The cat's pyjamas

There can be few sartorial experiences more delicious than getting a new pair of pyjamas that are perfect for you.

I spend an ever-increasing proportion of my life in my sleeping attire; it’s just so damn comfortable. I grew up in a country where this is the norm, at least for men. Our English word ‘pyjama’ comes from Hindi (say it in an Indian accent – it works) and in the northern states of the Subcontinent, when blokes come home at the end of a hard day at the office, they change out of their work attire and put on those lovely light, loose pyjama pants that are usually made of fine white cotton and tie with a draw string waist. Bliss.

The minute I come home at day’s end, all I want to do, after my cup of tea, is to take off my smart stuff, hop in the shower till I’m clean all over and get in something utterly loose, daggy and comfortable. An old nightie or boxers and a T in summer; in winter, cosy flannelette. When I get into these, I feel like a little kid again – warm and clean, safe and cosseted.

In the last feels-like-one-hundred years, while menopause has rendered my nights a sweaty misery, keeping warm has not been an issue. Maybe I am getting to the end of this stage, but during the first few, bitter nights of official winter this year, I was frozen, and knew it was time to buy PJs. The ones I bought three years ago are threadbare and holey and just don’t work anymore.

My new ones are not flannelette, nor did I get them at Target. This time, I lashed out and went to Muji, a Japanese store for clothes and home goods that can be found in the new Melbourne Emporium. The last thing we need in this town is yet another convocation of glitzy shops for unnecessary things; Muji, however, is gorgeous. My daughter-in-law worked there briefly last year, and I used to pop by to say hi; I stayed for the merchandise. Everything in the shop is the colour or wheat or sand or porridge or stone – classy, natural greys and creams and blondes. Everything is ethical, well made, loose flowing and natural looking.

I bought slippers there a few months ago. And that’s where I got my spiffing new pyjamas. Striped in tasteful shades of beige and fawn, their bottoms are loose and long enough that when I curl up in bed they don’t ride up, leaving my ankles chilly. They are as soft as most items of clothing only get after years of wear. The top is long enough that when I curl up in bed, there isn’t a strip of my lower back that is exposed to the cold and, best of all, it is lined. Lined pyjamas, who would have thought?

When I purchased these one lunch time and brought them back to my office feeling very pleased with myself, my colleague, seeing my delight, warned me that I couldn’t wear them to work, no matter how wonderful they were. It’s a shame. At home, I am rarely out of my new PJs. I wash them and dry them beside the heater, because I can’t last a night without their sheltering, embracing, consoling warmth.

I’ve blogged before about the joy of getting a perfect new party frock; I suspect that perfect new PJs are even better.

23rd Psalm - love for the tough times

Checking out youtube versions of the 23^rd Psalm is a somewhat depressing experience. There are a lot of sung versions of this beloved hymn from our holy book, and they divide pretty neatly into two camps.

First camp – what I like to call hoity toity choral music. Majestic pipe organs and dignified conductors lead angelic looking choir boys as their voices soar to the rafters of some ancient, stunningly beautiful church.

Second camp consists of a clip that inevitably starts with a mountain scene, or maybe a pristine, sparkling brook bubbling through idyllic green meadows. Perhaps a waterfall. There are usually inspiring words superimposed on this pretty scene, ‘In Him alone I trust’ is an example (and it is always a ‘him’ too). Then the song begins, and it tends to be saccharine and pious.

I am capable of enjoying both these musical styles, but neither helps me when the chips are down. And that’s a shame, because if I had to have one Bible passage to hang on to in times of trouble, the 23^rd Psalm might be it.

I first fell in love with these familiar words when I was 19 and travelling overseas by myself for six months. It was a lonely, confusing and unhappy time. I learnt Psalm 23 off by heart; at night I used to lie in bed and say it, over and over (okay, I was a pretty weird 19-year-old!) and it comforted me deeply.

My life has changed utterly since just before Easter, when my husband of 35 years was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer. Once again, I find myself turning to Psalm 23.

The thing I find most helpful about it is that at one level it’s all pastoral delight and bucolic contentedness. And then, as is the way with so many of these brutally honest poems in the Book of Psalms, there comes this knockout verse which I quote here in the King James Version: ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’ This is tough love, love for the hard times, the love of the crucified God who has known suffering, death and hell.

