Month: November 2014

Sausages, a man with a barrow and the Berlin Wall

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the
fall of the Berlin wall and my thoughts go back to the days when I first began to use
a computer for word-processing.
What an expression, word
processing.  No longer the business of
writing but the business of processing words, as if words were like sausages on
a conveyer belt in need of packaging. 
I can see it in my mind’s eye. 
My husband makes sausages.  He takes a lump of pork and minces it till it
turns into a lumpy pink sludge then adds herbs and spices. 
Next he forces some part of the
mixture into the top of his sausage maker, brand name DICK, and screws down the
lever that forces the mince into thin stockings of sausage casing made out of
cow gut lining. 

He squeezes a quantity of mixture
into a gigantic sausage and finally cuts it off in over size lengths that he
then sections into sausage length strips tied with a butcher’s string. 
My husband lets the sausages sit in
the fridge for a day, then Cryovacs a small quantity, usually in batches of three
or four sausages, and finally freezes them until use.  Most of the sausages he gives away to friends
and family, and some we take out and defrost for barbeques. 
My husband’s sausages taste better
than the ones we buy from the shops. We know what goes into them.
Word processing on the other hand
requires other ingredients like the mind behind the machine to turn them into
something of value.
Twenty-five years ago I looked at
computers in the same way as I had looked at cars another ten years earlier
when I was still young and believed I would never need to drive one. 
My husband would be in charge of
all things car related.  I could simply
be a passenger. 
Whether this attitude held me back
I do not know, though it took me several years in my early twenties to get my driver’s
licence. 
I was phobic about driving, one of
my driving instructors told me.  He took
me out for lessons in his turquoise coloured Datsun 180y and every time I
stepped inside his car I needed to change my shoes. 
These were the days of platform
heels, shoes that gave an extra three or four inches in height. 
Those were the days when a driving instructor
put up a yellow learner’s plate on his car and he could charge a fee to help
someone like me learn to drive. 
It took me three attempts to get my
licence. 
The first time I failed to stop for
a man who had walked across the driveway with a wheelbarrow. 
I can see him still this man
hunched over his red barrow intent on heaving his load from one side of the
road to the next. 
I could not bring myself to
stop.  There was too much to synchronise:
the getting out through the driveway in a non-automatic car with clutch and gears,
which I needed to coordinate in order to start and to stop. 
I had just managed to get the car out
of the parking lot but needed to stop too soon. 
I managed to slow back to first gear and hoped the man would get past
soon enough for me to go on driving but my instructor slammed on his secondary brakes
to spare us all the horror of my car running into the man with the
wheelbarrow. 
The examiner failed me on the spot.
The second time I went for my
licence I managed to get out of the driving zone and onto the road.  I was then able to negotiate my way through
several streets under the examiner’s instructions, but by the time it came to
parallel parking my nerves were frayed to the point I could not manage to synchronise
the required number of full turns of the wheel to get the car into place. 
Once again I failed. 
On my third attempt I managed to
drive through the streets of Oakleigh without any mishaps, but once again on
the hill that runs up to the Chadstone shopping centre after I had managed a
handbrake start and brought us back to the flat I could not negotiate my way into
a parallel park through the two marker flags the instructor had set in place. 
Too much reversing and I could not
get my mind into position, but this time the examiner took pity on me and
granted me my licence after all.
‘You’d better
practice your parking’, he said some thirty years ago.
 
Yet to this day I cannot parallel
park.  I can reverse into spaces from an
angle.  I can reverse out of driveways.  I can reverse into a parking space that is
parallel if there are no obstacles in front or behind, but I cannot squeeze my car
into a narrow space between two cars on the side of the road, despite my
instructor’s urge that I practise.
My husband and now my daughters
have volunteered to teach me, but something inside leaves parallel parking a gap in my
experience that I do not want to rectify. 

Another wall that has yet to fall. 

Where is she now?

This morning on my way home from
dropping my daughter off at her work, I travelled back through local streets.  In front of a block of housing commission
flats at the end of Munroe Street I saw a temporary sign pitched on the nature
strip like a billboard, ‘Humanist Society of Victoria’, with its bold blue logo. 
It gave me a jolt.  Such an unlikely place for such a sign. 
Somewhere inside one of the flats I
imagined a small group of mostly older people sitting around with cups of tea
or coffee in a cluttered lounge room discussing all matters humanist. 
And this, against the backdrop of a
radio program to which I listened in the car, where a woman described her
husband’s struggle with lung cancer. 
This woman coped by sending out weekly emails to friends and family to
keep them in the loop in all things ‘Russell’. 
The emails helped Russell’s wife to
sort through her own thinking. 
I arrived home before the program
ended and so I’m left with snatches of thought. 
The woman’s emails, the few I heard were lyrical and well written.  She put in details that many other emails
might lack. 
She described the hospital smells
and the way her husband grunted at her when she reminded him to take his salt/sugar
preparation in order to keep his electrolytes in balance between chemo
episodes. 
After he had snapped at her one time to many, she asked, ‘Do
you talk to the nurses this way?’
And he said, ‘No. I don’t love the
nurses.’
 A poignant reminder of how the people we love
can at times treat us like shit because they love us and know we love them in
return. 
In one of her other emails, Russell’s wife tells the story of an elderly homeless woman who sits on street
corners with a fluffy white dog in a trolley and asks for money.  If you tell this woman you have no money to
give she rails against you, as if you are selfish and rotten. 
One day the woman of the white
fluffy dog set upon the woman of the emails with such a tirade that the woman
of the emails said to her,
‘My husband has cancer.’
And the woman of the fluffy dog
responded,
‘I don’t even have a husband, you
bitch.’
It puts me in mind of another story
I’ve been following on Jennifer Wilson’s blog where she writes about a love
affair gone wrong. 
I had noticed that Jennifer had posted
less of late.  Her ex-husband had died
and I figured maybe she was finding the grief too much.  But it turns out there was more to Jennifer’s
absence, including the beginning of an affair that had sent her
spiralling. 
It ended badly – as affairs so often
do – when the wife of the man with whom Jennifer was having the affair, found
out. 
The secret was no more and the man
elected to drop Jennifer for his wife.
A common enough story.
Stories, stories everywhere and my
head reels. 
I changed the screen image on my
computer last night and for a minute considered putting up a picture of my
mother some months before she died. 

There on my computer screen I saw
my mother’s eyes and they glared at me. 
It felt like a reprimand. 
How dare you, she seemed to say,
how dare you go on living while I am no more? 
How dare you still have blood
flowing through your veins, a heart beat that keeps the blood pumping and
breath in you lungs, while I am dead?
I wanted to apologise to her for
this, and for the way I might use my fantasy of my mother in my writing. 
While she was alive, I did not feel
that my mother was a mother I could rail against, a mother I could treat badly,
which is not to say there weren’t times when I did treat her badly.
My mother of the fragile and low
disposition that required she believe in goodness in everyone and shunned all
that she considered wrong.
I wish now my mother had approached
her life with a greater awareness of its complexity, that we could have talked
about all things humanist, like the people at the end of Monroe Street, rather
than avoid conflict and discussion.  
My mother
instead fell back on her religion and her belief in God and the wall came up
and she shut me out, and shut out her doubts. 
And where is she now?
Looking down on me from heaven, and
saying I told you so?  I’m up here with
him and having a ball. 

Or is she no more in all but her spirit
and my memory of her, this woman who feared to go into the unknown and into
doubt.