Thank you Waiter

Looking back I still cannot understand what it was that you saw in me. Just the same, I will be forever grateful that you did see something, whatever it was.

I utterly adored you. You came to me when I was at the lowest point in my life and you made me feel worthwhile again. It is true it did not last and you broke my heart but what you took away was nothing in comparison to what you gave me. I wonder if you know this? I suppose reading the letters that you wrote me afterwards it is obvious that you did.

We had so much fun that summer didn't we? At least I did and I am pretty sure that you did too. I have a few highlights that I keep in my favourite memory bank, I wonder if you ever revisit those times? I know you used to because you did mention the pool once....ha!

I remember catching a cab over to West End after work one night, getting the cabbie to drop me in Sexton street and then walking up the back path and hearing your harmonica as I drew nearer. You were sitting up on the windowsill of that sliding window above the kitchen table, your long legs folded up, your knees a support for your harmonica holding hands. You were silhouetted against the light walls of that room and framed by the green and purple panes of glass in those windows that later I spent so many hours beneath. I loved those windows and that night as I walked up to the house I loved you. I don't know if you deserved my love or not but the reality was that I just loved you for being there. At that point in time, that was enough.

You introduced me to intelligent people. It might sound strange if I were to say that I had never met any before and perhaps that would be a lie anyway but I suppose I had never noticed any before and suddenly here you were talking to me about everything and anything and being idealistic and passionate and most of all, making me listen.

You forced me out of the mould I thought I belonged in and proved to me that my life could be whatever I wanted it to be not whatever I thought was expected of me. For that I thank you more than you will ever know.

In my dream I am speaking to my family but it seems nobody is listening. It is then I realise that although I am turning purple screaming my words out in a desperate attempt to attract the attention of anyone who’ll listen, there are no sounds emanating from my gawping mouth at all. Am I mute? I wonder this before I see my hands waving above me, fists clenched, punching the air in anger. My fists? A babies fists, fat and pink, useless and weak. What?

I want to wake up from this infuriating dream but instead I notice the dribble on my chin, cold and wet on my hot angry face.

Fish

The warmth came back yesterday, clear sun on the sandy beach and Ardi frollicked with a new puppy friend and I didn't have to walk home but just clean the sand out of the car when I got back. I wanted to take him down again later, but he is so spoilt he hates the back of the ute and there's no way we were taking him in the front and also last time we fished with him he ate the other fishermen's bait. So we stood in the perfect afternoon air and cast our lines into the little waves and watched the fish darting in the surf. I lost count of how many we caught, we just kept the big ones and let the others flip out of our fingers and back into the water with the energy of terror.After dark when the cold air started streaming in, I carried my big pot of fish soup over next door. The table was loaded, the good plates and wine glasses and happy faces and huge platters of food, grilled fish and baked fish and steamed fish...fish.I drank a whole bottle of red wine without enough help and then listened to myself as my mouth ran away talking too much, words spilling out as freely as the wine spilt in. I should have a hangover this morning but I don't, so I figure it must have been a pretty good bottle of wine. It is a shame I can't remember the label or I would go out and buy some more.This morning it is another gorgeous day, S and the Traveller are back working on the fence, after they put an upright in the wrong place last week when I was out. So after some re-designing this morning, we are back on track and I should stay here and help them but am going to take my son the the shops and meet my daughter there as she stayed at a friends last night and she is going to choose some clothes for the boy because she says if I choose them they will be sans style and she can't have a brother who doesn't look cool.And I wonder if you read all that hardly taking a breath because that is how I typed it. Have a nice day everybody :)

The Waiter

The first time I saw him he was tanned and blonde and strangely exotic, not my type at all. He strode through the kitchen, his steps slow, stretched out and claiming ownership of the space around him. Heads turned as he moved, his energy seemed to glow around him as everyone paused and stared.

He turned the corner and the titter next to me from the other girls proved he had been noticed. "Who was that?" they asked, I grabbed my tray and turned away, I didn't care who that was.

It went on for weeks, like a competition. Every time he turned up for a function, dressed in his black and whites like an arian god wearing the wrong uniform, the waitresses laughed and giggled and smiled coquettishly. He was so far out of my league, I didn't even turn my head.

