amberdextrous's Blog

It was, quite suddenly, quiet on my street, late on a sunny autumn afternoon. For at least two whole minutes there was only the background hiss of homebound traffic on the middle-distant freeway. No jets or helicopters rent the air above; no buses sighed to a stop just opposite; no angry thundering of motorcycle engines was heard; nor the rush and rumble of all those squat little wheeled boxes that so often whizz past. Not even next-door’s dog raised its too-common cacophony. (He must be eating, if he isn’t barking, and thrusting his paws at the rattling metal mesh of his garden fence.)
Oh, blissful suburban Peace!
It didn’t last, of course. The 5.43 bus arrived right on time to break into my silent mind, followed closely by a whining Porsche, accelerating out of the chicaine. And, now that the sunlight is fading fast –leaving the houses opposite silhouetted by light lemon sky- the birds begin their roosting calls... and Ziggy, the next-doors’ dog (having finished his meal), loudly protests the passing of a pedestrian.
It is the Chinese girl from up the hill, carrying her skateboard homeward, her backpack heavy with homework. Her chin sits on her chest and the skateboard’s tip scrapes along the footpath. She looks as though she doesn’t have the energy to respond to the dog’s barking, and seems focussed on some misted, distant future, but without enthusiasm, as though that future was almost indistinguishable from her overburdened present; as though she had nothing to look forward to but more of the same.
A young couple in stylish lycra walk their panting Staffordshire Bull Terrier home from the park, its tongue lolling, dripping, its saliva-sodden ball gripped by its owner in a single-fingered pincer with a cocked thumb, held well away from her tights. I hear the puffing of the overweight dog, but neither of the humans speaks, each with their ears plugged by their own preferred music, a sound-track to the movies of their separate lives. And yet they would both likely rate this as “together time”.
The tall Namibian man who was injured in a tribal war walks in his slow, rocking way downhill, pressing his stick hard into the footpath each time he leans towards the left. We nod and smile and bid each other a good evening. I hope he will one day take up my offer of a coffee and a further chat, our brief initial conversation by my letterbox having raised –for me- more questions than it answered about this quiet, calm, gentle-seeming man who had so obviously endured agonies beyond my understanding.
A splendid-bearded Sikh, all in white, struts serenely on his evening stroll, his generous belly bobbing like a trapped balloon beneath his embroidered waistcoat. His wife, in gold-threaded veil and orange sari, keeps pace, demurely, several steps behind. He has the carriage of a retired Rajah, parting the air in front of him with wide-nostrilled confidence, clearly the lord of all he surveys; and she, his wife, seems drawn along behind him like flotsam in his wake.
The Macedonian man who sleeps in his car around the corner passes, chewing on a burger and carrying his night-supply of snacks and bottled water. I hope he has plenty of blankets, as the sky is clear, there is no hint of wind and, without a quilt-cover of cloud, the city’s heat is quick to dissipate, so I suspect tonight will be a cold one.

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Indeed the night was cold –for this temperate climate, anyway. I curled up in a thick quilt all night, with bed-socks on, and a warm pair of tights that Clarkee gave me last time she visited. I felt close to her as I dropped off to sleep, despite the fact that we have had numerous communication problems lately, mostly resulting from my having changed my phone provider. I also –rashly- cancelled my wireless internet contract after seven years, as I have been piggy-backing for the past six months on the guy upstairs’ unsecured WiFi... until suddenly the WiFi connection grew abysmally slow, and now I am unable to access it at all. Perhaps he has finally twigged.
It is now the houses on the north-east corner opposite my porch that are silhouetted by the light bright peach that fades to pale pre-dawn lilac, already devoid of stars. When I took my 4am walk to buy chocolate croissants for breakfast –this being Pension Day- I passed the battered Mazda in which the Macedonian guy sleeps, its windows fogged and runneled with the condensation of his whole night’s breath. How he must loathe the dusk, when all he has to look forward to is curling up on the back seat and trying to sleep, despite the early hour. Perhaps he listens to the radio? Or perhaps he is afraid of flattening the car’s battery.
The poor man’s days seem equally devoid of any interesting activity. I sometimes see him wandering through the nearby park –he often took refuge in the shade of the peppermint trees on those infernal summer days we suffered for months on end- and sometimes I see him scouring the sidewalks for cigarette butts.
We have exchanged looks at times and once a curt nod, but have never spoken. He seems acutely aware of his social position, ashamed of his reduced circumstances, and I would not wish to probe, perhaps exacerbating his pain. I can see that he is trying hard to maintain some semblance of normality, and I wonder how he manages as well as he does. I suspect he makes use of the shower and the toilets at the nearby library, and washes his array of track suits and hoodies at the all-night laundrette on Main Street. He eats pies and sandwiches from the all-night service station and I’m told –by my old murderer mate, Dave –that the Macedonian man has a deal with the people who run the cafe inside, to fill his thermos for him with hot water, free of charge. Dave it was, also, who told me the car-dweller was Macedonian, that they had met in gaol, and that no landlord was willing to rent him a home.  So he had bought the car instead, as the next best option. We human beings are nothing if not adaptable.
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Bright spikes of egg-yolk-yellow sunlight slice through the trees across the road, a few houses further up the hill, and spotlight the steam that rises from my coffee. James is up and about, and I need to iron his school shirt. I had better go inside.
I have enjoyed this brief excursion back into my porch-blogging-self, and hope similar circumstances of weather, health and inclination will coincide again soon.
Thank You for reading

I was a little surprised –and less than delighted- to find what was on my internet home-page this morning. The word “Google” was spelled out in letters shaped like festive-looking cakes and, when I hovered the cursor over it, the drop-down message came: Happy Birthday Dex.
 
