The river flows on like a breath.*

Posted on April 17, 2021 by RosieL

So. I was going to read my book and then I thought why don’t I do a blog post? I set up the laptop and got into the position – the one where my fingers are poised to type and I am full of concentration and the topic is about to come, or at the very least some words.

Nothing happens, nothing moves or shifts or pours forth or bumps along. So perhaps, I thought, I needed to warm up a little, and found myself waylaid by my family history explorations. And then -*ding* – the computer, as if it’s aware of my struggling, went funny and gave me no choice but to restart. And somehow, when the restart completes itself I am in YouTube, completely forgetting what my intentions might have been.

Recently I saw a news’ segment on the crisis at the United States / Mexico border. People trying to get across to America, people believing they would now – finally, finally – be made welcome. They have packed up the spaces they have been waiting in; often squashed, often tiny rooms full of people and their few measly possessions. Waiting for the word, waiting to set out upon the pathway to the promised land. Because still, in spite of everything, that’s what America is for so very many people.

“The flow of migrants surges,” I read in an Aljazeera post, “Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala have agreed to deploy troops to their borders to slow the movement of migrants trying to get into the United States………The US Border Patrol is struggling with an increase in the numbers of people trying to cross the southwest US border because of violence, poverty, natural disasters and a lack of access to food in Central America and Mexico.” In the film clip I saw people being sent back, people being ushered forward, children often on their own. Hopes dashed, expectations lifted. The sorrow and devastation of rejection. The dreams of those ushered across that mythical borderline.

On YouTube, I watched Bob Dylan’s Farm Aid Concert version of Ry Cooder’s Borderline. The lyrics have stayed on my mind ever since. It’s not a fast and furious version. It’s simple, and sad, as if it knows now it changes nothing. In the 34 years we’ve had to listen to this song has the story, told this way, helped us understand? Have things changed at the borderlines?

And just before I go I’ll add that I’m not just talking about American borders here. Countries the world over are dealing with the massive tragedy of refugees and asylum seekers. They come from a hell. Too many times they get another version of it when they might be thinking they’ve arrived in a heaven. My country – an island – has been lead by governments which have been, and still are, barbaric in their treatment of refugees. You arrive by boat? You’re not allowed in. Instead, you’ll be jailed (but, as if you were still at school, we often call these jails detention centres) off-shore, endlessly.

It’s ugly sometimes, this life.

‘And when it’s time to take your turn
Here’s one lesson that you must learn
You could lose more than you’ll ever hope to find’ *

*Ry Cooder, Borderline, 1987

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Yes, it wearies us.

Posted on April 2, 2021 by RosieL

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If you’ve read only a few of my posts, you’ll have realised my obsessions. Even the ones I’m ashamed of. I dwell on family and health and broken bones and friendships and ageing and dying, amongst other things. Oh, yes. And hair. I find I write quite a lot about hair and that is a humiliating thing to discover.

I spent a day this week with an old friend of mine. She ticks many of my boxes. We go back decades to when our children were so small we didn’t fully know who they were yet. Now, they have made us grandparents. We are teetering at the brink of no more hair dyes, and we would both have made the transition if only I hadn’t fallen over just before I reached the finish line. We have seen each other through family illnesses and deaths, as well as our own incidents and accidents, And we are, in spite of our best efforts, growing old.

I leap into thinking endgame, but really it’s autumn. The ages we are we once considered old, but now, not so much.

But we see the wrinkles and lines in the mirror. We are stiff if we sit too long in the same position and when we rise in the morning. People – mainly our families but there are others – nag us about ladders and wet floors and climbing on chairs and walking on slopes. We wear shoes that are comfortable, not stiletto heeled with flash and sparkle. People in shops and out and about chat and smile at us for the most part, and are extremely helpful if we ask directions.

