Self – Wendy's Out of Station

A bike and the God’s revenge

So today the God’s decided to remind me of their potency after I’ve been teaching my 18 year olds that in the Odyssey they’re literary devices and that Marx was right that religion is the opium of the people, there is no god but man himself [sic.].

My backpack laden with laptop, dinner as I’d been offered a double shift, tea and water, texts, whiteboard markers and glasses. My person ensconced in tights, socks, boots, jumper, coat, gloves, hat, thankfully I remembered my pants before heading out the door and managed to pull them on. I raced to the lift, well as much as a heavily weighted tortoise can race. I checked both public transport apps and the sms and found there was no bus. Backpack too heavy to walk I decided it was time for a bike. Fortunately there were bikes at the rental and I’d brought my oci-straps.

I eventually strapped my backpack on the front of the bike, eventually as the oci-straps kept springing off. I’ve discovered others don’t call them that, was that just my Dad’s name for them or some special 4WD insider lingo? You know what I mean, they have hooks on each end and stretch, they keep stuff strapped in place, allegedly. Just as I was about to mount I discovered my jacket zip had parted at the bottom so had to take off my gloves, balance the bike while unzipping and re zipping and then I could be on my way. Don’t pick on the gloves by the way, it was 5C.

Of course as I set off from the bike stand a bus came along. Anyway I’m riding along and ping. There’s a noise in the front wheel. I keep going and the noise escalates. After a couple more blocks I notice there are no longer any octopi holding my backpack in place.

I managed to get to the side of the road and dismount without falling off – a singular advance on recent rides. Of course you’ve guessed the first oci-strap was wound around the front wheel’s shaft, the second was just loose and tangled around the handlebars. Balancing that bike with a 10kg backpack on the front while trying to unwind that oci-strap was no mean feat. But, eventually untangled and re-strapped I continued my ride. I did vaguely wonder why my pants felt lose.

Eventually I got to the library where one returns one’s bike, and felt quite proud when I dismounted again without falling. Docked the bike successfully and got the green light. Hey it’s $1200 fine if you lose the bike. But my pride disappeared when I reached forward to unstrap my backpack and my pants fell down.

Pull up pants. Button. Zip.

All I can say is praise the goddess for opaque black tights, and that today there was no snow.

Weather’s gone from Steamer to Fridge, & I’m stocking my Freezer

This is not a food blog, but food’s part of my way of coping with the unfamiliar so you get to see some of what I cook. It also explains why the one “homesick” thing that brought me to tears was the absence of rice bran straws from American stores. I’m committed to my cereal recipe! Cereal is my comfort food. Anyway I’ve made minestrone, smoked ham & chickpeas (pictured) and pumpkin soup for the freezer. Cauliflower curry is next. I’ve bought two coats – one feels like I’m a walking around in a down sleeping bag! I’ve procured lined gloves and bought two pairs of boots, one for wet and one for when the snow’s more than 2″ deep Mam. Near the coat and boot shops I was distracted by Dr Seuss and the Lego store. I’ve been dehydrated because I’m not drinking enough.

Apart from distracted shopping for boots and coats this week I’ve been about getting into (and resisting) routines, maybe me and the weather too. One day was a steamy 27, the next maxed out at 9C and I thought I was living in a fridge. Apparently 10C max (<50F) is the new routine for weather until it gets actually cold. Even with boots and coats I know the weather’s changed, but the locals don’t think this is cold yet. Today the modem man (don’t ask, but yes, again) said this is his perfect temperature, loves it. This is a man in a tshirt and shorts… I’m getting into a gym routine. Have done a full week of settled uni classes and felt prepared. I’ve paid bills, cleaned my apartment, found where to get my trousers taken up so they don’t drape in the puddles. Eaten a ruben with sour kraut that stung my lips in a cafe that reminded me of Scheherazade, felt lonely a bit, you know, life.

