Penelope Todd

First, there was high tea at the high table in the Hippopotamus Room for the BNZ Literary Awards. (This article highlights Chiao Lin, the young writer I chose as winner of her section. Too typically, she is under-mentioned elsewhere.)

From Wellington, Kate and I hit the road. Pretty much the first thing I did was throw my whole, hot cup of coffee over the car floor. (Sorry, Kate!)

Nevertheless, Kate shared hers.

Craig drove us up the narrow Wanganui River road. The roadsides were studded with goats and pigs. We saw no one on the hour-and-a-half- trip in to Hiruharama — Jerusalem.

We were on the lookout for James K’s grave. Someone said he was buried on the riverbank somewhere. Kate got a bit close to the riverbank. We decided not to carry on over the old swing bridge with missing teeth. (Thanks for a lovely time, Kate!)

Next day I tried to fly home and made it as far as Christchurch. The day after, I sat in the falling dark and stared at the little plane ready to fly me south.

My prayer for a cancellation was answered.

I flew home 24 hours later. Hardly a bump.

Today I was remembering Can Serrat as I blogged there about the link with Rosa Mira Books.

In the mail today:

Next week I will shuck off my slippers and therapeutic neckscarf, and scratch about for something that will pass as ‘business attire’, catch a plane to Wellington airport, and thence be professionally driven to the BNZ Literary Awards, where I will add my voice in praise of NZ writing, especially that of some very talented teens.

It’s an odd thing to contemplate from the quiet fastness of this Dunedin living room where I work.

Polly wrote on the footpath this morning.

How’s that for a neat dog?

Then I happened upon Helen Lehndorf’s tantalising Pinterest page, where I spent a few minutes gleaning ‘sartorial inspiration’. I was rather taken with the ‘naughty dog‘ brooch, and created my own, dangling into it Polly’s favourite scoffings.

 

You may have noticed that the things I draw are simple and relatively small. For example, I don’t know how to draw acres, or even square inches, of snow. I was glad to see yesterday that the oaks on the edge of the golf course were holding it in modest handfuls.

Today I had to go a couple of km over the frozen snow so I cut up some old socks and pulled them on over my boots. They made walking possible on the glazed footpath. It was easier to stride along the gritted vehicle tracks.
There were only about six of us in the supermarket — three were staff. Everyone smiled as they passed on the street. We were all creeping, slipping, eyeing the ground ahead.

Long things I have used today:

I took the ski pole walking, just in case, but in fact the socks did the trick.

With the spade, I scraped up snow and tossed it over the deck railing. With the broom, I swept loosened snow into heaps.

With the axe I split medium sized logs into quarters that would actually burn.

The file is the fire poker.

The sock was a surprise. It came up to my knee while the one I know covers only the ankle. I wore both.

The glass holds a refreshing infusion of sage leaves — 5 or 6 young ones steeped in a cup or two of boiling water. Served with a squeeze of lemon juice.

I had to practise a bit to make a budgie that didn’t look like a sparrow or an Easter chick.

If nothing else, I think this one has the cheeky eye.

Noddy used to strut around the dinner table. While we children behaved ourselves and ate quietly, he shrieked and scraped butter straight off the serving dish.

Or he slid down and hung from our hair, to intercept.

Almost 28 years ago we brought our first baby home. Today the last baby is packing his bag to head north. We’ve always had one here with us. How strange the house will feel tonight.

Find a nice big roll of polar fleece.

Ask them to snip you off a small piece. Take it home and measure your dog from stem to stern. Cut your coat according to your cur.

Cut four holes, two quite big and two very small. Sew on two buttons. Cotton calligraphy is optional. Call your dog. Button the coat into place. Alternatively, you can do up the buttons first, then pull it on like a jersey.

Let the dog out one last time while you clean your teeth.

Tell her to go to bed.

Tell her she’s a good girl.

You may now safely turn off the heater and go to bed yourself.