OK, I know I recorded my birthdate at the time I registered for a Gmail account, but I never expected Google to take any notice of it, much less to use it against me!
 
Poor James lost $10 thousand last night, at the stroke of midnight, when my time on earth ticked over to the start of its 55th year. Under the terms of my life insurance policy, the amount paid out to my beneficiary dwindles by $10 thousand per year after the age of 46, a rate of nearly $300 per day.
 
Insurance companies are nothing if not cold and –literally- calculating, and I guess their actuarial tables tell them that this is the only way the Directors can maintain their obscenely high salaries and bonuses. The older I get, they reason, the more likely I am to die, so the less risk they are prepared to take in betting on my life.
 
But it seems to me the insurance company has given me ten thousand reasons not to be alive this time next year!

My front porch has been mostly uninhabitable for months now, as my city suffers through yet another record heatwave. At 6am today the temperature still hovers around 30C, expected to climb to 40+ for the fifth consecutive day.

In 1962 my parents fled the chilly winters of England, seeking the Australian sunshine. By 1989, when my Dad retired from his job as a photographer for the Commonwealth Government, they had had enough of Perth’s searing summers and moved further South, to Western Australia’s South-Westernmost point, where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet. At least there they could be assured of a cooling sea breeze in the evenings.

The availability of my work as a clown, storyteller and stand-up comedian meant that I had little option but to sweat it out in this sweltering city for another 25 years, but I can stand it no longer... I hereby vow that this will be my final year of frying in this boiled, baked and sun-cooked place.

Given that this is my son James’ final year of school, and the imminent immigration of my new Life Partner from snow-bound Canada, I intend to follow my parents’ example and to find somewhere closer to Antarctica to live; I have truly had enough.

This morning the breeze –such as it is- sighs in from the East-North-East, out of the centre of this dessicated continent, and the usually-chirpy birds seem stunned into silence. A family of magpies that farm the new-cut grass beyond my porch already look exhausted, their beaks open, panting, their wings held wide, away from their bodies. A pair of wagtails takes an early morning shower beneath the neighbours’ sprinklers; and a jogger does not bother to deviate from the footpath between the sprays, knowing she will dry out soon enough.

Climate change denialists use all manner of statistical tricks to “prove” that the steady warming trend of the past three decades is nothing but a left wing conspiracy, but in truth the figures speak for themselves: eleven of the past 12 years have each seen temperatures soar beyond all previous records; rainfall figures in this South-West corner of the continent have plummeted by 30 per cent in the past 35 years.

These patterns are exactly as predicted by the meteorological models plotting climate change. The high tide levels of the Indian Ocean have risen even further than forecasted.

Climate change is real, immediate, happening. My only option, if I am not to sweat myself to death, is to move to somewhere cooler. Augusta, here I come...

The slimmest sliver of moon appears above the houses in the East North-East, edam-orange in the pre-dawn pale sky.
 
 
Venus blazes bright, as always, though sometimes haloed by puffs of thin low cloud.
 
 
Such is the alignment of the moon, Venus and two bright stars whose names I do not know, that it looks as though a game of celestial billiards is going on above the sleeping houses: the moon provides the curving butt-end of the billiard cue and Venus is its tip, ready to knock one of the nameless stars to canon into the other, perhaps potting it in a black hole.
 
 
I can hear the hiss and grumble of traffic on distant Wanneroo Road and a single bird –perhaps a singing honeyeater?- calls out across the misted distance that it is the first to see the lightening of the eastern horizon. A magpie, closer, carols its awareness, awake as well..
 
 
The horse-faced woman I have seen a hundred times trudges past on her way to work. She stares, always, at the metre of ground in front of her feet and never looks up, much less acknowledges my presence on this bright-lit porch.
 
 
I have had an awful night, woken frequently by the crushing pain in my arm and shoulder. I plump and pile up my pillows so that I am practically sitting, and try to move my head into a position in which the damaged nerves in my neck are not pinched by the bulging disc above the titanium plate that holds my neck together. My dreams, these nights, are plagued by scenarios in which my arm is being damaged : sometimes jammed in the door of an elevator, or squashed between the gunwales of a heavy, heaving boat and a hard dock, or simply run over by a bus.
 
 
I am still drowsy from the valium I washed down around midnight with a half-glass of vodka, but eventually I abandon all thought of sleep and brew a double espresso to kick my brain into wakefulness.
 
 
The cancers at the base of my tongue are stinging, and I realise that I will have to grind some more plastic off the dental plate that supports some of my lower teeth; it is crude DIY dentistry, but cheap.
 
