're a sprog. Until you're out of Primary School. (Grade 8.)  

As I live and breath - Charity?

I spent my Adelaide Saturday thrift-store-hunting with Zoe and the Architect.  Zoe is the queen of second-hand-stores: she knows every single one of them between Kapunda and Port Adelaide, and she spends her Saturday mornings in the over-stuffed back rooms of church halls across the Barossa valley. 

            We began in a little store on the edge of Tea-Tree Gulley.  It was the best possible sort of second hand shop.  From the outside,  it was small and nondescript, just a door and a window stuffed with raveled sweaters, a box of distressed paperback romances, and a hanging rack of geriatric car dashboard mats outside on the pavement. Only inside the shop revealed its true self - nested geometries stuffed full of books and vintage evening gowns and baby clothes and antique ski-suits, light-bulbs and crockery and wooly winter beanies and scarves and ties and handbags and shoes and dinner dresses -

            Oh, the dinner dresses... all of them all glittery and spangled and most of them desperately, eye-searingly, shoulder-paddingly pleated, sequined, studded and vintage nineteen eighties.

If my suitcase were as five-dimensional as the shop, I'd have taken home an armful.

            The hats were another kettle of feathers.  A door-frame behind the cash-register, approached at the right angle, unfolded into a long shelf of aerodynamical Adelaide Cup hats, trimmed with feathers and flowers and bunches of glass cherries and crab-apples.  I picked up a fetching black Merry-Widow wide-brim trimmed with most of a  white  feather boa and admired.

            A tiny old woman with white hair piled high on her head appeared from  behind the edge of a dust-mote.

            "She used to do amateur theatricals."  She said to me, fingering the feathers.  "The owner of the hat.  When she retired her husband insisted that she give away SOME of the costumes and she gave all the hats to us.  It's nice, isn't it?"

            "How much is it?"

            "I don't rightly know.  The others are between two and three dollars, but that one's scarcely dented - it could be as much as five.  Do you see a price tag on there?"

At length, and after some difficulty, I found a tag buried in the feathers of the boa.

            "TEN dollars."  The lady read.  "That's a bit much. Clara!"  She called out to another elderly lady  - this one was presiding over the cash register. "Do you think that we could give this nice young lady a discount?"

The lady behind the cash register looked up and I noticed that she had a firmer jaw than the white-haired darling, and that her hair was cropped firmly about her neck in a stiff, no-nonsense bob.  

            "You want me to give you a DISCOUNT?"  She said to me.  "Here?  In this shop?"  Stepping out from behind the cash register, she advanced on me with a contemptuous twist to her lips.

             "What sort of person asks for a DISCOUNT in a CHARITY shop?"  She said, pitching her voice to be heard through the whole room. 

            "It's  the Royal Society for the BLIND giving you that discount.   It's Children with CANCER giving you that discount- you know that, I suppose? Is THEIR money worth that much to you?"

She sneered at me.  "Don't you BELIEVE in CHARITY?"

Elderly women were popping into existence between hats and winter coats and  peg-boards of costume jewelry.  They all stared at me, open mouthed, their heads shaking, their hands rising up and boney, arthritic index fingers raised up to point-

I fled through a door into another room, where Zoe was rummaging through a bin of wooden block toys.  Shuddering and shaking, I  poured out the whole incredible story.  Zoe let out a shout of laughter.            
            "REALLY?" She squealed. "I don't believe a word of it!"

With epic narrative timing, a third elderly lady emerged from a shoe-box behind the toy bin.  She pointed a long index finger at my midriff.  Following the finger, I saw that I was still holding the hat - tightly, in both hands.

            "What were your intentions with this hat?"  She asked coolly.  "The original owner was a noted actress in our local theatrical community.  What were YOU intending to do with it? A birthday party, perhaps?"
She flicked the hat lightly with her finger and looked at me from beneath a raised eyebrow.  Very much beneath.