On Christmas day it was bedlam in the kitchen, I was tipsy from a champagne breakfast with my friends so perhaps my confidence was a little higher than normal. I felt the prickle of his stubble on my cheek as he snuck up behind me and leant in to whisper "Merry Christmas" over my shoulder. I felt his hot body, the day was humid, the kitchen like a sauna, when I turned in total surprise, he smiled and said; "Come to a party with me tonight?", I had a date already. I could see Louise staring daggers at me over his shoulder. He was not my type. I was too tired. I wasn't finishing work until so late. I did not need any more men in my life....

"Yes", I smiled, I'd love to.

He changed my life.

It is 13 years* since I saw him last, I am not sure where he is living now and I don't know if he is still the person he always said he was going to be. Sometimes I get frightenend that something may have happened to him and I will never see him again, but then I think that it doesn't matter,the impact he had on my life I will take with me forever regardless of whether we keep in touch or not.

He was the christmas present that I needed that year. I think he saw me like a project, something broken that he could fix, something small and lost and useless that he could metamorphisise into a new and better thing.

Louise was the one who had propped me up until that day. She had given me refuge when I found the strength to leave my ugly past and I repaid her by winning her crush. I never intended that.

So we went to the party, I fought past my feelings of inadequacy amongst his university friends and I let him drum me up and make me feel that I was someone too. We sat up until daylight talking, he opened a door for me that I never knew existed. It was as if he opened the door to my mind. He made me think. He didn't tell me I was too young, or too stupid or too ugly. He didn't leave me out of the conversation, speak over the top of me or speak down to me. He asked me what I thought and he listened and he took me into a world of new ideas and passion for life and appreciation of little things I had never noticed before.

"Come with me?" he asked and I followed him like a disciple. I met people who had thoughts and minds and rooms to rent and I dug myself out of my suburban pit and moved to a vibrant inner city alternative. At night after work I would go around to his house and hear his harmonica drift out across the lush West End backyards. Calling me like the pied piper called the children to their doom.

"Come with me?" he asked and we hitched the Australian east, drinking beer in western pubs and talking to truck drivers until our throats were sore from helping to keep them awake. One night in a church hall in Tamworth he taught me to dance and to love the people watching. In the Goondiwindi truckstop as we sat at a laminex table he showed me how to fold a map properly, so that every trip I have taken since a little of him has been there with me, being pedantic.

In Melbourne aged 19 I played scrabble for the first time while we sampled Coopers Ale, I had never drunk beer before I met him either, and I looked at him across the room and thought that I was truly happy. The next day he was going fruit picking for a few months and I was going back to Brisbane. It felt okay.

Then he told me.

Two weeks before in Brisbane I had heard him talking to his housemate. He had got a letter he had said..." but I can't tell her, I just can't!"
"But you have to" argued his friend.
"What?" I asked walking in.
His friend changed the subject and somehow I forgot about it.

So after sedating me with a bottle of Coopers that night, he told me it was over.
"I want to say goodbye now", he said, "because in the morning I am leaving at 4am, there won't be time."
I didn't understand, how could I? We were getting on so well.
I withdrew into myself and my shell hardened so much that the next day back at my sisters house in Oakleigh I pretended he didn't exist. I lay in that darkened room, nursing my Cooper's headache, that room I will remember as a room of grief, where the pain of that morning and the pain of the day when my father died all being melded into a hard dark lump. Inside that room.

Weeks later, back in Brisbane, I collected the letter from my letterbox as I walked to the train to go to work. I waited until I was in my seat then opened the pages and the person who I had tried to forget spoke to me in long eloquent sentences of explanations and excuses and reasons. He begged me not forget what we had. He told me that it wasn't all for nothing and that had he known he was going to meet me he would never have asked the german girl to come out here and marry him. "If she had written to say she was coming sooner", he said. "If I hadn't thought that she had changed her mind. If If If..."
I didn't believe a word of it but the tears still slowly dripped down my cheeks, blurring the makeup he always told me that I didn't need. I went to work and quit my job.

I got a job travelling north Queensland and revelled in my new found independence. I didn't think about him, I instead learned to work harder than I had ever worked before and found a new passion for travel and life that I knew I had him to thank for.