 
The first aircraft rumbles overhead, bound for the tiny mining settlements in the North. Having flown those routes myself –bound for stand-up comedy gigs- I know the ‘plane will be full of Fly-In, Fly-out mine workers, already dressed in their bright orange reflective vests, ready to start work as soon as they disembark a thousand kilometers away. They will work 12-hour shifts for two or three weeks, then fly back to Perth for their week off.
 
 
The work is hard but the pay –apparently- is good enough to have their homes paid off within a few years, their families set up and financially secure. But I wonder if the non-monetary cost is worth the lifestyle: the costs to their health, their relationships, their sanity…
 
 
The moon is chalk-white now, against the brightening blue, and Venus is dulled by the dawn. The other –nameless-stars have disappeared, so it seems the billiard cue has been secured in its rack.
 
 
Many birds are chorusing from their roosts and some flit from tree to tree in the daily ritual of re-establishing their territories.
 
 
I have finished my first breakfast –that double espresso and a cigarette- and it is time, now, for something more substantial to line my stomach before I swallow my first dose of pain-killers.
 
 
Another day has well and truly begun…

My sliding window is not quite sealed tight and the wind moans high and low, loud and soft, mournful as an old air-raid siren.
 
Just after mid-day I felt myself flagging, though more in energy than in spirits. I have been awake since just after 4am, catcvhing up on news from a dozen disparate sources, reading the overnight comments on Australian politics blogs, leaving my own comments here and there about the issue de jour, reading some recent posts by EP friends. I post a couple of Porch Blogs, laboriously tapped out by five fingers which once, when teamed with the healthy other five, could thump out 100 words a minute.
 
Every post I make –here and elsewhere- costs me much in the cold currency of pain. As does every other waking action and, lately, dreams as well. It hurts to shower and to shave, slipping on a shirt can make me wince. And I have to breathe deeply, brace myself and grit my brittle teeth, just so that I can tie my shoelaces.
 
The last time I ventured into the city centre I think I may have given half the population good reason to believe that I was suffering Tourette’s Syndrome. Every step I took was sending savage molten flares from neck to fingertips and my face was greasy white and twitching, “Uh! Shit!” I would sometimes hiss aloud, then shuffle on, and grunt, and swear again.
 
I express myself more freely inside my home, grumbling loudly as I bend to slide something into the oven, groaning as I slump into a chair, sometimes sobbing. James picks up on all this, of course, soaks it all in like a sponge. I want to squeeze him, sometimes, to try to remove the stain of my pain has made on his young life. I want to rinse him clean so he can start afresh without the whining cripple on the kitchen floor.
 
How long can I go on damaging my son’s life this way? At what point does the short, sharp trauma of my death become outweighed by the lingering burden of my diminished life?
 
Most who know a little of my mind will understand that such thoughts are not symptoms of depression, indicative of some cerebral imbalance. My words are nothing like a cry for help from a world that has already been too kind to me, but now has become too cruel.

Pre-dawn rain hisses down just as I wake James but I decide that, as the rain is slanting in on the southerly breeze, my north-facing porch will be shielded from all but the back-eddying rain-mist, and it is safe to sit outside this morning.
 
It is only a few days after the southern winter solstice, and dawn is still almost an hour away. There is no sign yet of any lightening in the eastern sky. The air above the tree-line is infused with pale orange from the streetlights.
 
The shiny-leaved flowering gum tree sways and drips and every few minutes a car passes, its tyres louder on the wet road than its engine sound. In the middle distance of my soundscape I can hear the rumbling of the early traffic down on Main Street, at the bottom of my hill and, beyond that still, the persistent heavy hissing of the distant freeway. I wonder whether, in the total absence of traffic noise, I might perceive the ancient whispers of the ocean, eight kilometres away.
 
It is too early, yet, for birds, dog-walkers, joggers or surprise visitors –my usual topics for these blogs- so I am left with a limited palate with which to paint my word-pictures.
 
The foreground sounds are of the wind-rustled trees, buffeted by arrhythmic gusts, their leaves making micro-slices of the breeze, their branches sometimes rattling percussive accompaniment. The gurgling of the gushing downpipe sings along with the drips from the gutters above.
 
If I had the ears to perceive the sound, I would hear the soil drinking, I am certain. We have had some storms this winter –including a “mini tornado” which tore through the suburb in which I grew up and caused $20 million worth of improvements- and there have been some days of steady rain. But this thirsty city is still well below its average rainfall for the month of June –again- and that average, of course, is itself falling. Perth now receives 30 per cent less rain each year than it did when I was in my teens.
 
There is a strained blue tinge to the upper sky now where Venus rides, pale and cloud-shrouded. Banks of dark plum clouds slide steadily past and suddenly Venus breaks out, ultra-bright, looking flattened and fattened, almost classic UFO shape. I guess the planet must be presenting us with a crescent-faced reflection from the sun, causing this distortion.
 
The first birds begin calling now, whistles, chirps, chattering and trills awakening each tree in turn.
 
“I’m awake!” they tell each other.
 