One of the many reasons I treasure being a Christian is the rich vocabulary our ancient faith has for every situation in life. What our family is experiencing right now is described perfectly in the beautiful, poetic, devastating line ‘I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’.

For years God has been restoring my soul in green pastures and beside still waters. That’s great, but it is nothing like the power of the experience of meeting God in the valley of shadow of death. And it is my conviction and my lived experience that God is with us there, that God meets and comforts us there and will continue to meet us in whatever lies ahead.

This piece was published in the June edition of The Melbourne Anglican

Emergency

The call comes at 11 o’clock on a working morning. It’s from my husband, who tells me our GP has rung and told him to get straight to the nearest hospital with an emergency department.

This is nothing to do with his multiple myeloma. Al has had some odd symptoms that prompted an ECG. The result, when they were sent to our family doctor, alarmed him so dramatically that he rang and told Al to report in to the closest casualty department, ASAP.

My beloved interprets this directive as instruction to jog there. Normal people would take an ambulance under these circumstances, at the very least a taxi. Not my lad.

After the call, I’m in a state of shock. I’m in Ivanhoe, checking out a potential venue for a conference; I ask the colleague I am with to take me to a train station. He takes one look at me and drives me right into town. When he drops me in Victoria Parade, outside the grim façade of St V’s, I am snivelling and incoherent, and in my distress it takes me a while to locate the emergency department.

I worked in casualty at the Royal Melbourne as a trainee nurse in the 80s and as a result I have a healthy terror of triage nurses, who have to be tough to survive in the job. I approach the sister tentatively, gulping and streaming, trying to explain that my husband has just been brought in. She surprises me by handing me a box of tissues, saying, ‘You’ve had a tough day, haven’t you?’ and leading me solicitously in to where said husband is lying on a hospital trolley looking, not to put too fine a point on it, in the pink. He does not give the impression of a man who is about to die of an aortic dissection, which is the condition it appears he has.

An aortic dissection is a very bad thing.  Basically the layers of the wall of the aorta, the main blood vessel, split; 40% of people with this condition don’t make it to hospital, of those who do, 5-20% die on the operating table or soon after. I am stunned and distraught. ‘And this is nothing to do with the cancer?’ I ask. Nothing. Just more bad stuff happening to good people.

In half an hour, he is wheeled off to have a CT scan of his heart – a much more accurate and sophisticated diagnostic tool. I read my book and don’t take in much. I make a cup of tea; Al is not allowed any food or drink in case he has to go straight off for surgery.

We are there for four hours, watching the complicated ballet that is life in an emergency department. A cast of characters parade in front of our curtained cell: doctors and nurses, ward clerks, ambos by the half dozen, orderlies and cleaners, med students, nursing students, unidentified others. Some crazy guy is screaming, over and over – he stops and then he stars again – the staff remain utterly calm, working in their choreographed drama of detached but attentive care. As far as people watching goes, it’s up there with the beach in high summer, and watch we do, dazed and mesmerised as the hours trickle by.

The timelessness reminds me of being in labour. In some ways the hours drag, in others they fly, in short, time is meaningless when you are in hospital and don’t know what will happen. I tell myself to hold Al’s hand, to touch his face, to talk to him. The few years we thought we had have now collapsed down to a matter, maybe, of hours. I tell myself to make the most of every second, but I am so tired and bored in our weird, waiting limbo, I drift off and fail to make the most of what could be my last hours with my husband.

Nurses come and go. At least six people check his file and note his vital statistics and every one of them baulks at his pulse rate, which has always been ridiculously low. ‘You’re either on beta blockers or you’re really fit,’ each of them says in turn, and he tries not to look pleased. His pulse rate is so low it keeps setting off the alarm; they have to recalibrate it. In the haze of anxiety and utter weariness, I marvel at the health system I have access to, simply by virtue of living in this country.

Four hours in, just as I have laid my head on the trolley beside him in exhaustion, the doctor comes to us with the verdict. ‘It’s good news,’ he says. ‘The ECG was misleading. Your heart and major blood vessels are in great shape. You can get dressed and go home’.

