Sometimes we get each other and sometimes, we don’t get. I know this because my favourite cafe today ran out of cups. The man standing behind me in the queue said to his girlfriend, “Dishwasher’s on the blink again,” and she told their little caramel dog, “Awww, dah dishhwashhah!” while the dog looked up adoringly.
I was queuing behind a man in board shorts whom I had greeted, “Are you the close of the queue?” He looked a little startled, then he smiled. “Reckon I am,” he said, and I said, “I’ll take over those duties if you like.” We were laughing now, just a little. “You can put in a shift,” he agreed, and I said, “I mean, I’ll take it on. Someone else is gunna arrive and ask, this the end of the queue, and I’ll tell them, yes it is! It’s only the one time, but it’s arduous.”
We had run out of things to say but now there was a rapport between us so we couldn’t switch straight back to automatons. And because my friendliness is partly anxiety, I noticed he was having to twitch himself out of the reach of the dried curls of jasmine wreathing the verandah post beside him, which kept reaching for him and snatching at his hair. I pulled out of them free and tucked it into the basket of dried branches it had sprung from, saying cheerfully, “That thing just really wants to get to know you!” and he turned as he finally noticed this source of annoyance saying, “Ohh! You’re right, it really really does.” There were still four people between us and the till were we would place orders and we would have had to resort to gazing studiously away from each other, maybe even whistling or humming a little, all that fakery; but he said, in a kind of gasp of social endeavour, “Reckon they could afford to give these plants of bit of water!” I glanced up. The verandah roof is high and four former or alleged potplants dangle, quietly weeping dead brown tendrils into the air. When he reached the till I fell away, and we both turned back between his order and mine to say, “Have a good one,” and now we were done.
I took an Uber home because I have an injury just now from an idiotic but cataclysmic pushbike accident. I had to go through the kind of surgery a surgeon calls, rather comfortably, “minor.” The Uber driver had a grey and black striped handkerchief tucked in at the top of his driver-side window for keeping off the sun. I said, “Is that the flag of your own individual people: the Nation of You.” And he said, “No, no, it’s a handkerchief,” so I said, “Yes, I know, I was just playing.” A silence. We were not of the nation of each other. And I said, “Just I think it would be so awesome if everybody had their own individual flag and maybe a coat of arms! to wave out the window in traffic. Once in a while you’d spot someone with a similar flag to your own and then the two of you would become best friends.”
Did I mention this everyday friendliness which seems to come so naturally is also in part anxiety, in part yearning?
“Oh,” he said. “That’s funny.” And we talked about the big trees along the road, which are highways for Brisbane’s possums. At my gate he pulled over very gently and I stepped very gingerly down and said, thrusting my fist in the air and indicating the flag, “Viva la Revolution!”
My driver said, apologetically, “It’s actually a handkerchief,” and I tried to let him off the hook on which I had not intended to hoist him: “Yes. I was just joking with you. Thank you for this peaceful ride, have a great day!” And as I pushed back the gate which like so much of this city if overhung by trees I was thinking how even the kin-man and I, the one the jasmine at the cafe was fingering, could have estranged ourselves and caused a brief sore rupture if either one of us had only hung round three or four seconds too long once we’d reached the register. We both understood the same rules: the rules of playfulness, only some of which are THERE ARE NO RULES. The coffee was really good. I gave the thirsty peace lily in the bathroom some water.
Category: kindness of strangers
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kept & cupped
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gulp it
Last night I went out for jazz and at the bar a man nibbling on the rim of his beer said thoughtfully, You are doing such a great job tonight. I said, Thanks! Then: Great job at what? Airily he said, Oh — just being yourself. When we all left he was standing at the far side of the suddenly bright room, waving goodbye with both hands. The music was like god.
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moon made of ice cream
I showed up at the supermarket checkout at closing time with a tub of ice cream. She said, “How are we this evening,” and I said, “Well, I can’t speak for you, but I’m fine!” I gave her such a big smile she took a blink and stepped backwards. But she was game, we’re human, they could put big windows up high in those places to let the trapped staff gaze out. Rewards card? Nope. Bag? I opened my little folding one with a whoosh. “I’m in the supermarket, in my pyjamas, buying ice cream,” I rejoiced. “This is a beautiful night in my life.” She laughed. She folded up my receipt over and over into a very neat square then pushed it inside the bag. We wished each other a great evening. All the way home I was peering up through the windscreen following the shrouded moon. Brisbane, you have so very many trees. So many friendly young women who are competent and under employed. So many tubs of fine ice cream.
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a money carrier
It is summer and the lockdown is easing; I went to pick up my disreputable, battered guitar from a studio where I’d left it lying, the week before the virus took hold. Such a beautiful morning. The clouds are massed on spires like whipped cream on biscuits and the trees bend in all along the avenues, blessing Berlin. Riding home I stopped for eggs and a loaf of bread. The woman who begs silently outside the greengrocers sat on her accustomed stool; we always smile at each other. This morning however her smile was as sad as my chest. I stood in the doorway with the doors opening and shutting either side of me, holding a fist to my heart. Yes, she said, nodding, her eyes brimming.
