Going Down Under

I missed my blog when I was in Australia. I didn't take a laptop or my password, and I wrote madly in my journal to keep track of everything but there were so many deep thoughts in such quick succession, it didn't seem like a good time to write. I'm changed, though. I come here a changed person.

My brother got married at 52, in a well-planned explosion of calm joy and I was so lucky to be there for that. My Mom at 89 traveled all that way and gamely went all the places we went and she and I shared a room in John's condo in Leichhardt. We ate all of our meals with John's wife Graziella's parents, who speak a mix of Italian and German as they live in Switzerland. If you know me you know I didn't really study that Italian like I meant to. There was the writing conference and the Jell-O Show and the Opening Day of Market and then making the cake decorations, and everything was a blur of challenge and work and then I spent a very long night on a plane and landed on the other side of the world. I learned quite a bit of Italian over breakfast, and lunch, and dinner, and cafe many times a day, though. So there's that.

I'm a person who lives in an alternative society bubble and I think I'm politically aware but I didn't really know how socialism felt. It feels really safe. When you have free health care (which I do but I don't trust it at all) and a safety net when you get old (which I do because I have made one by staying in this community for 40 years and being a fairly nice person) and live in a beautiful place (which I do because so many people care about this place and others haven't completely ruined it yet) you can open up a bit. There was no sense of fear and desperation there like you feel here, no constant competition for resources. I felt like I had opened up a lot but when I hung around with all these people who were younger than me, who were working a lot harder to be open and stay open, I saw how closed I generally am. Ah well. I'll do better now.

Family patterns are overwhelming and seem like they're set in concrete forever. At best you can tease and laugh about them, but changing them is daunting. The ones between me and Mom are pretty okay. I take care of her as well as I can, which is minimally, but for two weeks I did great with that. I walked slow and carried her water bottle and bird book and woke her up the night she had the whimpering nightmare. She was the person I could talk to the most, so I told her all my reflections and complaints and little thoughts and we talked about most of the things we could think of. Our worst pattern is this emotional very deep conversation we have to have about my dead Dad, every time we see each other, every time, and we had it right away this time. It was fine, we cried, but if you know me you know it's still deeply disturbing to me to talk about my Dad, who killed himself when I was twenty. Mom, like many people, wants to rewrite that story and boy, I do too. We both try, but rewriting is the best we can do. We can't make it go away, or not come up. I thought I had it handled for myself, with this knowledge that everyone has something, and that one isn't nearly as bad as most, but it was still there as it always is. Then I had to tell my brother about that, and he has a different story, but maybe he heard me. There were some funny sides of that story, like this incredibly tragic movie we saw in the torrential rainstorm. At the end I turned to him and said "What a happy little wedding movie!" and we got a good laugh out of it. I spent the whole movie saying "Tra la la, I don't live like that, my life is not a tragedy at all, I'm going to keep laughing," to myself. Which worked pretty well. There were some gorgeous scenes of destruction in the film that I'm glad I saw.

My brother was eight when that Dad thing happened; he's twelve years younger than me. We have some things in common, and can relate fairly easily, but there are patterns there too of course. When he was fourteen he came to visit me here and I led him astray in a few ways, and we've spent more time together than our other siblings perhaps...we share a willingness to work on ourselves and be open to pain and growth, but he is ever so much better at it than I am. I was afraid to be with him for two weeks, figuring he would see through all of my thin defenses and see right into my heart, and he did. He was patient and kind, though. He was really really glad we came. I spent a lot of time feeling that I was trespassing on his life (I doubt the Catholic language is a coincidence) as they was sleeping in the livingroom and we were just always there. I saw him in the week leading up to his marriage ceremony and met many of his friends and if anyone was exposed and vulnerable, it was him, but I worried about both of us. We did fine, overall, and he saw me and my heart and he still loves me. I got up on his wedding day and he had stolen my toothbrush, not on purpose, but just in a little brother way like the time he took my shabby shoes to the dump in Alaska. I just walked to the shops and bought a new toothbrush. It was his wedding day; he should have had all the toothbrushes he wanted.