We both stare at him, incapable of taking in this great good news. Really? Could you repeat that please? ‘You mean that all we have to worry about now is multiple myeloma?’ I say, not meaning to be flippant or sarcastic at all - at that moment, cancer seems suddenly manageable and distant, with time to discuss options, prepare for the future, plan and make the most of what is left. Suddenly our lives ahead, which had shrunk from thirty years to five and then to maybe half a day, elasticate back to a matter of years.

I ring all the kids, being careful to start the call with the words, ‘He’s absolutely fine, well, apart from the cancer, but your dad and I have had quite a day.’

Roller coaster cannot begin to describe this afternoon. But we take it on board as best we can. When I first got to casualty, one of the sisters said to me, “There’s a possibility this is a false alarm and you will be back home tonight, drinking champagne’. I didn’t for a minute believe her, despite Al, sitting up there on his trolley, hooked up to heart monitors, the picture of health and fitness.

But she was right. That night we don’t have champagne, but even I have two glasses of wine. I look at him sitting across the table and feel incredulous gratitude. When we curl up in bed that night, utterly spent, I say, ‘I thought I might never have you in bed with me again. I thought that I’d be spending the night in ICU’.

We sleep like the dead, we wake up, we go to work a little later than usual. They say comedy is simply tragedy plus time, and in very little time, we start to joke about the entire episode, particularly the bit about him jogging to casualty. Life, praise be, goes on.

To hell in a handbasket

‘In the past century there has been a revolution in health, longevity, education, human rights. The proportion of the world’s population living in absolute poverty has dropped from about 80% in 1820 to about 20% today. You’d never think it by watching the nightly news, but since the early 1990s the number of armed conflicts in the world has fallen by 40%. The percentage of men to have died in violence in hunter-gatherer societies is approximately 30%. The percentage of men who died in violence in the twentieth century, despite two world wars, is approximately 1%. The trends for violent deaths so far in the 21^st century are still falling, despite wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a story the media has missed.’

So wrote the late Pamela Bone in her 2007 book Bad hair days. I read this out to my husband one morning as we sit up in bed, having our morning ritual of a cup of tea with the newspaper. I’m not sure if he needs to hear this, but I do. I need to hear it every morning when I scan the news that makes it into the paper. On the day I read it aloud, the front page of The Age is dominated by stories about George Pell and Tony Abbott, both of which make me ashamed to be human, let alone Australian.

Pamela Bone knew more than most westerners about the atrocities that are perpetrated in our sorry world. A prominent journalist and columnist, she visited the scenes of some of humankind’s most recent, blackest chapters, notably Rwanda, where she visited the jails where the mass murderers of Tutsis were incarcerated. She had many visits to various African countries, arriving in the aftermath of wars, famines and epidemics.

Despite this, she consistently maintained that the world was gradually becoming a better place to live for most people. I lack Bone’s intelligence, analytical capacity and experience, but I have long agreed with her, despite the conventional wisdom that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

Much of the appalling child abuse in institutions and domestic abuse of women and children we hear about today is a result of these practices no longer being acceptable, condoned, ignored and hushed up. And we hear of it because of our ability, this century, to know much of what is going on in the world at any moment.

The irony, of course, is that we rarely hear the quiet, inspiring, good stuff that happens in every place every day. As Bone says, ‘It’s a story the media has missed.’

If you are a child, gay, black, part of any kind or minority group or one of the majority group of women, things are likely to be better for you now than at any time in history. As Bone points out, things are better for most people than at any time in history.

My own story reflects this. I live in a very privileged part of human society, but not so long ago I would not be alive today. I might have perished from cholera or typhoid as a child in India. If I’d survived that, I would have died of a burst appendix at the age of 12. If that hadn’t happened, I would almost certainly have died some time during the 36 hours of my first labour, as would our baby daughter. After that, chances are I would have been locked up during the period when I suffered from depression. If I’d escaped this, I would probably been given some very heavy-duty drug that rendered me zombie-like. The fact that I am alive, healthy, contented and productive at the age of 56 is thanks to modern medicine and modern psychiatry.

