Walking under the devastated trees the afternoon after a huge storm, their fresh scattered blossoms and leaves all over the pavement and all over the road as though some glorious festival has been by, I passed an elderly man walking with a stick, painfully it seemed, his upper body listing forward. As we drew near each other I wondered how bitter it might feel to be passed, without effort, by a member of what he perhaps thinks of as the fairer or even the weaker sex. He turned his turtle head and I said, Hi. On the instant a warm gleaming coal awoke deep in his eye, he had beautiful, unusually large, well-spaced brown eyes, and as I passed him I noticed his posture had changed. He was walking almost upright and seemed struck by pride in himself, joy in life, something of that sort I could see it in his gait. I thought: it’s crushing the way we treat our own elders. I thought: The meaning of life is love, what else can it be. I don’t understand why people keep asking. And as I flung the gorgeously aged garden tools someone had left in a pile of trash beside the road into the back of my ute, disturbing the spider who lives there on her quivering and much-travelled web, and slung myself behind the steering wheel and roared off I was crying out in my heart: I say this every day of my life, I will keep saying it til I die: we need to be kinder to one another.
Author: moseara
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better to have loved and won
The guy I adore has conversations with birds. These appear to be actual reciprocal chats, where the bird says something and he answers. After he has mimicked what the bird has to say, the bird often answers again. Again he responds, using a sound palette of his own devising: whistles, chirrups and chirps, clucks of the tongue, and little spoken fragments that remake in our alphabet what the bird’s liquidity of throat has offered out into the air. He has a dozen ways of answering and the bird has endless spurls of its own devil-may-care. To me the birds as I hear them relating to him out on our verandah of a morning often sound rather curious and questioning. They sound like they like being answered, albeit clunkily, in translation.
This is mostly magpies and butcher birds, sometimes a noisy mynah: though he is more wary of them after they chased onto the four-lane road a nestling we found, on Australia Day when we had been in the country only five weeks. He scooped up the fledgling in his long hands and carried it down to Kurilpa Hall, where John Pilger’s excoriating film was being shown.
Australia Day, Invasion Day. Utopia, Utopia.
He was so worried about his baby bird that he couldn’t concentrate on the film we’d come to see. I was mortified. What could be more important than the showing in this community of this film, why should two white people with their tiny adopted bird get to disrupt the long-awaited screening. I sent him outside with his orphan and sat alone through the shaming, ennobling, uplifting film. It was crowded, it was hot. I wasn’t the only one crying. Afterwards we all filed out in silence and I found the two of them sitting outside in a folding chair under a tarp, surrounded by elders who were sipping their cups of tea and offering advice. My long-legged monster had taken off his beanie and had filled it with tufts of grass for a little nest, and the bird was perched on his lap and he had worked out a way to feed it droplets of water by dipping a long grass stem into a paper cup. “I’m going to call him Harry,” he said.
We walked home after the barbecue, after dark, it was a long walk which took us nearly two hours of hill-climbing. The little bird rode on his outstretched finger and, unbelievably, snuggled down into its own self and grew drowsy. To see this Berliner, new to Australia, carrying home a tiny fig bird on his finger and to see the bird trust him enough to fall asleep and ride asleep, this wild creature, this orphaned unnested one, was incredible to me. I said, I think he seems more like a Clarence. I think you’re right, he said, lifting the bird very gently to peer at him as we turned down to walk home along the river.
He spent the next weeks reading up about fig birds and their habits and habitats, mixing up revolting pulps and stews which Clarence wolfed down avidly, talking to him in whistles and purrs, evading the cat. Whenever the bird really liked something he would trill his little scaly wings by instinct, as though keeping himself hovering in the air in front of a favourite fruit or flower. His eyes were big and round and his neck was moulted of its baby fluff and bare of feathers. He was the funniest little guy you could imagine. The two of them sat at the computer for hours, working, and Clarence rode about the house on his friend’s shoulder. After a while there were flying lessons in the leafy backyard, a long arm held up high and swooping suddenly downwards to give Clarence the idea that he could take off, he could fly. Unmistakeably they were two best buds. We hid our smiles. They were inseparable.
