How awesome! Sometimes it’s a good thing to come home to your family. Sometimes it is the right move. A move forward, in the right direction. If you need to save money, catch up, have some breathing space so you can plan the next part of your life, without the pressures of life’s financials biting at your heels, it really might be the perfect move to make. And the right decision.

I do love her. Gita, that is. Not the cat. Not so much. Although he is pretty cute.

Gita and Domino

Domino

Have you seen Spalding Gray‘s intense film, ‘Swimming to Cambodia’ where he delivers a monologue that takes every ounce of intentionality you can muster to follow all the way through, to the very end? Have you seen it? If not, I highly recommend it. “Spalding Gray sits behind a desk throughout the entire film and recounts his exploits and chance encounters while playing a minor role in the film ‘The Killing Fields’. At the same time, he gives a background to the events occurring in Cambodia at the time the film was set.” That’s from IMDb. I actually did watch it all the way through, some years ago, and managed to stay present through most of it. Only after several attempts though.

Last week, I got into my car, started it up, and, as I drove off, I pressed the radio button for the ABC. An interview with Alice Pung was on. She’s just published a new book, ‘Her Father’s Daughter’, and as I listened to her speak, I decided I had to read it. It’s an autobiographic account of her life as a young adult, and as she explores the opportunities before her, she finds herself delving deeper and deeper into her father’s life, from painful memories of the killing fields  in Cambodia, through to life in Melbourne.

I bought the book today. Can’t wait to start it.

It’s amazing! Inspiration sometimes comes from the most unexpected places. If you follow my blog, you’ll know that I haven’t posted for awhile. The last post I uploaded was on 29th May. Quite some time ago! It’s not that nothing much has been going on in my life. Quite the contrary. We’ve had an emergency trip to hospital for Moshe – all’s well now, thank goodness. One daughter announced that she’s having a baby – our first grandchild. Our youngest daughter is off for three weeks on a trip to the States, and our middle daughter moved out of one place and into another. Actually, that sounds really much, much simpler and uneventful than it actually was. It was more like those train tracks that click, taking the train in a whole new direction, and then, imagine if, whilst the train was midway across the interchange rails, they clicked once more, taking the train into another new direction, before the very next minute, clicking back to the first route again. One minute she was moving into a new place, the next she was coming to live with us (all my idea, my doing), and finally, after a looooong weekend of deliberation and contemplation and discussion, she made her final decision to stay with her original plan and continue her move into the new place.

Heaps happening. I kept rejecting the sketches of blog posts that breezed across my mind every so often over the past months. I don’t know. I can’t blog about things that involve others at a fairly personal level. A lot of people do it. I can’t. See, I know how at least two of my daughters feel about me writing about them on the internet. When it comes to the web, they both like their privacy and anonymity, and I respect that. It just makes it tricky sometimes when I’m busting to write things that I can’t share with the world.

This morning, I even seriously considered closing down this blog. I was in one of those moods. Lucky I didn’t though. I actually have plenty to write about! AND… I’m completely inspired to do so after the email I received this afternoon. I’d called to my endodontist’s office to pay a bill. The phone was answered by someone with a very pleasant and welcoming “hello!” We chatted, I paid the bill, she said she’d email me the receipt, and that was that. Her email came through almost immediately, with a two-line message that said:

“I will hold onto your eftpos slip here and give it to you at your next appointment.

Ps. I follow your blog – BIG yes to the sustainable house and kitchen idea!!!”

Amazing! She must have clicked on the link under my signature in my emails I’d sent ages ago, and she reads my blog! In that moment, I got all the encouragement I needed (thank you!!!), and my desire to write was re-ignited. Have I told you that I love to write? Have I shared with you where that love comes from? It began in primary school, Elwood Primary School, when, back in the 3rd Grade, I had Mr. Walter McVitty as my Library Teacher. Don’t know who he is? If you scroll down to halfway on page 2 of this pdf, you can read a brief biography. Mr. McVitty was one of my all-time favourite teachers. I used to sit mesmerized in his classes, eyes glued to his face, catching every frown, and smile, and grimace that he made as he sat on a wooden chair in front of us, his legs crossed, holding a book open in his hands, reading the next excerpt of books like “The Phantom Tollbooth“ by Norton Juster, and “A Wrinkle In Time“ by Madeleine L’Engle. I developed such a love of literature and reading in his class. I loved the worlds that got created in his readings, worlds to which I could escape reality, an indulgence I held very dear back then. He would spend time with us, recommending new books to take home and read, just as I’m sure all school librarians do. And for me, it was special, so special.

