Beholder. Beauty. Eye of.

When everyone had gone to bed except for my mother and myself, I collapsed into her arms; dribbling a gloopy mixture of tears and mucus over her shoulder.

“Mum, I’m trying my best, I really am. And I’ll continue to do so for as long as I live. It's what she deserves: our love, support and guidance; however tricky it gets.”

“I know, love,” she said quietly, rubbing my back.

We stood like that together for a few moments in silence until I realised that age had shrunk her enough that my breasts now slotted on top of hers like two stacked loaves of bread.  The imp inside of me hadn’t yet disappeared, so I shared the observation.  Mum chuckled.  

“You always had a good rack,” I snuffled, half laughing and half sobbing.  Sobbing won the brief battle between shaking off the Sads or falling deeper into them.

“Whenever I tell her that she’s beautiful, she doesn’t believe me. She thinks that it’s just my job to say that.” An elephant-like bellow into a damp tissue added extra punctuation to my statement.

“She is beautiful. If she’d only smile more...”

Stepping back, I decided to say it. To reveal the tiny sadness that had shadowed me, ever-so-faint but still present, for so many years. “But Mum, you never said it to me.”

It was her turn to step back, eyes widened in surprise. “Of course I did love. You were beautiful as a child, beautiful at your formal, beautiful on your wedding day, beautiful when the baby was born -----"

“But you never told me,” I whispered. “Not once.”

“But you must have known?”

Sinking down into the lounge, I looked up at her, still standing there uncertainly. “No, Mum, I didn’t. I would have killed for a ‘you look nice today’ from you. Even once.”

She sat down beside me.  Several seconds passed.  Would she say, 'Oh but you should have been aware of it anyway’ or become defensive, saying that she’d been busy and tired; or reiterate that she never wanted to produce children too full of their own importance, or ....

“You are beautiful. You have always been beautiful.”

She placed her hands on both sides of my cheeks. “I love your beautiful face.”

I cried again, but it was good this time.

Woolly Mammoth

"Hi, My name is Mike Carmichael and I live in Alexandria, Indiana with my wife Glenda. I'd like to tell you about Alexandria's only ROADSIDE ATTRACTION...the Worlds Largest Ball of Paint. Imagine an ordinary baseball... Now imagine that same baseball with over 19,100 coats of paint on it. Getting the picture? Good, because that's exactly what my wife, Glenda and I have done for the past 28 1/2 years. Now that ordinary baseball that once weighed less than one pound now weighs in around 1,700 pounds!"

Hmmmm, looks more like a deformed Malteser to me, or did Mike's surgeon save the testicle he removed during the cancer scare? This patient and determined couple's story can be found on their website: http://ballofpaint.freehosting.net/ because I wish you to know that I truly did not make the story up.

To be honest, I wish I had made it all up because it is so incomprehensible that an apparently normal-looking couple were prepared to do this for nearly 30 years and that they're proud of it. It doesn't say much for the town either, if this lumpy lovesack is the town's only attraction..... To be fair though, I'm not exactly covering myself in glory because you could also quite rightly ask just what in the hell I was doing that was so important and noble that let me to this item in the first place.

I don't know what 2009 is the Official year of (Twitter? Parsnips? Ugly animals people never visit at the zoo? The Ped Egg?) - but how about we put in a bid for the Year of Useful Hobbies. Ones that have a point and can be discussed with strangers at dinner parties without receiving pitying and bored looks.

My guilt is probably as strong as the paintball people because my unofficial hobby is knitting. No, nothing fanc - all I can do is the basic loopy, crinkled stitch (the name of which escapes me) that my grandmother taught me when I was nine and even then, have only ever been able to knit rows. Scarves aplenty, but thanks to the stitches I dropped the end product was vastly tapered at one end so that it resembled a triangle that had been on the rack and then peppered with bullet holes.

