It has been a long time since I last wrote and I am surprised at how very different and uncertain things seem now, what with the dregs of Covid and Putin. Anyway after our long hibernation and masked expeditions life seems to be starting up again and so I’ll write.
I am on day twenty one of giving away alcohol. I was feeling lousy and went to the doctor who ordered blood tests and when he read the liver function one said solemnly - no booze for a month. I knew I’d been drinking too much, maybe partly due to the dreariness of these Covid times – at least a bottle of wine a day plus a delightful little cook’s drop while I made dinner and perhaps a little something with television and then oblivion till next day. Actually giving it up has been sad rather than agonizing. In the beginning I couldn’t sleep but that wasn’t a drama. I wasn’t working and quite like the quiet of the deep night. I replaced the cook’s drop with Hot and Spicy V8 with extra tabasco and lemon and that sort of worked. Dinner with Grant, however, became rather monochrome. No tipsy squabbles about this and that philosophical point, no maudlin reminiscing. A rather quick adjournment to television’s offerings. At least I got to see the end of the thrillers which I had to ask G about before.
Anyway we both went down to the our south coast place to oversee a termite eradication and meet up with son number three and his wife and little baby Yay. Alcohol nagged me a bit there. Durras used to be Liberty Hall. ‘What happens in Durras stays in Durras’ was our motto. Now there’s nothing that needs to stay. After the termite business was concluded (at least we hoped so), Fredi had a fancy to comb through Vinnies (a charity shop) and I needed more Tabasco so Grant and I set off with her and little Yay in her car for Batemans Bay. Having bought what we needed we sternly decided to get some exercise. (Not so long ago exercise just happened but the reclusive habits of the pandemic has made it a thing to decide on, it seems). We walked grimly to the Water Gardens, a little known feature of the Bay.
On a grey day the Water Gardens are not uplifting. The first thing we saw was a shopping cart poking out of the water amongst the ducks. The reeds are rampant and look as if they want to conquer the world. There is almost nobody there – just a disconsolate looking teenage girl sitting on a far away bench. But there is a fine boardwalk over the swamp which we all stepped on to. After a bit I felt the need for a loo and told the others and said I’d catch them up."‘Go to the RSL (Returned Soldiers Club)” said G imperiously. “They’ll have one”. Actually I didn’t need to go that far. The curator of the nearby local museum was just shutting up and perhaps because she was about my age she empathized with my need and opened up the museum again and escorted me past the intriguing exhibits to the Ladies. I proffered my intensely felt thanks and set off back for the boardwalk. Despite circumnavigating the swamp I could not find the others and cursed my careless ways with my mobile. I passed the lone teenager on the bench and asked her if she’d seen Grant and Fredi plus baby. No, she said, I’m just waiting for my mum but what’s your name and I’ll tell them I saw you. ‘Tell them I’m going back to the car.’ I said.
I did the fifteen minute walkback to the car park briskly thinking there’s no way I could’ve done it three weeks ago. I hailed a silver haired figure who looked as if he was Grant pushing a stroller (maybe Fredi had needed a loo too) but realized on getting closer it was an old lady pushing her walker. I thought of the three jovial huntsmen who saw the moon
The first he said it was the moon,
The second he said nay
The third he said it was a pincushion with the pins stuck in wrong way
I was comforted by the fact that others had made mistakes before me and all phenomena were open to interpretation and nothing wrong with that after all.
I had fed the Bingo call, Legs Eleven into my memory when we left the carpark but there was a whole row of cars in row eleven and I did not remember what Fredi’s looked like – not even the colour. I began inspecting each car until a woman said “Are you all right” “oh yes” I said, explaining the situation. Then she said “I don’t like leaving you like this” as she drove off which did nothing for my self esteem. I did identify the car in the end by the ACT number plate and a baby seat and a striped bag of shopping just visible through the dark glass but I didn’t fancy to hanging about. The carpark was much more dreary than the Water Gardens, so I cleverly wrote a note on the back of an envelope FIND ME ON THE BENCH OUTSIDE THE COFFEE CLUB, put it behind the windscreen wiper and went up the escalator to wait on the said bench.
