Yesterday I took Harry, Paul’s first, 12, and Ciaran, Michael’s second, 12, out to the country home of some old family friends who have been out of touch most of the last 33 years, or so. Deirdre and Alex live on 12 acres of farmland about 7 miles the other side of Queanbyan, which is to Canberra as, say, Burien is to Seattle. They grow olives, feed the 4 chooks who gratefully produce about 6 eggs a day, and in general lead a relaxed kind of life. The property, like all the ones in this and most parts of Australia, is home to plenty of kangaroos, who alternately stand about like timeless sentinels, staring imperiously and a little disdainfully at anyone who comes into view, and bouncing about the terrain, although the movement is so effortless and smooth that they seem to be gliding at about 15 miles an hour – certainly faster than any human could run.
The boys amused themselves either by feeding the chooks, monitoring the kangaroos while keeping their eyes peeled for echidnas (gentle, shy creatures: spiny ant-eaters, cousins of the platypus, and with them the only egg-laying mammals), or scouring the waterhole for Murray cod (which have probably by now eaten all the trout, because there has been a 100-year drought, and the level is very low). No snakes, in the cool weather, although the property has plenty of browns.
Harry likes to sit quietly in any adult company, taking it all in, in his mild-mannered, shy way. He responds delightfully when asked a question, demonstrating that he has been listening intently, and speaking with evident contentment and a delightful turn of phrase. Ciaran is an original who will venture a detailed opinion about anything and everything, and is certainly the most conversationally precocious of 12 years old. His only real deficit is that he butts in, continually, in his eagerness to contribute his expert opinion on just about anything. He is extremely fastidious, both in terms of
And is highly quick-witted, somewhat in emulation of his father; but he derives the tendency most clearly from his mother’s late father, Clarry, in Tasmania, the most naturally gifted and hilarious of demotic storytellers. While Ciaran will veer off onto always fascinating tangents rather than take the road that threatens to lead to an area of his unknowing, Harry, with whom not knowing sits easily, is more likely merely to respond to new and surprising information about which he is less than expert by saying “Is that right?”
We used to visit Deirdre and Alex and their 3 sons, sometimes down at the coast where they still have a house. One of their sons, Jonathan whom we used to know as Jossy, turns out now to live about 100 yards down the same street as Paul, in Melbourne. I have a very strange and striking memory from age 3 or so (as I’ve ascertained through indirect checks with my mother). I and she were visiting Deirdre who at the time had a very young infant. I recall vividly a scene – not only the house, but also the light, the direction I was looking, how Deirdre was sitting, and so forth. But the single strongest element, still so clear that I seem almost to be there, was of her breast as she fed the baby. It must have been the first one that I really noticed, because my memory of it is so clear – a slightly orange-tinged, freckled skin, and a notably conical shape. What effect the memory may have had on my conception of the breast, in general, I can only speculate.
Of course, I did not bring up, in yesterday’s company, this particular recollection.
Over the weekend my parents hosted their 50th wedding anniversary festivities. My mum’s brothers Tony (with wife Margaret) and Geoff came up from Tasmania. Tony is a long-time member of state parliament, after a high-profile career as an Aussie Rules football star and then successful coach. He has seven children, all of whom seem to have achieved successes in recognizable, recognized professions. Geoff has never married; lived with his mother and father until his mother died when he was 18 or so, and with his father until he died at 92, about 10 years ago. Now 66, Geoff gets a pension, which he seems to spend on cigarettes and gambling, which reportedly leaves him without cash at least a few days before each fortnightly pension check, making him then dependent on Tony’s family for survival. Some telling stories came up about Geoff, which are all the more pertinent to me given that, as Geoff told my sister-in-law Jane (an expert at squirreling personal information from even people she’s barely met) that he reckoned that just as he was his generation’s hermit in the family, I would be mine (“please don’t let that happen,” pleaded my mother, when I told her). Of course, his prediction was hardly news to me; I’ve been contemplating that prospect for decades, ever since I realized that there was a history of hermits in the family. One of Geoff’s father’s 13 siblings was a severe hermit, up in the hills, where he died at age 90 or so, propped up against a tree for three days before he died after a heart attack. When my mother said to her father, ‘Oh, Dad, I’m so sorry; you must be terribly upset,” he replied “Nah, he lived tough, he wanted to die tough.’