I hear the first of the early-morning jets rumble overhead and watch its taillights blinking northwards with its human cargo of Fly In, Fly Out workers for the mine-pocked Pilbara and Kimberly regions. Two thousand kilometres distant from the Capital, Perth, those North-West regions are nevertheless in the same State.  These are among the world’s most remote and isolated areas, formerly pristine wilderness, unscratched any deeper than an ancient aboriginal digging stick.
 
The Pilbara coast boasts thousands of sites of ancient rock-carvings –up to 30 thousand years old- including whole high hillside galleries of jumbled iron-stone, whose every flat face is scored with images of turtles, dugongs, kangaroos, emus, fish, birds, animal tracks, human figures, their weapons and their tools.
 
Just such a gallery was dismantled, over 20 years ago, and dumped in a disused caravan park, to make way for the construction of a Liquified Natural Gas plant,  which condenses gas pumped there from offshore wells. I doubt the gas company could get away with this today, given that most of the ancient artworks are now listed on the World Heritage register.
 
But the enormous mineral wealth of this region –with huge, untapped sources of iron ore, gold, diamonds, oil and gas and uranium- means that every square inch is already pegged for exploration.

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It has grown light enough now for me to see my notebook without the aid of the porch light behind me, but I leave it on for a while. I like the feeling of my front porch being just as much a stage as it is an observation post. I remain here for a while yet, not spotlit any more, but highlighted nonetheless. And so I am “on show” to passersby. I don’t suppose that I am all that exciting to watch –just a man drinking coffee and scribbling his thoughts –but then, I don’t suppose that passersby see many like me in their travels.
 
I don’t mind being characterised as “that guy who sits on his front porch and writes”.
 
As an epitaph, one could do worse.

Venus sparkles, still, in a pale blue patch of true-dawn sky bounded by heavy dark clouds sliding in from the north-west horizon. It is chilly out here on my front porch, exposed to the breeze, but it is not so cold as the past few mornings, which made my bones ache.
 
I hear the distant humming of the freeway traffic, like an angry swarm of worker bees, roused too early. Nearby a family of honeyeaters gang up on a solitary golden wattle-bird and eventually drive it away with their aggressive chattering.
 
A Lycra-clad cyclist rolls by down the hill, resting his shiny calves as he lets gravity do some of the work.
 
A van pulls up beneath the streetlight in front of my home and disgorges two mountainous St Bernard dogs and their diminutive mistress, straining at their leashes, all three.
 
“I’ll see you on the other side of the park,” I hear the driver call.
 
“Oh-K!” the woman shouts back as the dogs drag her towards the light pole, their great shaggy heads to the ground.
 
“Soon!” she adds as the van drives off and the dogs jerk her down the footpath.
 
There’s not much going on out here as yet, and so I am forced to look inward for a time. I feel, now that my morning medication is wearing off, as though I am some kind of voyeur, indulging in a perverse perusal of my own suffering. The pain in my left arm has intensified during this past week, sometimes to excruciating levels. I can’t seem to find the right position of my head and neck to take the pressure off my damaged nerves.
 
It is definitely eating into my quality of life –and will likely define its quantity also. I wonder, quietly, how much longer I can endure this torment, especially given the lack of positive, pleasant experiences to balance it. I am just marking time, I realise; but what am I waiting for?
 
I hear James stirring inside at the same time as my phone signals a text alert. It is my beautiful young friend, K, asking if she can visit. She brings such beauty, wit and youthful wisdom to my world, such sunny, fun feelings, so many laughs, that I can’t consider refusing.
 
I often feel quite deflated after seeing James off on his way to school, retreating like a hermit crab into my empty home, my empty shell. But this morning I have something to look forward  to after all.
 
June 26, 2012
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Iron-grey clouds are splashed with bright galah-pink in the east against the pale blue wash of dawn. In the west, low grey-white bands or rain-cloud are sliding in on the chill wind, so it looks like yesterday’s sunshine won’t be repeated.
 
Shirley is on her way to the letterbox when she sees me sitting on my porch and makes a detour to have a chat. She bought some make-up yesterday –“foundation, to plaster over the cracks,” she says- but, in trying to open it, she spilt most of the bottle over her clothes.
 
“I’m sure it will wash out,” I reassure her.
 
“Oh, I hope so,” says Shirley.
 
Sylvette swoops by on her bike, looking fresh and trim. She cycles five kilometres each day to work, then back.
 
“Should I have brought my umbrella?” she asks.
 
“Yes!” I call after her. I see a grey curtain descending in the west. She is riding towards it.
 
Seconds after she has gone, the first light spots appear on the concrete path in front of me.
 
“Is that rain, Dad?” James calls from inside.
 
“Yes, Mate. You will need your umbrella.”
 
He has a maths exam today. He’s feeling confident.
 
A minute after he departs, his iPad in his ears, the wind suddenly picks up and sends the rain down hard. It lashes in against my legs and a fierce gust sprays raindrops across my notebook.
 
I scurry inside to finish this blog on the laptop.

It is a fine lemon-sunny mid-winter’s day outside my flat, following a week of rain and wild weather, so I take the rare chance to sit on my front porch and enjoy some fresh air with my cigarette. As always, I have my notebook on my knee and a ballpoint pen in my hand, ready to record some random thoughts.
 
