They’ve taken away the convent where the Dutch nuns lived – the ones who tried their hardest to miseducate us all. They lived in the house from about 1961 to 1989, or so, when they gave up and went back to the Netherlands. In that time, they managed to recruit only two novices, and at least one of them was off her nutter – I know this, because I knew her. In fact, she may have been the strongest candidate, in my own overactive teenage mind, for my settling some early-life traumas induced by nuns by seducing one of them. Come to think of it, that’s still, however remotedly, my very occasional fantasy. Something about combining the desecration of a sacred vow of celibacy with unleashed and perhaps unrivaled passion. That, plus the adventure of workign with all that white linen and then skin completely untainted by the light of day.
Well, I guess it is just an idle fantasy, now as then, really. But this particular nun, who was only a few years older than I, was given to speaking in tongues, and generally was a happy space cadet, but quite an attractive thing, even in her swaddling and camouflaging habit and veil. I recall that on one occasion, she, my kindergarten teacher Sister Emmanuel, and I and one other youth from the short-lived church youth group went to a pentecostal gathering, to see what it was like, and she ended up delivering a long, ecstatic prayer of bliis and ecumenism, which clearly took the Jesus Jumpers aback.
I wonder if she went to Holland with the nuns.
But they’ve knocked down the convent, which had special significance to me, as I somehow was never able to beg out of being an altar boy there, at least a couple of times a week, at the very crack of dawn, at the masses they had in their own chapel every morning. This time of year, that chore was particularly onerous, as it meant walking down Capt. Cook Crescent, at the crack of dawn, the 400 yards to the convent, in the direct flight path of bombarding magpies. They have the habit of protecting their nests – or so they thought; in reality I had no intention, ever, of climbing 100 feet up a pine trees to swipe their babies. First thing in the morning, they were particularly deadly accurate on their bombing runs.
So, even before I arrived at the convent, I was already traumatized and fearful. And then I had to face the ignominy of being laughed at by the nuns, as I am sure I was. I was so nervous working with my back to them that I frequently dropped or spilled from the cruits of water and wine, and I couldn’t even manage the usual accomplished clear, crisp ring of the handbells. The nuns were quite keen on incense, too, so it’s a wonder I didn’t burn down their house.
But the most painful aspect of the services, for me, was particular moments of shame that occurred whenever I was there. I wish I could report that it was that several of the nuns winked at me, and that one or two of the younger, more comely ones took to luring me into the habit closet and ravishing me quickly with all manner of sacramental bliss. But, alas, it was nothing so pleasant to later recall. It was simply that genuflecting, and even kneeling, tended to make me fart volubly, and on several occasions I am sure I heard a nun or two snickering from their pews. Nothing could prevent the escape, perhaps again due to the earliness of the hour. How was I to know, then, that such venting is only natural and healthy upon rising.
Now the convent is gone. Condos or a twilight home replace it.
What, no haka?
I’m watching the start of the blockbuster Australia v New Zealand 2nd netball test match, on telly. I guess only the Kiwi blokes do the terrifying war cry.
Netball is one of the most popular sports in both countries, in terms of participation, which is female, only, after about age 10. Before that, a few little boys play before they get the shit kicked out of them by the yobos for being pansies, which they probably are, lord bless em.
Netball is a variant of basketball in which each team has 6 players, but only 5 can be in the front two-thirds of the court, and only two can enter into a 15-foot scoring arc. Only two defenders can be inside the arc, too, and they can’t jump to defend a shot, nor come within about a yard of the shooter. The hoop is just a hoop, no backboard. In open-field play, you can’t take more than one step, and you can’t dribble at all.
The two umpies look frightfully like your worst recollection of a woman gym teacher, in white blouse and pleated skirt. The players wear skirts too, with matching knickers that are featured every time they get flattened to the floor by incidental contact. (The Kiwis, to their credit, wear black bodysuit-style outfits, with snug skirts that don’t flounce around like it’s still the 1930s.) Contact isn’t permitted, but it happens all the time, aided by the fact that the penalties that result don’t mean anything but a stoppage and possession to the fouled-against team.
Australia won the first test, in Sydney, in front of a record crowd for a women’s event in Australia, 14,000 people. This, even though the Kiwis are aided by a forward who is about 6’3” and, within the very narrow limitations of the game, a thug.
The game doesn’t have any of the lesbian-sisterhood feel of women’s basketball in the US. (It’s more a big, broadshouldered-gal kind of deal; lovely.) Nor, I notice, does Australian women’s soccer - on the other channel there’s an Australia-Thailand women’s game, in which the Australians are whoopin their opponents.
This morning I attended the painfully long musical-theater presentation by the kindergarten-through-6th grade students at my sister’s kids’ school. It’s a Catholic school of 530 students, demonstrating that there’s no danger, alas, of Catholicism dying out in the coming few decades.
