Testing times

They all seem to come at once. A cheery reminder card in the mail from my dentist. A letter from breast screen telling me my biannual mammogram is due. Doubtless the communiqué from the good folk at pap smear central won’t be too far behind, and the faecal blood testing kit will arrive a few days later.

This year there are more tests than usual. A bone density scan, on account of my being of an age where osteoporosis is likely, and better diagnosed than not. Plus an MRI on my poor old knee, to see how things have deteriorated (diagnosis: grade four chondromalacia which I gather basically means it’s bone on bone in there). My glasses are not as effective as they were when I got them two years ago, and cholesterol tests are a way of life now till I die.

Preventative medicine – one of the great blessings of life in the western world.

Maybe I will never get any of these things – cancer of breast, cervix or bowel, osteoporosis or macular degeneration. But if I do, my chances will be better the earlier I catch them.

Two hundred years ago, maybe less, I would have died at 12 from a burst appendix. If I’d survived that, chances are childbirth would have got me. You’ll not get many arguments about the wonders of modern medicine from me.

When I was a kid, we had twice-yearly inoculation against cholera and typhoid. Our friend, an English nurse who worked for the World Health Organisation, held ‘injection parties’ where we would gather on the roof terrace at her place, along with all the neighbours, and get our jabs.

I hated getting needles, but my abiding memories of those evenings was of many of the local kids coming back to line up a second time. When told they only needed one, they protested that they were so happy to be spared some of the more devastating diseases in their world, they wanted to be sure.

I think of this every time some precious parent is in the press for refusing to let their child be inoculated because they fear vaccines are dangerous. I was pretty unsympathetic when parents with whom I lined up to get my own infants jabbed complained of how cruel it was, the poor little darlings.

When I trained to become a nurse, another difference I noticed between health in India and Australia was that most people in hospital in the Subcontinent were there on account of infectious diseases or illness related to malnutrition. Here, the majority of patients were there because of overindulgence in things that are deadly when taken in excess – fat, sugar, alcohol, tobacco. No doubt most had good reason for their addictions, but the contrast was striking.

I’m not likely to make myself ill with any of the above, but as we all know, anything can happen to anybody. There’s a lot you can never guard against; some, things you can. So, when the testing times come around, I’m up for everything, no matter how time-consuming, uncomfortable or expensive. Which reminds me, I need to stop putting off ringing the dentist.

Back in The Age with a faith piece

I’m always fascinated by those columns where they ask the interviewee, ‘What makes you angry?’

For me, the answer to that question would come in two parts, as I experience two different kinds of anger. One is a bewildered, cold fury, for which the current catalysts are the federal budget and our nation’s treatment of asylum seekers.

Then there is the second kind, which is hot, sudden and violent and makes me want to hit out at the perpetrator, and which rises abruptly from comparatively minor misdemeanors. Such anger courses through me when three people are walking slowly abreast, taking up the entire footpath. When two shop assistants are too busy gossiping to attend to me. When commuters are talking self-importantly on their phone, rendering an entire carriage of people involuntary eavesdroppers. When opinionated people hog the airwaves, never asking someone else’s opinion, or stopping to listen to their story.

The most extreme upsurge of rage in me, however, is caused by men on enormous, noisy machines. These can be hoon cars or jet skis; most often they are overlarge motorbikes, accelerating with a cacophony of earsplitting sound in the middle of a busy street.  Witnessing this, I momentarily wish dire things on the perpetrators. I want to catch them up at the next traffic lights and knock them off their monsters; I want them to go screaming around the next corner at a road-hugging angle and fall off.

The common denominator in all the things that make me furious, from the personal to the political is rudeness and its close cousin thoughtlessness.  It’s the inability to imagine yourself in another person’s situation.

Everybody is thoughtless on occasion; some people practice it as a matter of course. Sometimes it arises from a keenly developed sense of entitlement that assumes they are more important than anyone else. More often, I suspect, it is literally thoughtlessness – when a person never develops the habit of thinking about others, of reflecting on what it might be like to be that other person. Jesus captured this perfectly in perhaps his most quoted saying when he spoke of loving your neighbour (anyone with whom you come in contact) as yourself.

