I was coming in on the train this morning and was sitting near a bloke with shoulder length curly hair who looked a liitle like James May with the craggy features of Don Chipp and the beginnings of a Friar Tuck tonsure. Which will mean nothing to anyone who wasn’t a Top Gear watching, Australian Democrat voting, Robin Hood fan of roughly my vintage.
And before I cop too much flack let me explain that I did in the dim deep past vote Australian Democrat when Chippy was party leader and before they became wig wam living, tofu and lentil eating believers in the doomsday version of climate change and that trees have souls. Not that I’m saying trees don’t have souls, just that for me the jury is still out, just like it is for global warming, which is another whole reason for a blog post.
But I digress.
Seeing the curly hair on this bloke on the train [remember him from paragraph one] reminded me of my two male cousins on my Mum’s side, both of whom had curly hair. Actually I had three male cousins but one of those is 10 years younger than me and therefore he is set aside for the purposes of this story. My hair, on the other hand was straight and I always had a crew cut as a kid, so it wasn’t until the 70’s came and I grew my hair that I found out it did have a bit of a wave. But both these guys had tight ringlets and I couldn’t understand why given we had at least one set of grandparents who were the same that I didn’t end up with curly hair too. Any knowledge of genetics and hereditary were still a long way in my future.
Then my Mum came up with a fantastic bit of folk wisdom – “Eat your crusts and your hair will curl” she told me. So I did. I even took to eating everyone elses crusts and it didn’t work. Sometime around the time I stopped believing in Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny, I stopped believing that crust eating would curl my hair. As it turned out one of those cousins joined the army and had his head shaved and the other grew his long but spent so much time trying to comb it straight that he went prematurely bald.
I like to think that Mum didn’t really lie to me. That maybe I just had stubborn hair. After all when I did grow it long it did have a bit of a wave to it. Maybe I was just one loaf short.
I’ve noticed another trend in the pronunciation of a word recently and I don’t know why these things happen. Given you my readers [sounds like there's a lot doesn't there ] are from many different places around the world let’s see if you can help me here.
My name is Laurie, short for Laurence having been named for an Uncle who was killed by the Japanese when they invaded Rabaul in World War 2. Now the phonetic pronunciation of my name is like that of the truck – “lorry”. Some of my American work colleagues call me Lawry, and a Malaysian guy I used to work with called be Rorry and himseld Lobert – I didn’t get that.
Anyway the word I’m actually talking about today is worry which I pronounce wurry as in slurry. But I’ve noticed a lot of people lately pronouncing it worry as in sorry or lorry. What is that? Where did it come from and how do you say it?
Everyone knows that it is best to avoid certain types of drivers – mothers dropping kids to school, old men wearing hats, young men wearing baseball caps backwards, women applying mascara and of course anyone who drives a Volvo. Each and everyone of these classes of people seem pretty much oblivious to other road users.
Well let me tell you ladies and gentlemen, having had the pleasure of driving to work several times over the past couple of weeks or so, I want to add another group to the list. Prius drivers, absolute tools. Maybe they think driving an semi-electric car shows they have a green conscience and the rest of us owe them something. I’ve been cut off, held up, denied lanes and found my presence totally ignored by these Prius driving priapic pricks. And yes I know there is a certain tautology about that statement but I don’t care.
I am not going to write a long post about this because many writers better than me will do so but I think I would to spend a little time reflecting. There aren’t too many events in a lifetime where you can remember the exact thing you were doing when you first heard about it. For me they include such things as the murder of John Lennon, Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, the death of the Princess of Wales and seared into my brain are the events of 911.
I was working two jobs at the time, full time as a security consultant and another 40 hours a week, supposedly part time as the Executive Officer of the Victorian Basketball League. I’d come home from one job and sit down immediately to start work on the other. That was the source of my ex-wifes comments that even when I was home I wasn’t there, and maybe there was some truth to that even if it was unfair. But I digress.
