Back to school

"You sound like a French-from-France!"

To most English speakers this would be a compliment, right? Coming from my 11-year-old stepson it is a stab to my heart, a soul-crushing blow, the most scathing of put-downs. Around here the French-from-France don't speak the True French. They are fickle followers of fashion, blithe spirits who do not care for tradition, who do not know the Old Ways. Québécois is the True French. Except when it borrows from English. Or a First Nations language. Or it had to make up a word to describe something unique to the New World. Or it uses the informal "tu" form of address with wild abandon. But let's not get picky now!

To someone who has had exposure to French-from-France—moi, for example—it is also a terrifyingly daunting dialect. Similarly causing, I'm sure, the kind of fear that must strike an English learner when they encounter a Scots accent, a Deep Southern US accent, or a broader-than-broad, closed-mouth, Far North Queensland accent. But here I am in Montréal, having just braved the joual of Témiscamingue, and today I started niveau 3 (level 3) of my cours de francisation.

I'm now at the Centre Saint-Louis, much closer to home after three and a bit months at the Centre Lartigue. These classes are run and heavily subsidised by the Commission scolaire de Montréal, via the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Immigration also offers classes, but after a spectacular fail at fulfilling their own KPIs, I wound up in the care of the Education Minister.

It's an incredible deal: a $70 administration fee per six months, plus $10 per level for the textbook. For that you get 20 hours per week of professional, immersion French classes. As I wrote: incredible!

I won't lie, I have found it very challenging going back to study almost full time. Twenty contact hours of foreign language learning by immersion leaves you pretty shattered for several extra hours on top of that per week. It's not the work per se; I'm doing very well. (Thank you home tutors!) But being a povvo student after years of full-time work is very challenging. My Aries moon is also always very impatient to just get on with things, and I want to master it all NOW, and I want to be back at work NOW! (I'm not saying these are attractive qualities I admire in myself, but it is a personality trait I am constantly battling to overcome.) I am continually taking stock and reminding myself that most of the known universe dreams of "taking a year off to learn French." Reason vs Wonder again!

So, now on my second institution, I am also on my fourth school venue. Some of the buildings have been beautiful—evocative and even anachronistic. Others have been coldly utilitarian. We've seen chalk dust and felt erasers, wall-mounted pencil sharpeners, wall charts and maps, linoleum, and even PCs running Windows XP.

It really feels like I am back at school.

 

Which word is the hardest to say?

Which word is the hardest word to say in the English language? Is it sorry? Or is it goodbye?

I have been having a few teary goodbyes in the last few weeks, three of them at airports (always especially tricky) but this evening was my official going away gathering in Cairns and there were so many goodbyes to be had at once. So many good people - good friends - such uncertainty as to when we would be together again. Tonight is also my last night in my house, dear Mavis Blue, and tomorrow I put my two cats on a plane, consigning them to stress and fear for four days until Charles collects them in Montreal. I have offset this all with the remembrance of how hard it has been the eight times Charles and I have had to say goodbye at the airport, unsure of when exactly we would see each other again.

The hardest goodbye so far, however, is still not even over. I have a very special friend. He is 11 years old. He is high functioning autistic. We spend a lot of time together and tonight, even though I will stay with him and his parents for the next two nights before I leave Cairns, he cried his heart out for 30 minutes at my going away party and it broke my heart. I have been so strong and excited until now, but this was quietly devastating. The most positive spin I can put on the experience was to rejoice that he was able to actually articulate his feelings, and rationalise about how he knew I would still love him from afar and how happy I was going to be when I got to be with Charles all the time. That is a major communication for him and he was so clear about it all. I was very proud of him, but at the same time I was gutted. Sorry may be hard to get out of your mouth, but the pain of goodbye can last long after the word is spoken.

Resistance is useless

Image: BBC

When I was young, Doctor Who was on the ABC every weeknight before the news. I loved it, but like so many other children, it scared the bejesus out of me. I probably saw more of the palms of my hands than the television screen and, yes, I did resort to the cliché of hiding behind the couch. Looking at the hyper-realistic costumes above it is clear why I would have been so terrified!

My segue here is fear. Fear and the bizarre effect it can have on us.

