The threads of life

I am back from a few days seeing my family, helping to mind grandchildren, and also attending the birthday celebration of a friend from way way back, when we were both newly-weds. It was such a pleasant occasion. This friend and I were married to men who were colleagues, and both our marriages broke up, on the initiatives of our husbands, who went off and had affairs with other women. Off they went, to find themselves, for more excitement, for true love and better sex, leaving behind some rather shattered pieces of humanity, in great need of emotional superglue, and tender loving care from our other nearests, and from our friends.

It always seemed to me that this friend had a very rough time. She was left with the care of their two daughters, and, from what I know, she had a rather hard time financially, having had to buy out her husband's share of the house progressively over a number of years. Naturally she wound up having to pay considerably more than if there had been an immediate settlement. We have lived in different cities for many years now, and at the time when I was moving to be with Dr P, she moved back to where I'd lived, to be near her sister. We have kept up our contact and our friendship, and now we have both celebrated each other's significant birthdays. And we share some common ethnic heritage, too.

I remember well the last time we met as couples. They came to our house for dinner, and I can't remember what I cooked. Her husband was lavish in his praise of my cooking and made unfavourable comparisons. I wanted to hit him. Surely you can compliment someone without simultaneously denigrating your own wife! At this birthday lunch, I said to another guest that I thought she had had a very rough deal, and she totally agreed.

It is not always possible to maintain friendships, even very dear ones. The passage of time, the physical distances, the responsibilities of families, and then the increasing time devoted to one's own progeny and then the grandchildren make it so much harder to keep in touch with friends, despite the very real affection we've had for each other. Paths diverge.

Maintaining friendship requires both effort and opportunity, and naturally one pays more attention to those who are closest physically as well as emotionally.  The long-term friendships are precious, as those friends made in this latest part of my life. They are people I love, and who truly care for me, now, in this life rather than in the life of yore. They are reciprocal.  Once the ties of marriage are severed, in this latest case by death, one must realise that truly you are alone and that the giving and receiving of friendship is vital and essential. As are the ties of family. But those ties are generational, and of a different ilk, and the relative needs and supports differ. In the meantime, minds and hearts continue to meet, and to reach out to each other.

A nice quiet life

A nice quiet life would be good, and I  expect my neighbours think the same. It is a month since work started, it seems another fortnight (at least) will be required, everything seems to be complicating expainentially, and the cost seems likely to exceed my worst and wildest imaginings.

Rip Van Winkle had the right idea. Hibernation must have certain advantages.

For now, it seems to be the case that building work increases forgetfulness and confusion in those for whom the work is done. Pessimism certainly increases, as does the cost of living.

Frankly I don't know how people whose renovations take months can stand it. They must have nerves of steel and an extremely healthy bank balance.

A life without sawdust seems a far distant memory. As does a a life where you knew where everything was. Somehow my back wire screen door became locked, and it took time, uncomfortable memory rattling, and considerable aggravation for me to find the key. And I go around sweeping up piles of sawdust and wiping dust off surfaces. When I can find the dustpan and brush, that is.

However the floors are in, and the steps between the three rooms are being constructed. More timber had to be bought, and now it seems that yet another piece must be bought. Silly me, I thought when the original order was placed, that would have been the total required, and the actual cost. I bet that the cost of sanding and sealing the floors will be three times what I expect. The door and window frame to the outside probably needs to be taken off and away to be fixed.

And the upper half of my kaffir lime tree looks exceedingly sick and I do not know how to save it. The lower half is trying to flower. Somehow this condition seems to mirror my own.

A time for every purpose

Today there was some slight progress with the floor, but it does look likely that it will be another couple of weeks before it is all finished. Lots more rubbish got taken to the tip, including things cleaned out from the cupboards.

During the weekend I cleaned out the cupboards in the middle level of the house. They contained the household linen, the grandchildren's toys, lots of extension power cords - how did I come to accumulate so many - and various relics of Dr P's, including a model of the neck vertebrae, and some little weights. Out they went. Also to be uncovered and assesses were many pieces of fabrics, bought over the years to be made up into sundry elegant garments, lots of yarns, and an extensive array of fabric dyes, dating from the time before I moved in with Dr P, when I did a lot of silk painting and also painted cotton T-shirts.. As the dyes have not been used for 12 years or so, I decided that in all probability they had passed their use-by dates, and so they too have gone to the tip.

