Sunday, March 08, 2009

Thanks Everyone

for your kind words of encouragement and your sympathetic oohs and ahs and catchings of breath. I am past feeling near death and hovering closer to ninnyish.

Probably fortunately I am in no position to give up driving altogether, though by necessity I've had the weekend off holidaying, oddly enough, with my mechanic, who is also my brother in law. I will have to drive on Tuesday from Melbourne to somewhere west of Bacchus Marsh (birthplace of Peter Carey) to a school camp. Yes. Whee. Then on Tuesday night back to uni to teach and then back to west of Bacchus Marsh for more camping fun. So driving ahoy. I don't feel too shaky about the idea of being behind the wheel, though something tells me I'll be driving plenty slow, specially if there's a sprinkling of rain about.

Now I should be packing, just back from a weekend at the beach, off now to this work bizzo. I am quite looking forward to coming home on Wednesday and belonging to my own house once more and doing some good honest writing on Thursday.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Crash

Last Friday - February the 27th - was my one year anniversary of being a licensed driver. It did not go past unnoticed by me, when the road into our town was still blocked off I was using my driver's license a couple of times a day to get in and out. I meant to blog about it, but as so often happens the blog post dropped half formed out of my mind.

So a year has gone by and most of the time I am just a lady who drives. I am still hyper aware on the freeway and at night, and - I thought - when it's raining.

There's two ways into St Andrews - one is via Hurstbridge and the other is via Panton Hill. For those of you intending to stalk me one day my route of choice is generally via Panton Hill, the road is wide and the bends are generally gracious. The Hurstbridge road disconcerts me. It has an 80km/h speed limit, which many locals see as a challenge, many tight bends and blind corners and it's narrow in places, narrow enough that meeting the school bus coming the other way never fails to alarm me. Today as I was leaving an appointment with the optometrist I hesitated at the roundabout, rain streaming down my windscreen, and considered for a moment taking a long detour to avoid this experience. No no, I told myself. You're a fine driver. You'll be fine. There wasn't much on the road. It's not uncommon to have something sit right on your tail going up the Hurstbridge road, and you can hear them thinking evil thoughts at you as you slow down to 40 at every turn. As I passed the turn off to Strathewen a silver van pulled out behind me. Perhaps, without thinking, I sped up a little, so as not to slow them down. The strange thing is that moments later they simply vanished. I guess they must have pulled into a driveway. Perhaps my eyes played a trick on me and when I saw them turning right in the rear vision mirror they really turned left. Do eyes do that?

I thought I was driving carefully. I must have approached the corner to fast. I must have braked instinctively as I was making the turn. I know I do this sometimes, and I know I shouldn't. Even as the car hit the barrier I didn't quite believe I was having an accident. Then I was flung across the road, then I was being tugged by some invisible force through the gravel gutters on the other side. I had no sense of being in control of the car (though somehow I managed to bring it back to the right side of the road and achieve a fairly decent, safe-ish park). It was like I was no longer driving the car, but some instrument that responded to its will. The steering wheel steered me, pulled my arms up and down like I was a puppet. A spooky puppet, with a silenced voice trapped inside. I had all sorts of coherent thoughts, it was just that the way they were strung together didn't make much sense. I ploughed down one of those little white poles with its tiny rectangle of red reflective plastic. Well, I say I ploughed it down, which makes it sound like I had a say in the matter, that I was an agent acting from will, that I had some reason to cause it harm and I didn't, honestly, I have always been inexplicably fond of those white posts, those reflective squares. They are part of the roadscape of my childhood. I spent a lot of my childhood on roads, wandering. In fact, aesthetically speaking, roads are one of my favourite things in the world. At one stage I wondered if this was the way I was going to die, which on reflection seems overly dramatic. Having said that, if I'd met something coming the other way, clipping along at 80km/h... Well. Let's not go there.

Of course I am fine. I probably should have mentioned that already.

So I turned the key and turned off the engine and sat for a moment. I got out and had a look at the little blinded eyes where the lights had been (they'd been taken out on both sides) and the big fold in the bonnet where the lid no longer fit. I seem to remember wandering on a bit, just a few steps, and then I waved down a car. A kindly lady stopped (later I found out she had once been a high school teacher, and she retained this air about her) and we stood together and wondered what I should do. Neither of us had a phone. She took me to her house just down the road and I called Martin. He was out walking with Una in the rain, but a friend of ours had met him on the road and he drove Martin and Una back to our place to get the second car and Martin set out to rescue me.