These days I'm trying to put my sheltered-workshop knitting skills to some good use by knitting long scarves that have seven individually coloured segments that are 45 stitches wide and 40 rows long. Mum then gathers seven of these Tom Bakers, sews them up and gives them to the mens' homeless shelter for use in their hostels and as 'sorry, the inn is full, here's some bedding consolation prizes.

I've been bidding for and buying balls of wool on e-bay. Yeah, I know: it's hardly as scintillating as Beatles memorabilia, signed first editions of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy or toast shaped like Elvis, but it's a way of getting cheap, cast-off yarn in dark, manly colours that hide all kinds of grass, beer, chewing gum and boot stains.

It also means that it's easy enough to do it in front of the telly and convince myself that no, just because I'm wearing elasticated tracksuit pants, ugg boots and am slouching on the lounge sucking squares of chocolate in front of 'The Big Bang Theory' I'm not a sloth; far from it. I'm knitting for charity. The sad thing is, my dinner party companion I'm regaling this to has normally sculled their third glass of sauv blanc by then and is nodding inanely, not realising that it takes me until Spring to knit enough scarves for one measly blanket.....

The shame of my remedial recreational abilities doesn't stop there. I also like to read through home design, food and womens' magazines, soaking up every glossy page and earmarking those take my fancy - recipes, home renovation ideas, decor, photos etc. Some I've used for home-made greeting cards that, quite frankly, haven't sold all that well, not even to the reception kids with snot trails leading to their lips at the school fete. It would probably make the local childcare centre really happy if I just dumped my crummy cuttings in their playroom with some curved-end scissors and pots of library paste and got the toddlers to go for it. Chances are their cards would be more successful too.....

Participators of other less-than-scintillating hobbies include my father who was an amateur beekeeper for many years. Every two months, he'd receive a copy of what might possibly be the world's least exciting magazine, The Australasian Beekeeper. "Whoo Hoo Dad, it's here, it's here!" I'd tease, waving the copy and running towards him like a lunatic. "Oh and look - it's got TWO pages of black and white photos instead of just the one!"

He proudly tells me that the highlight of his beekeeping career was having his jars of honey photographed (in black and white, naturally) for the front cover. Kate Moss hasn't achieved that.

A friend's boyfriend was into the adventures of Ivanhoe, King Arthur and related dark ages and mediaeval pursuits. There were apparently enough fellow fans of this time in history to have a Mediaeval society that met every fourth Sunday for a picnic and get-together. They'd gather to eat huge roast chickens and lamb legs (not sure who had to put them in the wheelie bin after the bones had been thrown over their shoulders), scull down mead (there's a reason we don't drink it anymore) and hold a jousting tournament. Each member was dressed as authentically as imagination and budget would allow - chain mail, coats of arms on jerkins (tops folks, tops), leggings (the blokes), ankle boots (yep, ditto), pointy hats (the gals, or add bells for some of the slightly more outgoing boys) and weaponry. The national parks and wildlife authority did not allow them to have horses at the events, and the mind boggles at what the jousting tournaments must have been like on foot.

My musical husband Love Chunks spent many years during school and in his early twenties playing the trumpet and the guitar. He proudly marched in Port Augusta's town band, played for a jazz group and tootled and strummed for many a local function. When he and I got together, both instruments had long been abandoned. No matter how many times I asked him to play something for me he refused.

The only time he got his trumpet out (ooooooherr, that sounds a bit suggestive) it terrorised the dog who shot outside and frantically started digging a tunnel to Mecca. LC has since strummed his guitar for Sapphire a few times, but clams up whenever I've inadvertently lumbered into the room. Pretty useless having two instruments you don't use, isn't it, but perhaps my mocking singing of "Kum bah yah, my lord, Kum bah yah...." isn't too encouraging. I'll make that a resolution to work on - Don't Mock; Encourage.

