A student of nuance, he is interested in the hinges, not the door. A door is just a wall without hinges, without the fluid, moving parts.
Let the students of metaphysics see everything as a lock and a key, let the practical folk design and build better doors and locks. Let the artists make the doors more beautiful. The student of nuance is only interested in the subtle movement that alters reality.
Parkstreet
Was she a local?
Damn right she was a local.
Allow me to explain how local she was.
One evening, just before sunset, she told me to don my thickest scarf and come out for a walk with her. It wasn’t that cold, but she rarely wasted words, so I fetched my scarf and followed her down the stairs from our little flat and out onto the street.
She led me down a lane which turned into a slender path between old blocks of flats, onto and across the beach road, through the park, round the back of the yacht club. There was a party on at the yacht club. She saw my eyes light up, shook her head, took my hand and guided me out onto the pier.
The scarf suddenly made sense. It was cold out there.
We wandered to the end of the pier, as far as I’d gone before, but she led me around the back of the kiosk and onto the marina wall. We climbed down onto the large rocks that held the waves of the bay at bay, sat down and looked out at the water.
She produced a sneaky joint from a denim jacket inside pocket. We smoked and snuggled.
As the sun set our eyes adjusted to the dark. I saw a small movement on the rocks below us, she squeezed my hand and held a finger to her lips. We sat in glorious silence as two tiny penguins hopped and fumbled their way up the rocks. They passed right beside her. She could have reached out and touched them.
An hour later, after we’d scrambled back up to the top of the wall, started walking back down the pier, I thanked her, a hundred times, for such an experience. I remarked on how close the penguins had come to her, still amazed.
“They know me”, she said.
That’s how local she was.
For Jacqueline Elizabeth Scanlon
Parkstreet
He started making origami boats. He needed something to distract him, something to do with his hands.
Large squares of coloured paper, really for children, but suitable for his large, clumsy fingers, turned into cheerful boats at his kitchen table. Why not boats? They seemed the simplest shape to begin with.
He took one in when he visited his mother, with the usual butterscotch and chocolate. She was delighted by it, delighted that he’d made it, delighted that he’d brought it to her.
So he took one with him whenever he visited, until the windowsill and the top of the fridge were covered by boats, until the ceiling fan blew boats around the room in summer, until the staff found a vast glass bowl to be filled with brightly coloured origami boats, a potpourri of the love of a son.
One day she was holding one of the boats when he came in. She wasn’t really sure who he was by then. She just knew that he brought the boats.
“I’ll have to go soon. On a boat. Will I have to go alone?”
“You will”, he said honestly, “but I’ll be here to see you away safely, so don’t worry”.
“And everyone will be there to meet you when you arrive, so you’ll only be alone for a moment”, he lied.
He had no idea what would happen once she sailed away, he just knew that part of seeing her off was telling her this comforting lie.
She pointed to the bowl full of boats. “What will happen to those?”, she asked.
“I’ll look after them.”
“That’s good. I’ve been worried about them.”
She closed her eyes.
He resisted the urge to call the nurse, watched the origami boat fall from her fingers.
Parkstreet
The young Deubussy,
Kicking a ball
Against a wall
While singing random notes
From a whole tone scale
To himself,
Unaware
Of his own
Genius.
Parkstreet
Our restaurant closed early, I can’t recall why. We didn’t care why. We were like school kids given a half day, cleaning up and getting out of there as rapidly as possible.
Somehow it was agreed we were going for supper, the Greek joint up the road. No one said anything, we all just started walking that way. And it was agreed that the boss was paying, despite no one asking her.
We stopped to buy wine on the way. Phil talked me out of my usual wine policy, cheap and lots of it, together we bought something with a price tag and an unlikely label. That label promised a hint of eucalyptus in the wine, we simply had to try it.
When eucalyptus trees are infested by insects they produce an oil that deters the bugs and heals the wounds they inflict. Some of this oil escapes into the air, when other eucalyptus trees sense it they begin producing the same oil to protect themselves.
Eucalyptus trees talk to each other.
Their means of communication, oil, is one of the reasons these trees are so susceptible to fire, but all language is dangerous.
Phil and I, both waiters, both armed with Waiters Friend corkscrews, I deferred to Phil’s skills and asked him to open our bottle. Boys playing gentlemen, he asked me to pour.
I poured.
We sniffed.
We tasted.
We looked at each other.
The label had not lied to us. There it was, a hint of eucalyptus, some of that oil had settled on the grapes at the right moment, the grapes had been handled expertly, that oil ended up talking to us, joining our table where the boss was flirting with the new kitchenhand and the usually tense chef was laughing along with everyone and the staff of the restaurant we’d occupied like cheerful bees were joining in the joy, adding their own jokes and japes. Everyone was spreading the good oil.
I fell silent. I’d read a lot about wine, drunk plenty, but I’d never felt a deeper understanding of it before. The incredible series of connections, thousands of years of improving grape stock, hundreds of years of improving wine making, vines carried carefully to a new world, that new world making the wine its own, that wine telling me of an ancient line of trees who spent their lives silently speaking to each other, speaking of insects and who knew what else? Do gum trees feel love? Do gum trees write poetry? Do they sing?
Phil turned to me, “you alright mate?”.
I smiled, told him, “I’m fine, I’m listening, I’m drinking gum tree words”.
Parkstreet
Dora joined me for coffee this morning.
Back in the 1960s, half a century ago, Dora had the shop next door on this small lane, laundry and dry cleaning.
She told me of a young man coming to pick up a dry cleaned suit, but without his ticket.
It was a nice suit.
Turned out the fellow had lent his Sunday best to a mate, so a wedding could be attended. The mate had done the right thing, kept the suit in one piece, dropped it in for dry cleaning first thing Monday morning on his way to work, but he’d never picked it up again.
It was a very nice suit.
Dora wanted to hand over the coat hanger with pressed jacket and trousers on it to the young man at the counter, but she had to be reassured it was his, why couldn’t he just ask his friend for the ticket?
That suit was so nice that it had led to the mate meeting a sweet bridesmaid. The sweet bridesmaid had neglected to inform him she was married to a local gangster. The apartment where the ticket was sitting in a fruit bowl on the kitchen bench was a crime scene, the resident had been stabbed to death by an unknown intruder.
The young man only owned one suit, he had to attend a funeral that weekend, just the same Dora felt uncomfortable with him walking away with the compromised ensemble. She asked him to think about it overnight, to come back the next day if he still wanted it back.
A year later Dora donated a very nice suit to a church jumble sale.
She said, “clothes make the man”, finished her coffee, wandered off down Llankelly Place, peering into her old shop on her way, but not before apologising for boring me with her old stories.
Dora is a great artist.
Parkstreet