The accident must have happened at about 11.45 this morning because as I waited for Martin it turned twelve. The husband of the lady who rescued me collects clocks. At twelve they all began to chime, each of them with their own set of bells. It was beautiful and eerie and poetic. Time. Time. When the accident began time began to bend, everything seemed to happen so slowly and yet there was no time to act. Time to think a thousand separate thoughts, but no time to bail out, no chance to pause, rewind, [APPLE +Z] UNDO, start over, do it properly. Time. A dozen separate bells, maybe more, all chiming for the same hour, but not quite synchronous, to make a music of sorts, or a poem, or a nonsense. Five minutes or so later the lady's husband showed up, with various family members fresh from the airport (from Tasmania of course because stories must be neat in their details), including two small grandsons. I was surreal to them, an oddity in this scene of homecoming. Only another five minutes and then I was gone, leaving oonly a small flurry of strangeness and re-explanations in my wake (you always retell the tale when the stranger is gone).

Information not available to me: where was the silver van? This is my story, but even your own story withholds details. It took me back to another story, fun times, eleven years ago. Another crash. This car beyond repair and the other guy was taken off in an ambulance. This one, as crashes go, was better.

Just after I had the accident (actually around the same time the accident was occurring) we heard of some money coming to us that will more than cover the repairs. Strange how these things occur. Una is quite cross with me for crashing the car and Fred is disappointed that she couldn't see it, it was already with our mechanics by the time she came home, Martin said they were gleefully ready to start ripping pieces of it as he left. Martin is just happy I am safe. And I am. I am safe. I am fine.

Sunday, March 01, 2009

More Photos

Summer is officially over, but we are reminded that fire season isn't. Tuesday is now being heralded as the worst day since Friday and schools may close again. To say I am sick of it is an understatement. Clouds have sat grey and swollen, low in the sky, all day. We have waited anxiously for them to open. Everything is so parched and dry. Tuesday isn't going to be hot, but they are expecting winds at 150km an hour. Weather. All this weather and no rain.
These photos were taken by Martin yesterday just up the hill from us, about five minutes drive away. I hasten to add that from our house we can't see any of this, we still have green bush across the road. It is utterly unbelievable to me to think: walk down to the road and turn right. Cross the bridge. Walk another five or ten minutes and there's this, the world deprived of colour:


The road past Mitten's Bridge is still closed. Martin went through with friends to help them clear their property and pick up the oddments that survived, a kid's playgym. A letterbox. Bits and pieces.
This last one I took in our front garden on the evening of Sunday the 8th. The whole garden glowed radiant orange red. It was the most terrifying beauty I have witnessed.

Just...wow


Here's their blog.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Links for my Mum

Here are some things I want to share with my mum, that I thought some of you would like to look at too.

The first one is this piece of writing about The Flying Nun. It's lovely and affecting and surprising - did you (that's a plural you, not just my mum, but I'd love to know her answer too) know it was a book first? I am going to try and track it down.

The next link is to the wonderful Barista blog, authored by David Tiley, a film maker (and historian? He doesn't say but he certainly seems to have a passion for archives). Many other blogs have already linked to his moving and intelligent immediate response to the Black Saturday fires We Lived Again but Life was Different; all his subsequent posts about the fire have been equally moving, beautifully rendered out of primary material with an unsentimental but clearly emotive commentary in the face of utter black empty loss. The way David holds history up to the light, the way he uses it, like a lens, to meaningfully and elegantly illuminate the present (and in turn creating a historical document himself) makes me literally hold my breath.

And then I love the Internet and I'm glad I waste so much time on it, because it helps me uncover real beauty and make sense of the world.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

not quite normal

I have signed on for sessional teaching at Melbourne Uni this year. I will be teaching two subjects, 5 classes a week, one called Novels and the other Reading Australian Writing, both 3rd year Creative Writing subjects. I am really looking forward to it, though it means a third day of creche for Una (which she will love) and before and after school care for Fred, hopefully she'll enjoy that, though I think she will be tired and g-r-u-m-p-y when she gets home, and there will be days I'll hardly see them. Logistics aside (the scheduling has been a nightmare). I am excited about going off to work like normal people with my bento box and my clear delineations between work and home, though of course I'll still be writing noggles in all my spare time (hahahahahahaha). It's only for 12 weeks, though there will probably be teaching opportunities for semester 2 as well. I have conquered my residual fear of driving on the freeway (well, it's more a fear of merging) and even fluked (utterly) a parallel park on a main road in Carlton with traffic streaming past. Friday is my one year anniversary of being licensed to drive.

