Retaining memories

My memory is extraordinarily frustrating to me at the moment. I mean, you don’t want to write too much about your foibles and frailties because who knows what insurance company is trawling through your online footprint or whatever. So for the record, no I don’t think I’ve got some memory problem. Not some diagnosable issue, anyway. But I’ve absolutely got that hormonal fuzziness that is so widely talked about.

I’ve always had a diary, but that’s more to give myself a sense of the doing of things. I’ve never needed it to act as a reminder before. Now though, I forget things to the point that I’ve even left a friend waiting for me. Twice.

But it’s not only the specifics that I’m fuzzy on, it’s the more generalised and global as well. Looking back on the last 18 months or even two years, I don’t have a visceral attachment to any of it. Even though I’ve done some big memory-worthy things–travelled to Japan, put on new shows, renovated my house–none of them are really sticking. I know the rona has muddied our senses of time, but this is something a little beyond that as well. ‘It’s as if,’ I said to a friend (have said to any friend who will listen), ‘I’ve been out for a night and had a few drinks, and I didn’t get completely blindingly shitfaced, but I did have enough that there are pieces of the night that I only remember once people tell me about them.’

My frustration is that I feel as if I’m not getting the full potential benefit of my experiences. Like I’m not experiencing them as fully as I might. And then there are the many little flashes where I think, ‘I should write about that,’ but then, when I sit down to write I find that those moments have disappeared. I can feel the scorch marks in my mind where a thought was sparked, but the flame and the light of the idea has disappeared.

These two facets of this experience coalesced yesterday. I was driving to Middleton and I was listening to an episode or two of Backlisted and in one of the episodes they were talking about a book about insomnia and the piece they read included snatches of poems. I’ve been more strongly drawn to poetry–to reading poetry–lately than I ever have before. And at the time I heard those quotes I thought how interesting it was that I seemed to be drawn to the way in which when I think about poetry I feel it more lightly. Not that it is any less sensual than the way I used to feel my experiences, with that kind of magnification and amplification. But that it works on me from the outside in, whereas the writing I used to do worked on me from the inside out. This is a complex sensation, or series of sensations, that I need to give some more thought to. I need to push this thinking and this idea and to examine it more closely. And here is the benefit of blogging, and the reason that I’m so excited to have this space back. Because I’ve captured this thinking now. I have come, I have recorded the thoughts, and because it’s public (as public as a hidden blog can be) I have written it articulately enough that I’ve teased out at least some of what it is I want to say.

This particular thought won’t be lost to the ether as are so many of my thoughts because I simply don’t remember them anymore.

A Cafe, Melbourne Cup

I spent all of last week doomscrolling twitter, wishing for it all to be over. Even though it was finally made clear at 3.30, I was up to watch at least some of it while it was unfolding. What a thing. What a relief. There’s still a lot of damage to be done on the way out of course, but it does feel like we’ve made a big step forward.

I am not quite back in the rhythm of blogging like I was. For example, I have not written about the woman I saw in the cafe on the day of the Melbourne Cup. The table was a long one–three small tables pushed together to make–twelve women in all, six down one side, six down the other and each of the ends unset.

It’s one of those cafes where no noise is muffled, and so the people shout louder and louder in order to be heard, and the louder they shout the louder they must shout, and why don’t cafes take as much care with their acoustics as they do with their menu? A conversation for another day, for now, I am focussed on the woman I saw.

This woman–the one I noticed–sat at the end of one row, her chair pulled slightly away. Everything at an angle: her body, her fascinator, her mood.

Her scowl morphed back and forth into a frown, the veil of the fascinator it seemed magnifying everything. The wrinkles of her frown, her eyeshadow, the crooked eyebrow crayon. Sometime before I got there, she had built a wall of silence, defensiveness and anger and now I had no way of knowing what it might have been.

If she were twelve, you would say that she was sulking. But this was something deeper than sulk. Invisible, but clear. I tried to think at what conversation might have happened to leave her sitting here past dessert and into coffee. Why had she stayed? Why didn’t she leave?

