My life as a case study in procrastination Part 1 or...About Bloody Time!

“You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. 
What mood is that? 
Last-minute panic.” 
― Bill Watterson

How true Bill, how true! Here I am, up before any civilised (ie normal) human being in the western world should be on a Sunday morning scrambling to put something together because...why? Because I’ve been challenged to (and I love a challenge),  I’ve been dared to (love that even more) and because I’ve been thinking about doing something like this for...hmm...a very very long time  (ah yes...my default mechanism and the least pressing reason to do anything.)

That’s it folks. I can turn mountains upside down for anyone and any reason and at a moment’s notice, but when I ask something of myself or that little voice inside me says “Go on Billy – it’s time, you know you want to, should do, have to” etc etc, well..Let’s just say selective deafness comes into play.

I can’t do it. Any excuse will do. Any other priority (except of course the ATO, banks and the dentist – they can bloody well wait) always comes ahead of the personal priorities I have for myself.

There have been the odd exception to this incontrovertible rule; I said yes immediately and without hesitation or thought to The Most Patient Man in the Universe (or at least my universe) when he asked me out and again when he suggested we move in together. For the purpose of protecting his privacy (because he sure as hell hasn’t made putting his life out there for all and sundry a priority) I shall refer to him as BB because he is, when it comes down to it, my Best Bud.

Nor did I put off having kids; once BB and I decided it might be a nice thing to do, even though the thought of being responsible for another human being in that all-encompassing way scared the shit out of me. Nope, just went headlong into it. (I suppose the fact that the actual baby-making process is kind of fun may have swayed me just a little in that instance...)

However, putting myself out there as a writer has been difficult. Almost impossible. Paralysing. I dip my toe in the water and then pull it out so fast you’d think my life was in peril. I suppose in a way, it is. Life as I know it will never be the same if I ever actually manage to publish a book.  That much I know. Is that a bad thing? Probably not. It still scares me though while at the same time calling to me siren-like in a bizarre tug of war.

It’s that fear of rejection that overwhelms, along with that fear of success and what that could mean (I’m very good at thinking of all the negatives). It’s the same reason I put off finding my birth mother for the best part of 30 years. That is a whole other story and a tale over which – again – I am delaying putting pen to paper. In time, I tell myself...in time.

So...here I am; two cups of tea and a piece of toast later, putting off telling you anything useful.

Instead, I am going to take the cheat’s way out and kill two birds with one stone. I have done my first blog (hopefully not the last) and am putting one of my short stories out there for general consumption.

Here it is. Eek.

Magic

By BK Greene

Even now, 40 years on, she could still remember how cold that winter was. It seemed it rained more often than not and when it didn’t rain it was bitter and icy.  The wind whipped her sturdy and often bare legs, nipped at her nose, chilled her toes through thin socks and sensible brown shoes. Little girls didn’t wear trousers and socks were all thin. It’s just how it was.

At the same time her young soul was experiencing its first dark season. Cold fingers – of fear, of pain, of confusion – gripped her heart and squeezed at will. It seemed to Milly at the time, as she sat silently in the back seat of her parent’s car, that the sun may never shine again – inside or out. She concentrated on the raindrops as they gathered on her window, watching as they joined forces and their combined weight became too much, forcing them to trickle in a drunken race to the bottom.

It also seemed to Milly that the three hour trip from their farm in country Victoria down to Melbourne was getting shorter. At the very least it had ceased to be exciting. There was no radio in their old Holden, but at least the heater worked well. The smell of warm vinyl and engine oil mingled with her mother’s perfume and her father’s hair tonic and gave her comfort when the uneasy silence did not. Sometimes they would sing to pass the time. Not on these trips. Milly wondered if they would ever sing again. She remembered thinking once, as the windscreen wipers beat a squeaky tattoo, that she was glad Nana got sick in the winter because hot dusty summer drives were no fun.

After her mother, Milly’s grandmother was without doubt the centre of her universe. She couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about at first. Nana still looked the same to her.  Even so, she knew something bad was hovering around their family, lurking where she couldn’t see it and threatening the happiness that had been her life up until this point.

