Visiting the moon

When I got up this morning at 5.30am (thanks, Eleanor) and stood grumpily in the dark kitchen I looked out the window and was amazed by the moon.  I can tell you that the moon at 5.30am in Berhampore, Wellington was a full, huge, luminous disk and the acne scar shadows on its surface were clearly visible.  I can tell you that most of the rest of Berhampore was not up admiring this, and that it was cold when I went outside to get a better look, and the streets were silent: streetlights illuminating parked cars across the valley.

I am tired.  Not because I got up at 5.30am, but because I am working.  Too tired or busy to write blog posts, or comment on blog posts, or read a book.  I was writing another post but it didn’t seem to want to finish itself, and I got distracted by this photo.

Ordinary things become evocative.  I’m not sure why we take so many photos of extraordinary things, because most of the photos that I linger over from the past are inconsequential snaps of people in the midst of life.  Like this photo of me in my bed from 30 years ago.

Compare it to this photo:

This is a photo of a special occasion.  It was taken at my ninth birthday in 1982.  I think this was one of my birthdays at Greta Point.  What I enjoy about this photo now is the look on my friend’s face (also, his shirt is pretty rocking).  Actually, I think that today is his birthday.  (Happy birthday, bro.  You’re a good-looking fellow now, but you were a lot cuter 30 years ago.)

The main difference between the two photos is that the first one is hugely, personally evocative, and the second one is a record of an event.  I think this is because the first one is a symbol.  While it is just one photo of one moment, it comes to represent the thousands of hours I spent sleeping there, and all the dreams, and nightmares, and the falling in and out of sleep in that bed, in that place.

I had that bed for a long time.  Perhaps 15 years.  It really wasn’t very good.  The frame was pretty cool, but it was built in the days before bed makers had realised they could make you buy a far more expensive bed by showing you pictures of spines and necks and magnetic underlays and all that (mostly) crap.  It had a thin foam mattress on top of a kind of metal net attached to the frame by springs.  There was a roller bed underneath, and by the time my bed was in its fifteenth year the springs had given up, and I was essentially sagging down so far I was sleeping  on the roller bed underneath.

Not that it mattered of course.  I was very happy with my bed, and the thin, striped duvet (Google translate: bedcover thingy).  Of course being a nine-year old boy I was also happy with the huge Pink Panther, and I can tell you that the little panda, dog toy had incredibly soft fur.  The orange book in the pocket above my head (so handy), was called So You Want to Play Wargames?  The answer to that question, by the way, was: “yes, but it’s too fiddly, and I don’t have any money, and do we have to measure everything with a ruler can’t we just set up two armies and biff lego at each other?”

Amazingly, in this photo I seem to have something written on my hand.  I have something written on my hand now.  It’s how I manage my life.  Other people graduated to planners and i-phones, I write things on my hand.  My hand system is feeling the strain now that people tell me increasingly important things, but I don’t think I will ever change.  In fifty years I will still be using this system.  On my hand I will write my name so I remember who I am.

So I remember who I am.

When I was at university our lecturer once explained this idea that our identity is a really a series of rapid repetitions of the same statements, like a film flickering on the back of the inside of our heads.  It seems to be the same thing over and over, but like a time-lapse film of a flower you are constantly in flux.  Always the same, always involved in change.

I am the boy in the photo. 

If I turned to my right in that photo I could see the bedroom door, and behind that door was the rest of the first house that I can really remember.  Sometime in 1982 my Gran came to visit this house.  If I could go back to 1982 I might choose to go back and get out of bed and see my Gran again.  Perhaps disturb her reading a book in the living room.

Or perhaps I would go upstairs and sit at the table and have breakfast with my mother.

I am not the boy in the photo. 

I’m the bald, bespectacled teacher, husband, father of two daughters.  Two daughters who are busy building their store of childhood memories.  Of getting up for breakfast in the dark, and coming across your dad standing in the kitchen looking at the moon. 

What is he thinking? 

He’s thinking about the concrete wall next to his bed when he was a kid.  He’s remembering that it had lots of tiny air bubbles in it.  How he spent many nights after the lights were out and his eyes had adjusted to the dark tracing patterns or imagining other places.  Imagining what he would be, what kind of star, what kind of hero.

Imagining he was walking on the moon.