We grew up in a cherry tree — the biggest we’ve ever seen. We knew it by heart, each shiny hand- or foothold on its banded, silver limbs. Its base was a receptacle for children. You pulled yourself up on the shallow stump always leaking amber gum. Then you climbed your chosen route, to the roof, the tyre swing, or simply up. In spring petals snowed over the lawn.

We waited until the cherries were densely freckled with pink before we ate them. They were best nibbled lying on a sunny bed with a roll of ten June and Schoolfriends from the church fair sorted into chronological order.

Before we and the birds had taken them all, our father climbed the tree with a handful of our mother’s stockings.

One evening a week or two later when the stockings had turned greenish, he harvested the cherries.

Talking of stockings, I made my first pony, Sandy Bay. Beige sock, two buttons, brown wool, and a bridle of bias binding.

As you can see, he lived. My heart gave a leap when I thought of him waiting for me in the corner of the bedroom.

Talking of socks, one hot day after school, Jillian and I filled the barrel with water and climbed in.

My brother and his French horn-playing friend John Maurice took away our clothes. John turned up on FB recently. His daughter Renee is a truly remarkable singer.

R tells me a man would not have this dream. I‘m inclined to agree that it’s unlikely

There was a horse race, too, in my dreams, but horses are much harder to draw than sleeping bags, and besides, my horse and I came last. I didn’t really mind. I was just glad I’d managed to stay on.

It’s said that none of us here in the south is getting enough vitamin D for optimum health. You have to spend almost two hours in the wintry sun to garner the daily dose. That’s with skin exposed and, presumably, without Chilean ash cloud subduing the sun’s rays. Thinking to take a good half dose today we set off for the beach. But…

So we went UP, instead. We drove into the fog and out the other side. We found a gravel road running south-north, with the sun upon it. We parked the car and walked.

What there was on the road/side:

I took the last two home with me.

 

Been thinking about thoughts and feelings this weekend. How they feed one another and how much say we have in the direction they take us. Yesterday I woke with the blahs: what on earth am I doing with my days which seem to be running together like watercolours with a wet brush dragged through them? Where’s my enthusiasm for the direction I’ve chosen? Have I taken a wrong turn, and lost the path of Greater Altruism? What about the writing (where is it)? Do I actually like the people I live with? Are we dragging one another down? I mean, why get out of bed today? …

You get my drift? Downwards. Muddy thoughts, murky feelings, running together.

I picked up the little book I pick up (when I remember) at times like this.

Stop it. That’s the basic message. Act. Do something, anything. Remind yourself of your capabilities, and that incapacity starts in the mind. And so does vast capacity. I guess that for someone else the best message would be opposite: go and wallow in a hot bath. Book a ticket to Hyderabad. Meditate and merge with the cosmos. Anyway. Acting works for me. Act by act.

Chopped wood. Dusted the innermost reaches of the bedroom. Said yes when a friend asked me out. Went out.

What I’ve taken for my current vocation took on its former glow of possibility. My housemates improved out of sight. Simple soul that I am, I got happy.

We have to go outside to get to our bedroom, so at least once a night I’m looking up for stars and moon, which makes me wonder about, you know, the space between here and there and beyond, and what the true nature and substance of God and the planets and galaxies might be, whether we are God’s cells, for example, or are alone. Anyway, I find myself reaching up, thinking about higher purposes, and wanting to know what mine is, or yours, if there is such a thing. Wanting the best in me (and you) to shine forth. I want to be fully awake.

(Actually, I don’t look this glamorous at night, as if I’m wearing make-up, and in real life the dressing gown looks more like something I share with the dog.)

Then I get into bed and my thoughts join me down here. I want to be warm, free of aches, to be held (or not), for there to be no earthquakes in Christchurch (or here), for my children to be safe and happy, for there to be enough firewood and food for winter. I want to be lulled to sleep.

Things have been rather subdued today: I, the housemates, the air itself, which was filmy with ash from the Puyehue-Cordon-Caullevol volcano in Chile. Perhaps it’s autumn, now spent (‘having been used and unable to be used again’) and mutely awaiting the next scene…

…which began late this afternoon: darkening skies and clouds racing from the south-west, a keen-edged wind and the rattle of rain at the windows.

