funny how
good reef
![good reef](https://i0.wp.com/houseoflovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/HoL-H2O-green-shadow-brown-dog.jpg?fit=2048%2C1536&ssl=1)
I spend a lot of time in this household running downstairs to close the door and just breathe. I duck out to coffee houses and get sane again. I spend time among the trees, or failing that, among the pot plants. This morning a friend of my father’s, a gracious fellow whom Dad first met when they were seated side by side in the first year of Norman Park State School, came to visit and I made him some coffee and offered a slice of the cake another of their friends had brought. I was thinking how lovely it is that my folks’ friends come to visit even though Dad falls asleep on them, how they have friendships stretching back decades from living thirty years in the same place. My father went to school and grew up here, and has friendships going back to childhood. I was thinking how this will not be the case when I am 77. We had a fascinating chat about Sir John Monash, whose biography this man has been reading, and about the anti-Semitism in Melbourne that kept Monash out of the Melbourne Club. Dad’s friend volunteered the view that Murdoch, an enemy of Monash, even back in those days acted like he ran the world. I said how this was in evidence every time we have an election. I was thinking of the photos of Tony Abbott clasping a puppy, etc, paired with a front page picture of his rival Kevin Rudd with mouth half open which was titled, “Does This Man Ever Shut Up?”
This led very quickly to a lecture from my father’s friend about the errors of environmentalism, which he perceives as a kind of conspiracy theory. He has holidayed recently on Heron Island and says grandly, “Heron Island is just as good as it was in the 1960s.” Oh good, I said: so all those acres of coral bleaching must just be a bit of a furphy. Well, he said: 7000 years ago the whole Barrier Reef was above water. Now it’s not so bad as that, is it? “Oh no,” I agreed, picking up my cup of tea, my notebooks and my cat and standing up to go. I kissed him on the cheek. “All just a big natural cycle.”
These natural cycles are all but overwhelming me at the moment. The slow sleepy death of my father, whose eyes are rarely open and who will take no nourishment but ice cream and milk. The frantic collisions of my mother with a series of administrative chores which she sets herself, needing to gain back some form of control over her life, and which subsume her grief and dread, I think, driving her into a frenzy of impatience and a series of spills of papers and pens onto the floor as she is kept waiting on the phone line by the bank, the electricity company, the phone people themselves. Our larger darker howling emotions. It’s hard to live in them. It’s harder to live alongside them… I feel.
Feeling for you. Feels right that you’ll stay a little longer for the next part. I’ve thought hard just what it is that I appreciate so much about your thoughtful and generous writing. It has to be something about the transport from the detail, the personal to the profound, from the inconsequential to the universal. And yet not feeling contrived. The ripples of larger darker emotions have spread wide. Howling somehow a privilege. Peace.
Thank you, Peter. I appreciate your reflective reading; this is a thoughtful and generous response, in turn. It’s true, we all have these depths of agony, ramparts of joy. So I would say: honour your howl.
It is hard to comprehend how some people can be in such a strong state of denial about environmental degradation -but ok I am an environmental scientist- so can say in a technical sense what needs to be done to save the planet is fairly clear cut; it’s the socio-political-economics thing that needs to be solved [and this is attested to by this old guy]. We must not give up though for the sake of future generations……
All this time we have been in conversation and I never realised you are an environmental scientist, Jon! Hurrah for you. I agree completely – it’s not rocket science, ironically, just a matter of assembling the will and deconstructing immediately, rapidly, all the delays and excuses and ways we refuse to act. As they say, we are the ancestors of the future. We ought not to fail them; nor the myriad voiceless creatures, nor indeed the human pullulation on the world, whose most unguilty elements in this are suffering from it the worst.
thanks for reading and for sharing my work, you guys
Thanks for writing about this strange hard time. Cathoel, have you seen that book by Roz Chast, brilliant American cartoonist – about her parents’ old age and her visits to them?