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Jasper at Home from School

There is giggling coming from the lounge room. He, the home-from-school-boy, is watching Megamind. It is animation so typical of this era. I give him a bowl of strawberries, washed and cut. The strawberries are enormous. Unreally so. They need to be cut in quarters. I remember when strawberries were small and sweet. Popped into your mouth straight from the backyard bush.

I have taken the home-from-school-boy to the doctor to be told it is most likely viral. There is nothing to do but to rest and drink plenty of fluids. Animation has advanced in leaps and bounds but there still remains no cure for a common cold but to stay at home and sip lemon and honey.

When I stayed home from school I watched Play School, even when I was way too old for what else was there? Besides, I still loved Big Ted and wanted to look through the round window. Most of the day I had to stay in bed, out of mother’s way. I have no memory of where she was or what she did as I dozed.  From my bedroom I could hear the going ons in the kitchen; a clatter of pans and washing up, a drone of radio. The Country Hour. She would go to the shops and leave me alone. Most mothers would have done the same. But not these days. Someone might ring the door bell, the child might answer, he might be kidnapped, the house could catch fire.

My mother grew quickly impatient with a sick child. Especially if I vomited. Somehow vomiting, especially when it was all over the bed, left my mother nonplussed and likely to start yelling. My stay-at-home-boy seems a lot less sick than I had to be to be at home. He has complained of a sore throat and he has a temperature, detectable on the battery operated ear Thermoscan. The thermometer became an essential item when Jasper was a baby and headlines of children dying from meningococcal disease seemed common. My mother detected a fever with the back of her hand across my forehead. If you had a temperature you stayed in bed, might not even be allowed out to watch Play School. You didn’t go to the doctor since she knew what to do. Fluids and plenty of rest.

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Did a blogging course

I was doing a blogging course. Why would I be nervous- it is supposed to be fun. But it involves finding a room in a unfamiliar building, not believing it will have wheelchair access and a disabled toilet, despite checking with the coordinators in the lead up to the day. A woman with two white yappy dogs discovers me looking for the entrance. She has been sent to check I find my way in, up a ramp and to point out the toilet that is normally locked and unavailable. So far so good. We will be in the FutureSphere with thousands of dollars worth of Apple Macs, their screens fingerprint-stained by teenagers. Contrary to its name the building is not futuristic. No lift. Drab beige seventies brick work. Concrete stairs. The Apples with their massive monitors are the only sign of the future. And then there will be the scary other students. What will they be like? Young groovers, ears lobes made large with spacers? And the tutor? A black belt web master? Perhaps I don’t know as much as everyone else. Perhaps their blogs will be superior and I will be shown to be a fraud – a writer who is masquerading as a blogger with a site that lacks cohesion and purpose. Asked what my site is about I can hardly answer the question. For what is more than writing? The blog is a place to go and tap about on the keyboard and send self out into the ethernet. I don’t understand how it gets out of my computer and into someone else’s. It is a form of magic or wizardry. Something both medieval and sci-fi at the same time. Like a cauldron, my Apple, the wicked soup the words. A chookhouse is a home for hens, so concrete and real. So yesteryear. It is dirty and organic, smelly and full of squabbling birds. It is earthy and uncomplicated. It is what it is. And yet I have called my blog this- so the blog is about what this word conjures to me. A homely comfortable place. Maybe I can make the web my chookhouse. The other students turned out to be the same as me; no spacers, some like me blissfully unaware of what SEO or RSS even stands for. They want readers too.We are in search of the real and the tangible connection with other bloggers, but we use this virtual, whimsical medium that few of us really comprehend. We could just as well tap it out on a typewriter of old and post it in your real life mail box or sing it in an alley way, waiting for eye contact, for an outreached hand.