Nana was sick. That much she understood. Nana was so sick that she was in hospital. Nana held court from her hospital bed now rather than from her kitchen in the tiny terrace house she shared with the big burly policeman Milly knew as Pop. As before, a procession of family and friends would come and sit by her bed and chat as the thin, frail woman with eyes full of life and the lopsided grin gave out as good as she got. The only difference Milly could see was that the guests seemed ill at ease and the conversation and jokes were a little too bright and breezy and somehow brittle. And the cigarettes. That was the other thing. Nana often got others to light her cigarettes for her now. What Milly didn’t understand in her 9 year old world was why? Why did people do that? Why did the doctors let her? Why did her mother, of all people, do that? The way it was explained to her when her grandmother was first admitted to hospital was quite simple. Nana was sick. Nana was sick because she smoked cigarettes. And yet, here she was being allowed to do the very thing that put her here in the first place. Surely, if she just stopped smoking she would get better and she could go home and all would be as it was.

Yes. As it was. Playing cards on the red Laminex table with its chrome edges. Home made soup. Stew and dumplings, even better than her mother’s. Toast made under the gas griller. Photos kept in Turf cigarette tins. Peter the budgie and Joey the galah prattling incessantly. Harvesting food from Pop’s vegie garden and the easy digging of the black sandy loam of St Kilda compared to the hard baked clay earth of the farm. The outside dunny, painted with cream enamel, a wooden seat and a chain to pull, and last year’s Pink Pages strung on a nail for toilet paper – something to read while you wait. Playing darts with Pop’s special ones – the ones with real feathers and needle sharp brass tips. Walks with Buttons the dog – a little white and tan mongrel that cocked his leg every five minutes and barked at nothing. Ringing the doorbell – one of those mechanical twisty ones – then peering through the letterbox in the door and watching as Nana walked down the long hallway and pretended she didn’t know who it was – every single time – making her giggle with excitement. Rides on trams and collecting the tickets so she could pretend later she was a tram conductor, just like Nana used to be. Trips to the pub with Pop to collect the six bottles of beer that fitted perfectly into his Gladstone bag, along with a block of Cadbury’s just for her. The smell of beeswax and floor polish and the deliberate, methodical way Pop set his fire – the first crisp crackles as it sprang to life and the smell of freshly split kindling and the inky remains of last week’s Sporting Globe. The footy and the races on Pop’s ever-present transistor radio in its brown leather case – Pop bought it from a police auction and its murky past held her enthralled. High ceilings that made a little house seem huge and strange anonymous voices, muffled and mysterious, coming from beyond the adjoining wall. The mantel clock ticking life away in its unhurried, measured way. Clear water in a deep narrow bath and the smell of gas from the hot water heater on the wall, with its little blue flame and soft roar. Pop’s uniform collars, starched and separate from the shirts, hanging stiffly to attention on the clothes horse. The distant hum of traffic in nearby St Kilda Road. The clip clop of horses and the clink of milk bottles in the predawn. The raucous rattle and chatter of the garbos oblivious or maybe just indifferent to the slumbering residents of Lambeth Place. Old cupboards and cabinets full of secrets and surprises.

And laughter.

And hugs and kisses.

And safety.

And love.

But no. Nana kept smoking as if she didn’t want to go home, and the visits grew more frequent, although the number of visitors dwindled. It seemed to Milly that people were scared. Of what? She knew now that it was the inevitability of death. Cancer. There was no coming back from that in 1969. It was just a question of how long and how ugly and for some it was too confronting. A reminder perhaps of their own mortality as they ducked into a waiting room for a quick puff to calm their nerves and tried to block out the connection between what they were doing and what they were witnessing.

And so Milly would sit silently in the back of the car and then quietly accompany her parents into the hospital, holding on tight to her mother’s hand. Visit after visit, day after day, until the fear permeated her being too. Until the hospital and all its warren of corridors and ancient creaking lifts and starch and disinfectant and sickly green walls and highly polished floors and artificial light became a place of dread.