Back in Brisbane I became friends with his friends and decided that he was right. It didn't all have to be for nothing. I had learned to think and forge my own path, thanks to him. His friend apologised for him, but I said it was okay, it didn't matter. His friend shook his head at me and would not believe I did not care.

I went back to the football ground one last time then I became a new person, if that is possible.

I met my husband a year later. The first night he was coming to dinner, I had 'evicted' my housemates, lit the candles and put on the music. The knock at the door was a little early and I am not sure what my expression was when I saw that it wasn't whom I expected.

I don't know why he had come around, I never asked him but it was the first time he had ever come around without her. They had had me over to their place to dinner a few times. She had carefully shown me their seperate rooms. It had been strange and I wasn't sure why thay wanted me there, just me and them. So I asked him to make himself scarce that night, while I waited for my boyfriend, he ducked next door for a while, then reappeared and gave my new man the ten questions. I pretended it didn't matter but his approval meant everything to me and his acceptance of my choice sent me down the life path that I am on now.

He surfed with my boyfriend and made friends with his friends. He came and stayed and brought his girlfriends. He entertained and educated me on every turn. His beliefs agreed with my beliefs and when he traveled hundreds of miles to the property for my 21st carrying an expensive gift, I was truly touched. He took the photos at our wedding and wrote long letters from wherever he was.

Then he turned up one summer thirteen years ago without his partner and looked at me in my little life and his eyes told me I had sold out. I haven't seen him since.

It is true I have never surfed the wave of a nuke ship, I have never been arrested for trespassing at Pine Gap, but I don't think I have sold out. I want to know what happened to him after the last time I heard his voice on the radio as he vowed to go to jail for his cause. I want to know why he suddenly put me behind him and why he doesn't write anymore.

I don't seem to have the gift that others have, of leaving the past where it belongs. When I love I love forever. It is not (always) a sexual love, but my soul does not stop loving just because we didn't fit. I don't think my love for him was ever sexual anyway. It was his soul, his mind, that made me feel the way I did.

I accept that it is his choice to take a life path that does not cross mine.
I accept that what he did for me was great and it was awful but I am so very glad I met him. I could so easily have said no that Christmas day, in the hot sweaty kitchen with Louise's green eyes burning hatred into my face.

*This was first posted mid 2003.... I heard last year that he had a going away party about five years ago before he moved overseas to get married. My source is pretty shaky though, a mushroom trip gone wrong whom I really should post about one day too. Other than that no-one I know who knew him seems to know where he has gone. I still hope to see him again one day and sometimes I look for him in crowds. A flash of blue eyes, long brown limbs and a knowing smile. ____ Update Nov 2007..I just 'found' him. He is well, happy and still passionate about his causes and I am thrilled!

The Pedicure

He is concentrating, intent. His hands are so gentle on my feet, carefully he trims each toenail, I giggle when it tickles and he admonishes me, "Be still".

We are sitting either end of the sofa in his parents loungeroom. His mother is in the kitchen. She is always in the kitchen in my memory, teatowel in hand. His father sits across the tiny room from us, his feet up, newspaper dripping over his legs and his glasses halfway down his nose. Occasionally he turns his head and stares me in the eye, a comment thrown into the conversation or just that look again, the one he gave me when I arrived.

I don't remember where we caught up, probably down the main street or at the local pool. He asked me back to his place though and it was like a time warp, as if everything was alright again and when I arrived his parents greeted me the same way they had for lunch every day. Well, almost the same way. His father smiled "Lissie!" his pet name for me, the only one who ever calls me that, then he peered at me that moment too long. He took in my face, the purple marks, the swelling and his sigh said everything and nothing. She came to the kitchen door. Did we kiss hello? I don't remember but then she exclaimed "What happened to your face?"

I muttered something about friends and hockey sticks, her eyes told me she knew I would lie even before I spoke. She started to comment then pulled herself up and turned and went back to the sink.

We are sitting there laughing, chatting, the four of us feel like a family, like it always was. I want so much for this to be the reality and not the dream, he moves onto the next toenail and chides me again for not looking after my feet better. "This is horrible", he says when he comes to the toenail that was infected when I was fourteen, I flinch because it is sensitive and it grows crooked and scarred and because I am more ashamed of it in that moment than I am of my face. His mother comes to the kitchen door again, she leans lightly on the timber frame of the open glass slider.

