Do you remember that show? With Norm and the other guy sitting at the bar? I can’t remember the other guy’s name right now, and I know that’s not right, because Cheers was all about having a place where “everybody knows your name”. Anyway, if you know Cheers, then you are screaming the Other Guy’s name out right now. (I’m pretty sure he was in Toy Story as well. Just call me IMBD.)

Moving on. I have had a couple of places like that in my life. And like my list of friends, I guard them closely. I don’t have too many (I don’t like to spread myself thin), and I choose them carefully. The Morning Star Hotel in Willi was one. Taco Bill’s in Clifton Hill another. I’d like to say Cocktails and Dreams on The Goldy as well, but I think that was more about NOT welcoming me in (another bar, another life). These days it’s Village Bicycle and Bistro C. And here.

The first two are by choice. The third, not so much.

And yet when we arrived here today, at a place that I don’t want to come to, to do a thing that I don’t like doing, I realised that this place is a part of me and I am a part of it. I have a favourite room (27), a favourite carpark area (mezzanine, part e, because: Me… I can always remember where I’ve parked), and even a favourite mug in the parents’ room.

Fave mug. Insta worthy hospital flat lay. Yes I used Mayfair.

Smiling nurses greeted us by name and made a fuss of the kid as if she was Suri Cruise. Doctors who I’m now on patient advocate boards with, popped in for a chat. Other trainee doctors came in to feel the kid’s excellent hepatosplenomegaly and marvel and the lowness of her haemoglobin (everyone’s gotta have a talent, right?). We feel comfortable enough to put our faces right in close to the camera at the entry, and make stupid faces to make Margie on the front desk laugh. We know the order of things, and we are close enough with the guy at Merlo to raise our eyebrows in conciliation when the idiots don’t understand the discount system for bringing their own cup. We never say a word to each other, Merlo Guy and I, our wiggling brows say it all. Today he was almost a seagull, as he step-by-excruciating-step explained the difference between cup sizes (why are they in ounces?) and the store pricing policy to an irate lady dressed in KT-26ers and leggings-as-pants, who was arguing over 30cents and her card being declined. Usually I would’ve just said to pop it on my order, but it would’ve felt like a betrayal to Merlo Guy, and us stalwarts have to stick together in here.

In here.

A funny thing happens to the kid when we get in here. I try to speak in the language of hospitality instead of hospitals. I call it “checking in”, and we run to the bathroom to see if we are getting L-Occitane toiletries (we aren’t). We look at the “room service” menu, and talk about how yummy the Mango Chicken will be (it isn’t). And yet, still, she becomes a ‘patient’. She lays in the bed all day, even though she could easily sit on the couch with me, and is as quiet and compliant as a lamb. It’s like the institution does something to her, as it does to me. She goes docile, I go to war.

Today I decided to play it a little different. I made a decision to treat this funny, mushy-pea walled place as my Cheers. I chose to see Margie as Sam Malone, and Penny as Diane Chambers. Kevin was Norm, and Stu was the Other Guy. (I tried not to call anyone Carla, but my brain accidentally might have. I told it to hush now, we don’t have to be that mean.)

In some weird way, after so much stretched-out time together, this soft, speckled lino and the sweet-prickly smell of chlorhexidine has gotten into my nostrils and into my being. I didn’t choose it, wouldn’t have chosen it in a million years, and yet here we are. If I love my life (and I do) and I love my kid (and I mostly do, can I be “barley” during tantrums?) then I must also love the experiences and the laughcries and the learning I have done in this place. It has tested me more than any other location (yes, even more than the Cricketer’s Arms in 1992, may I never get a stomach bug like that again), and it has shown me more about myself than I ever thought I wanted to know. I’ve had some of my biggest moments here, both fair and foul.

And so now, just like the blankets. A part of me is the property of Queensland Health.

Cheers.

Driving down the motorway, the familiar tightening in the back of my eyeballs starts. I know this sensation more than I ever thought I would. And more than I ever wanted to.