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Samuel R Delaney interviewed in The Paris Review on his dyslexia

“I had, and have, no visual ability to remember how words are put together. I can recognise them when I see them. But unless they’re in front of me, I can’t recall the vowels they contain. I have no command over whether they contain single or double letters. The closest metaphor I can come up with is that it is like being able to recognise hundreds of different faces but being incapable of producing any sort of likeness of any of them with a pencil and paper….The dyslexia didn’t much hamper my reading. What it affected was my writing. I couldn’t spell anything! In an early short story I wrote, a woman who works in a five-and-ten at one point exclaims, ‘Customers! Customers! Customers!’ All three were spelled differently – and all three were wrong. I could not spell the word paper three times right in a row!”

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from the short story “William Wei” by Amie Barrodale

“I once brought a girl home because I liked her shoes. That was the only thing I noticed about her. I live in a really small apartment. A lot of my clothes end up piled on my mattress or draped over the open door of the microwave. I guess the girl with the pink high heels woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t remember where she was. She went out naked in the hall and closed the door behind her. She said that she had asked me, and I told her that was the way to the bathroom, to go out the front door. I don’t remember doing that. I remember I woke up with the cops in the house, asking me if I knew this girl. I said of course, she was the girl with the pink high heels. They thought that was really funny. After that I didn’t drink for about five months.”

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I love Bananas

I am working in the library close to the children’s section. Bad choice; lots of distractions. A child of four or five stands in front of the shelf with the children’s DVDs. He wears camel corduroys and has similarly coloured hair. He is awash in beige, with milky skin. He has a cowlick. Beside him stands a groovy Grandmother, he calls Nanna. He has selected Bananas in Pyjamas. She says Oh no, not Bananas. I love Bananas, he says. She selects other DVDs and hands them to him but he keeps hold, in one hand, of the Bananas in Pyjamas. On the cover are the two yellow Bananas in their blue and white striped Pyjamas – what fun they are having.  His response to every DVD she shows him is, I love Bananas. She says Bananas is for little children.

Oh NO, I love Bananas, Nanna.

She shows him Peter Rabbit. This looks fun. Nanna says, You can watch Bananas on Television. Let’s get something different. Bananas is for Babies.

No it’s not, he says. I love Bananas. I sense a foot stamping coming on. The Bananas are dancing on the cover.

Nanna lays out the six choices she has made on the stool in front of him and says they can select three. She chooses. Still holding the Bananas he says, Bananas is for babies and puts it quietly back on the shelf. She turns, sees me watching and gives me a wink. She thinks I am a colluder. I want to say I love Bananas.

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Hawaii – Part 5

We drive on towards Volcano and the National Park, where our accommodation is on the outskirts. It is getting dark and the place is hard to find. The Crater Rim Cabin is cute and neatly done out. The hosts, Barry and Jim, are rightly proud of their redwood cabin in the lush tropical garden. Barry greets us like royalty, shows us around inside and is impressed with the manoeuvrability and compactness of my chair. He wants to hear how his place compares with the Cliffhouse and is eager to tell us he offers chocolates too. That we never met the hosts he believes is an oversight- for greeting the guests is why he runs his accommodation in the first place. We note the tea towels under the appliances and between the saucepan and their lids. It is here that Jasper discovers Frosties.

That night after dinner at the Thai restaurant we drive out to the viewing platform to see the distant glow of the volcano. It is orange like fanta, fizzing and smoking in the distance.

The next day we explore the National Park and Jasper completes a work sheet that will result in him becoming a Junior Ranger and getting a badge. The promise of the badge makes him realise he has lost or misplaced his badge from Pearl Harbour. He becomes sulky in the way he does when he loses something he has coveted – and somehow it becomes all about the lost thing. As the mother always asked to carry and look after the stuff it irks me that he has not looked after it in the first place. I can see it in my mind on the back seat of the last rental car. The car that no one can remember checking for lost things. Who knows where the thing is? We will all be forced to look for it to rid Jasper of that face. Let it be a lesson to you to look after your own things. Look after your damn things.