She starts a conversation asking me about my work and my flat, then she asks about him. Her words are clipped and her eyes are hard and she tells me that I must know what I am doing. I can't look at her and instead I focus on his fingers on my feet, his hand is trembling and his skin flushes red and white. His dad is staring at me hard again, over the top of his spectacles his frighteningly familiar blue eyes bore into me. Inside I am crumpling, I am screaming, my face is hot with unspent tears. Then the dishes clang in the sink again and the I hear the crackle and flick as the next page turns. The man who writes the newspaper all week and reads it all weekend.

He runs his hands gently over my feet now, a light massage like one I gave him not long ago and aeons ago, his eyes hold mine and his touch sends tingles right through my body. It is one of the most erotic moments in my life. "Come on", he says and we stand and I grab my bag and smile goodbye, I will see you soon and his mother turns and looks hard at me again. "Take care.." she says and his father doesn't look up, "See you, Lissie." and we walk out the door.

We climb into the car. THE car. It has a bench seat in the front, it is impossible to sit in his car without thinking about all the time we have spent in there. He starts to drive and we do not speak, he doesn't switch on the radio or the tape player. He drives straight down his street heading to the school, out of town and on towards the weir, he drives by habit. I cry silently. It is very quiet.

He called on friday to wish me a happy birthday and tell me his mother is in hospital. This whole post might sound a bit foot-fetish like(ewww) but it is really about my love for his parents and something beautiful that had to be broken.

Posting and Reposting...Kitchens and Memories...Deleting the wrong files....

Last week I decided that I needed to clean out my laptop, delete files, programs etc. I did the full back-up first, of course, but did not realise that the toshiba "my safe" folder I kept all my writings in wasn't going to back up correctly. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have managed to lose most of my writings. Pretty stupid hey? I have been able to find some though and stumbled across this post, below, written for what would have been my father's 78th birthday a few years back. It is rather similar to the previous post but I thought I would share it again anyway.


Seventy-eight

In the evenings it seems now that it was always just Dad and me. We would sit up late and play cards in a wonderfully comfortable quiet. When I longed for home during long freezing winters at boarding school, I longed the most for those evenings with my father. There was something in me that he understood, a thing that set us apart from the others.

He taught me to play euchre so that wherever in the world I have travelled he is with me. I feel my hands holding the cards the way his did and I rest my finger on my chin to consider my chances, as he did.

He liked a whisky late at night over those cards. He never drank more than a tiny glass or two, so I could never think of my father as an alcoholic, as my mother claimed he was. He was more a binge drinker when the cattle sales were on in town and when you consider his binges were often many months apart, for the most part he was a calm, patient and hard working man.

Every morning he woke me as he chopped the wood for the fire. I would wait until I heard the thump and rumble of the wood, and tinkle of the tinder landing in the woodbox. I would wait for the splash and crackle and roar as he lit the kerosine splattered firewood. I would listen for the sounds of his sock covered feet shuffle to the taps and fill the kettle, the scrape and grating squeak as he removed the fire cover and set the water over the new hot flames to boil. These memories of sound are like gold to me. The kettle would not take long and I would hear him feed the fire with chunks of increasing size, the final hollow pressured thump as he became satisfied with the health of the fire and rammed the firedoor shut. I would wait for this, then stumble out to the kitchen, warm now and welcoming.

We would lean inside the oven door together and let our cold hands sit on the white enamel insulated (asbestos probably) stovetop covers. His first hand rolled drum cigarette would be sending spirals of blue smoke into his eyes, and he would gaze quietly over the back paddock. I wonder now what he was thinking about. I suppose we must have spent this time talking and it seems wrong that the sounds of that room are so acute in my memory but his words seem to have drifted away and dissipated into the black soot on that vj lined ceiling.

Dad would have been seventy-eight last week. I knew even then, I think, that he would not last that long. He often joked about his smoking, that we would see the smoke rising from his grave but I looked last time and there wasn't any. I imagine him laughing and reminding me that he did give up in the end but not until two weeks before he died. It annoys me now that the doctors didn't let him live his last few weeks with that small joy. Instead they pumped him full of nicotine to stave the cravings and his weakness for just one more cigarette placed too much stress on his poor heart.

His dear heart.

She belongs on stage.