 

So that the blind may see

I went to Scots College when I was a kid.  Scots College is a private boys’ school.  Nowadays it is very expensive, but in the 80s it was only a bit expensive.  My mother decided that Scots was best for a few reasons.  It had a bus that picked up and dropped us off near her work, and the extra time I spent sitting on the bus let her work a better number of hours.  Also, though, there was the fact of my father’s death, and the idea that going to a boys’ school might put some male influence back into my life.  Then there was God.  Scots was a Presbyterian school with a chapel and a Reverend, and two services a week.  My mother has never been a fan of God but thought I should make up my own mind.

So I went to Scots College.  I looked like this in 1982 (I am the only chap here wearing glasses).

If you looked at my class photo from 1981 you would see that I didn’t have glasses.  In that respect at least 1982 was a significant year for me, and I was lucky I had Mrs Davies as a teacher.

One day in her class she asked me to read something off the blackboard and I discovered I couldn’t.  It was quite a strange feeling because I didn’t think “oh, I must need glasses.”  I didn’t know what to think.  I laughed.  Unimpressed, Mrs Davies asked me to stand up and read from the board.  I stood up but it didn’t improve things.  Instead of being told off however I was told to sit down and the lesson moved briskly on.  Later, I suppose, Mrs Davies called my mother and told her I needed to get my eyes checked.

Going to the optometrist was a curiously comic experience.  The optometrist had an entirely bald head and a white doctor’s coat.  Although he always seemed to be smiling he seemed humourless.  He had me sit in the large cushioned chair in his darkened exam room and then, in complete silence, manoeuvred various large apparatus on long metal limbs in front of my face.  One particular examination was terrible.  He took a small hand-held device with a little light and a magnifying glass at the end and examined each of my eyeballs with great care.  This involved him bringing his face within a centimetre of my own.  For some reason this always made me want to laugh.  The desire was almost overwhelming.  Sitting there with a strange man staring into my eyeball not laughing was hell.

Once I had my prescription we went to the oculist.  The sales assistant recommended a durable brown plastic frame with completely flexible joints.  “Indestructible!” he glibly assured my mother, proving that he had never had children himself.  Any parent knows that anything in the known universe is capable of being destroyed by a child in less than a minute.

Over the years I had many pairs of brown plastic glasses and they all ended up with a patina of scratches on their unscratchable lenses, and a diverse collection of glue and tape marks on the unbreakable arms.

On my first day back at school with glasses Mrs Davies sent me off on an errand during the first lesson of the day.  I thought this was a bit odd.  Later at playtime my mate told me that while I was out of the room she delivered a frightening lecture to the class on the terrors that would await them should they ever tease a boy with new glasses.  It must have worked because no one ever teased me about having glasses.

Many, many years later I learned that Mrs Davies had given up teaching to battle a disease that would ultimately leave her blind.  Which was another thing I learned from school about life, and was perhaps a factor that contributed to my increasing scepticism about God as time wore on.

Begin again

There were a few things to do before I left the old house.  First I needed to go into the back garden and touch the wall I built out of brick.  It’s not much of wall.  About waist height and as long as two chaps lying down head to head.  I’m not much of a handy man, but our old house had a lot of bricks lying about, probably from the chimneys that had been taken down by some previous tenant, so it seemed like I should use them up.  I bought some mortar and a little trowel and spent a few summer days a few years ago making that little wall.  Brick is lovely in the sun; it responds to it and seems to glow.  I think that wall is the most beautiful thing I have made with my hands so I had to go and sit by it one last time, and run my hand across the rough, uneven surface.

Like I had to go and sit under my favourite tree, and run my hand across the papery bark of the birch tree’s trunk.  In early summer, when the leaves were burstingly green, and fresh with life, I always made time to lie under that tree and look at the big blue sky through those leaves.  Can you feel the grass sing, take in the scent of it, fresh cut, see the leaves shiver in the wind, on the tips of their branches, and not feel young at heart?  Can you?

So I said goodbye to the wall and the tree with a heavy heart, and walked inside to my daughters’ old room.  All empty now; not even a curtain to pull.  I stood over the corner where Eleanor had her cot when she was new born and felt myself pour into that space.  Little girl, you were once a soft and nuzzling little being in my arms unaware even of yourself.  You fitted in the crook of my arm when I bathed you tipping cups of water over your head and watching it pour back into the tub.  Now you are such a big girl of five full or impatience and restlessness and tears and laughter and plans.