In the 4th Grade, with Mrs Davies I think, I continued to develop my writing skills. I was extremely proud of the short pieces I wrote for her. I remember one particular assignment we did. Mrs Davies handed out Xeroxed pictures for us to look at. We had about fifteen minutes or so to come up with an interpretation of what we were looking at, before taking the rest of that class to write a short story about it. This one I remember was of a little girl, standing in front of a huge wrought iron gate of a huge house seen in the background. You couldn’t see the girl’s face, as she stood with her back to us, her little hands holding the iron rods of the gate. I imagined she was crying, crying for her mother who was in the house. I wrote a whole elaborate, heart-wrenching story about this poor little girl. I remember carefully choosing my words to sketch the story on my page. Mrs Davies gave me a really high mark for this piece, and I took it home very proudly to read to my father. Thinking back, I remember I wasn’t sure if he liked it or not. I couldn’t get a read on his response, but it didn’t matter really. I was very happy with myself, and folded up the pages, tucking them into a tin box I had for all my little treasures. I kept that box for years and years. Can’t quite remember when I threw it away, but I now wish I hadn’t.

You know, I’ve got actually heaps to tell you about our Sustainability project! So, you wanna know? I’ll come back and write about it over the next few days.

Last night, Moshe and Sarah and I watched the footy. Carlton v Melbourne. Great game in that we won. Not so great because we still can’t kick straight. Oh well. There’s more east to go. Half time came, and our own Melbourne born and bred Olivia Newton-John (who I just learned is a Carlton supporter so we love her even more) promoted her kick-ass Cancer and Wellness Centre that she’s building out at the Austin Hospital. I must live under a rock, because I hadn’t heard of it before last night. However. I got quite inspired by her and her amazing project, and jumped up with a smile to do my bit and call up to donate to the $10mil she still needed to complete the thing.

I get on the phone, and the guy gives me his name and asks if I’ve called to give a single-time contribution. I said yes, I have, and if I could give you a million, ten million, I would. He said oh, thank you, and then he said something I wasn’t expecting at all. He said, would you like to give it in memory of someone? Oh, I said, yes. Ah, yes of course… ah… yeah… yeah, I do…

And then I couldn’t say another word. In my head, it went like this, only really fast:

In memory of someone?

Yeah, Moshe had…

no…

oh my god

oh my god

Dad!

yeah, in his memory

oh shit

shit!

oh my god

yeah, he died of cancer

oh shit

silence

to the guy on the phone: yeah, ah…

more silence, as I tried to speak through the lump in my throat again

I handed the phone to Sarah. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I heard her on the phone to the guy, giving my credit card number, and then he must have asked her for the name on the card, and she said, Mrs. – M- R- S, spelling it out for him. She realized what she’d said to him, and cupped her hand over her mouth, laughing kinda, embarrassed. No! no, no, she said. She’d been caught off guard a little too.

She finally completed the transaction, and got off the phone. Thank god she was there with me! I couldn’t go back in to watch the footy right away, so I sat for a bit at my computer. I looked on the website of the hospital for a bit, looking for ways I could contribute, I mean, in ways other than financially. I then remembered that WordPress has donation widgets, so I spent a bit of time looking through those, but none seemed right. Either they didn’t do what I wanted, or they did, but they hadn’t been upgraded for yonks, and weren’t right for my latest version of WP.

So, finally, I created my own widget. You can see it on the sidebar. The photo of Dad and me? Yeah, that’s it. If you click on the photo, or on the link beneath it, you go straight to the website page for the hospital, and you can click on their donate button. Please do. The whole of Melbourne needs this hospital to be built. Somehow, I don’t think any of us can escape being impacted by cancer any more, one way or another.

I love my dog. Tommy’s so very refined. He’s not content to gnaw at his bones in just any location. He likes to dine in the best places, where his dining experience will be enhanced with aromas and flavours befitting of any good foodie worth his salt. He selects the greenest, most dense thyme plant of the herb patch, drops his bone right in the centre, before relaxing down to the ground to pick it up and, with a good helping of the best my kitchen garden has to offer, chew away and really enjoy his meal. So impressive, such class, don’t you think?

Afternoon tea (well, t-bone perhaps?)

Over the next few weeks, our wonderful gardener Bree and her crew – that’s David, will build an enclosure that will house our first real vegetable and herb kitchen garden since the one we had in Fairway Drive, Richardson, Texas back in the 1990s. We (that is, the gardeners) had planted pumpkins, zucchini, tomatoes, and other fabulous vegetables, and the vines grew and grew over the garden, with the promise of new vegetable growth, and then we had to move house. We never got to reap the benefits of that garden. Such a shame. Moshe and I had also created a vegetable patch in the first house we lived in, back in 1977, right after we got married. Remember that one, Moshe? There was a two metre square area in our back yard in that run-down house where the back door never quite closed enough so we could lock it, and we planted our vegetables – watermelon, pumpkins, and other things that I can’t remember now. The creeping vines covered most of the lawn, and I think we did get to serve some of the produce on our dinner table.
Here is the site of my soon-to-be new kitchen garden…

I’m so excited about this new venture. I’m about to browse the isles of the Diggers and the Greenpatch Organic Seeds websites for fabulous organic herbs and vegetables to plant in our garden, once the grass has died off, and the fence to keep our puppies and the local possums out is put up, and covered with netting to keep the birds out. Any recommendations for what I should plant this time of the year in Melbourne?