In Germany you can buy bread nearly everywhere. Even on this quiet street there is another baker four doors down. I stood there trying not to wonder. Once you start to wonder, paralysis is apt to set in: they offer 35 varieties of loaf and I once went into a freeze in another busy bakery where I counted 73 kinds of bread. With sunflower seeds? or without. What kind of grain? Then you must decide: the whole loaf or only the half? Sliced, or not? Sliced thick? or thin. The woman handed me my whole loaf and I said, blurring through the cotton mask, Ah, no – just the half, please.
She pulled out half the slices and laid them aside, unsaleable now. “It’s hard to be clear, isn’t it,” I said. “Because of the masks.”
I had ducked in here last week to get milk and as I walked in I uddenly remembered: no mask. So I decided for once to bolt through without wearing protection. At the fridges a German woman remarked to someone standing behind me, “She – has no mask on!” Germanness is kindly meant and makes everything everybody’s business. But it can also leave a gracious lady begging outside a store unattended, and can lead strangers to speak about rather than to one another, as though we were merely objects on a landscape.
I chose two apples, perfectly reeded with green and red, glossy and plump. Outside, I offered one to my friend. One for me, I showed her: one for you. They link us. She smiled faintly as she rubbed it on her skirts to clean the wax. As I unlocked my bike an older lady with frantic eyes approached from inside the store. “Have you lost a Portmonnaie?” A money carrier. I clapped myself all over for my purse. “Oh, wow, I must have left it behind.”
“What does it look like?” I described it. I didn’t know the German word for ‘battered.’ She held it out to triumphantly, concealed very neatly under her own. “That is so kind of you, thank you,” I said, stashing the purse in my bag. “And now,” she went out, holding out her hand, ” – you give me five euros finder’s fee.”
“Oh!” Behind me I could see the Romany woman shaking her head. “Well, that’s – “
“Five times I have given back purses,” she said, “and no one ever even thanks me.”
“Oh! But I do thank you!” I propped the scarred guitar in my basket lest it fall. “It’s very kind, I appreciate it. But it seems – “
“If not,” she said, “then I – “
“You take back the purse?” I started to wheel my bike away. Her claw hand came down on the rim of its basket. “You’re actually trying to stop me from leaving?”
The electric glass doors opened and I raised my voice just enough to be audible at the bakery counter. “Hello? This lady has found my purse. She won’t let me go without a five euro finder fee.”
The bakery assistant came hurriedly round the counter and stood between us on the footpath. The older woman began to shout. “Five times! I have given back purses! No one even thanks me!”
“But I do thank you,” I said again. “Thank you very much.”
“She should give five euros. It’s just a finder fee. Otherwise I take the purse back and give it to the police.”
A woman entering the shop had paused. “Look at her,” she told my assailant, gesturing at my ragged basket, my rusted bike, my outfit. Thanks! “She also has nothing. She’s also doing it hard. Look, she has to play on this terrible old guitar in the streets, just to make a little money.”
I said, “It’s lovely that you have helped me.” The woman was still shouting. “But I don’t wish to be yelled at by you just because you have done something kind.”
“This is the last time!” she was shouting. “I’ll never give a purse back again. Next time, the police. You have changed my character.”
I had started to cry. The expression on the face of my Rom friend, to whom in three years of passing this spot I had never given five euros, was full of a complex wry compassion. How different it feels, to be asked, to have something demanded. How varied is privilege and presumption. How difficult we make it, to do right by one another. Yet it’s always still possible. “Be kind whenever possible. It’s always possible.” I thanked the bakery saleswoman from the grocery store and thanked the customer and pushed my bike uphill, discombobulated utterly. The shouting woman, still shouting, had climbed on her own bike. We had to travel in a convoy a little way and she kept shouting, to the world at large. “This woman owes me five euros! She won’t give it!” I turned away up my own street and bent my head to the handlebars, crying. Why is this place so desperate and why is the summer so short? How could he leave after such a stupid fight? How come the bookshops, like this one with its wheeled gondolas colouring the streetside, stayed open right through the pandemic and yet we treat each other, sometimes in some places, as though kindness and insight were a mere imposition, as though I were the only one here. -
trombone
I went down to the square to catch some sun. I had been sitting on the couch reading stories and eating toffees all day, though both toffees and stories were those I had made myself. It’s so warm! Warmer than it’s been in five long months. I found a bench and sat down to wipe my beer with disinfectant.