In any case, Geoff is a very personable fellow, although rather set in his ways, and with a history of such. He eats, with little variation, steak or sausages with potato, pumpkin, and peas. To offset his expenses after his father died, in a small town outside Hobart, he took in a lodger. He couldn’t charge him much, because if he had more than about $100 in weekly earnings, he’d lose his pension. So, he told the lodger that the deal was, he had to share the cooking, and he had to make either steak or sausages, with potato, pumpkin, and peas. Well, on one occasion, the lodger failed to follow this formula, so Geoff kicked him out – fired him, as my mother puts it.
Another suggestive incident is that Geoff, although he was here for the 50th anniversary proceedings, was not at the original wedding. He was 16 at the time. He explained this to Jane by saying he didn’t go because his older brother opened his suit. “He opened my suit, so I didn’t go,” he related, as if this really was a perfectly acceptable explanation.
I commented to Geoff that I recalled, again very strongly, how they made toast when I was 10 and my family visited him and his father in Huonville, on Wilmot Road, just up the road from the bike shop they operated, and from the swimming pool they managed in the summer (and from which, empty, Michael tried unsuccessfully to fish a terrified bandicoot, before my father took over and, to my astonishment, easily accomplished the task by picking up the animal and depositing on the lawn). I said, ‘I remember that you used to make your toast over your open fireplace, in a sort of cage, like a fish barbecuer.” He brightened considerably and said he still had the contraption, and had used it until he left Wilmot St. for a small apartment a few years ago, and that since leaving he missed that toast most of all.
In any case, I don’t smoke, or gamble, so perhaps my fate will be different, although, as I have often commented, I do sense the Fletcher hermit gene lurking in my destiny, and this perhaps has exacerbated my tendency to frequent intense loneliness, despite a bevy of very lovely and beloved friends.
Tomorrow I drive back to Melbourne, 400 miles, with Harry, who has remained behind with his cousins after Paul, Jane, and Neddy returned on Monday. The trip would be fairly humdrum if, unlike me, you didn’t find the scenery gorgeous – rolling farmland and bushland in seraphic light, at this time of year. Neddy, 6, of course finds it a little tedious, and he has trouble conceptualizing 400 miles, and fractions of it, so he and his father have devised a method of making distance and time more readily comprehensible. They refer to trips in terms of schloomper-doompers and super schloomper-doompers, where the latter is twice the former, and the former approximates to about how far you can go before you get really fed up, need to pee, and will probably need a milkshake to mollify you sufficiently that you’ll get back in the car and undergo another. Canberra, from Melbourne, is about 3 super schloomper-doompers. We got away, coming up, with only two milkshake or fish-and-chips breaks, so we did fairly well. I now have my rental car, so will be undertaking some major schloomper-doompers myself, soon.
The boys amused themselves either by feeding the chooks, monitoring the kangaroos while keeping their eyes peeled for echidnas (gentle, shy creatures: spiny ant-eaters, cousins of the platypus, and with them the only egg-laying mammals), or scouring the waterhole for Murray cod (which have probably by now eaten all the trout, because there has been a 100-year drought, and the level is very low). No snakes, in the cool weather, although the property has plenty of browns.
Harry likes to sit quietly in any adult company, taking it all in, in his mild-mannered, shy way. He responds delightfully when asked a question, demonstrating that he has been listening intently, and speaking with evident contentment and a delightful turn of phrase. Ciaran is an original who will venture a detailed opinion about anything and everything, and is certainly the most conversationally precocious of 12 years old. His only real deficit is that he butts in, continually, in his eagerness to contribute his expert opinion on just about anything. He is extremely fastidious, both in terms of
And is highly quick-witted, somewhat in emulation of his father; but he derives the tendency most clearly from his mother’s late father, Clarry, in Tasmania, the most naturally gifted and hilarious of demotic storytellers. While Ciaran will veer off onto always fascinating tangents rather than take the road that threatens to lead to an area of his unknowing, Harry, with whom not knowing sits easily, is more likely merely to respond to new and surprising information about which he is less than expert by saying “Is that right?”
We used to visit Deirdre and Alex and their 3 sons, sometimes down at the coast where they still have a house. One of their sons, Jonathan whom we used to know as Jossy, turns out now to live about 100 yards down the same street as Paul, in Melbourne. I have a very strange and striking memory from age 3 or so (as I’ve ascertained through indirect checks with my mother). I and she were visiting Deirdre who at the time had a very young infant. I recall vividly a scene – not only the house, but also the light, the direction I was looking, how Deirdre was sitting, and so forth. But the single strongest element, still so clear that I seem almost to be there, was of her breast as she fed the baby. It must have been the first one that I really noticed, because my memory of it is so clear – a slightly orange-tinged, freckled skin, and a notably conical shape. What effect the memory may have had on my conception of the breast, in general, I can only speculate.