But there was already someone on the bench – a guy of indeterminate age, apparently rather drunk. He’d got a shopping trolley to add authenticity to his identity as a shopper but clearly wanted to be left alone to doze and drink. I’d happily have let him do that except I had to be on the bench in order to be found by Grant and Fredi. I apologized for joining him and explained my problem. After that a little conversation seemed in order. There was the weather (horrible) and an exchange of names (his was Paul) and then he sipped from his coke bottle again and dozed off. I got restless after a bit and when he was alert again I told him I was going to check on the car and could he possibly look out for a man with a big white beard and a woman with green hair pushing a stroller. As I spoke I realized how hallucinatory the image was, and hoped he could handle it. But he said yes, he’d keep an eye open. I went back to the car and perched on the bonnet and tried to write a poem about the carpark on the back of a prescription. After what seemed an age Grant, Fredi and Yay returned but in a panic. Fredi had left her backpack at the RSL where they had erroneously been waiting for me.
So Fredi hastened back to the RSL and G and I went up the escalator again. I took little Yay, (who must be the most bewitching baby in New South Wales), with me to tell Paul that all was well at last. Yay smiled at him (as he does to everyone) and Paul laughed and put his big brown hand on Yay’s little foot. Suddenly he said “But where’s the mother?” I decided against explaining this last complication.
As he decanted more alcohol into his coke bottle I asked, with some nostalgia, what he was drinking. Port, he said and I began telling him how I’d stopped drinking and how hard it was, but he’d drifted off again. When Grant came however, I introduced them and he rose to shake Grant’s hand. Fredi returned triumphant with her rucksack and we drove the fifteen K home, me thinking all the way of the tolerance and kindness of all the strangers that I had crossed paths with that day and what a joy for people not to be masked and impervious any more.
I want to write about a dream next. I know dreams are usually a bore but this one is relevant, I think to the last bit of today’s blog.
I was the only old lady in a group of amateur actors who had just finished a rather good performance. They all seemed diminished and underblown now they were off stage. A young man came up to me out of the group and said “I could ask you to come home with me to share a bottle of wine and I could also ask you to stay for breakfast. I said “Breakfast sounds lovely but you must see that I’m in my seventies” “No problem” he said and he cupped my face in his hands. The next thing I remember is the sex which was unlike any that I’d had with other partners. It was gentle and warm and intertwining and turbulent and sort of transcendental like a good meditation session. We seemed to lose our boundaries. There was sparkling and an overwhelmingly sense of gratitude that bloomed into the night.
The breakfast was good too. I remember the pleasantness of boiled eggs and smashed avocado toast with freshly ground pepper. And then like all dreams it faded away.
Quite recently, and I think before the dream, Grant and I went to a movie that made me angry. It was a sneak preview with free glasses of wine which I managed to pass by but which continued to tempt me through the trailers. The film was ‘Cyrano’, based on an old story of a Count who was brave and poetic but, because he had a huge nose, felt diffident about courting his true love, beautiful childhood friend Roxanne. When she tells him she’s in love with a soldier, handsome but unpoetic and stupid, in a spirit of service to the unattainable Roxanne he colludes with the young fool and writes his love letters for him. It all ends in tears of course.
Now for some reason the director of the modern film chose to substitute the big nose problem for dwarfism and cast the very good dwarf actor Peter Dinklage in the role of Cyrano. This could have been a really interesting thing to do if the director had bitten the bullet of the real possibility of sexual attraction between Cyrano as he was, and the beautiful Roxanne. He could have chosen to have electricity at their trysts even whilst Roxanne was entertaining her delusions about her soldier boy but instead she and Cyrano patter blandly through the film and the deathbed kisses smack of pity rather than passion. It would have been daring and difficult to have Cyrano and Roxanne as latent lovers but not to do so just turns this film into one more nail in the coffin of the bid of all those people with variations on the accepted physical norm to be seen as whole human beings. While I recognize that a seventy six year old woman having a marvellous one night stand (with breakfast too) is the stuff of dreams – well I have had a full life already but so many other people with physical variations haven’t and it’s right to accept and celebrate their wants rather than fudge their existence as this silly film did.
But all in all there’s much to rejoice in after the sequestered winter of Covid and it’s such fun to be out and about. Even though I’m looking forward to Day 30 and the rattle of red into a glass, abstinence has not been too bad. Mind you its only Day 21 today.
