I like the lighthouse, Robbie;
as you know
I’m a lighthouse aficionado;
it’s tall, white,
tapering at the top;
it’s got
two rectangular windows
looking out on a yacht
and two seagulls
flapping;
& on the shore
a white fluffball yapping
DJ
It’s Monday, yay ! I get to see sis.
They say she has dementia but I don’t believe it.
She’s bright, chirpy, chatty, has a good sense of humor.
A keen mind. Don’t get her started on word games.
She’ll whip your ass, as they say.
But it’s the music she wants to hear..
Can you play me some songs, Mr. DJ, on your phone, she says.
Sure , I say, whipping it out..
Play me The Crystals, she says, ‘Then He Kissed Me’.
The drive of that song, the elation.
Then it’s the Big O, and then dreary old Marty Robins.
Could never get into him.
El Paso, the Hanging Tree and the one I didn’t know:
El Paso City.
No wonder we didn’t get on as teenagers.
I was a wild boy. I liked the rock ‘n’ rollers.
How about Lou Rawls? she says. You got any of him?
I pick out three of his best. She sings along. She’s in her element.
Me and Barry went to all of his concerts, she says.
That’s where we met. When Lou played the Findon, a small venue.
Barry came up to me, bought me a drink.
‘And when he walked me home that night. All the stars were shining bright. Then he kissed me’
she sang. Dementia. Bah !!
*pic by pinterest
Long Before.
I fell in love with her name long before
I fell in love with her.
Catherine Lighthouse was a tall, rather remote woman
with the brightest eyes
you ever did see.
But fixed in her ways
stood her ground in an argument.
Our relationship got off to a rather rocky start ….
*pic courtesy of pinterest
Balzac.
What a Balls-up! I say.
Isn’t that the name of a French writer? you ask.
No, you idiot. That’s Balzak. The novelist. But today was a proper Balzac if you like.
So what happened?
I went to the bank, withdrew some money, got home and couldn’t find my credit card.
Whoa! You left it in the ATM?
That’s what I thought. Checked my wallet. Not there. Where was my angel? I called her in, dressed her down and …
You didn’t sack her? After all those years of service?
Wadda you take me for? A heartless fiend? No, I gave her notice.
And then?
Don’t tell anyone. I was looking for my old credit card, not my new one, the one with the white and blue tint. So I called the bank and told them.
And?
All good. They’ll put a hold on it and then if they don’t hear from me within the hour they’ll cancel it and issue me with a new one.
Whoa ! That can take days. A Week.
Yeh, well I did what mum used to do during crises.
What’s that?
I took a Bex and had a lie down.
And did it ….?
Then I woke, Phoned Head Office and after the standard interrogation they believed me. So happened, the card wasn’t cancelled anyway.
Did you call ….?
Yes, I did. I apologized. Told her all was good. And what a goose I had been. What a Balzac of an afternoon !
the Angel at my Side.
There’s an angel at my side
watching over me.
When I go into dangerous places
she’s there.
She’s not my bosom buddy, my sidekick.
She’s my angel.
Sometimes I speak to her
suggest she take a break.
But she knows I go offline
at the drop of a hat
like the time I left a $50 note poking out
the mouth of an ATM
like a dog’s tongue.
She was onto it as I blithely walked away.
Hey Sport! she nudged me, You forget something?
I don’t pay her.
Sometimes I pray to her, not like you talk to Jesus
but like you would an angel.
I don’t know what she sees in me.
She’s been with me a long while.
I’m with you to the end, she says when I thought I was dying
from cancer.
But she’s got no need to watch over me much now —
I’m a quiet boy —
except when I go into dangerous places.
Cusp.
We coulda been an item.
We coulda been someone.
Like Patti and Robert.
You painted. I wrote.
We were on the cusp.
Except we squabbled.
Squandered our chances.
All alone while Spring
dances up our driveways.
*pic by pinterest
Lost Horizon.
Ever since I began work
I said
I’d travel to Tibet,
Take off one summer, rucksack on my back,
Freedom in my stride
But other things intervened:
Another child,
Extensions to the house,
A hard mortgage
But now
The kids have grown up
The house is paid for
And I’m still no closer
To Tibet.
Now I listen
To tapes of the Dalai Lama
Watch programmes on Tibet
Study Buddhism
Walk pass mansions
Called ‘Shangri-La
Watch reruns of ‘Lost Horizon’.
When are you going
to Tibet, Dad?
One day, I say, One day.
*pic by pinterest
Get over it, mate!
I thought I was going blind
all those blotches before my eyes
whenever I looked
at the sky.
I hurried to the optician,
a gruff, ginger-haired gent who took
one look at me
& said,
“ They’re floaters,
Everyone gets them.
Get over it, mate !”
but now, ten years on, a funny thing has happened.
They’re gone.
I don’t see them anymore.
I went to the optician
worried
this might be an ominous occurrence,
the precursor maybe to glaucoma, which mum had
or the cruellest of all —
macular degeneration, where you lose
central vision ;
imagine not being able to see the faces of your grandchildren
but she calmed me, and said,
“ sometimes the floaters just melt away
or are pulled down by gravity.
Don’t worry. You’re good..
How about a pair of glasses though>”
“ No thanks, : I said. :I’ve got six pairs at home
& never use them
except for reading small print.”.
“Okay, “ she said. “See you in 12 months”.
*pic by pinterest
The Littlest Library.
Sometimes the rarest of books come from the most unlikely places. When I discovered the Moomintroll books in a recent article in The New York Review Of Books I wanted to read them. I went to my library but, of course, being small and local, it had none, But the librarian did a thorough search through the State’s resources and found copies of these delightfully illustrated children’s classics.
Two weeks later my library notified me there were three books waiting to be collected. I did a little Irish jig [my dad is Irish] and picked them up.
When I got home an even bigger surprise awaited me. The books came from the Lucindale Library, one of the littlest libraries in the State. Lucindale is where I did my country service as a teacher and where my youngest daughter was born, the one I held shortly after in the palm of my hand, the one I wrote about in ‘The Wonder of You’ [on my blog].
Snowtown is a small town, some 90 miles north of Adelaide, our capital. I have passed by it but never through it. In 1999 it became the centre of a grisly series of murders known as ‘the bodies in the barrels murders’. Nine victims were dumped in barrels and hidden away in a disused bank vault. The subsequent trial made headlines throughout Australia and the world. By now Snowtown is just another small, country town, largely ignored by tourists. I expect the locals like it that way.
All that time a rare and rarely read book resided there: the sweetest and most lyrical of journals, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals written from May 1800 to June 1803 and which inspired some of her famous brother’s poems. How could such a wholesome book reside in a place so tainted ?I have read extracts and want to read the entire book. It resides in the Snowtown library, the only copy in the State. I will receive it sometime this week.
Sometimes the most magical books come from the most mundane of places.
For Dorothy.
We were off to see our Finnish friends who had just got back from the land of the Moomintrolls. We entered the aptly named Spring Street, effulgent with jacarandas, a purple lined boulevard extending into the distance.
It was like when Dorothy and her brother, the poet William Wordsworth, came upon those daffodils at Grasmere, beside a lake.
‘As we went along,’ she wrote in her journal of 1802, ‘we saw there was a long belt of them along the shore, the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones … some rested their heads upon these stones, as if on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed, and reeled and danced ….’.
It was like that driving down Spring Street with those jacarandas and for a time I forgot about our Finnish friends and the Moomintrolls.
John Malone 