The new treehouse isn’t getting much use yet but the bottom of the garden is, with a lot of traffic over the back fence to visit the five and two-year old neighbours, Sienna and Coco. Now that the age gap is less significant than when Sienna was a baby and toddler, the three older girls often call out to each other after school or on weekends asking about a visit over there (never over here: we don’t have any grass or toys out the back apart from the abandoned sandpit and trampoline). By coincidence a boy in Rhea and Lara’s year at school often visits there too, his mother is a friend of theirs, and when they have Sunday afternoon or night dinner parties there are often six kids running wild with the chickens and the dog already, another two doesn’t make any difference.
Last Friday night we couldn’t even coax them home for dinner, they grazed on popcorn and whatever else the kids were eating over there. When it got dark Lara and Rhea approached wearing borrowed miners’ lights to ask if they could watch a movie called The Good Dinosaur with the other kids. I said yes and we settled down to catch up on an episode of Gardening Australia, now one hour long. After about twenty minutes Lara came home in tears with fright, and Rhea followed a few minutes later. They still have a low tolerance for fear.
I’ve just started reading the last book that Oliver Sacks wrote before and while he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, called Gratitude. It contains reflections like this:
My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
And this:
I am now face to face with dying,
but I have not finished with living.
It’s a very short book so I read it in one sitting, but have already re-read part of it again. I’m concurrently reading the delightful memoir of Oliver Sack’s late blossoming first love with a beautifully observant and poetic writer called Bill Hayes, nearly thirty years his junior: Insomniac city: New York, Oliver and Me. Hayes intersperses stories of conversations, treasured domestic experiences and sensual pleasures between them with anecdotes about fleeting interactions with people he meets on the New York streets where they live. When Oliver Sacks writes in Gratitude that he is sorry he has wasted (and still wastes) so much time; and that he is sorry that he is as agonisingly shy at eighty as he was at twenty, Bill Hayes touchingly illustrates the latter point in his subsequent memoir:
‘O’s 76th birthday:
After I kiss him for a long time, exploring his mouth and lips with my tongue, he has a look of utter surprise on his face, eyes still closed. ‘Is that what kissing is, or is that something you’ve invented?’’
Today we all went to a Palm Sunday Refugee rally. Rhea asked ‘what’s a refugee? What does ‘free the refugees’ mean?’
I force myself to attend and I listen to the stories of how our Governments have destroyed people who like the Rohingyan refugees on Manus Island were already traumatised from seeing their family members killed and tortured. Our Governments have further tortured these asylum seekers and refugees in our name. The least I can do is to turn up and be part of a movement of protest. As a speaker said at the rally, there is bipartisan support for these damaging policies, they will not change until we all stand up against them and demand change.
Such injustice and needless suffering makes me even more grateful for the life I have the good fortune to lead.