Stammering slightly, I said something about a past history of fashion school, and a consuming interest in historical costumes and how this hat would make a fabulous accessory for a late-Edwardian merry widow ensemble - I don't know what had gotten into me.  My brief admiration had run its course in front of the cash register.  I wouldn't have wanted the thing if you'd paid me.

The lady considered.
            "Yee-eesss…." She breathed critically.  "That would be acceptable.  But what you have to REMEMBER" she said, pinning me with a stern look and that long index finger "Is the ORIGINAL value of the hat.  Don't you THINK that you're doing rather nicely as it is?"
She turned on her heel and swept out to the cash register.

            "Here."  I said, thrusting the hat to Zoe with shaking hands.  "Put it back for me.  I don't want them to see me do it.  I don't want to be the lady who tried to cheat the charity shop - and surrendered."

Zoe shook her head to clear it, and girding her loins, sailed defiantly into the front room, where a three-way argument was going on.

            "I saw Water for Elephants last night and I thought it was LOVELY."  The white haired darling was saying firmly.

            "But what about the CRUELTY?" The woman with the long index finger said.  "The terrible things they did to that elephant - I wept!  I would hardly have called that film lovely!  I'd never have seen it if I'd known -"

The firm-jawed lady snorted with impatience.  "It's ACTING."  She cried.  "For heavens sake!  I can't believe you were both taken in by a crew of acting animals!  They're perfectly happy!  They probably loved every minute of it!  Really, if we cried about EVERYTHING we saw up on a movie screen - you two bleeding hearts - "

Zoe must have had her jaw hanging somewhere about the level of the floor because the woman with the index finger looked at her sharply and said "Are you all right - dear?" 

Zoe picked up her jaw to answer, but a young man entering the shop behind her though that the question was meant for him and spoke first.

            "Just fine." He said.  "Thanks.  Just looking around."

            "Ooooh!"  The lady with the index finger squealed joyously.  "Isn't he HANDSOME?   And what LOVELY manners!  It's been such a LONG time since a handsome young man flirted with ME!"

Her shoulders shaking,  Zoe turned and precipitously fled from the shop into the sunshine, closely followed by the young man, scarlet faced and steaming.

There must have been something in the water.

We fled into the hills and ate lunch sitting on a verandah that commanded a view of an entire valley- olive groves and acres of vines, with fig and sweet apple trees tangling in our hair and fresh autumn winds to drive cobwebs - and white marabou feathers on black hats  - out of our heads.

Unreal.

The Longest Jetty in Australia?

We drove home from Booleroo  through Port Germein - a small port-town, half-way between Port Pirie and Port Augusta left-over from the Great Age of Wheat.  We drove that way because of it's big jetty, and because we were told we could find ice-cream there. Ice-cream is a big draw at the end of a Sunday afternoon. 

            At the end of the 19th Century, Port Germein was a major wheat port, with a population of almost four hundred people, most of them, we surmised cynically, looking around us at the endless spread of empty salt bush, in the hospitality industries.  Booze and freelance female companionship at a premium.  Average!

            Today Port Germein is two or three streets of small houses, a children's playground, and a meticulously kept caravan park on the edge of a long tidal basin.

There wasn't any ice-cream.  The manager of the caravan park laughed at us and told us about Sunday closing hours, so we ate apples from Sarah's apple tree and walked the jetty instead.

Port Germein's tidal basin makes our own sand-flat look like a narrow strip of shingle on the edge of a canal.

The jetty is 1532 meters long (!!) and only just manages to peep over the edge of the sand-flat into the deeper sea-grass beds.

The local geography has led to the development of a some rather clever technology.  We were there at low tide.  Miles and I had come down from the jetty onto the sand-flat for half a kilometer or so, and ahead of us in the distance, over the shimmer of heat-haze and blowing strands of seagrass, we saw something mechanical and very tall.

            "I think it's a car."  Miles said disbelievingly.  "A car on stilts."

It was racing towards us at rally speed, and as it flashed past we saw that that was exactly what it was - a cart with an engine and a steering wheel, mounted on stilt legs six feet high.