In April 2001 I had attended a Counter Terrorist Conference in Washington DC and there were a number of keynote speakers form the US Intelligence community. There were two major topics of conversation. The first the fragmentary nature of the US CT effort and the second the threat Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden posed to the West.
So after my usual 16 hour working day on September 11 2001 I sat down and turned the TV on to watch the late news and watched in horror the footage of those planes crashing into the twin towers. I spent the next several weeks in my security consultant role gethering and analysing whatever open source information we could find, writing threat assessments for our clients and reliving that horror as more and more details were revealed.
In my other role I had been organising our teams to compete in a National Basketball final series to be held in Bendigo which were cancelled because at the same time the domestic airline Ansett collapsed and I fielded a lot of complaints from people about how upset they were at the cancellation. I wrote an article for our website at the time which said in part that we needed to put things into proper context. Around the world tonight are, I wrote, are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, who would never see their loved ones again, not because those people had done anything wrong, but because someone somewhere had randomly chosen that they were to die as a part of campaign of hatred, as a symbol of philosophical difference. I told people to put things into proper context, that the cancellation of a basketball series was not something which could truly be considered a disaster. Crashing aeroplanes into buildings and destroying lives was a disaster and we should remember the sacrifice of those brave men and women who selflessly entered those burning buildings in an effort to save others lives.
On Friday I asked a number of people at work if they knew what the day was and for most it took a while to make the connection. That came as a surprise to me and the only comfort I took was that when it hit them what the date was that there was an element of embarassment that they had forgotten. Let us never forget because if we do and we let our guard down these things can happen again – we’ve seen it on October 12 a year later in Bali and on July 7 2005 in London.
It’s been a long time since I did a musical Monday post but having spent yesterday reflecting on what it’s like to be a father I thought I’d post this one for my daughters.
My Dad died on 14th August 2004, a little over five years ago and that was the catalyst for starting this blog and in so many ways the trigger for most of the changes in my life. It was the moment when the midlife episode hit leading to an awakening and a realisation that things would never be the same again. There’s been good and bad since that time for me. I have changed, in some ways becoming more honest, mainly with myself. I have learnt where I was weak and in the process I think I have become a better person. But you know what, hardly a day goes by when I do’t think of my Dad, when I don’t wish that our relationship had been better, that I had taken the time to spend more time with him, that instead of being just father and son, that we had also been mates.
And I sometimes wonder in looking at myself in terms of that relationship, how I might have been a better father to my kids. I know now that my biggest failure as a person is that I am a master at keping feelings to myself. Ironically that has been seen as a strength by many work colleagues because they percieve me as someone who is cool calm and collected and always in control. They don’t realise that sometimes that facade is hiding a little boy who sometimes quakes in hs boots.
That little boy tends to reflect on days like today. I remember going to the local shopping centre on Saturday mornings and getting a hair cut with Dad and then sprinting along the street to the milk bar for a milkshake. I remember him sitting on my bad at night smelling of beer and cigarettes and fetching me a glass of water. I remember the cubby houses we would build out of sheets of masonite he would bring home from work, and the days spent setting up my cowboys and indians and farm yards on the lounge room floor. I remember playing marbles in the backyard.
After I separated from my then wife and whilst I was living alone in a flat no one came to about two years after Dad died he came to me and sat on my bed. I know I was more than likely asleep but it was a very vivid dream and I was once again that little boy who got comfort from that nightly visit by his Dad.
I expect to see three of my four kids today. I fear it’s not because they want to but because they think they should and maybe that is a reflection of the type of father I have been. My ex did tell me after I left that they kids had discussed things and thought that I was never there when they were growing up. And it’s true I worked long hours but I never missed an event or any of the many games of sport they played. I didn’t play cowboys and indians with my sons, nor marbles, nor did we build cubby houses, but we played basketball and built lego towns and I read them stories at night whilst they fell asleep. Could I have done more? Undoubtedly. But I was what I was and that is all I was.
For anyone who is interested I have looked back over the posts on this blog and found some familiar themes in older posts.