This is all rather sad. I loved doing silk painting, developed a good sense of colour, and did some rather lovely things, and had quite a few buyers. Once I moved cities to live here, it was almost impossible to continue this work. I had no table on which to place the frames. The kitchen and laundry sinks were nasty white porous plastic things which would have soaked up the colours of the dyes. And I lost my market. And then, of course, I lost my skills, and any incipient entrepreneurial skills I was acquiring.

In my Canberra house I could paint without interruption, but once Dr P was on the scene he would sit in the room I used to work in,  and watch TV as I painted. Peace, quiet and concentration are essential  for such work, and the sudden sounds of gunshots on TV would invariably occur just as you were delicately painting, and of course the dyes would go splodge, and ruin the work in hand.

My timber frames were kept in the garage, but they became warped, and eventually had to be thrown out. I still have a couple, but silk painting now seems to be out of fashion, and when I investigated supplies recently, they have vanished from the shelves of the shops which used to stock them. It used to be possible to get the silk steamed so as to set the colours, but I never learned to do this and don't know who might do this now, and the stockists seem to have abandoned the craft. Arts and crafts are inevitably subject to trends in fashion. Interests and activities have their time and place, but nonetheless I am sad to have abandoned this work and creative development. Perhaps my increased interest in crocheting is some kind of substitute. My hands are rather arthritic now, and perhaps the fine motor control required may no longer be possible.

But who knows? Perhaps such interests may yet be revived. Even though I still have far too much stuff. One can always consider options. I hope for, perhaps, ten good years, and don't want to waste whatever time is left.

Dust, dirt, grime, and chaos

It is coming to the end of the third week of the floor replacements, and I think there is at least another week to go.  When Fernando and Colin left yesterday, they had put most of the kitchen floor in, fitting it underneath the kitchen cupboards, which, mercifully, they had not had to remove, but which required agility and awkwardness in the insertion of nails and glue. Not to mention doing things from underneath the floor.

I looked at their progress in mid-afternoon, and thought, Hmm, I don't think there is enough timber left to finish it. And so it proved. Some more has to be ordered and I presume that it might not arrive for a few days. Once the floor is in, it all has to be sanded and sealed, and that will take days for it to dry.

The timber, even in its unfinished state, promises to be beautiful.

There is an eerie silence in the house, punctuated only by the sinister sound of relatively quiet key strokes on the keyboards, and, from outside, the whoosh of the passing cars.  I have not yet restored the music station - in my absence the blokes change it to some sort of commercial pop station, which certainly is not music to my ears. But I think, well, it is hard and dirty work, and if it helps, that's fine. I just don't want to hear it, that's all.

They won't be here until this afternoon, so I am enjoying the silence.

I am now able to clamber into the kitchen although reaching into the pantry is requiring caution, as does getting from the dining room to the kitchen/eating area. I need to hang on to the cupboard tops, while carefully placing one foot after another on the joists. Imagining falling through them and lingering helpless until discovered does not require a particularly vivid imagination.

The dust and grime and chaos are getting to me. I want it all clean and organised. The furniture is all pushed together, and I cannot retrieve my concert ticket for next week until better access is available. At present a table is upside down on top of this piece of furniture, and even though I wriggled through to it this morning, it is not possible to open a drawer. I itch, fret, and ache to restore order.

Tonight a friend and I are going out to dinner. Last night I had cheese and biscuits and some sultanas. And some nice red wine.

Yesterday I succumbed to total stress and panic, as I needed to find my referral from the GP to the specialist for next week's breast check-up. Pile after pile of documents were examined, and confusion reigned. I knew I had put it somewhere.

Finally, a dim memory surfaced. It had been necessary to take everything off the bookshelf so it could be moved. Its contents went here, there and everywhere, and then I remembered putting the plastic box containing my pills, prescriptions and YES!!! the medical referrals, into the pantry. This pantry is in the furthest corner of the kitchen and I could not get to it until late yesterday. But now I have it, safely in my handbag. At least that is one minor problem solved.

But as I prowl around looking at the state of the house, I become more daunted. Smears of glue are on walls and other surfaces. Will they come off?  And a cupboard door is hanging awry.