The fact that I can vote, be in a marriage of equals, pursue the vocation I feel called to and interact with my children in a healthy way is thanks to my wonderful sisters the suffragettes and a thousand other women and men who fought for women’s rights over centuries.

As for ‘kids these days’, certainly I have been known to whinge and moan with the best of them about short attention spans and the apparent inability of so many to cultivate any sort of interiority. But I am more frequently to be heard to say that most of the young people I know well are far better at relationships than I was at their age, are more confident and capable and have a well-developed social conscience.

So I get cranky when so many people long to go back to the so-called good old days. They weren’t, or not for most people. I would rather be a parent now than at any time in history. I would rather be a person who has battled depression now than at any time in history. I would rather be a woman now than at any time in history. I’m with Pamela Bone.

The sweet art of doing nothing

The only thing I envy smokers is the excuse they have to disappear for a while and do nothing. I look longingly at them – standing at street corners, loitering in city doorways, taking the occasional drag and staring into space.

These days, of course, they are more likely to be gazing into a smart phone than space, so the effect isn’t quite the same. In fact, the main reason I don’t want a smart phone is that it will inevitably, no matter how disciplined I fancy I am being, take some of the time I currently have for doing absolutely nothing. On the train, idly looking out the windows. Ditto on the tram. Best of all, on a verandah, or in bed, where you don’t even have the excuse of getting somewhere which is purposeful and productive. You are simply practicing the sweet art of doing nothing.

There’s an old saying, ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits’. That’s me, if you substitute the work ‘pray’ for ‘think’. And I suspect that just sitting is as efficacious, in some mysterious way, as prayer or meditation.

It’s not simply that I am more likely to get ideas when I am ostensibly doing nothing at all, although that does happen. Walking with no head- or ear-phones is another great way of emptying the mind, but you are still doing something useful. The wonderful, subversive, counter-cultural thing about sitting or lying and doing nothing is that you are not being remotely useful in the sense that our society thinks of usefulness, with its outcome assessments and its KPIs, its insistence that even the closest relationships with our loved ones can be quantified somehow when it is ‘quality time’. Whatever the hell that is.

A lovely woman I know whose husband has Alzheimer’s said to me that she has lots of people to do things with, but she misses have someone to do nothing with. Another wise older woman, my step-mum, says that after she has had a long plane trip, she needs time ‘for my soul to catch up with my body’.

At the moment, with all that is happening in our family I seem to need extra time for my soul, or maybe it’s my heart, to catch up with my brain. I love being at work, for the distraction and the sheer normality it provides, but by day’s end I am so exhausted I can barely compose a sentence. It was like this when I was pregnant. I was always deeply weary, and had to remind myself there was a good reason for this: although I barely sensed it, there was so much going on inside me. I tell myself this now as well – at one level I feel oddly normal, but inside, in a place I can only sometimes access, my body, mind, heart and spirit are acclimatising themselves to a reality that is radically new.

And one of the things that helps me with this is sitting or lying and doing nothing. I sit on the verandah at home and stare out through the last of the scarlet leaves on our west facing creepers, maybe sip some tea, wrap my hands around the comforting warmth of the mug I am holding and do absolutely nothing else. Lying in bed of an afternoon is another good time to practise this. I am an afternoon napper; these days I find it hard to drop off, but still I lie there for a hour or more; I simply stare at the ceiling rose and let my mind go blank.

At our shack at Anglesea, the bedroom is the best place to do this that I know. Every window looks out to tossing twisted old eucalypts and stubbly ti-trees, sky and racing clouds. Everything is timeless and there are no buildings in sight. I can lie there for hours, just watching the leaves hang and blow.

Years of doing this have taught me that something does go on, at some deep inner level, when I am engaged in this ultimate non-activity. It reminds me that I am dispensable, and the world will keep turning quite happily without me. It balances the busyness that I willingly fill up so much of my time with. It also reassures me about any illness or decrepitude that lies in my own future. I often think that as long as I can read and walk, then I will always manage somehow. But if I am blind and incapacitated, even if my mind fails, as long as I can access this blank, deep, precious inner space and retreat there, I will be okay.