In the afternoon the boys do a hike across an extinct volcano crater, stepping lightly across honeycomb rock. I watch video footage of Jim in the 1980’s at the height of his volcanologist career as he leaps about filming rivers of lava – getting the shot. I watch whole landscapes change as lava engulfs them, whole townships disappear. Some residents slice their house in two and take it away, other evacuate and let it be consumed. From the cabin I can see Barry working alone in the garden. He works with a shovel diligently, swiping away mosquitoes as it gets darker. I can’t help but imagine he is digging a grave in which to dispose of the Jim we have not yet seen. Then we meet Jim and learn Barry is slowly ridding the garden of a noxious plant.

Returning the hire care we check on the possibility of locating the missing Junior Ranger badge. Not likely. On the flight back to Honolulu the woman next to me tells me her husband is heavy. She has his ashes in her carry on luggage and is taking him back to Wisconsin. She has fibromyalgia and is too weak to do her seat belt up – perhaps I can assist her she asks.

The last two days in Waikiki we must spend without Graham as he meets Jon to organise the final preparations for the sailing trip to Samoa. We are staying in the Sheraton with its generic resort feel. The days are stretched to breaking point with boredom. Even Jasper is over the whole affair. Over the pool with its slide and landscaped fake caves and rock pools. Over the room with its myriad of channels. Over the marbled shining shops with trash. Over the super air-conditioned malls and hotel rooms. Over the thin as sticks Japanese and fat as butter Americans.

We buy a ukulele for Jasper and I to share and go to lessons in a shop in the foyer. We watch King of the Hill and Tron from the double bed in the hotel room. If I smoked cigarettes I couldn’t do it in the hotel but it is the kind of thing I feel like doing while looking out from the balcony at other bored persons on other resort balconies.

Jasper and I get a taxi to the yacht to see the boys off. Already the men have a smelliness about them. Already without shirts, leaping skilfully on and off the yacht. The boat looks sea worthy, ready with lots of diesel tied to the deck. Jasper gets a tour of below deck but within minutes claims to feel seasick. Farewell photos are taken. Jasper has a final swim with Graham before we say good bye. In the last embrace his body is cool from the ocean, wet and smooth. I miss him already.

Jasper and I have shave ice and walk slowly back towards our hotel. On the way we visit the huge shopping mall that is a reason why some people like Waikiki. We find a Barnes and Noble and Jasper is excited beyond belief. He has inherited my love of  bookshops. A man sits in the coffee shop inside the bookstore with his headphones in, a large bucket of coffee in front of him, and a pile of beads and jewellery making equipment with which to work.

I am sick on the final day and Jasper must amuse himself most of the day in the hotel room. He manages to do this with a cardboard tube, paper cups and a few toys -pretending to annihilate an imagined enemy with explosions and all manner of arsenals. We make numerous trips to the laundry on the 18th floor, bless the Sheraton for its infrastructure and its fully functioning disabled room and take more immodium than is good for you. I locate the previously disappeared and now magically returned Pearl Harbour Junior Ranger badge and receive suitable accolades.

 

 

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Pippin – Case History

It was the first time in a long time that he had been able to stroke the cat, without fear – for it was dead.

Pippin had a short life of three years. She had always been a little strange. At first wary of strangers. She had been a “rescue” from the RSPCA cats’ home and right from the get go seemed a little on edge. When her first owner moved away and could not take her with him she was handed on to his friends, a young twenty something couple who had never had a pet before. Like lots of novice pet owners they thought it might be a good way to practice being parents before having children. At first she seemed like a regular cat, just a bit shy. But how nice it was to have another species to coexist with. It made them feel whole. Wholesome.

They were confident she would adjust to them and become a normal, loving cat. With the previous owner she had slept on the bed, but the young couple kept her out of their bedroom. At night she wandered the hallway yowling.

Getting up one night to get a glass of water the young woman was attacked around the legs by the cat. She swatted the cat away. Not my finest hour, she later told me, as if she were to blame for all that followed.

Then one evening the cat was sitting by the back screen door and something caused the door to bang a little on its hinges. Next moment the cat flew back at the woman, ears flattened, claws out, fur electrified and attacked her, scratching and biting. It was a vicious event and the next day the woman took the cat to the vet clinic to see if there was a medical reason for the attack. For why else would Pippin throw herself at her, enraged; she loved her already.