Every time it grabs me, I’m right back to the first time. The time when I thought that maybe things were still going to be okay. That life would go on as it always had. That this dash was a false alarm and I would be able to call my girl whenever I needed to know how to make spanakopita, again (“You know, the lamb one that you saw on SBS that time.”).  Or when I feel ripped off that there isn’t just one more sip in my capp (when I thought there was), and I can send a photo, and within moments my phone will ping with: #crook #fuckthat and I will know that I am heard. That there is someone in the world who knows my heart and my stories and understands my FW anguish.

Driving down the motorway, the familiar constriction of my throat starts, and I wonder if I have grown a tumour in the distance from Sunrise to Coolum- the looming head of the defeated warrior that is Mount Coolum seems to get me every time. What is it about dreamtime stories and connection with messages of the heart? The throbbing sensations of the rhythm of this land have a way of bringing me back to heart. And heart brings hurt. If it has been marked.

My heart has markings on it Hayls.

And you made them.

You made them deep and you made them good.

So tonight as I drive past the moment where I saw your last sunset, I allow the torsion in my eyeballs to wring their salty liquid, and I let it flow and flow and flow. The bruised greyblue skies reflect me, and the cane fields greedily devour our shared wrenching. The dusty cracks in the soil strain to be quenched with our grief. We nourish the sugar with our loss, and I wonder if there will be a bitterness in the sweet when it is refined. Or is all sweetness laced with loss?

The heaving in my chest surges like the Maroochydore River, and as I cross her, I say,  “I see you Maroochy. I see your sad and I hope you found your peace.”

I hope I will find mine, by and by.

Tomorrow we will cast the last of my girl into the biggest salty water, and I will watch her fly free, and wish I could have kept her here longer.

She will dissolve into that big blue, and I will not.

I will wish for one more laugh, one more lesson, one more conversation to stop the world turning. And I know that my wish will not be granted this day.

Not yet.

…From The Ashers

Make it count

Mental AS

Once upon a time I had a Dad who was alive in this world and he loved music.

He loved to listen to it cranked up so that it drowned out whatever he was tinkering with in the shed. If you listened hard you could hear his sighing, gravelly voice joining in with that riffy blues that used to get under the skin at the base of my neck and make me want to shrug like Atlas. The blues gave them to me then, and they give them to me now.

Thankfully, he loved many other styles of music, with a record collection stretching from Abba to Zappa like a long line of Friday afternoon bank customers, craning their necks to see when it would be their turn on the table to start the party. His tastes expanded mine from 3XY, giving a breadth that allowed me to take in more than the latest chart topper, and aged my repertoire so that I often have people older than me take in my skin, and try to figure out my generation when I know the words to something before my time.

He taught me that music is to be shared and pooled and mixed together and made available to all. He was always a one for making tapes of the albums he bought home from Brashs most Fridays, taking them out of their slippery sleeves to check for scratches before reverently placing them on the turntable. I think he held his breath a little until the crackles gave way to the opening bars. And then he was away. Lost in the story and the emotion.

The first time I heard Mental As Anything we were at our holiday place at Torquay, where the salty west-coast winds flapped the canvas roof up and down all summer long, reminding us to get to the beach before the cool change came in. My Dad had made a TDK-60 recording to play in the black tape-recorder that sat on top of the 1950s fridge (Current paint job: royal blue).

“Woah-ho, the nips are getting bigger.” sang Greedy and his buddies, the flippy tune forming an exuberant sound-track to my latest Trixie Beldon. It was the one where they found some dope-smugglers and when I asked Mum how to pronounce “Mara-jewu-wana”, she snatched it away with a black-snake whip, until I could convince her that Trixie and Honey were catching the baddies, not sparking up. I spent most of the rest of those hols, humming along to the Mentals, and laughing to myself about how a song about fishing and the nips they were getting, could be so catchy.

