Reckless Youth

In the year I turned twenty-two – two is my favourite number for reasons my analyst once suggested had something to do with my preference for the couple – I went into a crazy phase whereby I threw everything once familiar on its head. 

My boyfriend, a gambler and unemployed for most of the four years we spent together, began training with the Commonwealth Police. Fortuitous in some ways. It offered a steady income for one, and for another there was a time he and I were driving along the back streets of East Melbourne when by chance he failed to halt at a stop sign before taking off into the next side street and an unmarked police man off duty saw and stopped us.

‘You went over a stop sign without braking,’ he said after Paul wound down his window. 

‘I’m sorry officer. I didn’t realise.’

‘Your driver’s licence?’ Paul dragged out his wallet and proceeded to explain; he was in leave from training with the Commonwealth police. He flashed his ID card, and the police man waved us on. 

As simple as that. No ticket and no further explanation needed.

This was one of my first experiences in the world in which certain behaviours are overlooked by virtue of your status. But Paul’s status as a Commonwealth policeman was not enough to keep me with him. 

When he was shipped to Sydney for several weeks for training and I was left alone I began to reassess my commitment to him.

He seemed more dedicated than ever from a distance and arranged that I join him one weekend and visit the Blue Mountains. We stayed in an old chalet in Katoomba. Years later, Delia Falconer’s In the Service of Clouds transported me back there. 

At the time, the trip seemed onerous and without colour. I was restless and on my return to Melbourne and my first Social Work job at Prince Henry’s hospital where every day I trudged down to our basement department and tried to make sense of this career into which I had been launched, already longing for change. 

It came in the form of an invitation to dinner from one of the resident doctors. At first, I said ‘no’. I was in a relationship after all, but then with Paul away I changed my mind and the doctor and I met for pizza in St Kilda and later for sex. 

We continued to meet over several weeks until his rotation ended and the doctor fell out of life as easily as he had fallen in. 

By then the idea of continuing my relationship with Paul had cemented as a no-way in my mind and in time we found ways of splitting up.

It was a tortured break up as these things go with Paul reluctant to say goodbye. We separated but also hung on for several months with occasional get togethers for comfort and more sex until someone told him they knew I had been unfaithful while we were still together and he was furious.

‘Everyone knew but me,’ he yelled from below stairs and threw the last of my possessions from his place at my doorstep. This clinched it. The idea he was in the dark. The tables had turned so fast and far. When we met I chased him. He was the fancy-free bachelor and I naïve and a 19-year-old fully besotted to the point I once stowed away interstate on the Southern Aurora overnight train to be with him.

This is a long story. Save to say, I had declared myself loud and strong until I no longer felt the fire. It burned out and my crazy 22-year-old life began in earnest.

I think of it as the loneliest year of my life. I had moved into an apartment, chocolate brown brick modernist from the 1960s. We rented on the second floor with a small veranda and huge loungeroom, which we furnished with one long red fabric covered couch we bought second hand. 

I moved in with my four years younger sister, ill equipped for life away from home, but desperate to leave the craziness of our father. She had imagined, she told me years later that we would bond together and spend our nights away from work enjoying each other’s company and doing things together. 

She worked at the Commonwealth Bank and although in her teens she was the most rebellious of all the girls in my family, she soon settled into domesticity and longing for a quiet life while I grew wilder and more reckless. 

I picked a stranger up on a tram one night returning home invited him and he stayed for sex then went on his way. I have no recollection of his name or his appearance. But I was fortunate he seemed kind if not bemused by this weird young woman inviting him home. 

In any case, my younger sister was unimpressed. He could have been an axe murderer while she had met a fellow bank employee and fallen in love with him, although he was several years older. 

By the time our life in the apartment reached the end if its one year lease, she was married  (a marriage that did not last) and I had begun in the relationship that was to last the next fifty years of my life and beyond. 

But not before I enjoyed or should I say endured many other assignations with men, young and old, in my search for love. I was as dissociated as a person could be, I see now in retrospect. Finally managing to change jobs from the hospital to a counselling service in Glen Waverly where the work and my colleagues made more sense and offered greater job satisfaction. 

But my personal life tormented me like a stone in my shoe and I could not settle at home other than to go on trips to what in these days were called pick up hotels in search of company. The Anchor and Hope in Richmond jumps out in my memory and clubs like the Love Machine in South Yarra. The nights filled with possibility enthralled me more than the need to learn to drive for my counselling job where domestic visits were mandated and I needed to get wheels. 

But I was terrified of driving. Phobic my instructor told me one day. It took me over a year of weekly driving instructor lessons, at huge cost to my poor purse, to get the hang of it –  clutch, declutch, accelerate – all of it in his turquoise Datsun 120Y through the streets of Caulfield. 

It took me three attempts to pass my driver’s exam and even on the third my instructor felt sorry for me and let me by even though my ability at reverse parking was a joke. I have never tried to reverse park since. Though I can now reverse into car spaces allocated clearly, but trying to squeeze myself off the street between two cars still terrifies me and my daughter’s laugh at my ineptitude. ‘It’s easy,’ they say and offer to teach me.  But there are some things I refuse to master, life being as it is filled with other endless challenges.

I shall never repeat my twenty second year, but aspects of that young woman lie deep inside of me. I think of Jung’s shadow side, the disavowed parts of myself reflected in this story in so many ways I can only pluck at a few. 

You often hear people react in horror at the waywardness of their youth. The things they did which they would never contemplate now. The reckless abandonment of safety in the search for adventure, or he hope that someone will come along and sweep you under their wings and you might fly off together into a life of endless joy. Which never happens  we know but we can always dream.