Of course, I did not bring up, in yesterday’s company, this particular recollection.
Over the weekend my parents hosted their 50th wedding anniversary festivities. My mum’s brothers Tony (with wife Margaret) and Geoff came up from Tasmania. Tony is a long-time member of state parliament, after a high-profile career as an Aussie Rules football star and then successful coach. He has seven children, all of whom seem to have achieved successes in recognizable, recognized professions. Geoff has never married; lived with his mother and father until his mother died when he was 18 or so, and with his father until he died at 92, about 10 years ago. Now 66, Geoff gets a pension, which he seems to spend on cigarettes and gambling, which reportedly leaves him without cash at least a few days before each fortnightly pension check, making him then dependent on Tony’s family for survival. Some telling stories came up about Geoff, which are all the more pertinent to me given that, as Geoff told my sister-in-law Jane (an expert at squirreling personal information from even people she’s barely met) that he reckoned that just as he was his generation’s hermit in the family, I would be mine (“please don’t let that happen,” pleaded my mother, when I told her). Of course, his prediction was hardly news to me; I’ve been contemplating that prospect for decades, ever since I realized that there was a history of hermits in the family. One of Geoff’s father’s 13 siblings was a severe hermit, up in the hills, where he died at age 90 or so, propped up against a tree for three days before he died after a heart attack. When my mother said to her father, ‘Oh, Dad, I’m so sorry; you must be terribly upset,” he replied “Nah, he lived tough, he wanted to die tough.’
In any case, Geoff is a very personable fellow, although rather set in his ways, and with a history of such. He eats, with little variation, steak or sausages with potato, pumpkin, and peas. To offset his expenses after his father died, in a small town outside Hobart, he took in a lodger. He couldn’t charge him much, because if he had more than about $100 in weekly earnings, he’d lose his pension. So, he told the lodger that the deal was, he had to share the cooking, and he had to make either steak or sausages, with potato, pumpkin, and peas. Well, on one occasion, the lodger failed to follow this formula, so Geoff kicked him out – fired him, as my mother puts it.
Another suggestive incident is that Geoff, although he was here for the 50th anniversary proceedings, was not at the original wedding. He was 16 at the time. He explained this to Jane by saying he didn’t go because his older brother opened his suit. “He opened my suit, so I didn’t go,” he related, as if this really was a perfectly acceptable explanation.
I commented to Geoff that I recalled, again very strongly, how they made toast when I was 10 and my family visited him and his father in Huonville, on Wilmot Road, just up the road from the bike shop they operated, and from the swimming pool they managed in the summer (and from which, empty, Michael tried unsuccessfully to fish a terrified bandicoot, before my father took over and, to my astonishment, easily accomplished the task by picking up the animal and depositing on the lawn). I said, ‘I remember that you used to make your toast over your open fireplace, in a sort of cage, like a fish barbecuer.” He brightened considerably and said he still had the contraption, and had used it until he left Wilmot St. for a small apartment a few years ago, and that since leaving he missed that toast most of all.
In any case, I don’t smoke, or gamble, so perhaps my fate will be different, although, as I have often commented, I do sense the Fletcher hermit gene lurking in my destiny, and this perhaps has exacerbated my tendency to frequent intense loneliness, despite a bevy of very lovely and beloved friends.
Tomorrow I drive back to Melbourne, 400 miles, with Harry, who has remained behind with his cousins after Paul, Jane, and Neddy returned on Monday. The trip would be fairly humdrum if, unlike me, you didn’t find the scenery gorgeous – rolling farmland and bushland in seraphic light, at this time of year. Neddy, 6, of course finds it a little tedious, and he has trouble conceptualizing 400 miles, and fractions of it, so he and his father have devised a method of making distance and time more readily comprehensible. They refer to trips in terms of schloomper-doompers and super schloomper-doompers, where the latter is twice the former, and the former approximates to about how far you can go before you get really fed up, need to pee, and will probably need a milkshake to mollify you sufficiently that you’ll get back in the car and undergo another. Canberra, from Melbourne, is about 3 super schloomper-doompers. We got away, coming up, with only two milkshake or fish-and-chips breaks, so we did fairly well. I now have my rental car, so will be undertaking some major schloomper-doompers myself, soon.
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