Heartache came when we called the wildlife rescue people and were told you’re not, ahem, allowed to keep a wild bird in your home. My soft-hearted Berliner shed tears. He had arrived from so many miles away, from the snow, and made himself a root to fasten down into the soil by falling helplessly in love with this little halfclad chirping cute and ugly barely airborne birdie. On the day the two of them were due to meet the wildlife carer and try to put Clarence back in the same tree he had fallen from – “They’re unusual,” she said, “they’ll actually take them back” – a pall hung over the house. And even now, 10 months on, sometimes a fig bird comes to visit our mango tree and sings its song and this Berliner always cranes his neck: “Maybe it’s Clarence!”
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Kaffeewitzenkraft
We tried out a new coffee house, on our bicycles. Actually it was an old cafe, one of Brisbane’s earliest, in a dingy nook at the entrance to the gold-crusted cinemas on Queen Street. However it’s been done up like an ageing aunt, trussed in striped golden paper and with those little dinky tables too small to spread a newspaper. He ordered his coffee and I ordered mine. I was put off by the newly-renovated smell but rooted to the spot by the Abba album they were playing – the actual album, the whole thing, the impeccable swirling piano and harmonies. We stayed to listen.
One coffee seems never enough. I’ve fallen into the maw of first world greed. I stood up and wound my way back to the counter, the guy pouring showy, almost effortless lattes one after another. He had an Olympic flag of empty white-mouthed cups and was swirling them full rapidly. Another coffee? he asked, seeing me standing there watching. I said, Yes please. Decaf –
He finished for me. “Extra extra hot with some honey on the side.” Yes, I said. “And do you want another of the espressos?” No, I said: He hated his.
I always hold my breath, risking a joke against a stranger. They might not get it. They might decide to stiffen and feel attacked. The last customer might have been horribly rude. He swung away from me to open the till and as he did so, a great guffaw of laughter like a cough came out of him and he fell forward from the waist, laughing luxuriously. Phew. I went back to our tiny table and told my partner, in barista world my kind of coffee would be “a suburban why-bother.”
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possum off
Pissed on by a possum as I was lying in the hammock. Cat sprang out and stalked off, tail in air. Possum continued climbing the branch, tail in air. This was after I had already been bitten by a sharp mosquito that turned out to be claw of cat perched on nearby kitchen chair on the lawn to tell me, let me in, I want hammock, you gotta lift me up. Now the three of us who momentarily were linked are sundered: life goes on.
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storm
I just cycled home through the spattering rain, with thunder rolling heavy overneath, and as I swept down the hill riding on my brakes I passed a cluster of dark-clad people raising their umbrellas, phones to their ears, released from their desks for the day and not happy. They were large but looked not so much fat as spilled, a kind of liquid inactivity none of us had two decades back and now even swimsuit models can’t avoid. They looked as though the world had offered them poor options and their lives were dragged by addiction and stimulants and their day jobs were dull and dispiriting. Flowers of colour in the form of bright umbrellas struck me as indications of courage. And I thought about how with all our beautiful ingenuity we have failed ourselves, and how we’ve birthed the first generation of babies in human history who are likely to live shorter lives than their parents. Along the backs of the houses and light industrial sheds the river, muddy and sludgy and odorous between the prickling mangroves, lazed brimming with its greenish life and drawing down to the sea and back again all its clean secrets. I need a better life. I need more time on my feet. I want to live in a happier world. I want to get away from my screen and all the screens in waiting rooms and bus stations and fuel stops and public spaces and gather all the home going commuters for a game of touch footy in the sweeping black rain.
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collective noun a couch of potatoes
I have no depth and everything within me is shallow and small. I waste this only thing time. I spend it as a charity on stultifying trivialities all pettifogging at the window’s pain like untrue love. I show off and on again. I’ve nothing. Not even that nothing. Only what is left by boiling too many bones too long: mostly, scum and smell and the evaporation of beauty; mostly, strong dark waters no one would drink, but for their health.
I sit here, boiling far too many suns. But only as they fall across the water, winglike, saving daylight. Using words like jewels to deflect my nakedness and shame. A continual dinning sound like tinnitus, bling! bling! bling! Body fat and gemstones, a clattering cup’s old soup. Using time like words which can be flattened silent to the page. A couch of potatoes. A combine of harvests. A chapel of waysides. A nun of that.