We chatted about all these things the other day. She drove, I asked directions out the window when we were having trouble finding our cafe. We found an excellent car park and she reminded me that when she gets her knee done, she’ll get a disabled parking sticker. We both somehow didn’t see the parking meter set-up. It only occurred to us as we strolled back much later and saw a parking inspector. We had lunch, a walk during which a woman offered to take our photo, sat in the sun looking at the water, walked to another cafe for cake and coffee, then sat on wooden seats at the little beach, watching everything and talking about everything.

Who knew we would reach this stage of our lives? Our words flowed around each of our grandchildren and the joy they bring, our children, their partners and lives, her husband, old friends we’ve shared, family members we know, our mothers, our doctors, the football, our hairdressers (of course), our funerals, continence and lack thereof, eating, and or not eating, meat.

Oh, yes, we talked and talked. And we laughed, too. Sometimes quietly chuckling, sometimes almost raucously, sometimes until there were tears.

And when the afternoon was late, we rose gently, un-stiffened ourselves, stretched a little, and found the pathway with the least steps back to the car.

Two old Nannas.

Out for one of those great-to-be-alive days.

Posted in aging, beach, family, friendship, grandchildren, grandmothers, growing old, hair, health, humor, life, sisters | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Insta.

Posted on March 7, 2021 by RosieL

I’ve been trying to help a friend of mine with Instagram via the good old-fashioned method of phone.conversations and texts. Not just the how to, but the why to as well. Someone suggested to her it would be a useful tool for an enterprise she’s involved with. She doesn’t get it. Basically, she wonders what’s the point? I texted her some people and organisations to search for as a way to help her. At the time of writing, apart from acknowledging receipt of my well intentioned efforts, I haven’t heard back. This suggests to me that she hasn’t had a light-bulb moment.

Late this afternoon I had a brief look at my own Instagram feed, something I do several times a day. I scrolled down without much thought or connection until I came upon a vase of flowers posted by a former workmate of mine. We are friendly, but we have been out of touch for a while. We connect these days via our social media accounts. A like here, a comment there. She is much better at it than me. Perhaps because she has not been as immersed in her fabulous crafting as she once was. Her talents have not been on display.

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Having cancer has distracted her.

And here she was thanking people for all the beautiful flowers. And for the support.

Her lung cancer – and before you judge no, she’s never been a smoker – has not attended to treatments. Instead it has grown and spread to her liver and her brain, She’s reached the bit where there are no options. She writes of her “remaining days” and says, most remarkably, “I don’t mind too much. Am at home, comfortable and not in pain and have laughed and cried with all my important people….”

I read her message over and over as I buzz around doing useless things busily. I think of her beautifully crafted message, of where she’s been taken before arriving at this point. Her courage, her acceptance, her no doubt relief that she is not in pain. She’s at home, she’s comfortable. She’s waiting.

Because I am not at all good with my hands, she made a gorgeous pair or red booties for me to give my grandson the Christmas before his birth. I mentioned them in the message I finally put together in response to hers. On Instagram I thanked her and farewelled her and told her those boots would be back in action in a little while.

I agonised over every word. But there were so many messages, so many words already I don’t think I needed to be perfect. She knows I’m not. I hope she knows we all mean well.

Dylan Thomas’ rallying cry won’t do at all here. Instead, this: May she go gently into that good night, her most loved people with her, her dearly loved flowers in abundance.

What a tool, what a conduit Instagram can be.

Who knew?

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Snow white or rose red.

Posted on October 9, 2020 by RosieL

Yes, the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. Even if I just type the one word, pandemic, there’s enough evidence for the pessimism, the foreboding, the fuzzy unknown future. Add to your basket if you need more proof. You’re spoiled for choice.

And yet, somehow in the enormity of the situation, there’s room for the small stuff. Sweat away, it will keep you sane.

That’s my excuse, anyway, for the amount of time and conversation I’m wasting on the subject of my hair. To be precise, the question is should I stay grey haired – well, for the most part white now – or should I reach for the dye pot again?