That feels more like it: proper winter.

— and every other day,

Polly’s 14 today. That makes her a Gemini: a nosy parker passing comment on every passerby; curious, optimistic, in perpetual motion.

To her three pups was a capable, diligent mother, but melancholy. The hour the last one left home, she sprang back into her favoured role as my convivial, companionable dogsbody.

Today she frolicked up the Pineapple track with the north-easter turning her ears inside out.

Drawing is calming — the chafe of nib on paper — the silent object appearing in its untroubled imperfection. I hope you’ll try it. A fine-nibbed pen helps — giving the picture an air of simplicity and confidence that may or may not originate in the drawer. I use water-colour pencils: colour in, then add spit. Or if you’re organised, water applied with a fine brush.

Inexpertise is liberating. Wonkiness doesn’t matter. Whatever appears now exists.

I had fun in town yesterday. I trotted from shop to shop with a list, buying beautiful things for a friend, with her money. Too easy. I needed only a couple of items myself, chief of which was The Knife. The old Knife had snapped (cutting cheese, the culprit insisted). I was tempted by colourful sheathed Swedish models, and by ranks of gleaming chefs’ ware. But right at the counter, displayed like chewing gum or cigarettes for last-minute purchase was my knife: the neat red-handled, serrated Victorinox for $9. This little machine grips and dices onions without a tear being spilt; it carves through fruit, pumpkin, crusty bread, and flesh — it’s shaved the tip off my thumb already but so cleanly I didn’t notice until later.

I bought winter sheets, too. I let slip to the shop assistant that I meant to take them them straight home to bed. Surely not! Think who might have touched them, trailed their hands across the fibres. Think of where they might have been! I glanced at the bland cotton in its sturdy plastic wrapping. And anyway, did I know the secret of long-lived flannelette sheets? Add half a cup of white vinegar to the final rinse. Now you little hussy, go home and wash your linen.

I’m thinking I’ll get them on the bed today so we can enjoy two nights of fluffy heaven before nobody ever sleeps again. Yes, to the main business: that venerable 89-year-old American calmly and efficiently dispatching Earth and all its difficulties to oblivion on Saturday. (I occurs to me that, at his age, it’s no wonder he dreams and conjures portents of the end — he might well be transferring his personal mythology to the collective. Will he survive the 21st, even if the rest of us do?)

Possibly he’s doing the world a favour with his trumpet call. I think of the impressive film ‘Of Gods and Men’ that I saw in the weekend, where the residents of a small monastery in the Atlas mountains must decide whether to stay or flee under threat to their lives. Questions are concentrated to essentials, chief of which are, What drew us here, and to do what? Unanimously (though not without anguish) they conclude that the presence of danger alters nothing — and everything. It heightens their awareness of one another, of the present moment, of the beauty inherent in their daily lives and service.

Those are the pertinent questions, and the ones we’ve been discussing around here — as playfully as we can. I doubt we’re going to be let off so lightly as to have the world evaporate around us on Saturday. The preacher is tapping into our mutual great angst when we confront what we’ve done to this planet. We will reap what we’ve sown; we know that, although we can’t face all the horror all the time, or we’ll implode. But we can take care with this moment, and this person, and this small job and the next, doing what makes us glad, what gladdens the people and the air (and earth and water) about us. We can sow love. Then may the scope of our care be widened.

Okay, the dogs. They’re Elena’s and I brought them along because they make me laugh. When I stayed at her home in Jujuy, if they weren’t trying to fish me from the pool, these two clamoured to join me in my room where they would grab socks, shoes, undies to take into the garden. Or simply throw themselves all over the floor while I tried to dress or pack or tie my shoes. Head-butts and slobber-kisses.

Now, can I tie up knives, sheets, dogs and preachers of doom in a final line? Variously they cut, warm, humour and exhort. Sounds like the ingredients for a relationship. Shall I leave it at that?

Each of us in relationship to Life — we have to work it out.