Around her, the other women talked. At some point they had accepted this behaviour and moved on. So alone, this fascinating woman walked along the path of no return.

Lunchboxes

Valedictory Day weekend … and school has finished. I have to draw a line through the dot point on my internal to-do list, ‘Become amazing at lunchboxes.’ I started out with a bang. We had laptop lunchboxes and each morning I took great joy in filling the pots with popcorn, strawberries and sandwiches cut into neat soldiers.

Then year by year, my work diminished, the lunchboxes broke, I started to sleep in, the mister made lunches with no thought of aesthetics, the lads stopped eating their lunch anyway.

When we moved back to Australia, I tried to rekindle the magic. I made the lunches, established a muffin routine, making the muffins on Sunday night so they were fresh fro Monday morning. But somehow, control over the lunches always felt elusive. It still does. As I write I feel the physical manifestation of my ineffectiveness in the top of my right shoulder spreading down my arm.

And now I can never be that mother, the one who sent her kids to school with perfect lunches. I know it sounds ridiculous, but saying goodbye to that idea makes my body ache.

Magic thoughts

I’ve never got a handle on this feeling I sometimes have that writing is coming. It feels both exciting and reassuring. My writing is about to pour forth. And it will be as good, as recognised, as I my mind has always imagined it would be.

It’s really happening, I think. But the evidence is that it is not. I’m 51 years old, nearly 52 and this feeling has never been transformed into anything more tangible than this thought. I have finished very little that I’ve begun and those things that I have finished have been good–some very good–but no one has described them as great.

I can explain why this has happened, why I’ve had the feeling but never the result that it has promised. It’s because the feeling itself is dopamine enough, so I am never compelled to go that instant to my notebook and my pen. Rather, that sense of reassurance that I mentioned? It tells me that it is going to happen and so there is no urgency. And without urgency I do not act.

If I had gone that very moment to create, who knows what magic I might have made?

I read only recently–perhaps in those Daily Stoic emails I have subscribed to–that the only thing that stands between us and success is our inability to work through the temporary discomfort. This had deep resonance for me. I recognised myself in it. (Strange then that I don’t remember exactly where I read it, only that I did).

Over time, I’ve come to see these moments as the manifestation of something that is almost magical. Like a fairy, it existed only in that moment and because I didn’t catch it then, it disappeared.

They are gone, those stories I was meant to tell.

Ruts and rhythms and routines

New routines are evolving. Routines have evolved before, and I’m trying to remember whether I was conscious of that at the time or whether I simply let them evolve. Unfold.

I sometimes think about ruts, and I wonder how people get into one and I think to myself, ‘I’d love to find a rut, to know what was happening one day, one week, one year to the next.’

Is it part of getting older this searching for rust and rhythms? Looking for the softness that rhythms brings, the gentleness, the ease. If I were in a rut, I think to myself, I would be able to write the reams that I dream of writing. I would sit for hours and lose myself in words. If I were in a rhythm, I would know when it was time to write.

But that’s just something I tell myself. It’s another, ‘I would be a great writer, if only …’

After four years, nearly five, back in Australia, living in this one place, I do feel the rhythms and routines of the year becoming more sharply defined. Winter leaving, the spring winds springing up behind. Finding my momentum to write my next fringe show, knowing that October is too late to start, but knowing I’ve done it twice before and it all worked out okay.

Most of the rhythms and routines I’ve had in my life have come by accident, just one thing happens and then it happens again and there you are. Going to the market. Watching Insiders. Sewing trips on the Queen’s Birthday weekend (but not this COVID year). And now that I Made an Adult, all I can feel is the spaces where I didn’t get the routines working. The annual trips to this beach. The weekly pizza night. The lunchboxes. And of course, I’m thinking of all the ones I didn’t appreciate enough, didn’t put myself in the moment. How much I hated Saturday sports. Well, all sports really. How bored I was with it.