An old work colleague - who I detested - used to insist that we have the Christmas function at her place. This was presumably so that she could get outrageously pissed and fall off her high-heeled mules with her bed only several metres away but also so that we could see - and be dazzled - by her various collections and taste in decor. She lived in a mock-tudor Mc Mansion with a tiny garden filled with an above ground pool, two fat dogs and three shy cats. The blue plastic sides of the pool were artfully disguised with strategically placed potplants in which she'd placed some fake budgies.

Inside was the real horror - her duck collection. Pot holders, tea towels, boot scrapers, cross stitched pillow covers, paintings, coffee cups, storage tins, wooden trays and figurines. Lots of figurines, stored on flimsy lacquered telephone tables and inside twee kitchen cabinets that engulfed the house. They were made of china, clay, wood, brass, pewter and crystal with the piece-de-resistance being a stuffed one she'd found in an antiques shop. It left me with not only nausea but a secret prayer that someday that little duck army would rise up and find the collective strength to carry out her not so slight frame to the caravan park and de-tox centre where she belonged.

Love Chunks and I are also guilty of saving the back issues of Gourmet Traveller and Delicious Magazines. They hog up space in our cupboards and not once in ten years have either of us sorted through them or referred to an old recipe within them. Why do we save them? Sapphire has a collection of stones and gumnuts she'd gathered two years ago. The stupid little footy-shaped money box she stores them in gets tipped over at least once a week, spilling out the annoying little pellets. Why does she still keep them?

My mother insists on washing out every single yoghurt and margarine container and keeping them in her already over-burdened tupperware drawer so that when it is opened, they fly out like angry frisbees. Why - when will that mythical group of 79 people visit Mum and insist on taking leftovers home at the same time?

These are all unexplainable mysteries, but do point to most of us having collections and hobbies that are our own personal Submarine Screendoors in terms of usefulness in our lives. But maybe that's not such a bad thing. If no-one dies of stress or boredom then who's it going to hurt?

Maybe Sapphire, who looks to be inheriting a truckload of wool, greeting cards and margarine containers....

The demonic Doctor Checks

Walking into my local medical centre isn't a welcoming experience. Several coffee cups have been squashed on the steep front steps with their sticky contents dribbling down the grey tiles and making a nauseating soup when mixed with cigarette ash and butts. The graffiti scratched onto the glass doors doesn't enhance the atmosphere either.















Inside the over-heated waiting room, I'm given the luxury of time to observe my fellow patients and to consider just how the very worst of cheaply slapped-together 1990s architecture has stood the test of time. Answer: it doesn't. The once-white ceiling tiles are blooming with latte-brown water stains, the huge green formica reception desk is so gouged that the chipboard underneath has become a crazy-paving feature and the once-proud 'Chemist next door' enamel sign has been covered with a torn piece of paper with handwriting informing me that the 'Neerest chemist is 300m walk further up the road.'

A three year old boy and his mother sit beside me. Well, she does: he's busy doing lap after lap around the low coffee tables, saying "When can I see Dr Checks? When can I see Dr Checks?" over and over.

Dr Checks? Dr Cheques? Is his mother running some kind of blackmailing scheme...? I put my boring novel down and am rude enough to raise one eyebrow at her quizzically. To her credit, she doesn't say, "It's none of your pharkin' business," but laughs and says, "Hugo likes ---" she looks around, sees her target and points "-----that doctor over there, the one in the houndstooth jacket."

I see a stooped old man in glasses slowly shuffle behind the reception desk to reach for his next file. He most certainly would have been around to see the celebrations at end of World War One.

Hugo rushed over to tug at his mother's skirt. "See Mum, Dr Checks is here! Dr Checks! Dr Checks!"

Hugo is shushed by Mum, and I go back to my book. Both of us still have to wait our turn and she tries to ease her son into the idea that it might be Doctor Blue Shirt he sees instead of Checks. "His grandfather has the same jacket," Mum whispers to me and says brightly and in a louder voice to Hugo, "But blue is your favourite colour, isn't it sweetie?"

"Ye-e-e-e-e-sss...." Hugo's voice had now moved up an octave to a high pitched whine that was starting to rattle the windows. "But I wanna see Dr Checks!"