Nothing wrong could be found with the cat. With the vet the cat was fine, smoochy even. I was not the vet.

They took the cat home but something had shifted. They had begun to fear Pippin. And there were other emotions too – a soup of dread, suspicion and regret – all became the young woman’s bedfellows as she became intent on solving her cat’s behaviour problem.

She was a torty cat with orange eyes and wonderful soft medium long fur. She was a patchwork of ginger, black and white. The kind of fur you want to run your fingers through – for isn’t this the essence of pet love? In the vet world torties are known for their high reactivity to a procedure. Tortishells need quick and careful handling or else they need a lot of sedative. They scratch and bite and sometimes are hell to deal with. But this is when they are aroused by fear and having something done to them they don’t like- like having an intravenous injection. To their owners they are just regular cats and as affectionate as any other. Their owners rarely see their “bad” side.

But when an owner says their tortie is aggressive, you believe them and reach for the padded gloves.

No one wants to be bitten by a cat. Their teeth are very sharp and like a needle they inoculate bacteria under the skin. A cat bite can give a nasty infection, swollen and painful.

Pippin began to prowl the house. Stealth mode. The young couple feared surprising her as an attack might follow. They wanted her to see there was nothing to be afraid of outside so they took her into the yard  on a leash but she had never been an outdoor cat and was clearly scared of what lay beyond the screen door. She just wanted to be inside. The young woman tried a few more times but Pippin didn’t seem to want a bar of it. And perhaps it was making her worse.

Then one night she attacked again and the owners could see no reason or instigator for it. She simply flew at the young man and attacked him around the arms, biting through his clothing.

They brought her to see me. The young man pushed up his sleeves to reveal the criss cross scratches over his arms. Like bus window graffiti.

On the vet table she sat in her cat box, eyes widely dilated, peering. A paw came out through the bars and swiped at the air. She didn’t seem too fearful, more eager to get out of the cage. After talking for a while I opened the cat cage and out she came. She was like a hyperactive child; buzzing around the room, intent on exploring everything. She was quickly up on the shelves and benches but not in a panicked way, more in an adventurous, curious way. Wired felt like the best word to describe her.

After hearing their tale of horror it was decided she had been spooked by something outside the house, perhaps another cat and had then redirected her aggression on to them. I explained that the redirected aggression was the most violent form, the most unpredictable and the most difficult to solve. We needed to suppress her anxiety and screen her from her outside fears. She needed a safe room, full of cat soothing pheromones, high escape places and lots of food. We would also put her on xanax and prozac for her anxiety. I offered euthanasia and they declined.

With a plan everyone felt better. Pippin went back in her box, lured by her favourite treat, Vegemite.

Pippin went to stay at a cattery while the young couple were on holiday and it was agreed that while she was in boarding the original owner would visit her. She was going well at the cattery – so well that the cattery owner was surprised that she even needed medication. Then the original owner visited. He was sitting in her large enclosure and had petted her, when she moved away to the far corner, turned and attacked him, front legs boxing with unsheathed claws. He had never seen anything like it. Either had the cattery owner. Afterwards she could not be approached by anyone and the cattery owner had to start medicating her in her food.

When the young couple returned they were devastated to hear about her attack on her original owner, but being in the cattery where life is very different from home, they excused her.

I saw her again and took some bloods. She was fine.

Life with Pippin became like living with a time bomb. No one was sure when she would explode. Rules for living with Pippin included; no sudden noises or touching, screen the large windows that view the yard as much as possible, lock her away from visitors and children, have blankets at the ready to throw on her if she attacks. Give her Vegemite. Plenty of it.

The female owner said that fifty percent of the time when she was being petted she would appear like she was going to turn on you. My advice was; don’t pet.

The young woman had a cold sore on her lip; no wonder, I thought. She was picking up more medication for Pippin. Her skin looked bad.

Then they said they had decided to let her go. By this they meant give her away to someone willing to take her on. But there was no one. It came as no surprise.