This week has been enormous. On the weekend I realised that a recent Australian interest rate cut meant that renting my house was a viable Plan B if it didn't sell in the near future. Ergo: I no longer have to wait for the house to sell before moving to Canada. Tuesday night and Wednesday morning I booked my flights. Today I resigned from my job. The really fun part was finding a flight that allows for a stopover in Tokyo. The hardest part was pressing the button to commit to buying the first flight; I must have sat there for nearly ten minutes, aware that that one action would push me past the point of no return. On the flipside I know from bitter experience that an international flight can increase by hundreds of dollars in the course of a couple of hours, so I was also nervous that if I didn't commit this week - that day - I'd lose the one reasonably priced combination I'd been able to find for the month-long window of departure dates I'd been searching. Up until then all the one way flight connections I'd seen were more than my entire return ticket to Montréal in February.

Yet there I was, a woman with a fully formed, timed and costed-out plan and a husband to get to, hesitating. A whole new, exciting world of experiences and opportunities lies before me, with a gorgeous man to lie beside me, and yet the chatter in my brain, the resistance to letting go of my current life, the sheer physical difficulty in pressing-the-goddam-button-already, was astounding. I was paralysed with fear in the face of enormous change, despite the fact that the change is something I want so very badly. In the end, obviously, I gave myself a mental slap across the face, came to, and just pressed the bloody button!

Today I drove into work knowing that, again, an irrevocable action was about to take place. I feel a deep sense of loyalty to my organisation and I love my co-workers dearly, I feel bad about leaving them at a difficult time in the face of sector funding cuts and a tough art market. Telling my boss, in fact, was nowhere near as bad as telling my co-workers, even though we've all known this day would come for quite a while. Still, I had heart palpitations when I made an office-wide announcement.

But why? Why, with the prospect of moving to a major international city full of art and culture and good food, and where they speak both French and English, to be with the man you love, could there ever be a hesitation? I get to reboot my life completely, transferring across only those files I choose (though no doubt there'll be a few lurking Trojans!) Every time I get a heart pang at the thought of leaving my house, every time I fear that I'll be unemployed for the rest of my life, every time I see a Ulysses butterfly and wonder if that will be the last one I ever see, should and will be a time to get excited about all the new things that are to come and that could never happen here, will never happen if I stay. I won't be too hard on myself if I catch myself grieving, but I will reprimand myself if I find I am getting resentful of the reasons Charles can't come back here, or if I am clinging too hard to things that are ultimately of lesser importance – tin foil and pipe cleaners all of it, just like the costumes in the image above. Because resistance to change, fear of change, can make you hide behind the couch even when you are a grown up.


P.S. Unlike a number of my friends, I haven't been able to get into the latest incarnations of Doctor Who and its offshoots. I haven't watched a full episode since the fifth Doctor.

The agonisings of an unrequited love

Dear Mavis Blue,

I am so sorry. I thought we'd be together for a very long time. In fact, I thought at one point that I might grow old with you. But life has a funny way of taking unexpected turns, and mine will soon take me a long way away from you. And you, being so set in your ways, cannot follow.

There are still so many things I would have liked to do with you: install a rainwater tank, more plantings in your garden, polishing all your floorboards afresh, replacing your remaining original ceilings, doing more about the Wet Season drainage. And there are things about you, too, that scare me: the eventual yet inevitable restumping and the re-laying of your concrete slab, what to do with the enormous Cuban Royal palm in the garden that all the neighbours want cut down but that I love like a crazy person.

In the end I choose my husband over you, as I choose him over all other things in my life. Within that choice though, I must decide whether I keep some connection with you, stringing you along, kidding us both that we may one day be reunited, or that I cut that string, freeing you up to meet someone new who will love you and care for you as I will not be able to do from the other side of the world.

Of all the ties I cut, yours will be the hardest - I am a Cancerian through and through. But it must be done, and for that I am sorry.  

I will miss you.
Beverley


This week I have been in a housework frenzy. I have a co-worker house-sitting for me while I go away next month and the tentative start to the Wet Season has seen blossoms of mould bursting forth on the ceilings, walls and architraves of my 75 year-old Queenslander like so many rose buds in spring. It's a Tropics thing, we get used to it. Kind of. I've been up close and personal with the interior with bleach, spray bottle and bucket in hand, making things nice for visitors again, and while I've been labouring I've had time to contemplate just what exactly I am going to do with this house when I move to Canada sometime later this year.

