I trudged around Civic, the shopping and office area in the middle of Canberra, looking for free wifi. Unlike Seattle, the city doesn’t have a wealth of such opportunities, but I did locate one source in a handy spot. If you sit at any of the six or seven outdoor cafés in Garema Place, a square at the center of Civic, you can pick up one signal clearly.
I sat there answering email and generally doing the Seattle thing. After a week, I’m the only person I’ve seen working on a laptop in public. There’s a great business opportunity here for a Zoka’s-like café.
While I was sitting there, I looked up and saw, strolling by, was Anthony, my best friend from kindergarten to grade four, and then into our teen years, when we played footy and cricket either together or on different teams, but practiced constantly together at the oval opposite his house. We also played golf constantly. His dad took us out to Queanbeyan, a scrappy town adjacent to Canberra, across the border of the Australian Capital Territory, into New South Wales. They would pick me up at an ungodly hour, for me, 6am, as daylight began to break, and we’d be on the first hole as the sun came up. At either end of summer it’d be freezing until the sun warmed things up, but the air would have a stunning crystalline quality. My favorite hole was always the dogleg 6th, where you had a choice of going to the green via the fairway, or cutting the corner, which entailed hoiking the ball over a gulley at risk of losing it forever. Or, you could drive straight but with a huge slice, so that if you had the range, you’d follow the curve of the fairway and be safe and close enough for a long chip to the green.
Anthony’s father approached golf, like cricket and everything else, with tireless purpose. On Saturday afternoons in the summer, Anthony and I would often go and watch him play cricket. He always had small, round, crumbly mints in his glove box, as he drove a lot for his job, and we helped ourselves. His dad was much older than most dads, and very fit. He died a few years ago at 87. He played club cricket until he was 70. He had been one of the Rats of Tobruk, during the long siege of British soldiers there in the Second World War.
Anthony and I used to run around at his house for hours on end, playing “chasings” with his younger, twin brothers Chris and Geoff, who are identical and apparently remain hard to tell apart, even now.
The four of us were involved together in such famous incidents as the Fat Daddy adventure. One day we lobbed tomatoes from two backyards away into the backyard of Fat Daddy, as we called a short, rotund gentleman who had recently arrived from Italy with his family including two large and fit-looking sons. The Fat Daddies were infamous, in the context of neat-and-trim Narrabundah, and Canberra as a whole, for taking the unimaginable (and, per city ordinances, illegal) step of planting not just their backyard but also their front yard with veggies. The horror! (They were clearly a rural family. One day I heard a terrible squawking coming from their yard, and looked over the fence to see Fat Mama wringing a chook’s neck and then cutting its tongue with a pair of scissors, to bleed it. Am I just imagining that she then hung it upside down on the Hills Rotary Hoist? (Virtually every Australian suburban home has one of these: a square rigging of clotheslines that sits horizontally on a pole and can be raised with a crank.) At least, Fat Mama seemed to be cutting its tongue, if chooks even have tongues. Maybe she was slitting its neck. In any case, the sight made me quite queasy.)
But as I was saying, there we were, squeezed between the Herridges’ fence and the shed of the family next to them, tossing tomatoes. The efforts of the other tomato-lobbers failing to have much success, I carefully aimed one, handgrenaded it, and it landed right on the face of Fat Daddy’s shovel as he lifted it to fling away dirt. The tomato hit the shovel with a resounding squish, and he immediately dropped the tool and headed to his front yard, clearly intent on retribution. We tore out from behind the shed and took off running, across Capt. Cook Crescent, into the stand of pines around one corner of Jerrabombera Oval. We saw Fat Daddy’s large sons, who must have been about 20, emerge from their house, and look around Anthony’s place for us. They were big, country boys who’d apparently grown up hefting sacks of potatoes and turnips, or goat carcasses.
They gave up, after a while, but we thought it wise to remain hidden for a couple of hours, until Anthony’s sister Claire came over and told us what a pack of cowards we were. Fine for her to say.
I crept home later on, taking a long route around Anthony’s block.

