Today we celebrated Una's birthday, but it is not until tomorrow that it will be the four year anniversary of her birth and of this auspicious occasion, two sisters meeting for the very first time:
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Growing and shrinking
Una and Fred are playing in their bedroom. I'm on my bed, fixing up the last changes on the computer. The phone rings. Martin answers. It's his mum. They're making plans for the week. Something Fred says (I don't hear it) prompts Una to clomp up the three wooden steps that divide the mudbrick from the weatherboard and into the loungeroom.
'Dad?'
'Yes Una?'
'Do people ever shrink?' (This is an interesting question in light of the fact that several times over the last few days Una has asked me 'Are there giants in this world?')
I hold my breath, listening for Martin's answer.
Martin assures her no, people don't shrink.
She gets on the phone to Nana and asks her the same question. Una's voice is loud and bell-like, ringing through the house. Of course I am not sure what Nana says, but I think it must be something about old people sometimes getting smaller (which is not, I am pretty sure, what Una means, I think she means like Treehorn, which we were reading a lot about six months ago.)
Una informs Nana that she is not going to have her birthday (at the end of this month) because she doesn't want to be a grown up. This is a familiar theme. She has been talking about this for a week now, and not even the thought of presents and parties can entice her to change her mind.
Later it's dinner time, and we're all sitting up at the table together. We are eating chicken pie. There's a movie playing on Martin's computer.
Una turns from the movie and announces to everyone: 'I think we should talk about shrinking.'
Martin and Fred remain absorbed in the film. 'Are you worried about shrinking?' I ask her.
Her attention is drawn by the film.
'Una?' I say, trying to attract her attention.
She glances at me with a distracted frown. 'I don't want to die,' she says.
My heart cracks. I have a lot of little cracks on my heart, like a crackle glazed cup.
'All the people are going to die. Everybody wants to die but not Una.'
This moment passes somehow. Things happen. Martin turns the movie off. I go back to work in the bedroom. The girls eat dessert while Martin reads them stories. Una sneaks down to talk to me before bed. We converse. She is sunny. Her new haircut curls around her ears. She takes my breath away with her clear eyed, open faced beauty.
In the car, whenever we drive anywhere, Una will suddenly cry out 'I can see the distance!' Una's greatest desire is to live in the distance, but she can never go there, because the distance is always retreating. I remember driving up the highways of my childhood, looking at the velvet green rumpled hills and wanting to delve deep into them, to exist somewhere in their folds. Wanting to turn off the road, to glide over fields, disappear into forests.
She wants to drive on the moon.
She spent several minutes looking at the Schleich catalogue, telling me which smurfs she wanted and what she wanted them to be able to do: 'I want the smurf in the hammock, but I want him to be able to get out of the hammock himself and walk and talk by himself - real - and I want him to be able to sleep and sing and dance and...' She would rest her forehead on her hand, down on the table, between thoughts, as though tapping into some deep secret part of her mind. Real. The way she says it, her eyes wide, her conviction. There are some things you can't photograph, can't record. Some things you can only hope your mind will hold onto.
This time next week we will have celebrated her fourth birthday, though she will not be four for one more day. She will have blown out four candles. She will be little, but she will be also grown.
'Dad?'
'Yes Una?'
'Do people ever shrink?' (This is an interesting question in light of the fact that several times over the last few days Una has asked me 'Are there giants in this world?')
I hold my breath, listening for Martin's answer.
Martin assures her no, people don't shrink.
She gets on the phone to Nana and asks her the same question. Una's voice is loud and bell-like, ringing through the house. Of course I am not sure what Nana says, but I think it must be something about old people sometimes getting smaller (which is not, I am pretty sure, what Una means, I think she means like Treehorn, which we were reading a lot about six months ago.)
Una informs Nana that she is not going to have her birthday (at the end of this month) because she doesn't want to be a grown up. This is a familiar theme. She has been talking about this for a week now, and not even the thought of presents and parties can entice her to change her mind.
Later it's dinner time, and we're all sitting up at the table together. We are eating chicken pie. There's a movie playing on Martin's computer.
Una turns from the movie and announces to everyone: 'I think we should talk about shrinking.'
Martin and Fred remain absorbed in the film. 'Are you worried about shrinking?' I ask her.
Her attention is drawn by the film.
'Una?' I say, trying to attract her attention.
She glances at me with a distracted frown. 'I don't want to die,' she says.
My heart cracks. I have a lot of little cracks on my heart, like a crackle glazed cup.
'All the people are going to die. Everybody wants to die but not Una.'
This moment passes somehow. Things happen. Martin turns the movie off. I go back to work in the bedroom. The girls eat dessert while Martin reads them stories. Una sneaks down to talk to me before bed. We converse. She is sunny. Her new haircut curls around her ears. She takes my breath away with her clear eyed, open faced beauty.
In the car, whenever we drive anywhere, Una will suddenly cry out 'I can see the distance!' Una's greatest desire is to live in the distance, but she can never go there, because the distance is always retreating. I remember driving up the highways of my childhood, looking at the velvet green rumpled hills and wanting to delve deep into them, to exist somewhere in their folds. Wanting to turn off the road, to glide over fields, disappear into forests.