It was time to plough back into the dull book on my knee and let the mother of Hugo try to cajole him with a trip to the water fountain, the tatty community brochure stand, the toilets and shooshing him again when he saw the enormous nose ring in a punky-emo hybrid guy who'd just sat on the other side of him: "Why is he wearing a bangle in his nose?"
"Um, it's a nose ring, Hugo. Some people wear them as jewellery, like you sometimes like to wear my bracelets and necklaces."
Nice response, I thought, but not Hugo. "Yuk, it'll get boogies on it."
Fair point too.

Dr Checks came back out into the foyer.
"Yay!" yelled Hugo, "It's my turn, Mummy!"

Dr Checks smiled - or was he merely airing his dentures - and said, "Mrs Lockett?" I grabbed my bag and left the room to Hugo's anguished sobbing.

Three months ago, at the urging of Love Chunks, I underwent a cholesterol test.
"We'll call you if something's serious, so no news is good news," said the doctor filling up the test tube with my red stuff at the time.

No phone call was received, so I was in the clear: my cholesterol test was obviously OK and I could continue to inhale chocolate, cheese, chips, meat, pastries, pies, eggs and donuts with greedy abandon. Especially chocolate.

















Today however, found me there to get my tumour checked up on - keep an eye on those pesky prolactin levels and have a wee whinge about the unwanted and increasing visits from Mr Migraine. He was becoming the medical equivalent of a stalker.

"You look very fit," Dr Checks said.
"Oh, I am", I sat up straighter, beaming with pride and huge spadeful of vanity. "I run at least three times a week, power walk twice and am a good girl and eat lots of fruit and veges and-----"
"But," Dr C looked down into the folder. "Your cholesterol level is much too high."
"Wha-a-a-a-t?" My smugness disappeared up the anus from whence it came. "But I was told by the other doctor that no news is good news!"

He affected that pose that's so infuriating because you just know you're in for a lecture and you know it's probably deserved but you just don't want to hear it: he lowered his glasses and looked down his nose at me. Pompous git - and look a him sitting there with his old man moobs sweating in crescent marks on his too tight business shirt, about to lecture me, an educated, intelligent, responsible adult about diet and exercise, the nerve..!

"Your cholesterol level is 6.5 and it should not be anything higher than 5.5. The doctor here has made a note saying, 'Discuss this with the patient when she arrives to collect her test results'."
He pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose to deliver the final pompous, know-it-all, you-can't-handle-the-truth barb: "That was THREE months ago. Surely you must have wondered what your results were?"

As intended, it was now my turn to play the part of the sheepish, admittedly ashamed and naughty patient and the role fitted perfectly. "Well, um, I just assumed that if it was really bad, one of you would call..."

Dr C held up a tired, I've-heard-it-all-before-young-lady hand. "You're not about to be carted into an ambulance, but you need to do something about it now. Seriously."

And the next fifteen minutes involved talk of cutting out full fat milk, cream, butter, cheese, red fatty meats, chicken skin, animal fats, coconut milk, palm oil from my diet entirely. Yep, okay, fine, nod nod nod, can do all of that. Sure, absolutely.

And no cakes, eggs, bacon, biscuits, donuts, pastries, pies, tarts or quiches. Ye-e-s, okay, it'll be a struggle but yes, my health is important.

Of course I knew what was coming next.

I knew it, he knew it and you know it, don't you?

"How much chocolate do you eat a week, Mrs Lockett?"
"Oh call me Kath, you already know so much about me, inside and out, heh heh, although I don't want to have a pap smear today. Did you know that I'm a chocolate reviewer and writer and manage to look only slightly chubby instead of Jabba the Hutt-like due to my dedication to exercise and the proper intake of vitamins and min--"

"How much chocolate do you eat a week----" he paused, to let his authority and moral detachment sink in more fully "-----Kath?"

