Blog 11 - Wednesday 10 January – For Anne and Coco

The grey pencil is finally blunt, and a bright yellow one scribbles its glory across the heavens — but this does not stop my getting up to mischief.

I send Moo Hefner a text saying it’s nice to have spent the best part of my life dreaming and building a house for strange children. He replies, “I can see how that might irk.” He excuses the presence of strange children by saying the boyfriend of the mother of these children, Manfred, “gives me good assistance with the problems with my properties — which, as you are aware, are not small. I’m not going to dictate what social media activity other people post.”

I suspect Moo Hefner’s new girlfriend is sending these texts in between selling insurance to the good citizens of Timaru and making him Tip Top white bread sandwiches filled with iceberg lettuce, pulpy tomatoes with cores, and mayonnaise made with Highlander sweetened condensed milk.

Mum comes into my room saying, “I have a confession to make.”

I cannot bring myself to confess about my shameless texting and listen generously to Mum confess — “I have not replaced our porridge. Muesli or cornflakes?” I pass on the muesli, thinking of pebbles in drainpipes.

I tell Mum I am dissolute, and she says, “You’re not at all.” I look up dissolute, and it means overindulging in sensual practices. We eat our cornflakes with a dash of plum, apple, and cherry, and Mum says the new strain of Covid is spreading happily and suggests I put a little rubber band around my cornflakes pack.

We listen to the news in slow French. The Oxford Dictionary has announced the new word for 2022 is goblin mode. This slang word is a neologism for the rejection of societal expectations and the act of living in an unkempt, hedonistic manner without concern for one’s self-image — in other words, exhibiting behaviour that is openly selfish, lazy, and greedy. It was almost unanimous in its approval rating.

Charley bursts in with the exuberance of a Springer Spaniel. “Happucino” (his name for Mum), “I have been to the Mokohinau Islands with Matt and Gus.” Mum gets out her atlas while Charley says, “You’re not going to believe this, Happucino, but for nearly one hundred years (from 1890 to 1980) men lived on these islands just to shine a light at passing ships.” Mum replies matter-of-factly that she does believe it, as Elise (her mother) used to teach at the correspondence school and some of her pupils were the children of lighthouse keepers.

Charley says that these lighthouse keepers discovered all sorts of insect species unique to these islands while waiting for ships to flash their lights at.

He says the Māori would go in their canoes for ten hours to these islands to kill the muttonbirds that nested on the cliffs, and Mum says that being hungry sharpens the intellect.

Charley says, “Happucino, as you leave these islands and look back, they have disappeared — as if they never were.”

Mum and I have agreed to work together on a letter to a builder who I think would be a great mentor for Gus. I think it will be a simple text, but Mum thinks I need to write it down on paper, leave it overnight, then look at it again tomorrow. I start typing on my phone, and she gets up quietly and moves out of the room, saying, “I really don’t think I should get involved in these things.” Then she comes back. “Darling, that’s just my observation. Don’t involve me. I always give you a lesson, but you and I are so different. You’re bound to think that. I’ll check how many potatoes we have — that’s the sort of down-to-earth thing I do.”

My friend Anne, who I swim with three times a week, comes to visit. I ask her how her Christmas was. She says, “My three boys came for lunch. I cooked the lunch. They ate the lunch. They left. I did the dishes, ate some chocolate, then said to Coco (her British Blue cat), ‘I’m going to put the Christmas wreath away early,’ and Coco and I took it off the front door.”

She tells Mum she knows the daughter of the doctor who delivered me. “Doctor Kidd!” Mum exclaims.

“Ash was in such a rush to be born they had to knock me out with chloroform till Dr Kidd arrived, still pulling on his pants.”

I have heard this story so many times but think it’s a long shot to cite rejection at my first tentative attempt to say hello world as an excuse for my multitude of shortcomings.

Anne brings chocolate and flowers as pretty as herself. The chocolate has dried fruit sprinkled on it. Mum says, “They just got an ordinary block and tarted it up.”

Anne leaves, thanking me for giving her a book about a doctor who pushes his wife off a cliff, and says this book has made her discover reading again.

A little giraffe has been born at the zoo. It is six feet tall and drinks six litres of milk a day — and has been rejected by its mother. I am sad, but Mum doesn’t see why. She is simply curious. “I wonder why its mother rejected it,” she says as she pops some sausage, cabbage, and mashed potato into her mouth.

She then tells me about a time she took her eldest grandchild to the adventure playground. “I said to Mahoney, ‘Don’t go on the jungle gym as it had a high fireman’s pole,’ and what did Mahoney do? She went on the jungle gym and down the fireman’s pole. Then she said to me, ‘See, Danana, I went down the fireman’s pole all by myself and I didn’t hurt myself.’

‘You did,’ I replied, ‘but I asked you not to.’”

“Ash, you see, at some point you’ve got to say it’s the child who’s lucky, not the parents.

Darling, you mustn’t romanticise — that is folly. Look life in the face. You need flexibility to rethink as things dim with age. We can’t weigh things forever and ever, amen.”

We watch The Wild Blue and agree that animals should be left in peace with their world. We ask what it is we are searching for as we take our disgraceful selves into the galaxy. Can we be proud that our time in history is known as the Anthropocene era — defined by a footprint so heavy that for the first time in billions of years we have stained the world? Only our shared humanity can save us, but Mum says we will never have the tolerance of others that we need to save ourselves — and I must not put bread in the compost that the gardener puts out on the curb every two weeks.