Waltzing the Magpies: A Year in Australia

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13etween ~ Once I was comfortable in the house, I read Patrick White's novel The Eye of the Storm. White's intellectual stew is thick, and I can manage only one of his books a year. In the Eye characters swirled around the deathbed of an old woman. The novel undermined peace of mind, and suddenly essays bored me. Rarely do I depict anything other than routine. "What are you doing?" Eliza asked me last night. ''I'm rubbing zinc oxide into my left heel," I answered, "to prevent skin from cracking." White's characters lived intensely, never dipping into medicine cabinets for chap sticks or baby oil. For an evening or two I regretted being commonsensical . How different, I mused, life would have been if I were capable of religious faith, or, for that matter, any kind of fervor. Writing tempers zeal and enthusiasm. Forcing happenings, or the absence thereof, into paragraphs orders my days. When I write, I resemble a gardener. I bed nouns and verbs and weed life, so color can riot safely across pages, staining sight but not deed. Would that I were a real gardener. Yesterday while walking I paused in front of the garden at 48 Irvine Street, my favorite garden in Peppermint Grove. The owner was digging near a hibiscus. "Your garden gives people great pleasure," I said. "Thank you," he said. "Those are nice words." "They are only words," I said, "not flowers." Rarely do thoughts provoked by books endure. Vicki's mother 20 is dying. She spends days on a couch, unable to rise without help. As I read White, Vicki's mother drifted into imagination, "a beached jellyfish," I thought, "her skin orange, her arms and legs thin as tentacles." Fortunately ravens brayed from the back yard, pushing the picture from mind. Suddenly Vicki, herself, walked into the room. By attaching a spotlight she found in the garage to a broken coat rack, she'd constructed a lamp for the living room. After feeding the ravens and examining the lamp, I read more, pondering the gap between youth and age. Often news darkens my mood. I long for simplicity, and because I cannot remember the past, I sentimentalize times that never existed. In contrast Eliza and Edward are optimistic and read newspapers eagerly. Complexity appeals to them, and they anticipate the future, imaging days that will never exist. While they dream of cantering over the present into a misty unknown, I mull unhitching myself from the wheel of time and sinking immobile into emptiness. When the children stack improbabilities one atop another, my conversation is cautionary, toppling not raising dream. While I slump over reading, Edward is so active Vicki calls him "Mr. Gonad." Conversation between youth and middle age is impossible, giving the lie to educators who celebrate "mentoring." Happily before gloom covered me like the top of an iron kettle, Vicki approached. "Quit your book," she said. "The time has come for a walk and a treat." We ambled the shore of Freshwater Bay until rubble ended the path. From the Esplanade nasturtiums tumbled down the hill, breaking orange and green through periwinkle and daisy. Morning glories cloaked dead limbs in purple. Cabbage white butterflies wavered like thin notes, and honeyeaters burst from the shelter of Rottnest Island pine, clouds of pollen trailing caramel behind them. Figs dug into a limestone bluff. Guttered by rain, the bluff looked like a wasps' nest, half the cells broken, the papery tissue burned black and gold. Beneath the bluff wattles bloomed, and perfume from freesia wavered in sheets. A puffer fish seized a fisherman's bait. "Ah, you ..." the man began as he unhooked the fish. Then he noticed Vicki. "Ah, you, cute little fellow ," he continued and tossed the fish back in the bay. Vicki and I 'Between ~ 21 walked to Stirling Highway and at Vans on Napoleon Street drank cappuccino and ate cake, Vicki having a slice ofblueberry tart, and I, pear and almond pie. The bill was eleven dollars, and we returned the next day. Walking and eating, not talk, binds us together. On Saturday the four of us went to Cottesloe Beach. I watched boats slide across the horizon, freighters spindly with cranes, tankers, dark tubs. Because waves were thick as barrels, I swam cautiously. A fortnight later a boy drowned at Cottesloe, and at Scarborough Beach lifeguards pulled forty-two swimmers from the water...