She was a bright girl and soon realised her grandmother was never going home, that nothing would ever be the same. Her father became more stoic and grim faced. Her mother would cry silent tears when she thought no-one was looking. Her older sister swore she would never smoke again as she openly sobbed on a nurse’s crisp shoulder in the passage outside their Nana’s room. And Milly became invisible. It seemed to suit everyone that way.

After a time Nana was moved into a different room as the battle was lost and the cancer marched from her lungs relentlessly though the rest of her tiny body. She even lost the desire to smoke which gave Milly a glimmer of hope, however false.

Just as she assumed when even younger that her Nana was Italian because she had pierced ears, so Milly assumed her Nana was important because she was in a hospital named after a prince. Not one she had ever heard of, but a prince just the same. Now they had her in a corner room with lots of windows so that must mean Nana was very special indeed. Milly’s mother sat for hours holding her own mother’s hand, stroked her head, and they talked in loving tones about anything and everything except the fact that one of them was dying.  Milly would make up stories to tell her Nana when they first arrived because her Nana wanted desperately to know what was happening in the world beyond those windows and Milly desperately wanted to oblige. The problem was so much time was taken up with hospital visits and travelling that she had little to tell. So she became a storyteller. Tall tales and true from the imaginary world she inhabited more often than not. When her grandmother tired, or drifted off into her own morphine induced space, Milly would find herself perched by the window staring at the busy streets below from her 6^th floor vantage point.  Observing in anonymous silent isolation, there was much to see in daylight hours for a little girl from the country. Much to add to her imaginary world.

But it was the night time - the evening visits – that Milly began to look forward to in spite of the awfulness of the hospital and what it represented. The night time offered her magic, the likes of which she had never seen. Looking out onto that same streetscape, lights sparkled and glittered. Even the roads, slick with rain, reflected and illuminated everything; headlights, taillights, streetlights and traffic signs. The plane trees and the elms which lined the roads and dotted the parkland opposite stood in stark relief; some silhouetted, some up-lit with floodlights. The Shrine of Remembrance, all solemn grey dignity in daylight, transformed into ghostly splendour with nightfall.

All of these things were wondrous but weren’t what held her attention. They did not capture her bereft little heart and fill it with warmth and joy and hope.

No. That was bundled up in the framework and scaffolding and tangle of glass tubing and mysterious multicoloured gas that was the Allens Sweets sign in South Melbourne. Brand new and bold, assembled only that year, it was breathtaking in its elaborate sequence. The gigantic lolly wrapper with Allen’s emblazoned across gave way to the slogan for Kool Mints then came the tumble of Anticol out of their neon packet and then finally an explosion of fireworks cascaded back down as multicoloured rain before it started all over again. It was magnificent in the darkness of empty factories and warehouses that was that part of the city at the time. Milly was captivated. Even the cheerless weather could not dim its beauty. Instead, rain on the hospital window blurred the images into an impressionist kaleidoscope that danced and played and lit up her cheeks with a rainbow of colour. In a world full of fear and despair and inevitability; a world where everyone was so consumed with their own grief that Milly largely went unnoticed, that sign offered her some certainty and some wonder and kept alive her belief that magic was real. Good things could rise above it all and still exist.

When the thief that is cancer stole from her family and her Nana finally succumbed, Milly was deemed too young for the funeral. Instead, isolated and safely out of sight at a friend’s place, she cuddled her teddy and pictured that neon sign and clung determinedly onto the images of her grandmother that didn’t involve hospitals and tears.

Years later, her Nana long since gone and Milly now grown and elegant and quite the young professional, she would cast an eye over that very same sign and smile, reassured, as she left her city office each night.

Later still, in the midst of an ugly and tortuous love affair, she would cry bitter tears as the television news reported its demise and dismantling. An icon, they called it. For Milly it was much more than that.

She sat now reflecting on a lifetime of highs and lows – a little sadder and battle weary. She thought of that sign with a clarity that startled her. The memory still stood as a beacon of something good, something magical. Milly realised in spite of everything, she still believed in magic. And she smiled.