The shadows are already long across the lawns and it will soon be too cool to sit in comfort here. I watch some dog-walkers pass and am pleased to see that most are carrying plastic bags, with which to pick up after their pets. Ten years ago, many people would have bristled at the suggestion they should do so, and I am further pleased to note that attitudes can change over time.
 
My upstairs neighbour, Shirley, returns from a shopping trip, her bulging trolley in tow.
 
“How are you, Dex?” she calls from the driveway.
 
“I’m OK, Thanks, Shirley,” I reply. “How are You, Love?”
 
Shirley leaves her trolley by the side of the driveway and steps across the grass towards my porch, removing her ear-plugs as she approaches. She suffers from winter-time ear-aches, poor Dear.
 
“I’m pretty well,” she tells me. “Though this tooth is still a pain.”
 
“Still sore? I thought You had those antibiotics?”
 
“Oh, I’ve finished those,” she says. “The infection’s gone, but it’s still sore when I bite.”
 
We speak for a time about our dental care system, which is ridiculously expensive. I recall a senior politician lamenting a decade ago that it is easy to see the Class Divide in Australia, by looking at people’s teeth.
 
Shirley can’t believe how much she’ll have to pay out of her holiday savings to fix her tooth.
 
“It’s $260 for the extraction and over $5 thousand for the new one,” she tells me. I whistle through my own neglected teeth.
 
“And my friend was telling me her daughter went to Thailand and got the lot done for $1 thousand,” she continues. “Why are dentists here so much more expensive?”
 
“Because they can be,” I tell her. “They charge whatever they like. A dentist would look in my mouth and see his next Porsche.”
 
“Ah well,” says Shirley, “I s’pose I’d better get upstairs and cook us some soup. Would you like a bowl?”
 
I tell her I would be delighted. Shirley makes great soup.
 
“Are You OK with that trolley on the stairs, Dear?”
 
“Well...” she says, “it is a bit heavy... But your arm...”
 
“I’ll get James to haul it up for You. James? Could You carry Shirley’s trolley up the stairs please?”
 
“Sure, Dad.”
 
“Thank You, James,” Shirley and I chorus.
 
Now I await the soup.

Pale skeins of writhing steam drift up from sunlit roadways, following another unseasonal shower. They lift and swirl with thermal currents, veiling the trunks of the eucalypts at the bottom of the hill.
 
The land exhales, sending light white puffs of condensed breath upward, stark against the dark-bellied rainclouds overhead.
 
High winds spin tufts of cottonwool clouds across a patch of perfect blue. The edges of the clouds are ragged, teased and tangled by the struggle between updraught and downshear.
 
Mr Good Morning strides by in his customary pale blue shirt, dark pants, white court shoes, floppy cream hat. He walks the circuit past my house perhaps a dozen times a day, morning and afternoon, always passing left to right. He looks towards me and smiles and lifts his rolled umbrella to show he is prepared.
 
“Good idea!” I call.
 
He winks and gives me the thumbs up and in two dozen strides is gone from my view. For now. I expect he will be back in ten minutes or so, having completed another lap of the block, like a clockwork locomotive on a model track. He will glance my way again and if our eyes meet –if I am not bent, intent on writing- there will be an awkwardness between us, as though our vocabulary of interactions was already exhausted in his previous promenading.
 
We say “Good Morning” (hence my name for him) or “lovely day” or “rain again” –and that is our limit, long-established as the convention of our relationship, such as it is. In truth, we are only tiny tangents to the arcs of each other’s lives; we touch and go.
 
He has just gone by again, while my head was bent over the notebook. I didn’t notice him until he’d passed the flowering gumtree, when he struck my peripheral vision. And by the time I looked up, I was out of his eyeline, so that awkward moment was avoided.
 
A Lear jet sears the sky, banking loud and low beneath the clouds, heading for the crosswind strip at the airport south of the river. The people aboard have also touched my life, tangentially, though they were unaware of my existence on this little porch so far beneath them. Their jet’s engine noise is cause for resentment as it echoes back and forth between the clouds and the earth.
 
I watch the patch of blue closed over by the next cloud-front and think of people with whom my life’s course has intersected... how many thousands?
 
And Mr Good Morning strides by again. We meet each other’s eyes again this time around, and exchange smiles. And it doesn’t feel awkward at all.

 The elderly lady shuffled to the kerb beside my driveway and took a long, bemused look each way before she began slowly to cross the road. She looked about 70 and quite robust in body, but there was a frail uncertainty about her movement, as though her bones were porcelain and her brain just as brittle.
 
I watched from my porch as she stood for a time at the corner –perhaps to get her breath back, or to orient herself in an unfamiliar space. She was knee-deep in a patch of drying wild oats, peering at the street-sign, with an unsteady air.
 
She turned to face the way she had come and took a few sore-footed steps, as though her toes were cramped inside her shoes. Then she turned again and nodded to herself and shuffled on. And stopped again and shook her head.
 