As I was slowly reading a book of intense spiritual yearning and turning its pages splattered by shadows in the sun and sipping my green glass beer, high above our heads the church bells started to toll. For you. A man who likely hasn’t the luxury of sheltering at home came by to ask diffidently was I in need of the empty bottle or can he have it. He took it. The bells tolled on and on. Across the square a girl with her head knotted in blonde dreads raised suddenly her right arm holding a crutch and stabbed it upright at the sky as though leading all of us into battle. She let the crutch fall in a long arc slowed by its own light weight, it fell to the ground and she staggered forward on one remaining crutch towards her friend, standing and applauding. The bells died away like tide. And up on the uppermost balcony facing the square a man had started to play the saxophone. He played and we all sat and listened. On the opposite side of the playground a girl leaned her head in and bowed forward and she began to sing, hurling uneven phrases back up at him and starting up a patter with her syncopated clap. Three black women strolled past me talking very quietly and walking very slowly. A child cried out, Mama! Mama! The crutchless girl sank among the rose bushes and tugged at her raggedy hair. It’s nearly twenty degrees today, I turned a page in my book and read, “Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature.” St Augustine. The trumpet player ended on a remarkable languid flourish and I started up a clap and stomp which half a dozen people joined in with, and as our sound died away the sun was gone between the buildings which hasten the sundown in this hemisphere, where the sun’s arc is so shallow half the year, the air was immediately chill and somewhere nearby a trombone started playing, slowly and with seeming sarcasm, ‘Summertime.’
This is the twenty-eighth day of my solitude and here ends the reading, I will go back to my desk to write, now. -
ablaze and to blame
Wild animals are now approaching humans, desperate for water. Magpies are mimicking sirens. It’s so catastrophic we need a new word for catastrophic. And next year, and the year after that, those who are left will need a new word again. Heart is boiling with rage and grief. We saw this coming for so long. Now here it is.
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story about an artist
In my twenties I worked at the front desk of the Queensland Art Gallery for a while. It is huge and immaculate and rather hushed. One day an old man came in, wizened and bent. He approached the island of our desk across the marble floor.
“This the art gallery?”
Yes, I said. His hands were trembling and his fingers seamed with dirt.
He had come down from the country on the bus: twelve hours. He set a bag down on the counter and began to open it very slowly. He said, “Got a painting for youse.”
He unrolled a canvas and showed it to me. The painting seemed to me pretty awful but his courage and his straightforward, honest presumption moved me to tears. He’s a Queenslander, this is his art, this is the Queensland Art Gallery – why shouldn’t he bring it in here and offer to hang it? It made sense.
I was too gauche to know how to deal with him and his imminent and crushing disappointment. I thought he might never have shown his work to anyone before. He had come all the way down here to make a fool out of himself – a noble, exemplary fool – and in doing so, he exposed the far greater foolishness of our urbanity, our conformity, our stupid ladders and pretentious mores. I saw all of this in an instant and it filled my sore heart with heat. I picked up the phone and called a kindly woman who worked in acquisitions, who had sometimes chatted with me in the lifts. I asked her to come down and see him. I hope she may have taken him out for coffee and talked with him about his work. I hope she encouraged him to paint more. I have often thought about this man and his simple human courage, his artist’s heart. He might be dead now and it’s possible his paintings may all have been thrown away.
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parcel in cloth
One thing I love in Ghana is people seem so good and kind. Not all of them, I guess, but daily life seems to me founded in a beautiful mutual respect and helpfulness. I watched the ‘mate’ in a grinding and crowded trotro (a tiny bus) jump down and help the man who was slowly climbing out, he lifted the man’s parcel wrapped in stained cloth – perhaps his stall – from the front passenger seat and set it down on the pavement. Then the two of them lifted it without a word, one side each, and settled it on the man’s head so he could carry it home.
I saw a little boy tapping my Ghanaian boyfriend on the hip, offering a coin. “Boss – you dropped this.”
Sometimes I think about Australian cities where these days people barely say hello. I think about New York, where I first visited in 2011 and New Yorkers were always saying to me, “You Australians are so friendly. In New York we hate each other.” Then I wonder how much of my experience of being in Ghana is filtered through the privilege of being a relatively well-off visitor, a white woman, someone from whom everybody can potentially benefit.
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summer treat
The woman behind me at the supermarket checkout had a little pile of five caramel bars, two gossip magazines of the trashiest kind, the ones with really flimsy rattling paper, and a tub of flavoured yoghurt. She saw me looking and her brow contracted. When I said, “I’m so happy for you,” which in German is said, I rejoice myself for you, “that looks so delightful,” her whole face relaxed.
“Ja,” she said, and picked up the stack of caramel bars and hugged them. “It looks really great, doesn’t it.”
“It really, really does,” I said. When I reached my bike in the row of bikes out front someone had dropped a leaflet in its basket to advertise a yoga retreat on Corfu. It is colder today and the summer, only two days old, feels already threatened.