I’m still a little in awe of this sunfish Dad and I found washed up on a North Canterbury beach last week. I’d spent a warm month north of Auckland and was making my way home, visiting parents en route. We enjoyed the usual lingering meals, cuppas, walks on the beach and a game of scrabble, in which two of us were almost thrashed by the third who’s supposed to be losing his memory. I thought about the great privilege I’ve had of being brought into the world by good people. Any fights in my life have been with myself, not with them. Their affection, and patience with one another after 55 years, is touching. (Hi, Mum.)

Back at home I plunged into work as the damp weather wrapped itself around the city. In turn I was wrapped (much more cosily) by a handful of meetings with friends. When else can you cover so many meaty topics in the course of an hour as face to face over a table, with cider, soup, or a bread-cup? We start with the biggies and go from there: love, death, and the whole calamity. Earthquakes, the resilience and tenderness of children; how and where we want to live; whether and how our work satisfies; what we’re reading; gods, goddesses, and dreams; psychology — our own in particular; what’s for dinner; how was your wine and who’s that crossing the road? Tell me about that brooch, have we paid, and shall we walk to the corner?

Another sunfish was found near Kaikoura this week. I wonder what’s going on within this rare community of surface swimmers? I read that they’re curious about humans. Perhaps they each saw two women yakking on the beach over a dog-walk or a thermos of tea and, craning to listen in, were caught and tossed…

Poking around up at the local village today I had one of those shopping-glamour fits. You know the one, when just for a few seconds you feel you might be entitled to a gorgeous dress, long smooth legs, a beauty clinic face, shoes to die for, a crystal-and-candles restaurant dinner with a mysterious Someone, after which you sink into the the warmed leather seat (of the sort of car that has that sort of seat), look at one another meaningly and dot dot dot. These fantasies don’t last long because a) they’re a horrible cliché, and b) you remember that in fact you’re happy already, most of the time. You have plenty of serviceable clothes, even a few pretty ones, legs that work, a face that tells your own story, ten times as many shoes as you can wear at one time; and you recall that eating good food at home with favourite friends, with wine out of mismatched wine glasses, a fire, and a dog at your feet, is almost always far more delicious and satisfying than going Out.

It’s not hard to see where the glamorous notions come from; check out any magazine, TV ad, shop window, or (dare I say it?) certain Auckland suburbs, and you can quickly start to feel inadequately clad/wooed/fed/conveyed. Feed these images to the little girl inside who believes she’s destined to catch the eye/heart of a Hero/Prince, and you can trip yourself up any time.

Still, it doesn’t happen often now. I’m old enough to laugh at the illusion of the Other Life, to appreciate the great goodness of the people and circumstances I have already, and to know that a warm bum on a leather seat is no substitute for a warm, true and compatible man in a dented station wagon.

In the first few days up here I couldn’t keep my hands off the greenery — had to test out the strange varieties of leaf form, seed pod, fruit and flower. But the grass left my hands red and itching; the pod I broke open released a dozen glass-like hairs into fingers, wrists, even through the weft of my jeans. I became circumspect. Still, I can’t resist these sunlit toi-toi spears, or patting hard young kauri in passing. I’m still amused by opportunistic mangrove seeds, delighted by avocadoorrangespassionfruitfeijoasguavalimes that grow here, without cold to balk at. I wonder if I would become as lush, living in the north.

Evidently not all natives revel in the flora; some is downright dangerous, damp and plastered underfoot. This morning the calm bowl of the bay was disturbed by a vapid droning. Walking up to the shop, we saw the culprit, a woman my age (in her prime, fit and able) poufing leaves off her deck with a leaf blower. A leaf blower. What’s wrong with us moronic consumers? I feel all my vexation at the world’s woes coalescing around the innocuous plastic wind-bag.

Why would someone with two arms, two working legs and a set of abdominal muscles forgo the light and lovely motions of the broom for that soulless and noisy accessory? And then who’s going to remove the leaves from the driveway below, and how?