The lady was obviously disoriented, perhaps lost. She looked in pain, confused, distressed. I resolved to help her if I could. I crossed the stretch of lawn and called her from the kerbside.
 
“Is everything OK, Ma’am?”
 
But she didn’t hear my call, so I crossed the road and stepped into her field of view. She looked up at me in bleary-eyed surprise.
 
“Do you need any help, Ma’am? Are you on your way home?”
 
She nodded deliberately.
 
“Y-y-yes,” she stammered, unsteadily, then swayed back as though appraising me.
 
“Perhaps you’d like a lift then? I have my car...”
 
The lady squinted and clenched her lips and swallowed.
 
“No, thank you.”
 
She swayed back towards me and exhaled and it was then I smelled the liquor on her breath.
 
“OK,” I said. “Are you sure?”
 
“I’m sure,” she slurred.
 
Now that I knew about the booze, it was obvious that this elderly lady was not struggling with dementia, as I had surmised. She was just drunk.
 
As I watched her wend her way down the hill, I hoped she would make it safely home.

It has rained (again!) during the night, and a single snail is coursing over the wet grass like a sailing ship of old, retreating towards the shadows. But, with the rising sun, the shade-line is also shrinking towards the nasturtiums at the base of my porch.
 
It is a race in slow motion: as the snail stretches itself along the tops of grass-blades, its shell rocks side to side; the shade’s retreat is steady, one grass-blade at a time.
 
My beautiful Canadian Friend, clarkee, and I spent many hours on my front porch during her recent three-week visit, watching the world go by. I am sure she would confirm that a large proportion of these passers-by are as regular as clockwork, often exercising their dogs. And –almost always- the dog-walkers resemble their pets in clearly identifiable ways.
 
A woman strides by in tights that give her muscular legs the same lines as those of her short-haired terrier. And she wears a ponytail that bobs and flicks up with each step, like the tufted tail of her other dog, a spaniel/terrier cross. She sees me smile as I observe the similarities, and calls: Good morning!
 
A broad-shouldered man with short, skinny legs and a pugnacious thrust to his chin, puffs by, his barrel-chested bull terrier snuffling side to side, straining at the thick leather leash.
 
A thin-framed, small-featured woman passes with prancing steps, just like her poodle’s, whose dark grey curls are exactly matched by its owner’s hair-dye.
 
It is fun to watch the passing pet parade and to note pet/person parallels. I wonder how this phenomenon evolved? Do people sub-consciously change aspects of their appearance in order to resemble their dogs? Or do they choose dogs –again, sub-consciously- that resemble their own images?
 
While I ponder this conundrum, the snail seems to have given up chasing the fleeting shadow, which has now reached the edge of the concrete path. The snail has withdrawn into the moist and slimy sanctuary of its shell, to minimise the chances of its becoming dried out by the sun.
 
I think of the coming summer heat, and how most of my city’s population will need to emulate that snail. I am grateful for the recent unseasonal rain, which has topped up our dams and aquifers, though I do wish there had been more sunny days while clarkee was here.

This morning as I sat on my sunny porch I noted with jubilation the number of Australian native bees darting and hovering and farming the nasturtiums in my little garden for their nectar.
 
Native bees are much smaller than the European honeybee, and swarm and hive in smaller numbers. They are also stingless, and less aggressive in defence of their hives.
 
Native honey is produced in much smaller quantities than the industrial-scale output of the introduced bees.
 
Indigenous Australians called the native honey “sugar bag” and it was prized for a thousand generations as the richest source of sugar in their diets. As it is often made from the nectar of eucalyptus flowers, native bees’ honey is also known for its medicinal properties.
 
Native bee populations were dramatically affected by the introduction to Australia of the European honeybee, which bred and spread and became the dominant nectar-feeding insects in almost every corner of the continent.
 
In previous years, I have seen only single native bees occasionally browsing flowers in my garden. This year, they are turning up in their dozens. And there seem proportionally fewer European bees.
 
Perhaps the rapid change in climate in this south-west corner of Western Australia –with each of the past ten years warmer and drier than the year before- has caught the European bees off-guard? Perhaps the native bees are better adapted to the warmer, drier climate?
 
Let the fittest survive, I say.

My upstairs neighbour, Pat, will not be coming home from hospital, her husband says.
 
The “tough old chook” –as I described her in my account of the brave way she survived a fall in our driveway that broke both her wrists- is on palliative care now, in the final phase of her last fight.
 
She has endured repeated attacks from within, her own cells mutating into rebellious offshoots that choked and broke her internal infrastructure. Endured also the medical world’s counter-attacks: the surgical strikes, the chemical weapons, the radioactive bombardments.
 
Like any battlefield, her body is torn and scarred, worn down, rendered unproductive of all but pain.
 
But now, it seems, there is a ceasefire. Soon will come her surrender, and then ever-lasting peace.
 
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
 
It is difficult for me to think of Pat’s predicament without considering my own prognosis. She chose to fight, to dig her fingernails in deep and hang on desperately to dear life. She battled bravely, but both the cancer and the treatment took their toxic toll. And I have chosen not to fight, but  to loosen my grip and slide down what is, perhaps, a quicker path to peace.
 