I’ve been working on my study-life balance, although there’s been some procrasti-life balance for sure. Choir rehearsals started this week and I nearly cried I had so much fun, couldn’t stop smiling. I got turned inside out trying to find the rehearsal space and saw this room – have you noticed a theme in many of my Chicago photographs yet? No not ivy, although maybe that too. Montreal was street art, Chicago is…. Anyway we started learning a Bruckner motet and a South African hymn in Xhosa and I was just in seventh heaven. Our first concert is with Sweet Honey in the Rock. You politically radical, post-colonial feminist types, get listening! And the rest of you, well, if you don’t know them have a listen, ethical, gospel and good fun singing – yay. Oh and an Alto Lady who lives near me has offered to drive me home after rehearsal so I won’t have to walk in dark and snow. Nice.

I’ve almost come off the back of the treadmill because of course the speed is in mph and one doesn’t walk at 5.5-6 mph. I then climbed the 11 floors to my apartment after gym because the power was out. That was the day after I bought a flashlight despite the man in the hardware store telling me that the power never goes off in Chicago. We had quite a chat because I went in to buy a torch, I asked for a “big torch”. The hardware gentleman looked at me quizzically and took me to the back of the store, to a rack of 6′ stakes topped with kerosene wick contraption things! “No”, I said, “a torch”. “Yes”, he said holding his stake ready to enter The Temple of Doom (I’d say the Mines of Moria but Gandalf’s staff was smaller). “It’s like a cylinder, with a globe, batteries”, I said desperately trying to describe a torch in non-phallic terminology and sign language. “It’s like a flashlight!!” The light turned on, we laughed, I got a flashlight and batteries and the next day (at midday) the power went off. The power never goes off in Chicago, it must be me.

While walking everywhere I’m enjoying looking at leaves starting to change colour, jumping puddles, watching squirrels rush about collecting their foods. Still enjoying the architecture and smiling at summer’s last enduring flowers. Love the hydrangeas. I’ve walked past a group of Chinese ladies doing tai chi in the park a few times. Not sure why but they make me smile. Some sitting with the children in the playground, the rest moving slow and deliberate. There’s a lot to be said for slow and deliberate.

And so we wander, not alone

Wander or wonder or both? Today I am happy, I’m productive, I’m Wendy. I feel like the malaise of the last few weeks has lifted and there is so much that I want to do – watch out world, Wendy is awake.

And yet, today one of my dear friends is in the depths and immediacy of unwordable grief. Two other friends move tentatively with scabbed wounds, scars forming, hurts still real and fresh. Eyes furtive. Anger flashing. Loss of people, dreams, hope. Others I know are weighted with life, and like Frodo and Sam in Mordor can only wearily put one foot in front of the other. For others, in the words of Ursula Le Guin “There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.”

It would be easy to feel guilty for enjoying the sun, the smell of my steaming tea. For feeling some measure of control over life as I hear the washing machine spin, as I start to write an essay that’s been brewing in my head for a couple of weeks and must come out of its safe prognostications into the world of words and grammar. My toes are cold, but they want to take me outside so they can scrunch in the grass and dirt and proclaim “I am alive!” Energised. And yet a quiet niggle, “How can I be happy when others are in so much pain?” And another, “Don’t get too excited, this too shall pass.” I resist their ache and breathe into the space between my ribs.

Life is so fluid, fragile, fleeting. Formless. So precious. We try to hold fast, too tight, too human. Days like today are so sharp and clear. Intense. I hear one conversation, clumsy, god I hope I was clear, I hope in your pain you heard. “You gave words to their humanity” I know I tried to say. “You said that slavery and oppression weren’t the whole of their story. That even declared sub-human, people claimed their humanity in small acts of resilience, their agency in small acts of resistance. You gave them back those actions. It matters.”

I sip my tea. The Korean chimes proclaim my washing is ready for the line, for the gentle air and warming sun. Feminism must be inclusive if it is to be feminism, my essay wanders toward the keyboard. Breathe. Life is … this instant.

And so we wander, we wonder. We are social beings, us humans. We share, we journey. We are scared to trust, and yet we do. Time rolls us, twirls, layers. We pray to deities we think we don’t believe in. We reach out. We hold… and we let go.