She is happy again, I see a spark in her that has been missing for too many months. She stood the other night, microphone in hand, and let the sound pour out of her, it filled us, it ran through us and it touched us. She knew I was so proud. I looked across at my oldest friends, and looks can say it all.
Later on the phone, "You dreamed her up, she is the daughter that you dreamed of. I can't believe how well she sings" This from one whose talent I have always admired and envied. So I thank them, not just for words of praise but for a look which brought the spark back to my girl's eye.

25 years

The silence is almost deafening now that they have left.
We had late nights and karaoke, beaches and mountain walks, photos and non-stop talking. We had feasts and coffee on the deck, laughter and tears, champagne, home brew and chocolate.
Most of all though, we had renewed friendship and I feel honoured and humbled and blessed.
We sat by the table last night and the candle wax melted away as fast as the years and I listened to their voices, unchanged. The music cutting through time like nothing else ever can. 

Goddess

We are going shopping this morning, my daughter and I. I will walk beside her tall lithe figure feeling slightly worn and shrunken. I will notice the appreciative glances all the boys give her, while she tells me she is grotesque. I can only be stunned, but next to her petite and anorexic looking friends her 5 foot, 10 inches make her feel like a giant.
She is looking for something to wear today, but all her clothes seem to belong to somebody else, another smaller girl who she feels has betrayed her. Her frustration is palpable. I curse fashion and society and being fourteen. She shakes her mane of dyed brown hair over her shoulders, steps out of her room and even wearing all black as she tries to shrink herself, we can all see that she is a goddess. One day perhaps she will see it too.

Afternoon

The afternoon air is sleepy and cool. I am fighting to keep my concentration, not to let my focus slip. Today is making up for other days of procrastination and digression. The computer hums, the phone rings, the words fly and the task list shortens. I am coasting along in my tiny world of order, achievement and calm. A cloud of self satisfied smugness surrounds me. Then, with crashing, a rumbling and a torrent of laughter and words, the kids rush up the stairs from the school bus. The cupboard doors bang and the fridge door swings wide as two hot bodies push for access to whatever is on offer. The television is switched on at full volume, bags are thrown, crumbs are left and in a gradually decreasing flurry of activity they retreat to their rooms, a bedraggled line of possessions in their wake. Now the piano starts in one room and the voice excersises in the other. The television is still blaring, unwatched. I switch it off as the phone starts ringing again, this time not for me. I put work on hold until tomorrow, or later tonight or whenever I find my concentration again. This is an afternoon in my house.

After school

The afternoon air is sleepy and cool. I am fighting to keep my concentration, not to let my focus slip. Today is making up for other days of procrastination and digression. The computer hums, the phone rings, the words fly and the task list shortens. I am coasting along in my tiny world of order, achievement and calm. A cloud of self satisfied smugness surrounds me.
Then, with crashing, a rumbling and a torrent of laughter and words, the kids rush up the stairs from the school bus. The cupboard doors bang and the fridge door swings wide as two hot bodies push for access to whatever is on offer. The television is switched on at full volume, bags are thrown, crumbs are left and in a gradually decreasing flurry of activity they retreat to their rooms, a bedraggled line of possessions in their wake. Now the piano starts in one room and the voice excersises in the other. The television is still blaring, unwatched. I switch it off as the phone starts ringing again, this time not for me. I put work on hold until tomorrow, or later tonight or whenever I find my concentration again.
This is an afternoon in my house

On hold

I am on hold on the telephone. They play some recorded orchestral music, tinny through the handset. I listen half heartedly as I gaze out the window at the leaves dancing in the breeze. Then suddenly, she is there. Her fingers tracing the air as she plays the conductor, the twinkle in her eye laughs at my expression and laughs at her joy in the music, then I see him out of the corner of my eye. He is smiling at her. My memory plays this moment like a scene from a movie and I know that part of the reason I feel so fond of him still is because she loved him too.
She lives so vividly in my heart, she walks through my days in her words and her ways and her love and that she is gone now can never really be true when I feel her so close as I do. Perhaps I value him more than I should because when I think of my happiest times with her, he was there too. When I hear his voice I remember the utopia of that time, which can never be lost as long as I remember. So I love to hear his voice, it may not bring my Grandma back but it seems to bring her closer.