I started the process of shedding the colour before Christmas. I had skin problems, scalp included. I was sick of the rigmarole of regular colouring. I wanted to see what my natural colour would look like. (But I was overdue for a colour, or, in the language of the procedure, to get my roots done. I had some idea.)

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So the hairdresser chopped and chopped and I came away with short short hair, quite snowy in parts but grey at the back, with streaks of the old colour to lighten the load. My grandson was dining at the big boy table when I came into the kitchen. He looked up and stared, his spoon staying somewhere between his bowl and his mouth.

On Christmas Day my auntie was thrilled with my do, perhaps more because she was a fan of short hair. In her early nineties by then, and celebrating what would be her last Christmas with us, she kept up a regular weekly appointment with her hairdresser. Colour maintenance was included.

My mother’s uncle had white hair by the time he was in his early twenties, earning him the nickname Snowy. She never tampered with the colour of her hair, claiming the relatively early greying was a consequence of becoming a widow before she was 40.

It is not necessarily a sign of old age when you lose your natural hair colour. It just feels like it is. A tangled web is constructed between youth and aging and acceptance and denial and, you know, making an effort. I’ve hardly seen a friend or family member for months with the lock-down. My vanity has not really been challenged; I haven’t yet said a final “It’s time”.

At a family funeral somebody asked my brother about me and he said, oh she’s here, I just can’t remember what colour her hair is this week. Which was a stinging remark, seeing as how he was colourblind. At that same funeral a male relative arrived with a new shock of red hair on top of his head, and we were scandalised. We dye pot women had little tolerance for men who did the same thing. Embarrassingly unfair but true.

My sister from the North was visiting once and my mother remarked to her that it was a strange thing that she and my brother were so grey and her other two “girls” (quotation marks mine) didn’t have a grey hair on them. My sister told us she explained to Mum about our dependence on false colours.

I left school with long, gleaming, all natural hair. I know because one of my sisters took a photograph of me in our backyard. The next day, another photo in the same spot and I’m cut and coloured.

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It had begun.

And now, because of COVID and lock downs, I haven’t done anything with my hair all year.Or, perhaps it’s fairer to say, I haven’t had a hairdresser do anything to my hair. My daughter’s become a dab hand with the clippers. I sit in the bathroom while she buzzes away.

Every now and then I catch a glimpse of myself unexpectedly and I startle. Oh yes, I’m that person now. Then I see an image of someone – older, ahem – with amazingly vibrant and obviously coloured hair and I wonder, could I do that? Those colours, now? That shouting? A friend of mine’s daughter posts herself on Instagram wearing a bright blue wig. I find my envy a surprise. A grey haired woman I know sees me and launches into a discussion on giving up colour. At a medical appointment I’m asked about my hair. Where’s the colour gone, because it looks fine, but a bit, um, just bland.

I’m marking time. Deciding.

Respecting the fact that it obviously takes a village to decide hair colour when you’ve woken up an old lady.

Posted in aging, appearances, coronavirus, covid 19, hair, lock down, pandemic | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Waiting, waiting.

Posted on September 24, 2020 by RosieL
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The months have drifted by like a stopped clock. You know what I mean? It just needs batteries but it’s too high to reach. You take days to train yourself not to look at it when you need the time. But when you do look at it, you do a double take after you’ve registered the information. You say, or think, Is that the time? And whether you think you’re running early or late, you are, for the moment, bewildered.

And so it is in this lock down, to allow for COVID19 to stop the rampaging. How many times have how many people, over the past few months, exclaimed, bemoaned, shouted, bellowed, cried, whispered, or just plain said, Is it only Monday today?

When the norms go out the window (before it is boarded up), it’s hard work figuring out those most simple things, like time, day, date. When there isn’t a work place or school to leave home for, much less a meeting or a lunch or even a morning coffee catch up, we flounder more than a little. Holiday? Yes, that was supposed to be two, wait, no, three months ago.