And as my children grow older, get ready to leave, spend less time with me all the time, I know that my routines will be more clearly mine. That is, unshaped by their needs or wants. I’m looking forward to the things I will be able to do now. The creative projects I will be able to finish. But I’m sad about all of the times we will no longer share. I thought of trying to introduce a routine where we all got together for Saturday breakfast, but then I thought of the cracks in my heart I would have to mend when I was the only one there.

It’s like getting the band back together, only it’s blogging

In which I begin again

I was messing about on my website, and it came to me that a website and a blog are no longer the same thing. They haven’t been for years. But I didn’t want to lose my blog from all those years ago, so I went searching and there it was. My old blog. I left it when I was trying to set up something more of a website, a professional shopfront I suppose. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that’s about the time I more or less stopped blogging. Or blogging more or less stopped. And then of course there was facebook.

But I’ve never been as good at writing as I was when I was keeping a blog. There are things I think that are only suited to this format and without this format to go to, they’ve got nowhere to go.

So there I was sifting through my old blog and knowing it was time to delete everything from my website. But I couldn’t back up the blog … and one thing led to another and here I am. Back in my blog.

I’m just going to use this simple, straightforward template. I’ve got my old blog name, my old blog tagline, and the best photo I ever took of my kids. And this being only the second week of my life where I became the mother of adults, the photo seems even more perfect than it ever did.

It’s like coming home, truly it is.

On internal accents

In which my internal dialogue grows accents

Disconcertingly, my internal voice has started talking to me in the accent of Zelda the Destroyer, Ruth’s wrestling character in Glow. I have no idea why this might be, but it is particularly startling because I’m not having a lot of actual conversations at the moment, so much of what I do is narrated in this strange accent. I speak no Japanese–I haven’t even been able to work out ‘thank you’ yet. So there aren’t many opportunities for conversation, not even the small talk or the little jokes between people that we use to smooth out awkward interactions. Well, there was the man outside the 7-11 where I stopped to buy myself a sparkling water today (it’s hot and humid and I needed the sparkle) … there was a small bench outside the 7-11 and a few people were sitting on it so I sat down thinking it was probably more polite to drink my sparkling water there than as I wandered along the street.

I sat, and as I gingerly opened the bottle, trying to make sure it didn’t fizz on me, the man next to me laughed. It seemed like one of those things you might do when you’re sitting next to someone in the shade of a 7-11, and so I laughed with him. But then he started talking so I shook my head and said, ‘Sorry, English.’ ‘Ah, English,’ he said and I thought he was going to be one of those people who then starts a conversation in perfect English and makes a person feel embarrassed about their own lack of being able to talk to people outside their own language … anyway, he didn’t start talking in English, he kept talking in Japanese. It was about then that I realised as well as sparkling water it was possible to buy sparkling ale and I think he’d enjoyed a few out in the sun. I made my excuses as politely as I could given the circumstances and left.

And that’s about the extent of my conversations, my language barrier compounded by the fact that there aren’t really a lot of tourists here, or at least if there are they are lost in the Tokyo population. It’s not like visiting Paris where a person can hardly breathe for tourists and you get to the end of the day and wonder if you’ve even crossed paths with a Parisien. And while I’m not staying in fancy accommodation by any means, nor is it a hostel where people might go to the dining room to gather at the end of the day…mind you, even if I were at a hostel I’d probably be older than most of the other people and unlikely to get into any conversations there either.

So, having Zelda’s accent in my head is straight up weird. I will say that because it’s only in my head, it’s an excellent imitation of Ruth doing a poor imitation of a Russian accent. However excellent my imitation might be, I’m very much hoping that when I wake up tomorrow it will be gone.

On noodles

In which I eat before bed

As it turns out, the noodles were absolutely not to be missed, and definitely worth staying up for. I went down in my dress and carrying only my room key, expecting that we would be given a packet of two-minute noodles and sent on our way. Not so! The breakfast room opens again, but there are curtains around most of the buffet tables (there are four, all quite small), with only one small space at the servery open for the woman who has the noodle shift to do her work.