Like a mathematically challenged eight year old, I went through an average week, listing each block, truffle and bar and counting them on my fingers. "Well, I had lunch at San Churro - so it was a meal really, not an additional snack, but then there was the two Nestle blocks which were a gift from Helen and M&Ms have released an orange flavour that is only currentlyavailable in the 200 gram bags and it's greedy I know, but it took me three blocks before the willpower to photograph it emerged in order to write the review for the daggy but delicious Cadbury Tiramisu dessert block and just this morning I finally got a hold of the new Lindt Classic flavours and...."

I just can't write the figure here. It hurts too much. Let's just say that if Dr Checks had any hair left, his eyebrows had risen high enough to have hidden amongst his fringe.

"You have to cut that by at least ninety percent or you'll be in serious trouble."

He might as well have yanked my heart out with barbed wire gloves and plonked it into a tupperware container and slung it in the staff fridge to rot amongst the ancient sweet chilli sauce sachets and yoghurt tubs.














A few minutes later, I slowly walked home. The morning sunshine was too bright and harsh, and my backpack was heavy. Love Chunks opened the door and the moment he saw my face, said, "Oh my god Kath, what's wrong, has your tumour grown back again?"
My eyes were blurred with tears. "But I love what I do...."

I hadn't dared show Dr Checks what I'd purchased from the supermarket before my appointment with him; just a few treats to see me through a week in central Australia on a 4WD camping trip that was not likely to fully cater for my specific needs:

Still, if I get to eat ten percent of it....?

Day Twenty Three - Appreciative August

Resolution and Redemption



















When I was seven and my older brother was nine, he had two-and-a-half extra years of physical strength and the mental agility to tease with more effective results, mercilessly thrash me at Monopoly and invent better and more hurtful insults than I ever could. Perhaps he was annoyed that, as a three year old, I'd get up and eat his school lunch that Mum had made the night before, or pointed out that he always stuck his tongue out when he was batting at the crease or concentrating during a particularly challenging game of back-yard brandy.

The two year game of catch up didn't seem to end until we were in our late teens and one day I realised that we were friends rather than enemies. We could laugh at Blackadder and drove out to the orchards together in the summer holidays to endure the heat, the mindless work, the bogans and the boredom in order to earn the book, beer and bond money for the upcoming university year. We raved about the Midnight Oil concert at Memorial Drive in 1985, played endless games of tennis where he showed me how to run-like-my-very-life-depended-on-it for every single shot like a real bloke would; and he'd make wisecracks at the dinner table that would not only make me laugh but marvel at his quick cleverness.

It was me he came to see when he first felt the stirrings of real connection for a girl he'd met. What should he do, what if he'd got the signals wrong, what if she said no, what if......? Outwardly I listened intently, and assured him that it was worth the risk; she would say yes and that life would continue if it backfired. Inwardly I was so honoured that he chose me to confide these things to: was this the same person who made me cry so many times as a child?

When my share house was broken into in my third year of study, my two girlfriends and I came home stunned. We were all dirt poor, struggling on Austudy and holiday jobs and wondering just how in the hell we were going to replace our one and only bar heater, colour TV and tape player. The robbers must have been so disappointed to break into our place to reveal that it housed the poorest tenants of Hackney inside - no microwave, CD collections, stereo system, art work, computers or gadgets; which is why they found the time to smoke and butt out their cigarettes in my bedroom, go through my wardrobe to remove anything with a recognisable label and select whichever cassette tapes appealed to their ear.

Rob himself was also still a penniless student, but he cycled over from Mile End an hour later, somehow carrying his own double-tape stereo deck, a black-n-white television and an ancient Vulcan reflective heater. "Ah, no worries," he said, brushing off my thanks, "I'm at Libby's (his girlfriend's) place most of the time, and she's got better stuff than I have."

He moved in with us for a few months when Jo was working overseas for a few months towards her geology PhD. We needed the rent, he was in between jobs and houses and I wondered how he'd fare with Charlotte, a fairly straight, classical piano student who'd come from a family of five daughters. I shouldn't have worried - she loved his quirky outlook on life, loved him calling her 'Chuck' and he asked her endless questions about boarding school, life raising horses and exactly what piece of music she was practising and why.