The last time I spoke to Pat was as she stood between my back door and the laundry block, where she and I have so often chatted throughout these past ten years. Her eyes glimmered still from their sunken sockets and she lifted her chin as she defiantly declared:
 
“I’m still here!”
 
Alas, she never will be here again, except in spirited memory.
 
I’m still here, too. For now.

When I first received the news about my cancer, I had all sorts of strange, sometimes conflicting thoughts flow through my muddled head.
 
Some were entirely practical: I should make a will to name James, my son, as my next of kin rather than his mother, whom I have never legally divorced despite a decade’s separation.
 
Central to most of my thinking –and my feeling- was consideration of what I would leave behind; what kind of footprints in time’s shifting sands.
 
And chief among those considerations was an earnest desire that my departure should not cause excessive pain –especially to those I Love. So how to avoid hurting them, when my own pain ends?
 
My writer’s mind will wrestle with an idea, fictionalise, re-characterise, so the ‘I’ who is writing the story shifts responsibility and consequence to a character. With this device, I can ‘act out,’ on paper and on screen, some of the darkest –or the brightest- facets of my personal prism.
 
The writing ‘I’ suggests that one way to reduce the pain and grief on Loved Ones is to reduce their number; to make them stop loving me.
 
In an instant, I conceive a short story –starting in an empty cemetery chapel, with a naked coffin on a plinth. A crematorium functionary enters, footsteps echoing. He presses a discrete button and then turns his back as the coffin slowly lowers.
 
Then follow a series of vignettes revealing how the coffin’s occupant had changed quite suddenly from being a friend, lover, loving father, son and brother; how, from a gentle, caring man, he had metamorphosed overnight into someone mean and malicious, snide, sardonic, savage in his criticism and his treatment of those who loved him.
 
He had kept it up, this malign manifestation, with barrages of toxic comments, shunned invitations, unkind acts of all descriptions, until they had all hated him. And no-one mourned him when he died.
 
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Of course, it is not my intention to behave that way, during the time that I have left. Rather, the reverse. I don’t think I have any actual enemies on this earth, but there are some with whom I have fallen out –or simply fallen out of contact- and I aim to rebuild one last bridge between us, to communicate again, because we used to care.
 
I know that some people will be saddened and sorrowful when I am gone, and I am sorry that I will have caused them that suffering. But it is inevitable, a necessary price to pay for having been loved.
 
The more I love and am loved, the wider will spread the ripples of grief when I take my final plunge into that tranquil pool... tranquil, at least, for me. The bigger the splash one makes in one’s life, the further floods the devastation.
 
My final existential dilemma becomes: how much should I love people? And the answer is, intuitively, obvious: I must leave behind as much love as I can.
 
I Love You for reading. Thank You.

It is the doves that wake first, well before this part of the world rolls far enough towards the east to be tickled awake by the sun.
 
“What do we do?” one dove calls from a tree outside my window. None of the other doves seems to know the answer. They repeat the question: “What do we do?” from tree to tree. “What do we do?”
 
The pied shrikes pipe up next, declaring: “Pretty boy! Petty Boy! Pretty Boy!”
 
And then the wagtails chime in. “Cheeky!-Cheeky!-Cheeky!” they accuse.
 
“Shit!” calls a New Holland Honeyeater, running late. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
 
“Cheeky!-Cheeky!-Cheeky!”
 
“What do we do?”
 
“Pretty Boy! Pretty Boy!”
 
“Shit! Shit! Shit!”
 
Then suddenly there is a silence as a dark shape blots the stars, and a low whistling farewell from a departing owl.
 
“I’ll see you!” she warns the other birds. “I’ll see you!”

There is a fruit salad sunset sky in the west, a disc of deepest mango orange, sliced horizontally by plum-purple lines of cloud, then a band of apricot paling into the star-freckled blueberry night.
 
A final flight of black swans plies the skies above the chain of lakes that snakes its way through the northern suburbs of my city, a few miles inland from the ocean’s sandy fringe.
 
I follow their V-formation in my mind, as though piloting a glider in their slipstream.
 
They will slant across the freeway soon at 300 feet, and feel a thermal current rising from the homeward traffic. They will hold their wings still, outstretched, micro-steering with their outward primary feathers spread like fingers tickling the breeze.
 
I will bank with them towards the lights of city buildings, reflected in the broad expanse of water, fringed with silhouetted reed-beds, known as Herdsman Lake.
 
We will follow the gentle curving of its northern shore to cut the breeze, then turn into our downwind leg, above broad beds of reeds and rushes, growing slowly closer as we descend.
 
At 100 feet, above the terra cotta roofs of the encroaching suburb, we will wheel sharply round to face the wind and point our noses towards the dusk-shimmering surface, slowing and losing height as we approach.
 
Just above the water, we will flare back to wash off the last of our air-speed, then kiss our own reflections, scattering stars.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

If I believed in reincarnation, I wouldn’t mind coming back as a swan.

There is a new visitor to the red-flowering gum that dominates the view from my front porch, and the pair of wattle-birds who’ve grown up there are not impressed, despite the interloper’s colourful plumage.
 