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bar none
Seems to me when you have yourself a brow bar (they only do eyebrows), a blow-dry bar (they only dry hair), and a tanning salon (they brown people) in the one block, it could be your locality is suffering what we might call First World Problems Syndrome. Meanwhile, in Arnhem Land…
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climate chains
God, I feel so depressed about the American midterm results today. What seems clear is: the more frightened people become about the horrors of climate disaster, water wars, drought refugees, the more they vote for these cowboys in the big hats who say: The Lord spoke to me personally, and told me… how to save us all.
No matter how many studies associate extreme Conservatism with lower IQ… no matter how clearly we know that intelligence is dimmed by terror… we still reach for the Big Man’s Salvation in a crisis. Crises deepen and worsen on every side. Therefore we leap straight from 100% denial into “well, there’s nothing we can do about that now, it’s too late… batten down the hatches.” When oh when will we allow the love that is in us to rule our hearts, our world, our hearts?
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global weirding
Yesterday I accompanied a friend to a medical specialist who has been urging invasive and ill-tested procedures, saying, “Don’t you want to go with the science?” We were talking about the weather, to cover an uncomfortable examination. The doctor pointed out that in Europe it has actually been colder lately. He said, “So much for global warming. I mean, are you into that?”
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I’ve been beautiful since I was nine years old
Being shoved up against the train windows by a much older man whose friends looked on and hooted. Waking up as the blankets were stripped off my upper bunk and the passport controller’s flashlight swept up and down my body. Having to leap from a moving car on a back road after accepting a lift with a girlfriend from two seemingly friendly, laid-back university students we had been chatting with for some time. Having a man grab and wrench my breast as I passed. Innumerable insultingly degrading sexual suggestions, often from immaculate men in suits. Erections pressed up against me by hairdressers, fellow commuters, shoppers. Being lifted out of the way every time the manager at the place I waitressed needed to pass. I was fifteen. Being called sunshine, baby, darlin, hot lips, sweet mamma, etc etc. Being called “that.” Being spoken of and numerically rated by men who address their friends rather than me. Having various uncles slide their hands up my leg and one of them tell me, “You are so beautiful I can see how uncles might have Funny Feelings about their nieces.” Being told this year by a male gynaecologist he finds me “too erotic.” Facedown in underwear after a massage feeling an elderly, frail physiotherapist recommended by a trusted (male) friend plant a kiss on my outer butt cheek and then crow to himself, “I’m allowed to do that, because I’m your Uncle So and So.”
Being grabbed between the legs from behind as I walked off a dance floor, by a man I’d not even had eye contact with. Being followed. Being crowded in doorways. Being told “Ohhh, I love your eyes,” by a man staring at my breasts. Being asked a thousand times, in injured tones, “Hey, where you going?” Being wolf-whistled, cat-called, followed in slow cars. Having my drink spiked at a nightclub, fighting off the swarming feeling of faintness, and later hearing from a friend that she had woken up in the alleyway behind the club. Being attacked whenever I speak up against misogyny and called frigid, ugly, a bitch, a lesbian bitch, accused of man-hating. I had a fork shoved into my butt as I leaned across a broad table of well-dressed executive couples by a man who said when I turned, “Are you done?” Waitressing felt so hazardous. A sweet, shy, tiny elderly man tunnelled his head under my arms to nuzzle my breasts, in front of all his family, as I was leaning across the table with my hands filled with platters of hot food. I looked down and he was smiling up at me with a blissful expression of entitled boyish naughtiness.
I am a shy but fairly outspoken person and am protected, to some extent, by my strong and athletic tallness. I’m taller than most men. Talking to other women shows these experiences not to be very unusual. It’s endemic. For many of us it spreads across our entire life from the age of eleven or twelve. I’ve tried a range of responses. Ignore him. Pour his beer over his head. Report him to a bouncer. Yell at him. Most times men seemed gleeful to have gotten a response; sometimes the lack of a response seems to invite further harassment.
If you are a man, picture to yourself how intimidating any one of these experiences might feel. Now picture a barrage of them, week in week out, regardless of what you wear or of how you conduct yourself. The only way you can escape this treatment is by sticking close to another man, who owned you first. There’s nowhere safe.