We had a few interesting meals when he'd visit the Central Market just on closing time, buy an entire box of one vegetable and try and make something different with it for dinner for the following week. Avocados, parsnips and even on-the-turn tomatoes were particularly challenging. He'd chop up onions wearing his swimming goggles and, after we'd finished and enjoyed his seafood Hokkien noodle stir fry, he'd say, "Oh I'm glad you didn't notice that I also put the beaks and eyes of the octopus in as well; it makes it go further."

One time he, Love Chunks, my best mate Jill, a few others and myself were at Boomer Beach. God I loved the waves there and used to love jumping up, over and then let myself get swallowed up in the white foam and unceremoniously shoved into the sand at the shore. Inevitably the day came when I misjudged the timing of a huge wave spectacularly badly. Jill recalls that it looked brilliantly funny from the shore, but for me it was like being flung and and then dunked further into a wading pool by an angry ogre,over and over again.

The power of the rushing water, sand and waves still breaking overhead - or was it overhead, because I could not tell which way was up and was being thrown about manically and could not do anything to find the bottom of the seabed or stand up - seemed to go on forever. I had sucked in too much seawater and wondered if, maybe, this was it for me. Or was my head going to smack on some rocks that I saw some distance over, but might now be right under me for all I knew? Were my friends on the shore just assuming I was goofing off and having a wonderful time? Could they even see me out here?

Smack, tumble, gasp, tumble, smack. All my eyes saw was sand, foam and darkness, even though it was a 30C summer day. Why couldn't I, a strong swimmer and fit young woman, stand up? Why couldn't I breathe?

Rob found me, grabbed my shoulders and hoiked me up. I was coughing and sobbing, "I thought I was going to die, Rob, I really thought that this was it for me...."
"Ah come on now, it's OK, you're fine. That's a fair old codpiece of sand you've got dangling between your legs now, Kath." He laughed at me, but his eyes looked worried and relieved.

And yet this year, the two-year difference re-emerged. We were living in two separate states of the country, in two different households, two different spouses and with two different sets of issues and problems to deal with. We fell out. He blamed me for something I hadn't done; I fought back without trying to see why he might have done so; he snapped back defensively; and I told him a few other 'truths' I thought he needed to hear.

Such is the nature of cliches that it is only when you live through one that you realise why they're cliches. They're true. My words, spoken in anger and frustration and aimed to wound, felt impossible to take back, especially when left to hang for a long time.

Five months went by. I was fuming over the unfairness, the hypocrisy and the lack of truth I'd received. I cried many times into Love Chunks' shoulders in confusion and pain. Coming only two months after the Bulldog fiasco at work, I had sworn to myself that I was no longer going to accept being treated badly without fighting back and insisting on my rights, yet having to assert these with my brother was heartbreaking.

We didn't speak or email each other. We didn't respond with even a polite, "Oh, really, that's nice," when our parents, or little brother David, tried to pass on news of each other. We didn't take action even though our parents urged us to. And yet, I continued to grieve. Wasn't I worth respecting? Why did he do this to me? Why didn't he understand how damaging it would be?

At the urging of Love Chunks, my younger brother Dave, sister-in-law Sonia, I wrote to Rob, asking for what I wanted. An apology.

An email shot back: "Can I fly over to see you?"

I was on the blower the second after reading it.
We both cried. "I am so sorry---"
"Thanks, Rob---"
"Don't thank me---"

That night, after a long conversation and the luxury of time to fully explain, to listen and to finally understand, we hung up. I chatted jubilantly to Love Chunks who said, "I'm so glad, Kath, I'm really glad," and I ran the fastest, strongest and best session on the treadmill ever, singing out as loud as I could, without giving a flying fig what any of the neighbours thought.














I love you Rob.