Things are still not normal in St Andrews, though I think we are all getting used to the relief centre, the quietness of the roads, especially on Saturday mornings, the constant activity at the CFA, the posses of vans - Bigpond, Parks Victoria, travelling in threes and fours, one identical car after another shooting past as I walk up the main road after dropping Fred at school - and of course the police road block. At first I found their constant presence comforting, though alien. The world had changed and I needed these things to be here to mark its borders and to help interpret the new order of things. I am still appreciative of their presence and their hard work, but I am very much looking forward to the seasons changing, the Saturday market returning, to things getting "back to normal". As I write this I fully know and embrace how lucky I am that there is such a thing as normal still for us, that many people will have to rebuild normal from the ground up and then live it for years before they recognise it.

I also know it's not safe for us to just 'get over it' (as if we could), the season isn't over yet. There is still smouldering behind containment lines, and we are still surrounded by unburnt bush. There have been more fires on the eastern edge of the city and in the middle of the state. As the temperatures are set to soar again on Friday, we're thinking about school and creche and wondering how much we should disrupt our routines every time there is a fire danger day. It's not an easy decision to make, not as easy as I thought it would be immediately after the fires where we declared we'd be driving out every total fire ban day. The fire season stretches long into the school year, at least one month either side, more like two as summers get longer, in 2005 there were bushfires at Wilson's Prom in April as the result of the loss of containment of a controlled burn in unprecedented hot weather. This choice may be taken out of my hands, the Department of Education and Early Childhood are deciding tomorrow whether or not schools will be closed. Luckily Martin and I are both home on Friday. This sort of closure will only get more complicated for us, and will prove almost impossible to balance for some families. Sadly, I wonder if this will end up discouraging people in urban interface like us to send their kids to the local, that's already a bit of a problem here. I know it seems ridiculous to be thinking about the inconvenience of disrupting our routines even if there's the slightest risk of tragedy in light of the awful tragedies, and yet this is where we live, where we spend our everyday and participate in our most ordinary of activities.

Not to end on a sad note, here is a list of things that are making me happy:
*Watching Fred blossom into reading and writing. She came to me before with a jumble of letters, and as I tried to decipher it she showed me the words she'd copied from the subject reader for Reading Australian Writing: 'Nobel Prize'. And, yeah, I could kind of see it, despite the errant F and the fact that the Z was an S.
*Eating a bowl of soup while I type made by Fred with little help from me, with basil and chard from the garden, cherry tomatoes, salt, pepper, fresh ginger and other spices. Actually, it's delicious, a lovely light summer broth with fresh ingredients.
*Marmalade cookies, light and airy, dipped in cold milk.
*A home day with the girls, Fred's last Wednesday at home before the normal school week commences. I feel a touch nostalgic, this is Martin's first week back at uni and my last day at home with both girls under these ordinary circumstances. They've had the odd fight, and for the last hour Una has been bursting into unexpected tears, but for the most part they've played beautifully together, spending most of the day indoors making rockets out of cushions and chairs, doing puzzles, cooking and playing Mums and Girls, Cats and Girls, Girls and Babies etc.
*On Monday (a tense total fire ban day) madly refreshing Twitter as people offered hilarious play-by-play commentary on the Oscars.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

This is not a world

"People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: `This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: `This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.'"

Russell Hoban, from Turtle Diary, ch 24 found via this site, which seems to be dedicated to seeding random Russell Hoban quotes into the world (!!) And I found that via Julia Lawrinson's blog.

I will write a more personal post later, in the meantime I wanted to stick this into the scrapbook that is my blog, for fear I would lose my way back to it.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children

Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children
by John Updike

They will not be the same next time. The sayings
so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.
Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in
the more securely to the worldly buzz
of television, alphabet, and street talk,
culture polluting their gazes' pure blue.
It makes you see at last the value of
those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells
of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces
like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)
who knew you from the start, when you were zero,
cooing their nothings before you could be bored
or knew a name, not even your own, or how
this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.

found via Judith at Misrule (not on her blog, she posted the link on Facebook).