I hear the rainbow lorikeet chuckling quietly to itself among the upper branches, but it is strangely difficult to see. It seems counter-intuitive that a bright green bird with a purple head and bands of red, orange and yellow could be camouflaged, but it is. I see the parrot, finally, dangling upside down as it farms the rain-fringed blossoms of their dewy nectar.
 
As beautiful as they are, I despise rainbow lorikeets, which are not native to this South-West corner of the continent. A small flock, brought from their native Sydney on the Eastern seabord, was irresponsibly released here in Perth some 20 years ago, and they have multiplied and spread, to the point where there are now up to 50 thousand of them.
 
I detest them for their aggressive breeding strategy, and for usurping all the nesting hollows that the truly Western Australian native parrots used to occupy. I haven’t seen the local “28” parrot, or heard its sombre whistle, for some years now.
 
The young wattle-birds make tag-team attacks on the gaudy invader, darting with their pointed beaks, fanning their wings. The rainbow lorikeet tries to ignore them as it feeds, but the wattle-birds persist until the parrot finally succumbs to their hostility, and swoops low across the road to settle in another tree, devoid of blossoms.
 
Something in me, beyond mere parochialism, wants to cheer on the locals.

View From A Concrete Porch 2

-occasional observations from my front porch as the world passes by, and sometimes drops in for a chat.

I have been inside for most of the day, listening to Parliamentary Question Time, watching it in a window on my laptop, and live-blogging on an Aussie politics website. It is more fun than it sounds, I promise.

But all morning the sun has been screaming through my windows at me: Come outside and play!
So I obey, and find it is, in fact, a perfect autumn day –if, that is, one can suspend one’s worries over wetlands and aquifers and dams.

Grey-bottomed puffs of silver-topped clouds dot the sky, which is a pale powder blue at the horizon and a more steely hue as it rises.

Above the roof across the road a rangy palm-tree thrusts its lengthy fronds in all directions, tousled as a teenage boy with a bottomless budget for hair-gel. The leaves along the palm-fronds respond to the tickling fingers of the breeze and, although it is inaudible to me at this distance, I can see they are playing the great Existence Symphony for wind and palm-tree.

It is ten degrees warmer today than it should be. This, the same day the Government’s Climate Change Commission reported that sea-levels were rising faster than expected.

A family of Golden Wattlebirds is using the tree 10 feet from my porch as a kindergarten. They are dove-sized birds whose long necks, beaks and tails, and whose flat heads are so evocative of the dinosaurs from which they evolved. They have dark brown heads, wings and tails, flecked and banded with white, and their narrow chests are a greyish beige, overshot with a sheen of yellow.

The mother takes her two young through a program of branch-hopping, and shows them how to forage inside the bowls of gum-nuts, in search of bugs and grubs. It is a question of survival.

My friend P drops by on his bike. He is on his way to meet his wife at a nearby shopping centre, where they will buy some warmer clothes.

“Your car is still parked in our driveway,” he tells me.

“Oh. Right.”

I had forgotten that they borrowed it a few nights ago, when it was raining.

“You should have taken the car to meet S,” I suggested.

“Well, she has her bike,” he explained. “And the car-keys, too”.

Ah.

************

So many day-to-day problems beleaguer us. From feeding our families to legislating global action to combat climate change.

But the most important question of all is: “Who has the keys?”

View From A Concrete Porch

-occasional observations from my front porch as the world passes by, and sometimes drops in for a chat.

Afternoon
 
The sun-slant, on these autumn afternoons is such that as I sit in my favourite cane chair, my face is out of the direct sunlight, but my legs and body are warmed by it, and my book spot-lit.

There is a softer yellow in the light, now, than that which has glared, unblinking, for the past six months. This gentler light seems to have the effect of integrating the objects in my view –the houses blend in better with the trees- whereas the summer sun made everything stand sharply apart, defined in shiny lines.

Cloud-shadows slink across the terra-cotta rooftops like an inflowing tide, dulling colours, muting shadows, dappling the contours of the hills opposite. And, in between, those “Angels’ Spotlight” shafts of sun, whose path is lit by a trillion tiny shining droplets hanging in the sky.

Summer’s dust is washed away, and leaves and roofs and walls shine clean and richly coloured, washed in this light, bright like new. The bougainvillea across the road is an almost-painful pink.

New Holland honeyeaters –with their black and white speckled chests and yoke-yellow bars on their wings- forage inside the shrivelled gum-blossoms for unwary insects. A wagtail skips and flits and fans its wings and tail to flush out any insects on the grass, then leaps to catch them as they try to flee. A swallow-tailed swift flies low altitude sorties up and down the length of the lawn, its beak agape, in search of the same prey.

An African woman pushes a stroller up the hill. She is tall and lithe, swathed in a bright cotton print dress, with a matching band wrapped and tied around her head.

Her big-eyed child looks my way and smiles.

“Hello,” I call, waving.

“Say ‘Hello’,” her Mum tells her.

“Hello,” says the little girl, and waves.

They continue up the hill. The child twists in her seat to keep me in view.

“Hello!” she calls, as the angle narrows and I can no longer see her.

“See you next time!” I call back.