And add to the mix that there’s been a curfew in the big smoke, with a time to be home like you might issue to a partying teenager. Even in the day time, pictures emerge of empty streets and footpaths. Someone told me recently that as part of her you-can-travel-5kms-from-home destinations, she could reach a trendy, inner-city spot. There were plenty of car-parks there, she said, because everything was closed.

The playgrounds have opened up. Children no longer have to consider that the slides and swings and see-saws are covered with germs. Trust me, says a significant adult, they’re not. Maybe, maybe, swimming pools will follow this lead. And perhaps libraries and schools and most of the shops and cinemas and hairdressers and churches and childcare centres and train rides and merry-go-rounds and, and, and. Then all the guests can go to the wedding and the party and all the mourners to the funeral.

Imagine that.

We’ll probably be removing our masks to eat Christmas dinner, but even so.

Now I’ve cheated a little giving this sorry report. I don’t live in the city, I’m classed as a rural soul. This means things are a bit easier in this neck of the woods, a bit more flexible. We have a lower rate of infection where I come from. We haven’t got the freedom keys yet, but as far as our city dwellers go, we should be dancing in the street. I’m not sure that’s allowed yet, but it’s a fine sentiment.

But the trouble is, when will it be safe to throw masks out the windows (the boards having been removed)? When will it be safe to flock, yes flock, in the streets, laughing and hugging and for the sake of my rhythm here, dancing?

Does COVID19 accept and acknowledge defeat and then take itself away, perhaps to the middle of the ocean where the winds will split and pummel it? Or does it lurk in the shadows, rebuilding, regrouping, re-arming, building a new Trojan horse? Do the people it infected rise up from their beds and embrace their recovered health? Can we at least hold funerals for those whose lives the virus wrenched away?

The new normal waits for us all, and we for it.

Let’s hope the worst is over now.

But wait, nobody’s promising anything.

Ummm, have you heard anything?

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Catch me if you can.

Posted on August 16, 2020 by RosieL

And so the world turned some more.

COVID19 turned too. Wriggled a bit, stretched, and perhaps was heard to say, “Run, run, run as fast as you can, you’ll never catch me….” *

And across our state, the numbers increased alarmingly. This many new cases, this many hospitalised, this many deaths. But we were winning! We were, I remember it well.

And now we’re in lock down again. In the city, it’s most severe, there’s even a curfew. But it’s hard on us all. Doable, but tough. Families and friends can’t gather, workers are stood down, celebrations are cancelled, schools are closed. Go outside your front gate, make sure you’re wearing a mask. You learn to breathe through it, you learn ways to stop your glasses fogging up. It becomes an everyday thing, shopping, walking, exercising, among the masked.

We are in this together.

Compared to so many countries, we are so lucky.

This too shall pass.

Etcetera.

I know all these things and more and yet I still have a sooky sentence wanting to burst out of me.

I want to go somewhere.

Just somewhere that requires a little bit of planning and a little bit of travelling. What you could call, these days, an expedition. But, you know, a day trip would be just fine. It would be nice if the journey had a purpose, a highlight. Say, meeting up with some beloved family and/or friends. For a coffee or two. Or maybe, possibly, lunch.

No masks, no social distancing, lots of hugs.

It seems like it will be a long time before this will be possible. Well, possible without the running commentary of fear. How will we know when it’s safe for us to at least resume some sense of our previous lives?

When I was talking -by phone- with a friend of mine the other day we found ourselves agreeing that most of the anxiety we experience going out into the world is probably due to the simple question somewhere within us: “Will it be today?” Is today the day masks, hand scouring, disinfecting, distancing, sanitising will let us down? Will we succumb, will we unwittingly bring the virus into our body, then into our home? Will we, could we, pass it on?

Are we simply filling in time, waiting our turn?