I've owned this home for a little over four years. It is my first foray into real estate. Buying my own home was something I had wanted for years, almost a decade. I was so proud of my achievement when I bought her, and also crazy shit-scared! I bought her in 2008 when the magnitude of the GFC was just beginning to become apparent here. The previous owner only had her as an investment property and just wanted to get rid of her quickly so he could buy something else. I joked at the time that I stole a house, I had paid much less than was common at that time. Unfortunately, Cairns real estate not only stagnated, its value has gone backwards over the last few years. Agents make valiant claims of a comeback soon, but I know in my heart that if I sold her now I would only get about the amount she was valued at in late 2010 and I have spent $14,000 on a new bathroom since.

I also know I am never coming back to Cairns. Even when (if?) I return to Australia, I will not be coming back here. I will be heading down south, closer to my family and most of my friends. My dilemma, obviously, is whether to keep the house or sell her. While a couple of friends have their hand up to move in, I couldn't charge in rent the full amount of my weekly mortgage repayments. That in itself is scary since I don't know when I will start working once I get to Canada. But even now, when I live with her and love her on a daily basis, there are times when I find myself petulantly resenting the sacrifices I have to make to service my mortgage. Some days it feels like entrapment. When I crunch the numbers, as I am doing with increasing frequency, all maths points to selling and accepting actually making a loss when I consider how much I have spent on renovations and mortgage repayments. Further losses may result otherwise. There are only two things that count against that: the gambler's eternal optimism that the market will improve in the next few years, and total, unmitigated sentiment. The trouble is, I love this house. Oops!

My stepmother, always a beacon of rationality in any financial storm, once sagely counselled: "Never fall in love with your house." So, Reason, where are you? I need you on this one. But Mavis Blue just has her charms, and few seem immune to them. She feels like a holiday house. Every day. She is private, and breezy, has pretty light, and French doors, and just the right amount of charmingly flaking paint (if you are into that sort of thing). And she is the most magnificent shade of blue. It is immediately calming. Every time I think of selling her I feel a wrenching in my heart.

Charles and I will sit down together while I am in Montréal and run the sums again and talk about what is and isn't possible. From 16,000km away it will be easier to make a rational decision.

I should have listened to my stepmother.

Si tu m'aimes

 

Jean Sablon, source: fantomas-en-cavale.tumblr.com

I'm not going to do this too often - foist my taste in music upon you. It may be because I don't get as obsessed about music as I did in my teens and twenties, but also I'm probably foisting enough of my other opinions on you, too! I'll give you a break.

Just not today.

This post is about a song I have been trying to find online for years: Si tu m'aimes (If you love me) by Jean Sablon. On the weekend I had a garage sale and I sold the LP that I first found this track on to one very happy collector from Townsville. Don't ask me the price - Charles just had conniptions over it. The following morning I woke up with seller's regret over this - well, this and a few other newly-dispersed former possessions - but this I could remedy. I thought surely by now this was online. And, finally, I was right.

This song has always made me think of walking along an old street on a summer's night. A French street, of course. This is just the sort of track I imagine to be playing from a second storey window in an otherwise quiet and empty neighbourhood. I love the lilting piano, and Sablon was known as the French Bing Crosby, though I have heard a track of his where he pays out on that sound, hamming it up for comic effect. Anyway, this is lovely and romantic and very of an era. My personal French translator, aka my husband, Charles, says that the song is about a man warning his flirty paramour not to blow it all by unthinkingly and irredeemably hurting him. I love the last line:

Et que le bonheur suprême est fragile aux mains des imprudents.
And supreme happiness is fragile in the hands of the careless.

Please indulge me to share it with you, the link below should download it for you, it's only 3 little MBs. If you loved me you would ...

http://archive.org/download/JeanSablon-SiTuMaimes1936/JeanSablon-SiTuMaimes1936.mp3

Dude! That was, like ... whoa!

Sometimes things really are all they are cracked up to be ...

Some items on my personal list of such things are the miracle of birth, Uluru and the Roman Forum. This morning I added another one: a total eclipse of the sun.

This morning at around 6:39am we had a total eclipse of the sun here in Cairns. As the photographic evidence shows, my camera equipment is not quite up to the task of documenting such an event, but please indulge me. Being the build up to the Wet Season, it was also really cloudy here in Cairns itself. Apparently it was clear about 60kms south and on the northern beaches, about 20kms away. While I could, in theory, see the sun from my front deck, I was pretty convinced I was going to miss the actual moment of totality due to the cloud cover. The quality of light, however, was just incredible. If it is possible for grey to glow, it did this morning. I went and stood out by the creek in the middle of the street and I had the whole eerie place to myself.