So if you happen to be lucky enough to still have your Dad, make sure you contact him today and tell him you love him. Don’t end up with some of the regrets that I have. And if you happen to be a Dad make sure you also tell your kids how much you love them, that if at times there have been some cats in the cradle moments, that is a weakness most fathers have. We carry that burden of provider, pre-programmed into us and for some of us it is something we will bear till the end of our days. If we’re lucky our inevitable midlife episode may give us a shake and awaken us to some of the other possibilities. Maybe that’s why some of us make far better grandparents than parents. Perhaps being that little further down the road means that we can choose to live the moment differently.
My dog Ramsey is a little over a year old and a true ratbag. Daughter number 2 who is with me at least every second weekend has been harping for months now about the need to get him desexed. Now he doesn’t have a predilection to hump legs of tables or persons, he is not overly agressive and whilst I understand that it is a recommended course of action I’m a bloke. And blokes struggle with the thought of having their balls chopped off.
Today daughter number two decided to tr and appeal to my medical knowledge by telling me that if his was deknackered he would not get testicular cancer, to which I replied “Why don’t we chop off his head then. That way he won’t get a brain tumour.”
Now any bloke who has seen someone else hit in the nuts at any time knows that it is the one thing that makes all of us squirm. It is deeply programmed into mankind and most likely dates back to the time when our first shrew like ancestor fell onto a tree branch and straddled it painfully. It’s something that we tend to want to avoid at all costs. I’m not saying he won’t be done at some stage in the future but right now with a 16 year old telling me that his nuts are gross and he’d be better off without them, I am manfully resisting the call.
A few days ago I briefly set up a burner feed of this blog back to my facebook page, but only left it up for around 15 minutes. I chickened out in other words. Blogging has been a refuge for me for a long time. A place where I can reveal parts of me that I wouldn’t dream of talking about in the real world. Sure there have been people who know me reading it on occasions with the associated grief that brought at the time, but for the most part this communication has been with people who began as strangers but who I have come to regard as more than that as we have interacted.
Facebook though is full of people who know me personally – there are friends and family, current and ex work colleagues, business associates, old school buddies, a conglomerate of every type of person I have met throughout my life, and after I posted the feed I asked myself if I was ready for each and every one of them to have access to what is really a mirror into my soul. The answer was not really.
I am not ashamed of anything I have written because I know that blog posts are snapshots of an instant in time. Truth for the moment and in the context of the moment. But there are also people who don’t understand that and some who will take things out of context and use them against me. That sounds a bit paranoid but I have had it happen before so I don’t have a lot of faith that it couldn’t happen again.
So I’m asking you as blogging buddies – do you publish your feed on Facebook? Am I being a chicken or are my concerns legitimate?
At least that’s true most of the time and it usually means that when I do I tend to fall in a heap. I got through the entire first 13 months at my current job without taking any sick leave but on Monday night last week started to get a bit of a dry cough. That night I went down hill and although I got up to go to work I ended up going back to bed. Same thing Wednesday and come Thursday morning I decided I’d go to the doctors.
I was in the surgery for around a minute I reckon. He held the stethscope to my chest in three places and asked me to cough, he stuck a depressor down my throat and then said.
“You are not well. I feel you have a virus and you should go home and spend the next three days in bed. If you are no better on Sunday, come back and ask for Dr Alex.”
Come Sunday I was feeling better and Monday I went back to work only to find that I coughed and spluttered all day and lost my voice. In the end the boss told me not to come in on Tuesday, so I didn’t. So what is the illness – I don’t know, I have had the symptoms of swine flu, but the doctor never told me that was what it was. All I know is that I was not myself. Some might say it was man flu, but I can tell you I was genuinely incapable of working for the best part of a week.
Now here’s a nightmare. A 58 year old man was taken to hospital in Cairns early this week after sitting on a public toilet seat only to find that it had been smeared with superglue. Now I’m hoping that it was one of those horsehoe type seats because if his willy had somehow brushed the seat the outcome may have been even worse.
] are from many different places around the world let’s see if you can help me here.