She wants to drive on the moon.
She spent several minutes looking at the Schleich catalogue, telling me which smurfs she wanted and what she wanted them to be able to do: 'I want the smurf in the hammock, but I want him to be able to get out of the hammock himself and walk and talk by himself - real - and I want him to be able to sleep and sing and dance and...' She would rest her forehead on her hand, down on the table, between thoughts, as though tapping into some deep secret part of her mind. Real. The way she says it, her eyes wide, her conviction. There are some things you can't photograph, can't record. Some things you can only hope your mind will hold onto.
This time next week we will have celebrated her fourth birthday, though she will not be four for one more day. She will have blown out four candles. She will be little, but she will be also grown.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
He's All Our President
Can we share him? He's an awesome orator.
Read the whole thing hereBut at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world - and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.
And that's what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.
...
Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I'm working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you've got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don't let us down - don't let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Gratuitous Beauty
I am searching for birthday presents for Una. Remember how weird and obsessive I am about present buying? How I always want just the right thing? And then talk myself out of buying anything much at all? Anyway, here I am, looking at painfully and gratuitously and for varying reasons unattainably beautiful things on the Splinter-nets. And I thought I would share my painful melancholy yearnings for these platonic ideals with you all. Because I am thoughtful like that.
Kitchen toys made out of used olive oil tins by rafinesse and tristesse.
The above dolls house from Hase Weiss (we are into economically sized dolls houses)
And this one below by Jeanette Domeisen
Though I fully acknowledge we ought to be able to make our own version of this, just as this clever person has done (via We Heart Books). In that other spatial dimension where time is like soup (plentiful, easily padded out to go round, and you can store extra in your bread).
I want to live in this playhouse:
And I haven't even started on Etsy.
Kitchen toys made out of used olive oil tins by rafinesse and tristesse.The above dolls house from Hase Weiss (we are into economically sized dolls houses)
And this one below by Jeanette Domeisen
Though I fully acknowledge we ought to be able to make our own version of this, just as this clever person has done (via We Heart Books). In that other spatial dimension where time is like soup (plentiful, easily padded out to go round, and you can store extra in your bread).I want to live in this playhouse:
And I haven't even started on Etsy.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Miss Spelling
My spelling is wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles and the letters get in the wrong places. Winnie the Pooh
I em dansing.
Ponies the past went past we.
Mama Pene Mama Eart Me After Dad
These were all in a notebook Fred writes and draws in sometimes, like a diary but without the usual sense of order a diary suggests - her pages are random, there is no indication of when each was written, though most of them were from the time of our holiday at Easter when we went to Silvers circus. The last one is a song, each syllable is accompanied by a musical note. I stumbled upon it looking for somewhere to scribble notes while she was on my computer.
In the book I found a map she had drawn with the title: I EM HAPPY. It is a map of school and she has labeled certain landmarks: CUBILAND, PLAYGRAND and CURPAK (it took me a while to realise that CURPAK, which points to a ladderish image, means carpark and while it strikes me as odd, as a grown up, that the carpark should be one of her major landmarks, I myself have a wash of odd and ambiguous nostalgia about the row of carparking spaces out the front of Mt Nelson Primary School, which is odd because I have few memories of being driven to or from school). It's testimony to how much she likes school, despite my lingering worries about the smallness of the school and the lack of facilities and opportunities compared to bigger, shinier schools.
The other day I did a talk at a lovely secondary school, and then workshops with year sevens. One of the young writers asked me 'why does a book need to be copyedited? Why should it matter if the spelling is correct as long as people can understand what's being written?' It matters because it does I suppose, but I can see her point. I am always interested in Fred's writing, I am fascinated by how unstable language can be, how stretchy it is, how unreliable the step from the spoken to the written - it seems every second word has a rule-breaker: a silent letter, or unexpected diapthong. There is pleasure that, in a way, Fred's language is still private, still held within the embrace of the family. There is pleasure in the intimacy involved in deciphering codes, an intimacy perhaps that I am betraying by sharing her writing here.
Sitting beside me on the table is a book Fred has made herself, roughly stapling together the pages, which do not quite line up. It's title is THE BIG BOOK OF SICRIS. The first page is filled with a floating mysterious question mark. The next says: "DO YOU NOw ThaT PReRNS CAN Die BeFoRe CHiLDReN?" This secret is obviously so big, and so silencing, that for some days now the rest of the pages have remained blank.
'Haa Haa Haa. I hav a plan.'
This is written on the blackboard in the hallways. I discovered it walking past, and I could hear Fred in the bedroom, alone in her room, speaking aloud. There is something sinister about mispellings too, something that threatens cohesion, sanity, the order of things. Language is a series of objects we arrange. If we carefully lined our shelves with broken things: eyeless ruptured dolls, teacups with a bite taken out fo them, worm-filled apples, we would probably seem quite mad. Encountering mispellings is like seeing headless ghosts or zombies, things that have created life from the leftovers, the animated dead.