As it got darker and darker in the minutes before totality, the street lights started to come on and a few neighbours finally wandered out. Then, click, the sun went out, but also at that moment it popped out from behind the clouds. Totality was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And, just like when I first saw Uluru, I was awestruck and, in response to all I've ever seen or heard of it, could only manage to think the words: It is true!

It takes about an hour from the time the moon first touches on the edge of the sun to totality, then about another hour until it has fully passed off it. As luck would have it, about 10 minutes after totality the clouds had thinned significantly as the morning warmed and the sun had also risen above the thickest part of them. I was able to watch the remaining 50 minutes or so as the moon passed off the face of the sun through my flimsy yet surprisingly effective special eclipse viewing glasses ($5 to $6 a pop this week for something that looks remarkably like an old-fashioned pair of 3D viewing glasses). I almost think it was better with the cloud cover, either way was just as remarkable.

If you ever get the chance to see this phenomenon, even if you have to travel a way, go!

 

If it ain't broke...

"Listen up.
The 'universe' DOES NOT CARE about you, okay?
It doesn't try and 'tell' you things or reward or punish you for anything.
It just doesn't give a F#$%! It can't! It's a universe... not your f#$%in' mamma. Alright?!
Thank you." - GDD, former housemate, now long-distance Facebook friend, Facebook post 2012, initials used to protect anonymity.


Every once in a while you get a moment to yourself to pause and reflect on the true nature of the Universe. For me that chance came a couple of days ago as I was rolling around in agony at the bottom of my back stairs.

I was having an incredibly productive day, of the type I haven't had since before my back went dicky. I'd just had my medical and X-rays for my permanent residency application to Canada, I'd had two sales on Etsy, and I'd finally gotten around to buying a new printer after hours of painstaking research. I'd even taken myself out for brunch at Caffiend and had their truly wonderful fetta and basil omelette. It was a benchmark day in my recovery. Life was good. 

I'd popped home to package up the Etsy sales and drop off the printer, then I'd planned to do a run to the post office, then the op shop to try to restock for Etsy, pick up the X-rays and deliver them to the GP, and then do a supermarket shop. Busy, busy, busy! As I headed out I stopped near the bottom of the back stairs to add one last thing to my shopping list on my phone, and then I stepped off... 

Except I wasn't on the bottom stair as I thought, was I? No, I was on the second or third, and I stepped off into the void and went crashing down, landing with a sickening crunch on my right ankle while my phone smashed face first into the concrete. As I lay there trying to breathe through the pain—watching my ankle imitate a tetchy puffer fish and running through the checklist of "Is it a sprained ankle, or a broken ankle?"—I contemplated that I may have been done in again by a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for. 

Now I'll confess that in my younger days I used to be a bit of a hippy-dippy, esoteric, New Agey thinker, but I got over that. Reason has won that contest, though on occasion Wonder still tries to put her two cents' worth in. I don't believe that 'everything happens for a reason'. In fact, that's a platitude guaranteed to send me into a boiling rage. But I have observed that sometimes if you really want something to happen, it does. Hence you have to be careful what you wish for.

I'm not advocating 'wishcraft' or any of that Law of Attraction hoo-doo, I'm far more inclined to think that wanting something to happen makes you much more receptive to noticing when it does, and probably also makes you act in subtle ways to bring it about. But what I'm taking an awfully long time to get to is that, in my experience, if you are really putting it out there that you want something to happen you had better be specific—like make, model and serial number of desire—because otherwise it tends to come back to you any which way and you must wryly concede that you got what you wished for, just maybe not quite under the most ideal of circumstances. I'm talking getting fired when you hate your job but you haven't yet got anything else lined up, that person you've been crushing on turning out to be a dick once you are dating them or else confessing their true feelings the minute you've given up and started seeing someone else, that sort of thing. In this particular instance I have been very strongly focusing on how I wish I could have several days to work from home because I have so much written material to generate and I'm getting interrupted every five minutes in the office and can't concentrate, and, as is well documented on this here blog, I am really not loving my Android phone and miss my iPhone, particularly since Bek introduced me to Camera+ the other day, which like Hipstamatic is not available for Android users. Amazingly, my phone still works, even though its screen looks like a spider's web.

So, here I am, proving that is is in fact possible to limp with both feet (gosh, I must get around to explaining about that left leg!), trying to keep my fat, sprained right ankle elevated, compressed and/or iced as much as possible and contemplating either a replacement phone screen or the purchase of a second new phone in the space of six months (aaaargh!).

