Getting home and the blessings of myopia

Coming home after a long trip back to England is never easy, that I know, but each return presents its own special tangle of thoughts and feelings to come to terms with.  I wonder how soldiers and sailors manage their dislocations.

The flight around half of the globe is a sort of monstrosity – leaving the roses and meadows where the sun is smiling and arriving twenty two hours later to a sullen Sydney winter. The flight is more horrible than ever now that it is split into six hours to Dubai and then fourteen to Sydney. I gobble nasty food, hungry for no reason and even eat a Mars bar poked at me by a flight attendant in the depths of the night and hate myself for doing it. When I go to the toilet I look back at the ranks of people strapped in their seats, eyes fixed to their little screens with silent flailing shapes on them.  It seems an ugly mindless way of being human but then there is nothing else possible up there in a plane. Perversely, though, back on the ground I feel a tiny bit panicky and wonder, now I have all this space, where to put myself.

Our crepe myrtle in the garden has shed all its leaves as usual.  Grant jokes. “It’s a dead tree” and I do the pet shop parrot joke “It’s just sleeping”  But it does look dead and indeed everything seems a bit dismal and  bleached.

Politics are in chaos here as well as everywhere else and I visit 91 year old Betty over the road who says with some satisfaction “It’s the end of the world” I laugh and in some funny way her pessimism cheers me up.  Mum used to say on the phone when told of terrible things going on with the kids.  “It’s not the end of the world” and I take a leaf from her book. Whatever Betty says it’s not the end of the world.  I just have to find my way back into this side of it and get on with living.

Home is lovely, especially as son Finn and girlfriend Fredi have been staying here and doing good works, making a set of steps, swapping our ancient bed for a better one and other things too.  I go up to the roof garden and pull all the beanstalks out as they have done their dash.  In my morbid mood I dwell on a great big bean that never got picked and is crispy brown with fat seeds inside.  What a waste. Or is it? I could plant those beans I suppose.  For some reason the row of tiny red beetroot seedlings and green threads of onions are exactly as I left them.  Maybe they’ve been waiting for me.  I shall prick them out, as I think it is called, tomorrow and give them space to grow.

Then Ruth rings up and says “Do you mind if I don’t ask you about your trip and all that but tell you about something weird that’s just happened?” and I laugh and bless her from the bottom of my heart.  I so want to hear about the weird thing.  She’d been with Jacob at Leichhardt Mall and seen a man in black track pants carrying two guns.  She called the police. “Was I stupid?  He was probably a security guard”  I absolutely agree with what she did.  Whoever he was, carrying two guns was over the top, especially in these troubled times where it takes next to nothing to scare us.. Indeed it’s more indecent than being stark naked which would immediately bring the law down upon you.  She was right to call the police.

We arrange for her to come round with the kids in the afternoon and it is so good to see them – Jacob, who is six, making adult remarks as usual and Ethan, now three rather mute and baleful towards me.  He’s still of an age to take offence at grandmothers going away for extended periods.  I marvel at how much children change their characters.  Not so long ago Ethan was the epitome of sunny joyousness with not a complicated thought in his head.  Now for some reason he sneaks into the cutlery drawer and tries to get away with two cheese knives.  What is he thinking, I wonder.  Both kids go off and discover some cardboard tubes for posting maps and such.  Jacob comes back with his arms stuffed in two of them and talking like a robot.  “But you’ve got no hands” we cry in mock distress. Still in a robotic monotone he says “I am a robot with a human inside me. I have hands.”  I am touched by his need to reassure us.  Ethan comes in half dressed and also with tubes on his arms and won’t let us repair his disheveled state.  Eventually we get the tubes off them both with glorious farty noises and they all head off.

As I shut the front door I see a plane in the sky presumably full of people like me.  I am so glad  to be back, up close and personal with my world and the people and plants in it.  I don’t like the sense of perspective that travel curses me with, the knowledge that I am a speck on the globe which is itself a speck in the universe.  Who needs to know?  Myopia is a blessing and thank god I haven’t got to go anywhere else for a bit.  Just get the shepherd’s pie made and put the peelings in the compost heap.