I have to get out of here. Off now to do some food shopping, and to have a coffee. There is nothing like domestic chaos to provoke pensive and profound ponderings on the meaning of life. Answers remain to be discovered.

Away away, a blogmeet and home again, jiggedy-jig

It can be quite difficult to know where to start after you have been away for a few days, cramming a lot into them, but being without access to a computer.

These flurries of activities were spread over six days, two of which were required for travelling to and from my daughter's place, and the other four were occupied by my minding her two children.

I am now safely home, after a trip which seemed incredibly quick, and No, I did not speed. But when I got to the Motor Way there was an HOUR's delay due to a serious accident, and we all inched, or rather centimetred along. I did not expect to find out what had happened, but it featured on the TV news tonight - a truck flipped over, and it took a long time to extricate the driver.

There is never any point getting aggravated by such things, so I practiced some saintly patience while listening to the whole hour's interview by Margaret Throsby with an intrepid journalist. Eventually I got home and put the washing on - having been unable to work how to use my daughter's machine - could not even open the detergent dispenser (Oh, you just pull it out, she told me this morning.)

My kitchen floor has been removed, and thus I am kitchen-less, which has never really happened to me ever before, and it is a weird feeling.  The reek of damp is strong, and there is more dust on everything than any rational person would have thought possible. Doubtless my slumber will be beset by a lengthy series of nightmares about cleaning up, finding everything and putting it all away in new places, but there is no need to panic, as such activities are by no means imminent. Fernando rang me while I was twiddling my thumbs and occasionally moving forward a few metres, to say he had gone off with a rather sore back, but that the floor can now be laid. That will probably take a couple of days and then it will all have to be sanded and sealed. Njal's Saga has nothing on this, let me tell you.

Overall the children were pretty good, and I managed, with my son's help and my daughter's instructions and encouragement to do the insulin injections for my grandson. Not without fear and trepidation, but we all survived the experience, and his sugars were quite stable over the four days.

When my daughter and I arrived at the school and took my granddaughter into her classroom, her teacher looked at me and said 'I know your face! We sang together years ago'. I recognised her face too: she was in her teens then, and came from a very musical family, and we were in the chorus for a Handel opera all those years ago. We had to learn by heart and sing eight long choruses (with lengthy fugues), while moving around the stage with face masks on (and without spectacles). After those performances, with real-life opera singers, I decided that I could do anything (not quite true as it turned out, but certainly an experience which stiffened my spine, and led me on to many other things). I was delighted to see her again - now a mother herself and a splendid primary school teacher. Isn't life amazing at times!

And I had a wonderful blogmeet. I enjoyed it so much. I knew I would, despite feeling rather nervous, as this blogger voice and her images repeatedly resonated with me. We made our arrangements, and I confidently turned up, but could not find her. Eventually I telephoned, and found I had stuffed up well and truly. We agreed on this location, and my mind repeated it, but I actually went to a completely different location. Fortunately I managed to make contact with her home, and then realised my error, and she was told, and waited for me. Mea culpa, well and truly. We had such a good time talking. And I look forward to the next meeting.

Et lux perpetua

The choir performed Verdi's Requiem last night, and our second performance is tomorrow afternoon. We sang well, and the audience seemed very happy with it. The Requiem is a work in which you can sing your heart out, and always respect. It is a big and a strenuous sing. To soaringly sing all those top notes gives immense pleasure.

I woke up this morning having lost my voice. Some germ crept in and attacked my vocal cords. It is disconcerting to wake up voiceless. As the morning progressed, my voice came back and I am able to emit some notes, but I am having to be very cautious.

It is not an easy work. It has complicated fugues, with fluctuating tempi, and it is easy to become lost. You think you know it, and then it pops up and says to you " I am not so easily mastered: you must try harder". So you try harder, and sometimes it all comes together, and other times it can fall apart, and you think 'Oops' and resolve to do better. Even the professionals can flounder. The music traverses the many and conflicting human emotions and reactions to the end of our being.

But Oh! When it works, it is simply glorious. The music reverberates in your head, and you could sing it all day, and never tire of it. I am listening to some early music as I write, but what my mind is hearing is the Verdi. And I think about what a fabulous composer, and how miraculous he was. We immerse ourselves in his sound, in the complexity of his composition, in the emotion that a Requiem creates.