The show was billed as St. Anthony’s on Broadway. I imagine it was not much different from a billion other school presentations – they would all make me happier never to have become a teacher.
The selections were from Mary Poppins, Oliver!, and Grease, with an additional hommage to Australian native son Peter Allen, whose most famous song here was the emetic “I Still Call Australia Home.”
The whole event, in fact, was a tribute less to him than to Milli Vanilli – the whole thing was quasi-lip-synched to original soundtracks, played louder than the voices of the few students who bothered to sing at all.
It was three hours long, and hardly worth spending more time on. But some of its notable features were:
- With no hint of a sense of why it might be inappropriate, a child-as-Peter Allen appeared in blackface, which is how the real Allen appeared when he won a talent show in Australia early in his career.
- A zillion pre-school-age kids were in attendance watching their big sisters and brothers, plus parents and grandparents.
- There was excessive recourse to a dust machine, which was used because last year, at the school’s ballet recital, they opted for a smoke machine that set off all the smoke alarms, and then the fire brigade arrived in force, and the audience had to leave the hall
- The school has apparently been listening sympathetically to the Howard government’s recent call for increased jingoism in schools (little Johnnie wants the national anthem played each day, and the flag flown). The Peter Allen, and the Grease (originally with Olivia Newton-John) were chosen for their Australian connections; there was the obligatory rendition of “Waltzing Matilda,” and at one point a hundred or more of the kids were given small Australian flags to wave. Vomit.
- Only one, perhaps two, passably dishy mums
Tonight I’m going to dinner with Dinah W, my first great love, at 15, who I always thought stood me up on my first-ever date, although I suspect that she never perceived it as a date, and so was unaware of why I was so mortified to see her, later that evening, under the arm of one of my classmates. I was, at the time I saw her, waiting for the last #29 bus home, 11:10pm, from Northbourne Avenue in the center of Canberra. A very dismal day. Then I got to know her platonically the next year, again, as we attended the St. Benedict’s youth group, which was initiated by my kindergarten teacher, Sister Emmanuel, who was very tall and very kind, not at all suited to keeping company with those other harridans. Dinah’s brother Richard was a friend of mine at school. He wasn’t there for long, because his father was a diplomat, and they spent time in Japan. Richard was a character, effortlessly subversive and idiosyncratic. After school he joined the merchant marine, but eventually had to quit because he contracted a severe, prolonged case of seasickness - months and months on end.
Their mum has severe Alzheimer’s disease, which is why Dinah is back in town. I spoke to her on the phone last night, and she sounds quite the same, which is weird. As I say, I was quite smitten by her in my mid-teens, so we shall see how sentiments go, now. She told me earlier that she had omitted to get married, or have kids. Well, we have that in common.
Well, I guess it is just an idle fantasy, now as then, really. But this particular nun, who was only a few years older than I, was given to speaking in tongues, and generally was a happy space cadet, but quite an attractive thing, even in her swaddling and camouflaging habit and veil. I recall that on one occasion, she, my kindergarten teacher Sister Emmanuel, and I and one other youth from the short-lived church youth group went to a pentecostal gathering, to see what it was like, and she ended up delivering a long, ecstatic prayer of bliis and ecumenism, which clearly took the Jesus Jumpers aback.
I wonder if she went to Holland with the nuns.
But they’ve knocked down the convent, which had special significance to me, as I somehow was never able to beg out of being an altar boy there, at least a couple of times a week, at the very crack of dawn, at the masses they had in their own chapel every morning. This time of year, that chore was particularly onerous, as it meant walking down Capt. Cook Crescent, at the crack of dawn, the 400 yards to the convent, in the direct flight path of bombarding magpies. They have the habit of protecting their nests – or so they thought; in reality I had no intention, ever, of climbing 100 feet up a pine trees to swipe their babies. First thing in the morning, they were particularly deadly accurate on their bombing runs.
So, even before I arrived at the convent, I was already traumatized and fearful. And then I had to face the ignominy of being laughed at by the nuns, as I am sure I was. I was so nervous working with my back to them that I frequently dropped or spilled from the cruits of water and wine, and I couldn’t even manage the usual accomplished clear, crisp ring of the handbells. The nuns were quite keen on incense, too, so it’s a wonder I didn’t burn down their house.
But the most painful aspect of the services, for me, was particular moments of shame that occurred whenever I was there. I wish I could report that it was that several of the nuns winked at me, and that one or two of the younger, more comely ones took to luring me into the habit closet and ravishing me quickly with all manner of sacramental bliss. But, alas, it was nothing so pleasant to later recall. It was simply that genuflecting, and even kneeling, tended to make me fart volubly, and on several occasions I am sure I heard a nun or two snickering from their pews. Nothing could prevent the escape, perhaps again due to the earliness of the hour. How was I to know, then, that such venting is only natural and healthy upon rising.