Last weekend, Greedy and a new gaggle of fellas came to a little country town near us. Reg has gone onto other things, and Martin is pretty crook, but Greedy was there, playing his keyboard and belting out all the old tunes as if it was 1986.

At first I thought I might stand politely up the middle-to-back and have beer or two (I started out, just drinking beer.) and maybe lip sync a few songs then head home. However the first notes of the fist song did something to my synapses and within a beat I was back in that summer.

White zinc cream mixed with that hard, peeling skin on my nose. Lips infused with salt. Hair faded to light from the sun. Sandpaper sheets, and still, melting heat making it hard to sleep, whilst parents caroused- the cadence of their laughter and stories a backdrop to the click of the crickets. Eventually silent, only moments before the crows started their morning dance on the thick canvas roof. We would toss and turn and try to scrinch out the light, until the paperboy started his litany, “SunAgeAddyAustral-yan” and bleary-headed Dads in their jocks ran out to grab the news of what they were missing from their city lives.

So when Greedy started, I wove my way through the crowd like an eel, taking my place among the old and the young. The Old who were swaying to the echoes from a simpler life. The Young who were there for the cheap live music, or, in one girls case, because her Mum had loved The Mentals.

Had.

I sighed with her, and kissed her maternally on the head as she told me her story of loss and scattered corpuscles, and we toasted her Mum and we toasted my Dad and we toasted the silly, fizzy soundtrack that could take us back to a time and and place where our hearts were still whole and unscarred.

Where we could live it up.

Thanks Fellas, You’re still Mental As.

…From The Ashers

I’ve been reading a lot about ‘callings’ lately. I’m at an age and stage of life where I think that I should have it all sorted out, and be living the dream.

Which I am.

But I’m not.

I’m living a lucky, beautiful life, in a place I adore and with people that I would do anything for. I can count my blessings like so many sheep and then never fall asleep. I have ticked all of the boxes that ever existed for me, and then ticked some more. Most mornings I lie in bed, in that delicious moment of waking, as the blur of my dreams fall out of my ear and onto the pillow to dissolve like sugar crystals, and I wonder if I am actually awake. Is this life real and true? Do I really get to have all of this? Am I worthy?

And then an annoying, corkscrew of a notion makes three clockwise turns into my right cerebellum and I’m almost dizzy at the knowledge that I’m not telling the whole truth. There is secret that I’m keeping from myself, and it takes everything I am to cover it up with tasks and thoughts and things that must be done RIGHT NOW. Until it collapses and suffocates under the weight of responsibility and action for another day.

It was a full moon this week, and in the fitful sleep of the liar, the rotation of the the corkscrew has been relentless and exhausting, trying with its twists and excruciating turns to force me to notice it. I’ve noticed. And I have resisted. Stress-resist-stress-resist in an endless dance of the shambling 3am drunk who cannot stop for fear that they don’t know where home is any more.

I have a calling.

And I’m ignoring it.

I think I’m afraid that if I bring it out into the light it might not be a shiny as it is in my mind. Or perhaps I won’t know what to do with it once it hits the air. Oxygen might destroy it, or give it wings that can’t be clipped, and I’ll be careening out of control and out of breath, trying desperately to keep up, yet falling behind, falling behind, crawling along with no skin on my knees and the sting of dust it in my eyes where I once held my precious thing.

It’s safer to bury things in the dense flesh of your liver. The darkness keeps it safe.

Doesn’t it?

Do you have a calling?

Are you hiding it too?

…From The Ashers 

Post Script: The top of my blog draft page has little tags. Something Anna put in when she designed this page. I think it’s called the Hello Dolly plugin or something. Maybe it’s the words to the song. Anyway, I’ve never taken much notice of it. I just looked at it now, and it said, “It’s so nice to have you back where you belong.” Interesting.