My mother, the woman I thought I didn’t know

I am lucky to have been mothered in my life by two strong, beautiful, capable women. It took a long time for me to let myself discover in my stepmother a woman and friend that I love and respect. Until now I’d not discovered my mother as a person: she died in 1980, very much still my Mummy. I am lucky now to know and love these two priceless women. It’s wonderful that the human heart can morph, can love without limit or competition or comparison.

There’s a woman in my life I barely knew. Never got to know as a woman, as an independent person. Never got to separate the Woman from the role of Mummy.

Some may say I’m too much in my head, but it was feminist philosophy that hit my triggers, called challenge to my resounding clanging shut bronze defensive doors with many many locks. They said that the most important relationship for a woman to recover, to find herself, to discover human intimacy, to identify herself as a subject in her own right not an object relative to a man, is with her mother. No way. I checked the locks and bars. No mother needed here.

But here I am some eighteen months later, after a long-lost friend of hers telling me how much I am like her, after many more feminist nigglings “Before any woman, before you can see yourself as a person, you need to see your mother as a person, a subject in her own right, an individual not a role, a woman is a woman first, a daughter, wife, mother only thereafter”. After an uncle sharing photographs I didn’t have. Nauseated by endless feminist fiction where the daughter reconciles with her dead misunderstood mother. After visiting her grave and feeling almost nothing, after fleeting thoughts and questions I quickly suppressed. After all that niggling like a buzzing mosquito, on Saturday afternoon I found myself crying in the front bar of a pub. Hugging strangers. Telling all who’d listen that my Mum was there in ’54. Proud to have been born in Footscray. Bulldog Premiers. Singing under my breath the old words, words she held more dear than any hymn. It felt like it was time, not just for the Bulldogs but for us.

So here I am trying to identify for myself the woman, my Mum. To look at footsteps 36 years faded, and find a person. A woman.

I know she was loyal – perhaps to a fault. Loyal to her beloved Bullies, to family. Loyalty reciprocated by friends, even after her death. Fierce loyalty that could look a lot like stubbornness. She wasn’t shy, afraid to stand up for what she thought was hers, or afraid to speak her mind: I sure learned those traits young.

She was active in trying to get me the best. No pre-school near our home? She formed a committee, and it opened the year after I started primary school. No primary school near our home? She drove a parents’ council so one was built, opening for my Grade 6, just over a year before she died. She sewed my Barbie clothes when we couldn’t afford to buy them. She worried if the new high school would be good enough for me.

She loved food, and friends and wine. To party. She was vibrant. I think she laughed. Yes she laughed, I remember she laughed at other mothers’ horror when she brought me to my ballet concert covered in charcoal from my school concert chimney sweeping debut. Cleaned me up and sent me out to be a queen. She struggled with weight, but I remember soft enveloping hugs. I missed those hugs. She loved apricot – the colour, the fruit, jam, especially apricot flowers. And purple, I mean who has a purple toilet? I guess it was the 70’s. She didn’t drive and was afraid of water. She was afraid a lot I think, and isolated. She found a sister in my Aunt. She wrote ILY randomly through the calendar of 1980 on dates after she knew she would have died.

She was the queen of lists, she would have been dangerous had she lived to wield a spreadsheet. She worked as a book keeper then shop keeper. She could budget. On holidays we played cards, 500 and canasta. She had a home she loved, with simple treasures – glass reindeer, a trio of dalmatians, albums of Pat Boone and Johnny O’Keefe, Elvis and Bill Haley & the Comets. She loved Christmas planning, laying out the presents months in advance. She hated ironing. She was passionate in love and temper and joy. She beat herself up when she thought she didn’t meet her own standards. She and my Dad took turns to hold me when I had nightmares.

She was fallible, but aren’t we all. She wore pink, had manicured nails. She loved me. She laughed so hard she cried when I dropped the tablecloth out the apartment window and it caught on pipes halfway down.

Her mother died in Footscray. She and I were both born in Footscray Hospital. Her Dad was a life member at Footscray. Their blood ran red, white and blue. So I stood, tears flowing, in a Queensland bar surrounded by strangers, singing Son’s of the ‘scray, the red, white and blue. 62 years after she screamed herself hoarse when they last brought home the flag. And I think I met a woman with blue eyes, a voluptuous love, and a loyal generous heart.