The young man brought her in in her familiar cat cage and she looked at me with her round orange eyes. He said his girlfriend was too distressed to be here. Pippin was a bit heavier than I remembered, perhaps from her meds and also all the food given to appease her.

I took her out the back and we administered a heavy sedative into the lumbar muscle.

I took her back into the consult room and explained it would be five minutes or so before she was sedated enough to be put to sleep without any restraint. She fought the sedation, it seemed. The dose did not knock her as much as I had expected and when I took her from her cage she still was a little alert. But he could at last stroke her and talk to her and not imagine she might turn on him. I administered the euthanasia solution and within seconds she was gone.

He stayed with her for a long time afterwards, just kneeling by the table, his face close to hers, as he patted her. Her eyes remained open and he peered at them. It would have been an act you would have been too fearful to do while she was alive. She never really knew the firm, yet calm, confident touch of people. Humans were always tentative and scared around her. How strange to feel such relief at her passing. Now you could breathe. Finally, as simply fur and non-seeing eyes, she was, at last, tame. Her sentient self had been so full of unpredictability  and so chaotically unhinged that it took her death for her to become their loving pet.

 

 

 

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about sniffing from “Inside of a Dog” by Alexandra Horowitz

“Given our tendency to find so many smells disgusting, we should all celebrate that our olfactory system adapts to an odor in the environment: over time if we stay in one place, the intensity of every smell diminishes until we don’t notice it  at all. The first smell of coffee brewing in the morning: fantastic …and gone in a few minutes. The first smell of something rotting under the porch: nauseating… and gone in a few minutes. The sniffing method of dogs enables them to avoid habituation to the olfactory topography of the world: they are continually refreshing the scent in their nose, as though shifting their gaze to get another look.”

It has been estimated that a Beagle’s sense of smell may be millions of times more sensitive than ours.

“We might notice if our coffee’s been sweetened with a teaspoon of sugar: a dog can detect a teaspoon of sugar diluted in a million gallons of water: two Olympic sized pools full.”

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Hawaii – Part 4

We fly to the Big Island. I am pleased to finally be able to pronounce a place name. We collectively decide that I would never be able to live on Kauai because I cannot say it correctly. We are sad that here there are no free roaming chooks which give an island that run down, lay back feel of Kauai. The inter island airports are small and have a sixties feel. The furniture is retro cool, the floors spanking polished vinyl.

In Hilo we are on a mission to buy Graham’s Kanile’a ukulele before finding the Cliff House further up the coast. Hilo has a rundown, Cuban feel to it. The weatherboards are harassed and shops disheveled. Flaky paint and uneven sidewalks. No Honolulu high-rise, no condos. It is altogether a different, better feel than Waikiki.

The music store is perfect. A ukulele paradise. Floor to ceiling instruments. The storeowner has a sister who lives in Fremantle. He has been around. He’s played and drunk with ACDC, back in the day. Now he’s sober. He advises on the best instrument for Graham while we all have a strum and a pluck. A concert Kanile’a is chosen made of solid koa wood.  He restrings it for a left-hander. We ask him for his recommendation for somewhere to eat lunch and have a great meal, although slow, at Ocean Sushi in Keawe Street.

We have a bit of a drive to the Cliff House in the Waipio Valley. The drive is lush and tropical, a reminder of Northern New South Wales. We collect the keys from the Art Gallery and make our way to our accommodation down a grass driveway, past another house and a paddock with two chestnut horses. The host has prepared the house with fruit and chocolates and a pantry with many essentials. The view is so magnificent that we decide to stay in for dinner and cook on the BBQ. We ring Richard, the owner, and he suggests we drive into the town shop for some Spencer steak. After all the Big Island is known for its ranches and herds of beef cattle.

The house is all-alone on the cliff face. It stands on stilts, a twelve-step haul for Graham, but is on the level once inside. A verandah faces the ocean and the sitting room has an enormous six-foot square window that frames the Pacific Ocean hundreds of feet below. Whales can be seen often from this vantage but we are staying at the wrong time of year. There is mist and storms further out to sea and the horizon is smudged and indistinct. There is the distant sound of the ocean on the shoreline below. The valley is an ancient, sacred place for the Hawaiian people.