Once, when I was very small, I had a dream of such terror I cried and cried at bedtime the following night. I told my father I didn’t want to go to sleep because I would have the same dream again. And my father said no, no, that’s not how it worked. He promised me, promised me, that you never had the same dream twice. And upon that promise, I slept.

I am no longer of a generation that expects such reassurance or comfort. I think instead that I’m still supposed to give it. But I’m a bit lost myself at the moment, so you’ll just have to bear with me until I rally. Until I come back to myself, assuming I can.

And when I do, we’ll play chasey. We’ll be strong and fearless and confident. We’ll run, run, run as fast as we can, together.

Daring to be caught.

*The Gingerbread Man, Copyright 2005, Shauna Tominey.

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Buckets of rain, buckets of tears.

Posted on July 12, 2020 by RosieL
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I went to my friend’s funeral. It was a long journey, full of rain. I carried a dog scuffle injury. There were so many familiar faces there. Words were spoken, stories told, pictures shown. Laughs, tears, lemon slice, memories of the place it was.The time it was.

If my uncle were there, I can imagine him saying “Anyway, we gave her a good send-off.”  If he himself wasn’t dead. If he had known her.

My friend J. died.

We hadn’t been in touch for a while. Last time I saw her she drove across to my place, phoning me about every 10 minutes to get directions,  Drinking tea with me when she finally arrived she was positively scathing about certain persons suggesting she might have Alzheimer’s.

She did, of course & god dammit, have it. Alzheimer’s. The disease that takes you away while you’re still here, the same but different. She wasn’t at home when she died, but was in the company of her treasured daughter.

Back in the day we were neighbours. I volunteered and she had a paying job at the same organisation. She had a little schoolgirl and I a toddler. She took to visiting me in the years we were a corner away from each other. Sometimes she’d bring her daughter, always, her dog. The dog would power down the passage from the front door and, depending on the season, find itself the coolest or warmest spot to curl up on in my living room.

Once, when I had a bit of a broken heart J. scooped me up for a trip to the gardens on the edge of the city. There were brides and grooms being photographed as far as the eye could see. “Look at them,” she had a theatrical screech in her voice. “Poor suckers!” I think that was the moment I learned that mortification can’t kill you.Another time, with another friend, she organised a surprise trip to the opera for my birthday. It was about time I showed up, she said in a very polite way.

We talked about anything and everything. The pace was ours, as we slowly peeled back the layers of the other, learning about lives already lived and selves we had been. J. was more political than I in the beginning, and, maybe, always. She never let a day go by without reading the newspaper of choice for the discerning activist. “It’s like an old friend,” she would say. I tried to catch up.

We lived further apart but still in the same suburb. We still visited, met while we were out and about or at someone’s party. J. loved a party, especially one of her own. In the end, we knew a lot of the same people. I moved out to try life in a country town as gentrification rampaged through our neighborhood. Some years later she moved out to a slightly bigger town, leaving her newly gentrified home behind. We met one day in a supermarket in her town. It had been a long time since we’d seen each other. We were at the Christmas card catch-up stage by then.

The friendship became, briefly, more active again. Once I said I hoped she got my apology for missing her latest big 0 birthday party. She said, “Look, to tell you the truth I can’t remember if you were there or not.” I recovered myself and laughed, with her. She sent me two, maybe three Christmas cards and letters one season.

She was disappearing.

I probably never thanked Judy properly for the decades of friendship. For her regular visits with Polly the dog when I lived around the corner. The wisdom & encouragement dispensed, the gossip mulled over, the way she’d throw her head back & positively cackle with glee.

For being one of a small posse of women who began the task of properly educating me in matters of feminism, activism & what is now known as networking. Oh, & mothering too!

Always ready for another cuppa, another topic, another challenge.

Thanks heaps Judy ( I’m sorry, I never could quite adapt to Judith). I honor your memory as a woman who made a difference, who made the world a better place. For me, & for so many others.

*Buckets of Rain, Bob Dylan 1974.