I’m not writing much these days, although I’m always at the keyboard. I edge hesitantly and rarely along fiction’s overgrown pathways. The novel I’m two-thirds through seems to have lost it relevance, and nothing else is clamouring for attention. However my own past assertion keeps me questioning the silence: the assertion that when I spin fiction, in some sense I spin my own life forwards. Well, that has seemed so in past years. I’m not sure if it still holds true. Is it enough for now to stretch myself in other directions: building my organisational, editorial and liaising muscles; learning to be calm and clear and with any luck effective?

I suppose we each ask ourselves such questions from time to time (if not daily, hourly): What is it imperative to keep in my life? What do I need to ditch? What is my best service to others? My best creative effort? What keeps me alert and growing? And of course each question has to be lived, pushed at, experimented with, turned inside out (what if I do? what if I don’t? how do I recognise my own yes or no?) because no one else can answer it for me.

Do people exist who are not nudged and gnawed at by such deliberations? Blessed are they.

Shoot. I was going to write about how the cat’s in the dog’s basket again, and the dog’s taken the cat’s place on the sunny carpet while outside the Peasgood nonsuches waggle about in the morning breeze … and I’ve ended up writing another sermon. Sorry.

Go forth in peace.

Steep, dusty, fur-wrapped stairs; a Burmese girl roaring about on a motorbike; jack-hammering wood-milling machines — the stuff of dreams. Yes, Freud, I know.

Half an hour back and forth in the pool down the road, and five minutes blissed out against the second best jet in the spa pool.

Porridge with raisins and dates, topped with walnuts and brown sugar.

Emails, in-laws, phone calls, discussions and decisions. (I will blog more often.)

The thick, warm mouthfuls — morning coffee.

This ridiculous Youtube: Who’s a guilty dog then?

Wondering (always) what is means to open, soften, say yes more, let go, be alive here, now. Breathing.

Is it nothing? Is it everything?

Venus hangs fat and gold. The old ring-barked sycamore gleams white under a pale blue sky. Leaves fidget in the first breeze. I sit on a cushion and light a candle in the window where a fine-limbed spider makes delicate purchase, trying to climb the glass. The tree, the spider and the star are reassuring, each in its own way, steadfastly doing what its species does: living and dying, web-making, burning bright.

Reassuring because I feel increasingly uncertain what’s required of me on a planet that’s quivering with its own potency and undermining centuries-old assumptions about our place upon it.

Usually we spend a lifetime assimilating the facts of our frailty, realising the provisional nature of our dwelling on earth. On Friday the whole world realised it together, in the 12 or so hours it took for all sleepers to awake and take in the images of Japanese cities scraped up and thrown into monstrous heaps.

In a calamity we see for a moment that we will all die; that although we weave into our lives vast complexity, the final fact is very simple. We are faced with the knowledge of a finite number of days remaining to us — whether ten or ten thousand.

At a time like this we ask ourselves what makes life meaningful: our loved ones (but what if they’re dead or disappeared?); the beauty and comfort of nature (but what if your place is lost amongst towers of mud and debris, and it’s beginning to snow?); work (but of what relevance is that if the air is poison and anyway the workplace no longer exists?) A Japanese woman says on a youtube video: I don’t know yet if it is a good or a bad thing that I have survived.

At a time like this we fear that we don’t have enough love or resources to help and heal what’s broken; that beauty will fail to console because nature has bared her destructive arm; that work is merely an escape from our own deep unease.

Although I can’t recall their detail, my dreams this week have been benign and comforting. I wake feeling soft and warm towards life — until I start to remember what’s happened in Christchurch and Japan, and start trying to work out what is still important to do (even though life goes on quite normally in this placid city).

I can only conclude that the things that gave meaning yesterday are those still called for today — but in greater measure.

May our love be enlarged.

May nature be honoured, restored and restorative, starting with the first spring greens of Sendai.

May we each do the work we find in ourselves to do — heartfelt, dignified and creative work — our particular offering to the quivering world.

Speaking of heartfelt, dignified and creative, Claire Beynon is still gathering art and donations for Christchurch with her fine initiative, Many as One.