I have sung a number of Requiems since I became a chorister, and each has brought its own message about dying, and the meaning of the texts. One cannot really explicate how music works on us all: only that it truly seems to meet a fundamental human need and emotion.

I never tire of such music. There is this fundamental message: we all die, and this is what happens. Whether or not we believe, we are caught up in the solemnity and the finality of death. Truly it passeth our understanding.

The glory is in the music. Music is what moves the soul, what expresses the emotions, what activates so much of the brain, the mind and the heart. Is it not marvellous that human beings have created such wonderful sounds? Is it not strange that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?
There is so much glorious music, which taps directly into our hearts and minds, into our emotions, and, dare I say it, into our souls?


We are so blessed.

Pronouns

Somehow or other, the incorrect use of pronouns has become endemic. Perhaps it is only those aged 50 or more who understand much about parts of speech and the rules of grammar. Increasingly the difference between subject and object pronouns seems to have evaporated.

English verb forms do not generally tell us who has the active voice. So English uses both subject and object pronouns. I, you, he she or it, we, you and they, are subject pronouns. Subject pronouns are me, you, him, her, it, us, you, and them. I hope I got that right.

Thus you say 'I met him' and not 'me met he'.

People generally can cope with correct use of subject pronouns when there is a single subject: eg 'I saw her.' But when the subject is plural, confusion reigns. 'She and I saw him' becomes 'Her and me saw him'

'Him and me took it'. 'Her and him go out together'.

Strangely enough, you don't often hear 'Us went out'

You cannot talk or write thus, for example, in Italian. The verb form tells you who the subject is. You don't need to use the subject pronoun. You can, but only for additional emphasis.

My daughter used to say " Me and Tracey' and I used to correct her each time, 'Tracey and I...' But it did not seem to do much good. The grandchildren make these same mistakes now.

The confusion between subject and object pronouns now seems endemic in fiction. Me remembers encountering it in Tracy Crisp's Black Dust Dancing and it made I wonder whether her wrote this deliberately or whether it was a genuine error. Now I keep coming across it all the time, the latest encounter being Ruth Rendell's novel The Vault. Verisimilitude, that how the people talk these days.

Don't teachers teach grammar any more?

Although I froth privately from time to time, I am provoked to write about this today because of an interview I listened to yesterday, on the ABC, with the excellent Margaret Throsby interviewing an economist, the journalist Jessica Irvine. Irvine is moving across from Fairfax to News Limited,which is a bastion of rather conservative values, and which employs a lot of people who want proper grammar taught in schools. (As do I.) She writes well, and clearly, and takes many examples from our everyday lives to make her points about economic conditions and theories. However, during the interview, although in many ways expressing herself clearly, she overused the expression 'sort of'. I was sufficiently provoked (or needing distraction from the nitty-gritty of my present existence) to listen again today to the podcast of the interview.

I did not manage to list all her uses of 'sort of', but there were more than 40. She did it so often that my innate pickiness was provoked, and perforce I took note.

They included:

That's the sort of competitor to Fairfax...

People are sort of worried about this tide of people

Sort of doing on-shore processing

That we're sort of talking about

And sort of make each other better off

To sort of smooth out

To get the government sort of out of the economy

Sort of every economist I know.
Sort of heart swelling music.
The central sort of lessons of economics
I've sort of given the example
Sort of satisfaction, well-being.
We sort of follow habits...
This has sort of been the big advance of economics
We'd much rather sort of buy a $100 pair of shoes.
We have sort of become a slave to the mortgage.
They make their money by sort of making losses.
It occurred to me to sort of put to them
A mathematician who sort of runs the numbers (!)
To work sort of through the High Commission
I'd sort of been at Belco High in Canberra
Political economy is sort of a different way to study way economics
To sort of view economics as a social science
Adam Smith is sort of where it all began
Societies sort of arrange themselves to the benefit of individuals
Corrupt sort of Wall St bank
A piece of sort of electronic music (and I thought it was was excruciatingly boring)
Sort of sound fixing board
I've sort of got this theory
It's sort of a spoonful of sugar
Economics sort of tells you how..
I'm sort of excited...

Oh dear!

And as for the disappearance of adverbs in spoken English, well, words fail me!  However, I may yet rise to the occasion. Angrily and grumpily, but accurately and, I hope, convincingly.