It’s the day for it, isn’t it? The day when all of your chosen media are full of everything you should-would-could do to make yourself more shiny from this moment forward. The implication being that somehow this whole last year was crappy, and were all personally in need of some kind of therapy. Depending on the algorithm and, what you have been looking at and liking of- it could be your body, your mind, your finances or just your shoes.

I don’t hold with that at all.

I think that almost everyone I know did the best they could in each of the moments. I know for me, some moments were better than others in the Champion Of All Things awards, but on balance, I did okay. And I bet you did too.

The end of the world year can take on portentous feelings if you buy into it all too much. The endless lists of how-to and what-to and who-to can become overwhelming if you let the whelm come anywhere near your neurones. And it will try to flow over you. That’s its nature.

This morning we chose to pop over to the beach for the last time this year, I thought I would take some really cool pics of the kids frolicking in the gentle waves, and Nath getting barrelled. I imagined the sun would be rising over the water, creating diamonds of significant rays all ready to be captured. In my mind’s eye I envisioned a significant moment. Perhaps we would hold hands in the water and send out a frangipani, singing Kumbaya and Auld Lang Syn (neither of which any of us know more than two lines of) and say fare you well 2016. Something to mark the passing of the year, and the passing of my Dad.

Shit. I wasn’t going to mention that, but I have and I have and I have, and of course I always do, for the end of the year now always brings more to it than just the end of the year. It is also the end of a life. Which is why I attach more significance to this day than just an arbitrary date. For if we are to be real and say the truth, there is no inherent meaning in the moments from 11.59.59 to 12.00.01, other than the meaning we chose to make.

Ever since my Dad passed away on the first day of the brand new year, I wake up on the 31st feeling scratchy. Sometimes half a day goes by before I acknowledge the reason why, but whether I chose to look at it or not, the irritation is there from the moment I open my eyes. Sometimes I think I’d like to hurt someone or have them hurt me back, just so I can let the constriction in my throat burst out, and the prickling behind my eyes slosh away.

So we went to the beach. Like any other day, but like a day that I would like to be different, significant, something.

The beach was a fairly windy, which is never a good omen for me because: FRIKKEN WIND, and the surf was little more than a blown-out shorey with a massive sweep. The sand was too hot for children who had chosen not to wear their thongs, against my best recommendations, so: all.of.the.whinging. And then on her first ride, Coco cracked it because the salt water was too rough and TOO SALTY. Liam tried to paddle out the back a few times, couldn’t, and came sloping over to me, shoulders hunched in the posture of defeat.

And that was about where I lost it. Not in a major way, and not out loud, but in enough of a way that everyone knew to ‘Stay away from Mummy right now’.

I went up the beach a ways by myself, and wrote ‘2016’ in the sand with my big toe, and the waves licked it up.

I noticed the toe-nail polish from my Christmas manicure glistening in the sunlight and I thought it looked pretty.

I felt the despicable, messy wind on my two-day-old sunburn and I liked the slight cooling feeling.

I looked out to the horizon and saw a white yacht bobbing over to the edge and smiled at the memory of all the drawings the kids and I have done together over the years.

I saw Nath standing with his back to the dunes, hand up shielding his eyes, watching the waves, watching the kids, watching out for us in the solid, stable and careworn way he does and I realised that even in the shittiest moments, in the seconds where I feel the most broken and fragmented, I have this wonder of a man in my life.

We didn’t sing Kumbaya or even One Love. There were no petals set free. The kids still carried on about things that kids do. My sunburn still stung and we still have ants in our bathroom. There is still paperwork to be done, and tomorrow I will probably have a slug-like hangover rather than fluttering into the new year on rejuvenated wings. And my Dad is still dead.

But there is coffee for tomorrow and champagne for tonight, and we all do the best we can with what we’ve got, and some of the moments will be mundane and muddy and magical. And so it goes. Come by here and Kumbaya.

Fare You Well 2016.

Fare You Well Peter.

Fare You Well, Regular Reader. Travel Well, Travel Light, Smile When You Can.

…From The Ashers