When the lovely young fellow from the hosting service managed to free things up and I could have a little peep behind the curtain here, for a moment I thought I’d turned into a virus or something. FIVE HUNDRED and ninety four comments. The most I’ve ever had. To be honest peeps, for one magical moment back there at 4.32pm, I thought I was a proper author.
So much lovely from BrandonWang and KeithNob. Beautiful suggestions for some shemale action from SlappingLesbian. And the alluring offer of various medications to make things bigger, harder, longer or just more healthy (yep you can get antibiotics with your authentix (sic) Nike Airs) from most of Russia and half of Germany.
The joys of the interwebz.
Anyway, this is just a little warm up to get my phalanges pumping (no, don’t send me a pill) and my synapses singing.
See y’all soon.
PS Feel free to comment. But don’t worry too much about the myrrh next time (or merkins for that matter).
I heard about Mike Robinson well before I ever met him.
As is the way with certain personalities, his reputation preceded him.
I’d heard about him from Rick and Hayls, and they painted him on a big canvas, as daughters are sometimes wont to do. I think that when a fella has a presence like Mike, children can forget they are all grown up, and that they can be almost equal with their fathers. Part of them remains ever childlike, and they see themselves through the eyes of a man who thinks they still have pigtails and matching gingham ribbons.
So when I imagined the man who I would later, much later, hold in my arms whilst he sobbed into my pointy shoulder, I thought he would be six foot tall and made of Kevlar.
When I first met Mike Robinson I was surprised by his build. He was shorter than I had expected, but he had the stance of someone who was always on the balls of his feet.
Ready, like a boxer.
And I suppose he was.
I never knew Mike before his girls, first the youngest and then the oldest, were diagnosed with cancer. I only met him after world had punched him, making him poised to fight. And I only ever really got to know him after his girls were picked off, first the oldest then the youngest. I don’t know if it was my imagination, but I sometimes felt like he never really dropped his shoulders after that. As if a part of his brainstem was always on alert, alternating between prayer and parley, hoping that his sunshiney middle daughter would be safe.
Willing it to be so.
When I first loved Mike Robinson it was during one of his regular Chiro checks, back when Rick was on the wrong side of lean, and almost hysterically grabbing at potions and procedures and promises that could take the cancer away. We were discussing things that were beyond our control (his strong-headed daughters) and our respective roles in their healing. All of a sudden Mike Robinson jumped up, almost giving me a Liverpool Kiss as he scarpered from the office, saying, “I can’t do this.” I ran after him and somehow scooped him up in the carpark. He accepted my remedial hug and we both softened a little.
It was nice have someone strong with me for the next part.
When I first really listened to Mike Robinson it was when I was a new Mum, and everyone else seemed to offer wash-off advice that contradicted itself and disappeared like those tail-eating snakes as it puffed out of their mouths. Not Mike. Those eyes pierced right inside me with adviceorders and made sure I minded him. He spoke directly, that easy smile belying the intensity beneath. I carry with me so many Mike-isms, from “You can’t assume- every day is a new day with kids,” through to “You have to sell a lot of coffees to make rent.”
I learned lot more from you than you will ever know Mike Robinson, you funny, raw, truthful, stubborn, vulnerable, tenacious bugger.
Last night we were sitting on the couch, The Silverback and I, and I was saying that I want to see that new movie with all the nominations. Someone had seen it and said that I would love it. Let’s be clear: this is not a movie review site. I found the movie to be disturbing (why so many guns, America?), superficial (why don’t we actually get to know even one character properly?) and *spoiler alert* it had a shitty cop-out of an ending. I tried to like it, really I did, what with Woody Harrelson and Napoleon Dynamite’s Nanna, but it was insipid. Too sad and too bleak in a pathetic, relentless way. Two wrung-out stars.
But that’s not the point of this blog. The point is something different. Of doing something different.
On Tuesdays when I finish work, dinner is cooked and the kids are in bed. We eat, then sit on the couch together and scroll through the book of faces (that’s true love, right there, no?) and I watch that show with the doctor who does Asperger’s. His voice prickles me like blowing across the top of a pen lid (arghhh), but I do like the dramatic medical events that unfold. It’s good to know that hospital admissions aren’t all strung out meth-heads and people with complications from the stupid amounts of medications they are mixing in their cells. This is proper emergencies from causes other than the stupid.
The medical drama was about to get going, and I was settling in for some good old blood letting, when Nath said, “Why don’t you go then?”
What?
An unplanned movie trip on a school night that starts in six minutes and I haven’t even made popcorn? Surely that can’t work? Or is the plan so simple that it just might?
So before anyone had a chance to call it off, I grabbed a Stella from the fridge, dug out a coat that would be suitable for Antarctica, and ran out.
And I cannot tell you how good it felt. I think twenty years flew off and out onto Sunshine Beach Road between home and the cinema, and when I took my seat (far enough from the weird old guy on the far left wing so that I couldn’t see what he was up to. Nothing, I’m sure he was up to nothing), and close enough to the screen so that I could be encased in the vista without getting a neck extension injury, I’m pretty sure another six years fell into the aisle and rolled to the front like Jaffas. I lost another two when I surreptitiously opened the Stella and it made a little sigh as the house lights went down, when for some reason I was convinced that the man-child usher would come and scold me in front of the pod of teenagers in the back row. (Funny how, even at this advanced age, I wanted to hold up my stubby of bootleg beer and show them I was cooler than them.)
It was nice losing all those years. Nice feeling the responsibility of a school night, and the heaviness of the incomplete To-Do List, shrink to a pinprick as the curtains drew back, and I got lost in someone else’s world.
Going to the movies is better than going on holidays. It’s far easier, it’s more comfortable and if I don’t like it I can leave at any time. Or fall asleep in a hug of red velvet. As long as that weird guy doesn’t come too close.
When the shitty movie ended and the lights came on, everyone hurried to evacuate, but I stayed a moment more. Savouring the smell of freedom that was masquerading as popped corn and fake butter, and the perfume of the last person whose arms rested underneath mine. I breathed in that smell and I breathed in that feeling. And I tried not to breathe it out.
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.
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.
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.
Alison Asher on Hey Rick, Bit Weird: “I love that Paul. That smile! (And daring you.. she was always the most daring wasn’t she?)” Sep 16, 09:48
Alison Asher on Hey Rick, Bit Weird: “OH Tan, I didn’t know you had the boots! I’m so pleased as I never wanted them to go to…” Sep 16, 07:30
Tania on Hey Rick, Bit Weird: “Love it. I have those bloody cowboy boots in my wardrobe and they will never leave my side. Just loved…” Sep 15, 22:29
PB on Hey Rick, Bit Weird: “My memory shifts between the intensity of her eyes when she spoke to me…..controlling me ,enveloping me, daring me ….to…” Sep 15, 21:49
Alison Asher on Hey Rick, Bit Weird: “Oh Trace. I’m so sorry to hear that. One foot in front of the other, ‘eh? Do you have a…” Sep 15, 18:42
Tracy K-S on Hey Rick, Bit Weird: “Good reflection for me on what has been a tough few weeks. A new friend was diagnosed with cancer today…” Sep 15, 18:35
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