We feel privileged and lucky to have found this special place. Everyone who stays here feels the same. Reading through the visitors book are the oohs and ahs of welcomed travellers. Graham is straight away on his ukulele. It is an instrument suited to him. Easy to hold, to carry, to transport. It makes you smile. It is happy, joyful, friendly. Jasper is writing an adventure tale, based roughly on the travelling he has done so far. It has vomiting in it.

We have homemade fruit salad for breakfast made from all the in-season fruit left to us by the owner. Pawpaw, pineapple and banana. We are driving today around the Northern part of the island and will check out some beaches. First Jasper and Graham do a hike down to a black-pebbled beach while I read Joyce Carol Oates in the car. I watch as car after car stops and people pile out to do the trek and then return sweaty and red faced an hour or so later. We have lunch in a small town, green mango salad and chicken kebabs.

The beaches give the impression the hotel and condo complexes that line the coast privately own them but they can be accessed. We can get reasonably close and then Graham piggybacks me the final way across the sand and into the ocean. It looks like he is about to dump me on a rock submerged beneath the surface as my unspectacled eyes detect a dark shadow. But then a mottled head appears and we realise we are right next to a giant sea turtle slowly making its way along the coast. The ocean is clear and warmer than we are used to back home. The swell is gentle and mild.

The sand cannot compete with the pristine whiteness we are used to and take for granted. Here the world is new, geologically speaking, and the sand still fresh from its volcanic beginnings.

We check out some other beaches and stop on our way home at an art gallery to see a famous painting by Herb Kane of Captain Cook and his landing on the Big Island. We stop at the supermarket and are appalled at the lack of quality fresh produce, but then again we are only in need of Spencer steak, potatoes, onions and red wine before driving back to our cliff house for another night of BBQ and ukulele on the verandah. Jasper has made friends with the horses and we need a carrot to hand feed. A horse quality carrot can be purchased, luckily. As well as the much needed exercise notebook to write his adventure story. Leaving the car park the Stop sign reads Whoa.

We leave the next morning and on the way out of town have the local Hawaiian donuts so heavily commented on in the guidebook and visitors book. Plain with cinnamon sugar voted best.

We are heading for Volcano, the other side of the island, and are going to stop at Kealakekua Bay where Captain Cook met his death. We take a long road down towards Napoopoo pier to a car park where some locals have kayaks that they hire out to tourists. Kayaking across the bay is the only way to reach the secluded spot where the Hawaiians bludgeoned Captain Cook to death and where also some of the best snorkeling can be done. Jasper is both cautious and eager. You can see the tug inside him. Yes I want to see what Dad’s talking about, his interest in Captain Cook’s voyage spurred on by recent readings on this Hawaii trip, but the look of the choppy ocean in the bay and the dots that the kayaks turn in to as they disappear across the water holds his enthusiasm back. But Graham gives him no time to focus on why not. They are out of the car, they have warm gear in a waterproof bag, and they are off.

They are dumped in the ocean off the jetty and are paddling. Jasper sits in front, Lord Muck and Graham paddles from behind. I watch as the orange boat bobs along across the bay. I get a wave. Beside me in the car park various pick-ups come and go. Locals have a few kayaks they must try and rent out in between beers. More men, more beers. Special hand shakes. Fuckn this, Fuckn that. Board shorts, cap backwards, tight brown belly. Islander life. The man who Graham got his kayak from comes to check on me, like he’s concerned for me amongst the swearing locals. Xcuse me Ma’am, you ok? Just checking on you. They are not doing much trade with their kayaks. They sit in the open tray of the pick up. Mother fuckn Billy the Kid. A postcard is handed around and a discussion about how he died ensues. Burps like a blocked drain clearing.

I watch as kayaks returning come into focus. I can detect two paddlers. Not them. Eventually I spot them, making good ground across the choppy water. Yes they stood where Captain Cook fell. Snorkeling was luscious. Fish with yellow and blue stripes. The monument to Captain Cook had been defaced….

to be continued…