As it turns out most of the things I was afraid of happened. Mom missed her connection and had to travel alone, but she did just fine with it and John and I worried more than she did. It gave us the opportunity to talk about how we don't communicate about things. He was late to meet me and I wandered around the airport thinking things like "What if they are saying to themselves that I am a 64-year old woman and I can certainly take a taxi in an English-speaking country..." I knew that they would pick us up but without Mom I doubted my assumptions bigtime. My phone wouldn't work there, of course, and I didn't know what to buy (a sim card sounds like something from a game that I haven't played) and I changed some money and the person was kind enough to give me the right change for a pay phone so I called him but he didn't answer. I walked up and down and went outside and probably missed him a couple of times. Oh yeah, I got pulled over to the Group W bench in customs, because I had a felony 35 years ago and was afraid not to declare it on my visa. They couldn't find anything in the system and asked me to explain it, so I told them that I had left the scene of an accident and had to pay $50, as that was the extent of my felony conviction, but it is still shrouded in shame for me as it was stupid and I hate to be stupid. They didn't bust me for bringing in the animal products (gelatin) and didn't find the dried mango or they would have confiscated it. My distress on entering the foreign country was laughable but as I was alone, it shook me. I felt weak and unprepared. I was weak and unprepared. I had brought his correct address and forgotten where I had left it, or I would have stupidly taken a taxi and gotten even more lost.

It went on. I did all the tasks which included writing the name cards, so I could figure out some of the people and their relationships, which helped make connections. There were relatives from Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, and other places in Australia, as well as Alaska and both coasts of the USA. John and Graziella's friends are great and were quite welcoming, but there was a lot of sitting around the table listening to their family speak Italian. I liked that, but there was no solitude.  I did go out and wander by myself, and found some neat places, one with rock carvings that remain mysterious.

 I was different, am different, in my hippie artist ways, but that didn't bother anyone. They were more puzzled by how old I look, as apparently I look old enough to be his mother, because people in the rest of the world outside Eugene generally dye their hair and wear makeup and dress fashionably. Whatever. I wore a bra the whole time and thought that was a huge concession to social acceptability. I shudder to think what they would have thought if I hadn't. To be honest probably no one would have noticed. Once I started dancing at the wedding I sensed a change. I got my confidence back, for one thing, because I have always been a good dancer, and people thought it was pretty cute that an old lady could move like that. I guess. Anyway I had a blast dancing at the wedding. (Except for the slow dance with my brother when he told me to stop leading.) I told people I rarely pass up a chance to sing or dance and that's kind of true. I got to sing with my brother's choir with my Mom and that was really sweet and fun too.

Oh, it's late, and this is long and I can't really tell the whole story. While I was gone someone died and someone else died and was brought back to life, though my house did not burn down or get ransacked. My friend who had cardiac arrest will not be all right for a while. He is having a big surgery tomorrow. He is a work partner of mine and I immediately decided to do all of his work which is a huge undertaking, but entirely the right thing to do. A lot of people are counting on me and that is when I am at my best, really, when I have a big load of work and can just immerse in it. I printed today for really the first time in a month or so and it felt great. I will be able to make a big impact in the next months and while I am working I can mull over these changes at a slow pace and write more. It all leads up to the big hippiefest and with all the love and dread of it that I hold after all these years, it will be the place to feel that big heartbeat. I'll get to hug my son then, and lots of other people.

Every year there I have that conversation, deep in the soul, about the fact that we are here now and someday we will not be. Every year someone or many are not. I go to the spirit tower or sit in my piece of the woods and feel that. It's a gorgeous and rich moment and not painful, just real. Real like the wedding moments, which I cried through just as I feared I would. Real like the aftermath when I came home so intense my son didn't want to talk to me. Real like my mother reading that poem about marriage that I would have had to lie to read. Real like the absolute tons of rain that cascades down in the tropics, the thunder, the hail, and the whipbird that we saw in that part of the forest by that waterfall we won't forget. Real like the way we flew around the world, lost a day in a long night, got one back in a short day short night short day. I looked out the window almost the whole time and I was the only person on the plane who did. It was magnificent, and I can report that there are lights in the middle of the ocean, but you can't see a whale at 33,000 feet. And you can fly right over Hawaii in the dark and not see a thing. It was colder than minus 50 degrees right outside my window, all night. There was no way I could sleep through that.

I feel different on the verge of my 65th birthday. My life feels more real. Real like my garden, my tomato starts, my bike and my messy house with no guest room. Real like family, like partnership and what we call love, which is a huge thing we can't describe. All we can do is participate in it, witness it, and feel it as much as we can. We can't deny it, that I know. I don't know why I sometimes try.