Telling and not telling

‘We resurrect the dead in our dreams.’ Siri Hustvedt

The only time I see my parents now is in my dreams, in photographs and my memories.

My dreams, the clearest depiction when they come alive, and in them we have conversations. Reading Siri Hustvedt’s book Ghost Stories, a story of grief on the death of her husband Paul Auster in 2024, I’m struck by her passion for this man, within the context of a long and fulfilling marriage, despite the tragedy of drug addicted Daniel, Auster’s son who killed himself soon after the death of his eight-month-old daughter Ruby, for which he was held responsible. 

Hustvedt details this tragedy, the year before Auster was diagnosed with lung cancer as a possible determinant in the onset of the disease. The doctors, she writes, are interested to know his genomic history and the fact that he smoked, but they did not once reflect on the extent to which this tragedy, losing his granddaughter and son in such a short space of time, could derail a mind and body such Auster is unlikely to have been the same ever again. 

Stress, Hustvedt reminds us, can lead to bodily changes, which the medical establishment with its heavy emphasis on the mechanics of bodily health and disease the quantitation of blood and hormone levels fails to factor in.

This book, like all diaries, as Hustvedt describes, is a ‘geography of telling and not telling.’ Isn’t this true of all lives?

Yesterday, I met with an old friend. We extend across four decades with long periods in between where we have scarcely seen one another. Linked in large part by mutual friends, one of whom has since died. His wife, now in her mid to late nineties is losing her memory. My friend and I tried to piece together the time in between, when she spent a good deal of time with this friend and placed that memory against earlier times when this woman was like a substitute grandmother to my children.

When this older friend and I travelled every Tuesday to an event held at the Athenaeum Library in the city, for The Tuesday writers. A group of people stemming from my days at the Council of Adult Education with whom I completed a diploma of Professional Writing and Editing. 

Some from my class did not want our novel writing class to end so we formed the Tuesday writers. I left this group ahead of my friend to care for my grandchildren which I’ve done these past 18 years. The Tuesday Writers might still exist but given my Tuesdays are never free now, and I no longer know anyone in the group I cannot say.  But something is stirring inside. How can I chase them up? How can I reconnect?

They, too, are like ghosts in my memory. So many people and their names fading much like the ghosts of a lifetime.

And the conversation with my contemporary friend was studded with gaps but I gave her a copy of my memoir The Museum of Failure assuring her there were people she might recognise despite the pseudonyms.

I did not tell her that the person who was most instrumental in my failure was a woman who was most significant in my friend’s life as her analyst.

There is something about keeping the identity of other people’s therapists safe and sacred for the sake of the person’s therapy or analysis that is deeply ingrained in me.

We don’t want to badmouth other people’s heroes.

It would be like telling you things about your parents you do not want to hear. Things about your parents that might re-shape their view of those parents after death. The ghosts will morph into something horrendous relative to the idealised views they hold in their hearts. But I want to tell my friend about her analyst now dead. About her strange ways that were hard on me. And other secrets I know, but secrets are like this. You hold them close for fear of the damage they might do. Her secrets, my secrets.

A geography of telling and not telling. 

Paul Auster began writing letters to his grandson Myles, born four months before the writer died. Such compelling letters as Hustvedt details in her story. She also includes some letters she wrote to her friends during her husband’s illness. She wanted them to know. He wanted them to know what was going on following Auster’s cancer diagnosis. To keep them in the loop. 

It reminds me of the messages I sent to my siblings during our mother’s last days when she was in the Dandenong Hospital dying. 

We did not realise this until she was described as palliative. For much of these last three weeks of my mother’s life, my sister and I operated as though we would need to find her higher-level care given the retirement village where she lived for the past decade did not offer this. 

My mother died in the Bethlehem hospice, which seems apt given this hospice which is no longer trading under that name was in earlier incarnations a maternity hospital where my husband was born. 

He likes to joke, like Jesus, he was born in Bethlehem. Born in Bethlehem and baptised in St Patrick’s Cathedral. You can’t get more high ranking than this within the Catholic hierarchy of Melbourne, but he does not submit to these hierarchies anymore.

My mother did. She believed in miracles with all her heart, which brings me to another of Hustvedt’s observations when talking about the roller coaster of the story of her husband’s life, his final months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. 

‘There is an important distinction between optimism and hope. The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that at least for those who love the patient are unsustainable. Hope on the other hand is necessary for living on. In my case a stringent reality principle with hope allows me to be a better companion as this story moves ahead.

The number of times my mother told her children a miracle had occurred, and our father had agreed to stop drinking is remarkable in its frequency. This alone put me off the idea of miracles. And the day my analyst told me there is a fine line between optimism and denial stays with me. Such a fine line. Better to stick with the idea of hope. That things as Emily Dickinson writes like hope with feathers. It can fly. Despair cannot.

But miracles belong with the ghosts of our pasts and presents, ghosts that help us maintain our connections to those long gone, but they cannot be rematerialised except in our Imaginations.

And like Hustvedt pining for her beloved Paul we must learn to grieve our losses rather than image they will one day be resurrected that way of Jesus. We all must die. But while we live we hold onto the hope of finding meaning in our lives and connections such we might never need resort to miracles if religion or otherwise. 

They can lead us into false hope, and denial which ill prepares us for those final days. Auter said he hoped to die telling a joke. Philip Adams talks about wanting to be awake when he dies. From my limited understanding of death when it comes, it’s unlikely to go the way of movies with a person uttering their final word. My mother reported that our father’s final words were along the lines of ‘St Francis was a wonderful saint.’ 

Somehow I find this hard to believe. Perhaps she thought it. Perhaps she wanted it. My father reformed from alcoholism into the church of heaven. Another miracle, or so my mother believed. I suspect he died in silence. His last breath no more.