A few minutes later it raced back past us in the other direction, heading out to the water towing a boat-trailer. The driver was wearing hip-waders.

            "Did you see that concrete block mounted between the rear wheels?"  Miles said.  "That'd give it a negative buoyancy.  You can't bring a boat up to the shore in this place - so they drive out to get it!"

Further out, we saw that this was exactly what was happening. There was our little cart, and its trailer, next to a man with a small boat, and in the shallow water on the edge of the sea grass bed, the cart driver and the sailor were trying to winch the boat up onto the trailer so they could bring it in to shore.

            The boat wasn't having any of it.  A stiff wind was blowing the boat broadside to the trailer, and the driver of the cart didn't seem to have the wit to swing around and line the cart up to match the way the boat was pointing.  Instead, he climbed down into the water and with the help of the boat owner, tried to physically shove the boat around into the trailer against the wind.  With the full force of the wind coming broadside, the boat blew onto the sand and grounded there. The men hauled and bullied and pushed till their faces were red and swollen, but the boat was solidly stuck.

            The driver of the cart climbed back up and drove around in a circle to meet the boat at right angles - almost precisely the worst way to do it.  The fisherman hooked the boat up and they both hauled - and the winch line snapped with a crack.  The driver climbed down, retied the line, climbed back up, and hauled again.  This time he snapped the winch.

            It must have been exhausting out there, battling the boat, and the wind, with a rising tide slapping hard against their legs. They were angry and tired and frustrated and the peanut gallery of engineers up on the jetty couldn't have helped any. They were growing rather redder in the face than bullying a boat called for, in fact, so we thought we had better leave them to it.

            Which turned out to be a successful strategy, actually, because as soon as the engineers in our party had exhausted their private wit and headed back down the jetty toward dry land, the driver abandoned his shipmate and buzzed back to shore in his cart and came back with a fresh trailer - and then lifted the whole process into Keystone Kops territory by re-aligning the thing at 90 degrees to the boat - just as the first unsuccessful time round - and starting the whole rigmarole all over again.  

We left them to it.

Back on the shore, we took a spin around the playground.  The swings were extra-swingy and the rumbley suspension bridges were hair-raising.  It was terrific fun, but we wondered how on earth the play equipment had passed muster with the regional council - I'm 5'6" and I was too terrified to come off the monkey bars by myself, and Miles almost broke an ankle falling off a set of swirling standing stones.   Mr Tabubil, despite being twice the recommended maximum height, went down the helical slide on his stomach and came out the bottom with a severely pulled muscle in his upper back.  He didn't feel very well at all.  But you can't blame that on the council.

Yes, that helical slide.  He is a clever one, isn't he?

            Sarah is a physical rehabilitation therapist, and she was able to confirm that there would be no permanent damage worse than a broken ego. 

            Later, going home in the car, Mr Tabubil looked up at me and offered a wan smile.  "I've got friction burns on my elbows."  He said. "And gravel stuck in my shoes.  And I spun around so fast I almost threw up.  All in all, that's a pretty satisfactory visit to a playground, isn't it?  Isn't it?"

Yes, Dear.

A Break in Our Regularly Scheduled Travel Blog: Welcome to Brisbane

Welcome to Brisbane.

It got pretty wet up here.

I'm up here for a medical procedure, staying with my mum and sister, Dr Tabubil, in my sister's apartment on the river.

            Dr Tabubil was lucky - she and Mum rode out the floods safely on the Gold Coast. And after all those days of living the flood vicariously on the television and over the interwebs, her building in Brisbane was NOT flooded out - the residents sandbagged and watched the water lap at the door and organized bucket brigades for if and when it rose and reached the electrical junction box (housed on the ground floor, naturally!) For two days, every healthy resident was downstairs sandbagging or moving all the files and furniture in the manager's office to higher ground and the building manager, when Dr Tabubil talked to him, was quite concerned for several elderly people who shouldn't have been sandbagging but had insisted on doing so and were now having some heart trouble… But they made it through without anything more than minor palpitations.