Not-so-lucky duck

I know I really should be posting about my truly delightful wedding to my truly wonderful new husband, but this evening, now that I have a minute to write again, I am inspired by something a little sad.

You see, there was this duck...

There is a creek that runs down the centre of my street. A couple of weeks ago one of my neighbours asked in a Facebook message if I had seen the new duck that was hanging out in the creek. There are a lot of native waterbirds that forage along the grassy verge, but I hadn't seen a duck. I made a joke in reply about how lucky it was for the duck that I hadn't seen it, since those who know me know I am a pretty enthusiastic consumer of the little dears.

Then I saw it. It was huge! Seriously, its body was about the size of a goose, but it was definitely a black and white duck. It was not even a Muscovy, because, you know, those suckers get big. No, there was no red wattle or anything like that, just a very pretty, very big, black and white, domesticated duck.

I saw it a few times and wondered what its story was - how it came to be all alone in the big (pfft!) city. But, well, we were getting married that week and then we went off to Fitzroy Island with the kids for a few days afterwards and I forgot about it. Then, a couple of days after Charles and the kids had gone back to Canada, I was driving my beautiful bridesmaid, Morgan, to the airport at an ungodly hour of the morning. It was still dark when I got home and as I turned into the street I saw the duck by the creek in the headlights, awake and scared by the light and obviously feeling vulnerable. My heart went out to it and I knew at that moment that it had once felt safe in someone's yard and now it was trying to be a big brave duck and not doing so well at it. I resolved to try to adopt it.

I spent the next couple of days keeping an eye out for it, checking up and down the street, thinking maybe I could herd it into my well-fenced yard and then it would have plenty of safe spots to roost. I'd get it a kiddie pool, the cats would befriend it, I wouldn't cook any more duck at home, and we'd all live happily ever after. I told Charles about it in a Skype session and he laughed his head off at me: "A duck? 'Safe'? At your house?" Um, yes, well, I realise that, on paper, my house would have to be one of the least safe places for a duck to be, but I've never actually killed one myself. Anyway, I couldn't find the duck.

This evening I drove to a friend's house just on dark. Coming up to a T junction three blocks from home, by another creek and the local shopping centre, I saw some red clothing on the road, a t-shirt or something, and I swerved around it. As I stopped at the T a four-wheel drive to my right slowed down and swerved around what I assumed to be another bundle of clothes, black and white. "Hello", I thought. "Someone's lost half their back pack of clothes." As I turned into the road and drove past the lump I realised the lump had feathers. "What the hell? Did someone's chicken escape?", I wondered. Having seen the 4WD swerve I thought I would do the citizenly thing and go and move it off the road because things were going to get ugly real quick on a road as moderately busy as that one. I did a U-ey and went back and as I pulled up I actually said aloud, "Oh, no! It's the duck!" And it was. I just knew it was freshly dead, too, since it hadn't been squashed yet. I felt so sad for it. I got out and grabbed some things from the boot to roll it off the road with. There were three young 'lads' on the other side of the creek watching me: the kind of teenage boy that in this neighbourhood probably would have tried to rob me and steal my car if they'd been on my side of the creek. In my sadness I called out to them since they were clearly following the drama from a distance:
"Did you see it get hit?"
"Yeah."
"Did it just happen?"
"Yeah. What is it?"
"A duck."
"Oh..."
Followed, in my grief, by the life story of the duck as I knew it, told as I rolled it to the gutter. My parting words to the boys were:
"Pity, it'd probably be really yummy!"
"Are you gonna eat it?"
"(Sigh!) No!!!!"
Mind you, once they suggested it, I thought about it for a second and decided I probably couldn't bear to gut and pluck it. It's a sickness, I'm sure!

So there you have it. The sad demise of one scared duck that boy, oh, boy, don't I wish I'd been able to find earlier in the week now, or that I'd left the house 10 minutes earlier so I would have seen it wandering on the road and somehow managed to herd it to safety. Mind you, given the poor visibility and the speed people drive on that road it probably would have resulted in me lying on the ground with my insides spilling out a little instead. But, please, in light of this, spare a thought for all the lost, abandoned and wayward creatures in your town that might need some care and attention. The charities I choose to support are invariably animal-related: for some reason I am much more emotional about and empathetic towards dumb animals than sentient humans when I am asked to dig deep. I can't even begin to analyse how I can be sad for the death of one duck, yet happy to eat others.

PS This post is also a cover for the fact that my last grandfather died this week. I'm not really going to go there online, so let's just concentrate on the duck for now, shall we?