Posted in aging, dying, feminism, friendship, health, memory, women | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Nonetheless, despite all misgivings, I voted. *

Posted on May 25, 2020 by RosieL

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What with the pandemic, the lock down, and the isolation, I struggled with Year of the Monkey to begin with. I couldn’t come to grips with talking signs, empty lolly wrappers, and a most mysterious man named Ernest. The world had gone a little crazier than usual, and I was craving clarity. I couldn’t do any more hazy.

But I’m a big Patti Smith fan so I persevered, which is not the way I’d imagined reading her latest book at all. I had thought about it as a precious treat and, after collecting a copy from the local library the day that service was to close indefinitely,  I made myself wait a few days before commencing to read. I can’t even remember why I did that now. Maybe I simply knew I was just too rattled to appreciate it.

And I was rattled as schools and shops and businesses and services shut down around me, as supermarkets were shopped dry, as dire warnings and graphic stories were featured with terrifying detail of the unstoppable, gruesome, life-ending Coronavirus.

So, along came Patti. And along I struggled, slowly, slowly reading her words. I struggled with what was real and what was surreal. I did the worst thing I could do with a book and forced myself to read it.

Suddenly, I clicked back into place. I breathed in and then out. Click. Click. I let myself be transported. I let there be magic and dreams that take over your story in a moment. This was not Just Kids; it wasn’t meant to be.

I fell in as Patti wove her words into stories and dreams and memories and loss and grief and aging and travelling and food and, and, just life, really

The photos are of the politics. The Year of the Monkey is 2016, the year of a presidential election in America. It is Trump’s campaign. It is Trump’s victory, Trump’s inauguration that sees the end of the monkey’s year. Trump – and politics – that cause Patti Smith such despair.

I hold dear Patti Smith’s sentence about the election, the one that goes “Nonetheless, despite all misgivings, I voted.” Just as I hold her final sentence,”……the trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up.” It closes a long meandering dream story, where she travels abroad and meets many faces and counts her dead. And finally has a conversation with Sam Shepherd (also one of her dead) when he tells her everything is fodder for a story.

“And I thought, as he reached down to brush the hair from my eyes, the trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up.”

*Patti Smith Year of the Monkey. Bloomsbury 2019.

**As it is Trump’s America right now which has sacrificed 100,000 lives to this Coronavirus. 100,000 lives. 

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May 16th.

Posted on May 17, 2020 by RosieL

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Everybody seems a little weary. Jaded. A little bit anxious because the Coronavirus cannot be tamed. A little bit sick and tide of the rules and regulations; the self-isolation, the social distancing, the lock-down. A little bit afraid when things start to ease up, when we take steps towards that little bit lost, largely remembered, normal.

Like so many people, days and dates often elude me in this time of pandemic. So I surprised myself this morning when I saw, and registered, the date.

May 16th.

Once upon a time, 58 years ago today, three adults got into a hospital lift together, A nun also got in. The group of three – my mother, her mother-in-law, and my father’s oldest brother, who was a priest – exchanged pleasantries with the nun, who then enquired of my mother the name of the patient they were visiting. When she heard the reply, the nun gasped, told my mother she was a poor, poor, thing as were we the poor, poor, little children and promised that she would pray for us all, including my poor, poor, father.

The trio left the lift at the floor where the specialist’s room was. All pretence, all hope had drained from them but they remained upright and silent as they found their way to a waiting room. I imagine my mother having the heels that would click as they touched the shining linoleum along the hallway floor. In the waiting room I think they each would have stared ahead as if alone, lost in thought, and fear. There was that lash of shock too.

My father had not been well. I don’t know for how long this had been the case before he saw the local doctor, whether he had been a little bit unwell for a long time or a lot unwell for a short time. His problems concerned mainly his bowel; we were small children and these things were not discussed with, or near, us. We knew he was gone to hospital, We knew he was having an operation “to see what the matter is.”