            But the designers of the buildings to either side had the genius to site the electrical and elevator control rooms in the basement. They will be out of power for a fair while, it's reckoned.

            My aunt and Uncle spent the flood living in a fair zoo, opening their house to flooded-out friends and relatives. My ballet-mad 13 year old cousin though the flood was seventh heaven - one of the refugees was a genuine ballet dancer from the Royal Australian Ballet who'd come to town for a teaching conference - guess who ended up being the student demonstratee at the conference later in the week?

            We've heard of only one friend - so far - who went under entirely. She and her husband were given enough warning to round up friends and salvage the photographs and important papers and hump whatever furniture they could up to the second floor. They're shrugging their shoulders and saying "we'll rebuild." Nothing much else they can do.

             The daughter of a family friend raises horses on an 11 acre property in the Lockyer valley. On the day before the floods she had been rushed to the Ipswich Hospital after being kicked by a horse. She was released - after many tests - with severe bruising and a quantity of morphine for the excruciating pain. On Monday evening, she was given 25 minutes by the State Emergency Services to evacuate their home. She and her husband and twin baby sons made it to a property on a hill 2 miles away from their house and sheltered there with 15 other refugees while an 8 meter wall of water roared through the valley.

            They spent three days there, watching the water swirl past. On the first night, she ran out of morphine. I understand that it was a pretty rough three days for her. Her frantic father tried to arrange for an emergency airlift by helicopter, but the helicopters were rather more pressingly engaged picking survivors out of trees and off of submerged buildings.

            But then - hallyluyah hallyluyah!! When the waters went down they went home and found their house standing. Two houses down the road, all that's left is a foundation buried under a pile of rubble; at her place, the water came up the drive and stopped - twenty centimeters from her back door. The property at the end of her road lost 51 horses - every single one of her horses rode out the flood belly deep in a hill-paddock.

I flew up here on Monday - the flight was full of cheerful young men wearing construction boots and toting hard hats - apprentices sent up by their bosses to lend a hand wherever they were needed. Our town sent an S&R team. On the weekend ten thousand local residents turned out to sweep and scrub and tote wreckage.  And the CBD, at least, looks damned good. Mum and I took a wrong turning off of Anne St. yesterday morning on our way to the doctor and drove through the formerly flooded zone - the disaster crews have hosed down the streets, and buildings that we'd seen on the news waist deep in water were now sparkling in the sun - the only evidence of the flooding were the building lobbies cordoned off with incident tape, and the tankers trucks lining the streets - pumping out basements and sending fountains of muddy water in the street. We do all right with the mopping up, we Australians do. We're doing all right.

            Yesterday afternoon Mum and I drove into St Lucia, down by the university. I took a few photographs just before yesterday's enormous storm hit (we only felt the edge of it - no hail or trees coming down where we were, thank heavens!) Unfortunately my laptop here won't recognize my memory card - on the weekend I'll go buy a cable for it and THEN I'll post the pictures. 

Edit: the uploaded photos can be found here. And here.

St Lucia got hit HARD. Driving through the suburb, the flood stopped being vicariously awful and faintly thrilling and we just felt sad, and sick in the stomach.

            Convoys of army trucks. Convoys of cranes and fire engines. Houses that had gone under totally, weed hanging from the gutters and windows hanging from their sashes. Buildings with the flood line (and it's a very clear line) sitting well above the start of the second storey. Junked cars. A park that has been turned into a giant rubbish skip - a whole block of crumpled furniture and fixtures as people have just had to strip their whole lives out of the shells of their houses. A marquee on a corner - serving up hot-dogs to people in muddy shorts and construction boots, who stood and ate, heavy, empty eyed, and rolled their shoulders and crimped their necks and headed back into those ruined houses.

There's an electrical storm outside right now - lightning going like a disco ball. I'm turning the computer off. At least the rain will help wash off the houses.