The old man wakes way before dawn. He reads for a while. He researches Tang Band full range speaker drivers, but only briefly. The galahs awake in the trees outside. The skies pinken. He watches a bit of the news on ABC 24 using his iPad. He allows his daughter to have first access to the shower so she can spend all the time she needs to get ready to set off for a day at university. While she’s showering he tidies the kitchen a bit whilst looking forward to the warm trickling waters from the shower-head. She finishes in the shower. The sleeping wife springs from the mattress and enters the shower while his back is briefly turned. Oh the cruel irony of it all. Another week starts. Unwashed.
It’s almost 5am. My cup of tea is cooling to a tolerable temperature.
I know that as we age we need less sleep, but 11pm until 12:14 … that’s just silly!
Still, I got some thinking done – about art, about subjective and objective perception of time, about the Church and its failures, about love … once I’d have thought about sex, but I don’t care enough anymore to do so.
The remarkable activity that is blogging allows us to share the wonders of our wisdom with all those people out there, wherever they may be – wonders that they may have spent their whole lives not knowing they had missed.
For instance, just this morning I got into the shower with my spectacles on. Oh, those first few moments of panic, when you think “have I gone blind?”– “is this the way the world ends?” Like Lou Reed would say, “O, O, O, O, O, O, O, what a feeling!”
Now here we are at 7am. It’s February – the hottest month (except it’s not – that was December and January this season). Yes, the hottest month was two months. Sweating on top of hot sheets in the gentle breezes of the quietly humming fan. I sweat and twitch, too well bred to exercise weakness of character by turning on the air-conditioner.
Besides, with the air-conditioner working, the windows would be closed, and who can sleep with the windows closed? – with the walls pressing in in the darkness – with the night taking on a threatening solidity, unknown ghosts of midnight invading and whispering and chuckling in the closed oppressive gloom – who could sleep in such darkness?
The galahs were disturbed all night last night – quarrelling sleepily in the trees. Even the birds are tired of Summer changes. It’s the changing climate you know.
I might pop out soon for coffee and breakfast. Even in times of uncertainty there are cafes. “O, O, O, O, O, O, O, what a feeling!”
Even Bo Derek Only Scored 10! (me waiting for coffee photographed by my Joy)
Sun and roses through pink lace curtains. Honeyeaters and parrots. Blue sky and light breezes. My 6am tea is cold now, but I don’t care. Monday morning with birds.
The rough-sleeping man, tall and bearded, is back in town.
He’s hoping for coffee.
Possibly he is hoping for money, but I think he believes me when I say I don’t keep cash around – it’s true.
I give him two cartons of chocolate Get-Up And Go milk drink, two packs of breakfast biscuits, and a pair of socks.
Year after year he is back.
He says that he has been going through rough times – and I am sure he has. But it is his life – his career … I think now that he actually likes rough times. Spare him a prayer.
But “Lead me not into temptation” – keep your doors locked, lest you get him into trouble.
No chorus yet – just a distant pair of carolling magpies, black and white in a monotone pre-dawn.
Foxings 