Now the convent is gone. Condos or a twilight home replace it.
What, no haka?
I’m watching the start of the blockbuster Australia v New Zealand 2nd netball test match, on telly. I guess only the Kiwi blokes do the terrifying war cry.
Netball is one of the most popular sports in both countries, in terms of participation, which is female, only, after about age 10. Before that, a few little boys play before they get the shit kicked out of them by the yobos for being pansies, which they probably are, lord bless em.
Netball is a variant of basketball in which each team has 6 players, but only 5 can be in the front two-thirds of the court, and only two can enter into a 15-foot scoring arc. Only two defenders can be inside the arc, too, and they can’t jump to defend a shot, nor come within about a yard of the shooter. The hoop is just a hoop, no backboard. In open-field play, you can’t take more than one step, and you can’t dribble at all.
The two umpies look frightfully like your worst recollection of a woman gym teacher, in white blouse and pleated skirt. The players wear skirts too, with matching knickers that are featured every time they get flattened to the floor by incidental contact. (The Kiwis, to their credit, wear black bodysuit-style outfits, with snug skirts that don’t flounce around like it’s still the 1930s.) Contact isn’t permitted, but it happens all the time, aided by the fact that the penalties that result don’t mean anything but a stoppage and possession to the fouled-against team.
Australia won the first test, in Sydney, in front of a record crowd for a women’s event in Australia, 14,000 people. This, even though the Kiwis are aided by a forward who is about 6’3” and, within the very narrow limitations of the game, a thug.
The game doesn’t have any of the lesbian-sisterhood feel of women’s basketball in the US. (It’s more a big, broadshouldered-gal kind of deal; lovely.) Nor, I notice, does Australian women’s soccer - on the other channel there’s an Australia-Thailand women’s game, in which the Australians are whoopin their opponents.
This morning I attended the painfully long musical-theater presentation by the kindergarten-through-6th grade students at my sister’s kids’ school. It’s a Catholic school of 530 students, demonstrating that there’s no danger, alas, of Catholicism dying out in the coming few decades.
The show was billed as St. Anthony’s on Broadway. I imagine it was not much different from a billion other school presentations – they would all make me happier never to have become a teacher.
The selections were from Mary Poppins, Oliver!, and Grease, with an additional hommage to Australian native son Peter Allen, whose most famous song here was the emetic “I Still Call Australia Home.”
The whole event, in fact, was a tribute less to him than to Milli Vanilli – the whole thing was quasi-lip-synched to original soundtracks, played louder than the voices of the few students who bothered to sing at all.
It was three hours long, and hardly worth spending more time on. But some of its notable features were:
- With no hint of a sense of why it might be inappropriate, a child-as-Peter Allen appeared in blackface, which is how the real Allen appeared when he won a talent show in Australia early in his career.
- A zillion pre-school-age kids were in attendance watching their big sisters and brothers, plus parents and grandparents.
- There was excessive recourse to a dust machine, which was used because last year, at the school’s ballet recital, they opted for a smoke machine that set off all the smoke alarms, and then the fire brigade arrived in force, and the audience had to leave the hall
- The school has apparently been listening sympathetically to the Howard government’s recent call for increased jingoism in schools (little Johnnie wants the national anthem played each day, and the flag flown). The Peter Allen, and the Grease (originally with Olivia Newton-John) were chosen for their Australian connections; there was the obligatory rendition of “Waltzing Matilda,” and at one point a hundred or more of the kids were given small Australian flags to wave. Vomit.
- Only one, perhaps two, passably dishy mums
Tonight I’m going to dinner with Dinah W, my first great love, at 15, who I always thought stood me up on my first-ever date, although I suspect that she never perceived it as a date, and so was unaware of why I was so mortified to see her, later that evening, under the arm of one of my classmates. I was, at the time I saw her, waiting for the last #29 bus home, 11:10pm, from Northbourne Avenue in the center of Canberra. A very dismal day. Then I got to know her platonically the next year, again, as we attended the St. Benedict’s youth group, which was initiated by my kindergarten teacher, Sister Emmanuel, who was very tall and very kind, not at all suited to keeping company with those other harridans. Dinah’s brother Richard was a friend of mine at school. He wasn’t there for long, because his father was a diplomat, and they spent time in Japan. Richard was a character, effortlessly subversive and idiosyncratic. After school he joined the merchant marine, but eventually had to quit because he contracted a severe, prolonged case of seasickness - months and months on end.
Their mum has severe Alzheimer’s disease, which is why Dinah is back in town. I spoke to her on the phone last night, and she sounds quite the same, which is weird. As I say, I was quite smitten by her in my mid-teens, so we shall see how sentiments go, now. She told me earlier that she had omitted to get married, or have kids. Well, we have that in common.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home