People come down in dribs and drabs, most of them wearing the lounge suits (I would call them pyjamas, but that seems maybe a bit rude, because they aren’t pyjamas but are in the hotel rooms with a sign that tells us we are welcome to wear them around the hotel). The woman gives a token to each person and then, when she has made their order calls out the number and tells them their noodles are ready. When she knows we don’t speak Japanese, she calls, ‘Thank you for waiting, noodles are prepared for number 7.’

I rarely eat before bed these days, because I always sleep terribly if I eat or drink too much too close to bedtime (probably I always slept that poorly but now that I’m middle aged I don’t like being tired the next day and get tired more easily and so on and so forth … all of that is a long-winded way of telling you that I wasn’t sure I’d actually eat the noodles, but I did want to see what it was about.

As soon as I saw them, I was in love and knew that they would be exactly what I needed. The noodles are the perfect size. Small enough that I don’t feel over-full and uncomfortable before bed, large enough that I feel sated. The noodles and the soup are both light and thin. Also perfect. The whole thing is extremely cozy, and because it is shared with other people, it is also a reassuring touchpoint, reminding you that you aren’t alone. All hotels should offer something like it, because as wonderful as holidays are it is pretty lonely when you realise that there are all these millions of people around but not one of them knows your name.

And now I’m extremely tired again and about to fall asleep. I wanted to tell you about my day–not that anything amazing happened to me, but I did discover a bit more about this amazing city. Maybe I’ll be able to stay awake long enough tomorrow night.

On departures

In which I make it

It turns out that an hour is enough time to get a domestic-international connection in Sydney airport, but it’s highly stressful and you don’t get a chance to sit and watch the airport go by. Sitting and watching the airport go by is one of my favourite things … mind you anyone watching me go by would have thought I was leaving my dying grandma and never going to see her again the way I was sobbing at the departure gate. Combination of the stress of realising how close my connection was going to be (but knowing that they don’t book it if they don’t think you can make it), but also growing deeper and deeper roots into my house into the next stage of my life.

I’m exhausted now … the only reason I’m still awake is that I’m waiting for the hotel’s noodle service in another twenty minutes. I could’ve gone to sleep hours ago, but there’s something so beautiful in the idea of a ‘noodle service’ and I’m only in this hotel two nights so I don’t want to miss out. Weird thing to not want to miss I know, but there’s been little in the way of rational thought the last couple of days. I’ll be a lot more lucid after a meal of noodles and a nice long sleep.

Talk tomorrow xx

On farewells

In which I’m grumpy, even if I know I shouldn’t be

Sometimes I think, ‘Well, if I just keep talking eventually I will have something to say. But mostly I have no more to say than a person who has nothing to say and no less than someone who has not a lot.

We went out for lunch and it was father’s day. We didn’t know that when we booked. Really we were supposed to be going out for a meal together–the four of us–because I’m going away for a bit, and that’s what you do when someone goes away. You all go out together. So now I’m feeling slightly grumpy that my lunch wasn’t really for me and not only that the meal wasn’t all that great because of course they were doing the whole set menu thing that all the cafes and restaurants do on their busiest days. And I’m grumpy with myself for being churlish, so I’m mostly trying to talk myself out of that.

But we wouldn’t have gone out if we’d known it was father’s day. First, because the meals are always rubbish on days like today. And second, because I try not to buy into the commercialism of it all. I had a wonderful father, and my children’s father is wonderful, but there’s too much pain and hurt in the world regarding fathers and as much as I think it’s important to celebrate the good, I don’t think there’s any need to make the hurt greater than it already is. It feels extremely exclusionary to me. I try not to make a big protest about it, but equally I don’t make a big song and dance about the celebration of it either.

And now I really must go and pack. It’s my worst thing. I’m even worse at packing than I am about being gracious when my farewell lunch gets taken over by something I don’t even agree with.

The puppy is still cute.