We visited him in hospital and our aunt took us into the corridor for wheelchair racing. Our dad came home and my birthday party had to be cancelled. I got in bed with him and showed him my presents and he said he was very very sorry about my party and upsetting me so much and I felt bad and said it was alright. He got a bit better, got out of bed and sat by the fire, went back to work a shorter week, recuperated, started the cycle over again.

Nobody told the younger three children – “the little girls” – that he was dying. Nobody told him that either. It was the times, the belief that someone might just give up altogether if they knew the truth. He called to my mother a few days out from his death and she left the kitchen and the orange cake she was mixing to go to him and he asked her then, “I’m not going to get better, am I?” And she told him the truth and wept, and asked if he’d guessed and he said he had noticed that no-one had congratulated him after the surgery.

My mother never made an orange cake again. At some stage the grief by association must have passed, but, still.

The specialist came for the trio in the waiting room. He sat them down and sat himself down and proceeded to dash any shred of hope that may have survived the nun in the lift. There was cancer to be found and it was everywhere. The story, eventually told us after his death, omitted the colostomy. There was nothing to be done so my father was stitched up again and returned to the ward. There was a belief at the time that if it wasn’t bad enough to have cancer, it was worse once the air got to it. It was then out of control.

Somebody asked the question. How long?

And my mother would always tell this bit of the story with wonder, and admiration. The doctor had replied that he thought, all things considered, about six months. “Do you know,” she would say, as if by now we didn’t, “he was exactly right. Six months from that day until November 16. Truly unbelievable. He was a very good doctor of course.”

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Shirley Temple’s ears

Posted on May 9, 2020 by RosieL

My grandson stopped me in my tracks in the middle of our game with a stinging rebuke. “NanNan,” he said, severely, “stop clapping like John Denver does.”

I was mortified, understandably. But I didn’t argue the point, or rise up in my own defense. He keeps me humbled and in my place, this little gift from the gods and goddesses who, astonishingly, celebrates his third birthday today.

Out come the trite but true. Time flies. They grow so fast. Where has the time gone / does the time go. It seems like only yesterday……

Yet here we are.

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He took so long to arrive in the world, all those weeks and months and then, right at the finish, those never ending days. On what would become his birth day I walked along a beach. Not our beach, but one a little closer to the hospital. I didn’t tell the dog where I was going. I imagined I’d be heading to finally meet my grandbaby from the beach and didn’t want to leave a wet dog in the car.

I didn’t know there’d be hours and hours to go. I didn’t know that the ocean wouldn’t still be sparkling its blues, that the shops and cafes would be well closed, that the night would be black, that I would have fallen asleep at my post on the couch by the time the call came, the one that said, “It’s a boy!”

The next day I drove across to the hospital. It was morning but a little later than I’d imagined, what with the few calls I’d allowed myself make of the it’s a boy variety at a civilised hour. I parked my car in a street without parking meters, a mistake of such magnitude that I would almost fling myself onto the concrete pathway howling when night fell and I was still looking for it.

But this was the morning! I found my way to the hospital. I found my way, with a little help, to my grandson’s room, the first one he would ever have, the one he shared with his mother. I pulled at the curtain gently, my daughter exclaimed, “Mum!!” and I saw a nurse was attending to the babe.

My daughter had never looked so poorly in her life, or not that I was aware of. She’d had a time of it, that was for sure. I thought I might cry and that my tears would be for the wrong thing. And then, I don’t know, the nurse finished what she was doing, my daughter issued an instruction quietly and my arms opened instinctively.

And as he lay there in my arms, a little snuffly, a little squirmy, I looked at this grandchild, my grandchild.

“Hello baby,” I said. So softly.

I was in the moment and not wandering down any tracks, imagining the years ahead. I couldn’t know that almost three years later I would watch this baby turned big boy walk toward me in the back yard and say, apropos of nothing at all, “NanNan, Shirley Temple’s got ears.”

Ah, love.

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