And on the other wall the space where dear little Rosamund slept.  She will not remember this place.  Her home is already the new house, and yet here you began to become yourself.

In the main bedroom I said goodbye, and thank you to the house.  I said thank you because I was suddenly aware then of that house’s great age, and that for all our self-important bustling about, it was the house that was hosting us, watching us turn into parents, and celebrate births, and shed tears, and then letting us go before welcoming a new “owner”.  I said thank you and I waited for a sign, and briefly the watery sunlight coming in through the bedroom windows strengthened and the whole room was bathed in light.  That was enough for me to feel that the house, or the universe, or something had responded.

When I closed the front door behind me, and ran my hand over the house number one last time, I felt sad but ok.  Ready to start again.

Eleanor goes to the shop and reviews the Three Musketeers

 

Sunday

I spent the morning asking Daddy if I could go to the shop to buy some lollies with the money from my piggy bank.  He said no at breakfast, but I knew that if I kept asking until lunchtime he would say yes.  After breakfast Daddy took me to the video shop to get some DVDs out.  We always get three because they have a special deal where you get three.  Sometimes I let Daddy get one.  Sometimes Daddy tries to get two for him, but I just have to roll around on the ground for a while screaming “it’s not fair” and he usually agrees to get two for me.

I don’t know why he wants to see the movies he gets out anyway.  His movies are usually about men and women talking.  Sometimes they say things that are funny but mostly they seem to be upset, and cry, and hug each other, and then roll around in bed for a bit, then they get upset again.  I think he would enjoy my movies more.

Three Musketeers is an excellent movie.  I have made Daddy watch it three times now.  It is excellent because Barbie and her three friends do excellent adventure things and there are almost no boys in it, and the boys who are in it are bad or stupid.  I think this is correct from my experience at school so far, although most movies pretend that boys are good and heroes.  Girls are better heroes because they do action things, but also look really pretty and have nice hair.

I thought that Daddy understood this but then he got me a book out of the library about the Three Musketeers and all the characters in it were boys.  Barbie wasn’t even in it and she’s the main character.  I refused to let Daddy read it to me even when he got cross with me, I even refused when he begged.  I think he felt a bit glum, so I showed him some of my Three Musketeer (girl version) moves.  Three Musketeer walking, and Three Musketeer brushing teeth, and Three Musketeer eating dinner.  It’s hard to do these things while spinning around with your sword and taking off your hat and saying “all for one and one for all”.  Daddy shouted at me when I tried to say “one for all” and sprayed my toothpaste across the bathroom floor, and tripped on my cape and almost fell in the toilet.

After lunch Daddy agreed to take me and Rosamund to the shop to get some lollies.  It doesn’t take long to walk to the shops.  Except that we had to stop and pat all the cats on the way.  Rosamund got lost behind a hedge and then got confused about being my sister and thought she was a cat for a while.  Daddy kept saying “don’t touch them they’re dirty” which might be true because I’ve seen a cat licking its bottom once and they might all do it, or it might have just been that cat.

When we got to the lolly shop there was a pile of lollies in bags and I had to choose which one I wanted, and then I had to pay the lady behind the counter, and then I had to run outside open the bag and pick which lolly to eat first.  I chose a pink mushroom.  A man came up to Daddy and tried to sell him a broken portable TV set.  I thought this would be quite useful, and told Daddy to buy it, but Daddy just glared at me, and said no thank you to the man.  The man looked quite sad.

On the way home I ate a worm and a bug out of the bag.  It’s been a good day so far.  I think Daddy and I will watch the Three Musketeers again when we get home, and I’ll try to explain about the girl thing one more time.

World Ruled By Me

Look! I wrote another song (hey, I can hear those groans).  This time I got Eleanor to sit in the background so there is something to look at other than my bald patch.  You will notice that this video is pretty rock’n'roll because I swear.  Actually, I had intended to say “crap” but I think I got away with it because usually when my filter doesn’t work Eleanor picks up on it instantly and with great delight.

My favourite thing about this video is what Eleanor says at the end.  I think she’ll be a great music reviewer one day.