So, I had a nice chat with Anthony. His mum is 80, now, and something of a shut-in. She sees only Anthony or his siblings when they call, other than the meals-on-wheels people and the gardener who comes once in a while.
Coincidentally, while my mum was in hospital last week having the chemotherapy “port” inserted in her chest, Claire, who has been a nurse for over 30 years, popped in to say hi, having seen mum’s name on the register.
She’s on her fourth husband, apparently. As the daughter of her mother, and of her inspiring father, I doubt that she would tolerate clinging men, so I was not surprised to hear that statistic. (I remember that she provided my first-ever awareness of the issue of circumcision and penile health: while she was a nursing student, I heard her talking to her mother about how absurd the practice was, and how poorly based in health considerations. How right, I’ve always thought, she was.)
Anthony’s other, oldest sister Jenny suddenly turned out at the ANU to have amazing abilities in languages. She graduated top of the whole class of her graduating year, and got a lucrative fellowship to go to Indonesia with the Australian government.

Some more observations on the Australian swimming pool:
At a good number of the pools, it is striking to see how many old – and I mean, really old – people are swimming, or merely getting exercise in the water. Then there are the water aerobics classes, some of which are for the young-ish – almost all women – while others are for the geriatric set – I mean, even older than me, by three or four decades.
Then there are the droves of tiny schoolkids or young club swimmers who come in on most days, in huge numbers, and with countless instructors sending them in squadrons down the lanes, doing the crawl or breaststroke or even backstroke and butterfly. And many of the kids, only 7 or 8, are really good swimmers. It’s amazing to see some of the clubs practicing – they use three or four lanes, which look like a salmon run when each lane has several kids belting away in close formation.
Then, today at the Civic pool, Canberra’s first Olympic pool, swim clubs practiced. Teens, mostly girls, were belting up and down the 50-meter lanes at an incredible clip. I thought my backstroke was getting to be decent, but some slip of a teen zipped past me and then instantly returned doing the butterfly. I noticed underwater that that stroke, done properly, features an amazing undulating wave of the whole body, and again the propulsion made me realize how decrepit my strokes are. I still can’t manage to get quite all the way down the pool doing overarm. I almost suffocate, lose the rhythm of my breathing, and next presumably would be drowning. Backstroke is OK, and certainly breaststroke, but even then I have to pause at the end of almost every length. Today I was contemplating asking the 10-year-old boy in the adjacent lane to tell me what was wrong with my kick, which seems to be next to useless. My legs just drag along, and provide next to no forward momentum. Still, I’m definitely improving little by little. I seem to have the breaststroke rhythm down, and I am quite accomplished at floating down the pool on my back, recuperating.

I went to dinner with Brendan at a place call The Chairman and Yip - part of the new Chinese chic for Mao. There was a huge electrical storm and downpour – an inch in a couple of hours. Later we went to Brendan’s office at the Australian National University, a little way from the center of the city, which I attended from 1975-78. He is a professor of environmental science, and has become quite prominent. He has three or four research assistants, and works on natural resource issues using a lot of data obtained from NASA - amazing maps that show things like the density of vegetation in Australia over time; historic patterns of water flow over the whole continent; and so on.
I haven’t yet had the characteristic Canberra experience of being attacked by magpies. Every spring they protect their nests by bombarding anyone who comes within a couple hundred yards of their nests. The “maggies” aren’t the same as elsewhere in the world, but a larger species about the size of crows. They’re regal-looking and cold-blooded.

Just to show how close Australia can come to a police state, and how blithely, yesterday a mob of police stormed a two-person National Indigenous News to search for documents that several newspapers have been using to demonstrate that the federal government (whose Dept. of the Prime Minister and Cabinet orchestrated the raid) had lied when it said it had the absolute right to disband a national indigenous-affairs NGO and replace it with a body of its own. Needless to say, no raids seem likely on, say, the offices of Rupert Murdoch publications.
On the couple of occasions when I’ve been present at random breath tests of drivers, I’ve had a sense of the proximity of police-state elements here. You can be driving along a city street or country road, and suddenly all the cars are being diverted around the back to a large parking lot, or a side road, so that every driver can be tested. Then, as you proceed through the gantlet, they check your car for improprieties, such as broken or inoperative tail lights, and give you a ticket for any breaches of their precious laws. The breathalyzers are benign enough, taken in isolation, and considering the number of boozers on the roads (being caught brings quite severe penalties including suspension or loss of license), but the latter part of the procedure is creepy, and the whole practice strikes me as just a little too close to rehearsal for far more draconian measures.

My 10-year-old niece Jessica got back from an overnight class trip to the bush, where they stayed in some kind of bunkhouses and experienced the great outdoors (where it was pelting down rain). She said the menu was Roast Cow, Spuds, Rabbit Food, and Mud (i.e. gravy), then, for dessert (which she scoffed had been misspelled ‘desert’) Frog in Jelly (a small frog-shaped chocolate called a Freddo Frog, in jello).