'Ponies the past went past we.'
But there is a poetry to the mispelled too. It implies an independence from authority, a boundless creativity that goes right down to the basic building blocks of language. And when they come from children they contribute to this intuitive sense that children are closer to the source than we are, the rich, wild source where imagination and creativity spring from. It is obvious that to Fred, words are as malleable as playdough, and they can be pushed and moulded as necessary.
At the moment, Una is in the bath saying to Fred, who is pretending to be deaf: 'Why do you need to not hear?' The surprising cadence of their idiosyncratic syntax informs my writing and changes the way I make sentences. I feel sometimes that I am the zombie, or the vampire, feeding off their jangling, living, dansing words, the music of their mis/spellings and mis/speakings.
I em dansing.
Ponies the past went past we.
Mama Pene Mama Eart Me After Dad
These were all in a notebook Fred writes and draws in sometimes, like a diary but without the usual sense of order a diary suggests - her pages are random, there is no indication of when each was written, though most of them were from the time of our holiday at Easter when we went to Silvers circus. The last one is a song, each syllable is accompanied by a musical note. I stumbled upon it looking for somewhere to scribble notes while she was on my computer.
In the book I found a map she had drawn with the title: I EM HAPPY. It is a map of school and she has labeled certain landmarks: CUBILAND, PLAYGRAND and CURPAK (it took me a while to realise that CURPAK, which points to a ladderish image, means carpark and while it strikes me as odd, as a grown up, that the carpark should be one of her major landmarks, I myself have a wash of odd and ambiguous nostalgia about the row of carparking spaces out the front of Mt Nelson Primary School, which is odd because I have few memories of being driven to or from school). It's testimony to how much she likes school, despite my lingering worries about the smallness of the school and the lack of facilities and opportunities compared to bigger, shinier schools.
The other day I did a talk at a lovely secondary school, and then workshops with year sevens. One of the young writers asked me 'why does a book need to be copyedited? Why should it matter if the spelling is correct as long as people can understand what's being written?' It matters because it does I suppose, but I can see her point. I am always interested in Fred's writing, I am fascinated by how unstable language can be, how stretchy it is, how unreliable the step from the spoken to the written - it seems every second word has a rule-breaker: a silent letter, or unexpected diapthong. There is pleasure that, in a way, Fred's language is still private, still held within the embrace of the family. There is pleasure in the intimacy involved in deciphering codes, an intimacy perhaps that I am betraying by sharing her writing here.
Sitting beside me on the table is a book Fred has made herself, roughly stapling together the pages, which do not quite line up. It's title is THE BIG BOOK OF SICRIS. The first page is filled with a floating mysterious question mark. The next says: "DO YOU NO
'Haa Haa Haa. I hav a plan.'
This is written on the blackboard in the hallways. I discovered it walking past, and I could hear Fred in the bedroom, alone in her room, speaking aloud. There is something sinister about mispellings too, something that threatens cohesion, sanity, the order of things. Language is a series of objects we arrange. If we carefully lined our shelves with broken things: eyeless ruptured dolls, teacups with a bite taken out fo them, worm-filled apples, we would probably seem quite mad. Encountering mispellings is like seeing headless ghosts or zombies, things that have created life from the leftovers, the animated dead.
'Ponies the past went past we.'
But there is a poetry to the mispelled too. It implies an independence from authority, a boundless creativity that goes right down to the basic building blocks of language. And when they come from children they contribute to this intuitive sense that children are closer to the source than we are, the rich, wild source where imagination and creativity spring from. It is obvious that to Fred, words are as malleable as playdough, and they can be pushed and moulded as necessary.
At the moment, Una is in the bath saying to Fred, who is pretending to be deaf: 'Why do you need to not hear?' The surprising cadence of their idiosyncratic syntax informs my writing and changes the way I make sentences. I feel sometimes that I am the zombie, or the vampire, feeding off their jangling, living, dansing words, the music of their mis/spellings and mis/speakings.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Things that are true that I read in a book
This is a meme. It came from Mark Lawrence, and Kirsty (what started it), and Genevieve. Encountering truth in fiction, the kind of truth that gives me a shiver, is one of the greatest pleasures of my existence.
There are so few people given to us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given to us to love, and they all stick.
Anne Enright, The Gathering
In the old nursery rhyme, when the cat went to see the queen, he caught a little mouse under her chair; that was long long ago and the queen was different from our queen, but the mouse was the same.
Mice have always been the same.
Rumer Godden, The Mousewife
"If you're going to stop a band playing every time someone has an accident, you'll lead a very strenuous life."
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party
There are so few people given to us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given to us to love, and they all stick.
Anne Enright, The Gathering
In the old nursery rhyme, when the cat went to see the queen, he caught a little mouse under her chair; that was long long ago and the queen was different from our queen, but the mouse was the same.
Mice have always been the same.
Rumer Godden, The Mousewife
"If you're going to stop a band playing every time someone has an accident, you'll lead a very strenuous life."
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party
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