One of my favourite lines in the Hebrew Bible comes from the prophet Micah: ‘What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and love kindness and walk humbly with your God’. Kindness and humility: underrated virtues that can sound sappy but are actually incredibly strong. 

As a Christian, ‘walking with God’ by regular prayer and worship is the best way I’ve found to slowly grow these qualities. But whatever a person’s religion or lack thereof, the practice of justice, kindness and humility would obliterate most of the things that make me mad: from a jet skier arrogantly carving up the water to a government handing down a budget that targets the most vulnerable in our society.

Published in The Age Sunday 22 June 2014

New window, old view

Looking out the window of my bedroom at Anglesea, I could be in the 1920s, just after the first instalment of this little place was built. All I can see is old stuff.

Straight ahead, facing east (fabulous watching the sun rise) there is the tiniest glimpse of ocean, but mostly it is trees – tossing or still – all eucalypts, big and old and twisted and muted greeny-grey. A wall of limbs and leaves.

To my right, there is evidence of humanity, but ancient and rustic. Out a tall sash window, salvaged from an old chapel, I can see one half of a circular driveway. I take care to park my car on the other half, so that I can’t see it from bed, so that there is nothing modern and shiny to break up my view.

I like to see what my grandparents would have seen when they were here. Other people might like their car in view, to make sure it was still there or to remind themselves that although this place feels turn of the last century, in fact there’s a modern world out there, with ambulances and supermarkets and the internet, that they are safe. I like being safe too, but aesthetically, the modern world isn’t that pleasing.

The sea of gum trees continues out this south-facing window, bracken growing under them and, this time of year, lush grass. Either side of the drive way are thick stands of agapanthus, much despised by my son-in-law, but the colours in late spring are irresistible.

The centrepiece of this southern view is the old woodshed. It started life as a garage, where my grandfather parked his model T Ford. (When Mum was a kid in the 20s, they knew when their dad was arriving from Melbourne because they could see the lights of his car approaching the tiny township. There were no other cars.)

At some stage, it was transformed into a woodshed; as long as I can remember it has had a sturdy wooden pole running up the middle of the front, holding up the peak of the corrugated iron roof. The wood shed – rough weatherboard construction – has fallen apart and been rebuilt so often that not much of the original is left. Inside, it is stacked with the extravagance of wood we have from our rambling bush block. Eucalypt, wattle, ti-tree and a whole bunch of random, crappy stuff that we cut down in our endless battle to keep the block reasonably fire safe. On the floor of the shed are piles of twigs and bark, old and new: perfect kindling. An old Singer sewing machine table doubles as a small workbench.

There is fauna too, of course. So many birds – the sounds of magies carolling greetings to the morning, the cackling kookaburras and screeching sulphur crested cockatoos that make a mess of all the local lawns as their sharp beaks and claws dig for insects. There are currawongs too, rosellas, and bright red and green king parrots, all arriving imperiously on our verandah rail and squabbling, not so imperiously, over the birdseed we scatter there. Best of all, in early summer there is a gloriously ugly tawny frog mouth, raising her chicks in a dead gum tree near our veranhdah.

Most days there are kangaroos on our block; they gather on a grassy spot that catches the sun, next to the woodshed and yes, I can see them from my bed as well. Sometimes, one will hop right round the drive and past the bedroom window.

It’s like being suspended in a Fred McCubbin painting – all bushy drab greys and greens. Okay, so we do have electricity and an indoor toilet these days. And there is a snappy computer on my lap. Apart from that, this is as close to my parents and grandparents world as I can get in this lifetime, and this is the place I feel them most powerfully all round me.

My column in The Melbourne Anglican June edition

I could live quite contentedly without coffee, alcohol and chocolate. Tea, however, is a different matter.

I was born in the nation that drinks the most tea on earth, I went to boarding school in the middle of tea plantations; it just went from there. From spicy chai at street stalls in India to my own ceramic teapot, I always feel better with a cup of tea in my hand.

One 16^th century definition of a sacrament is a ‘visible sign of an invisible grace’. Thanks to the words of a recent Leunig cartoon*, I can now think of my teapot in sacramental terms.

 In his Soliloquy for Strange Times, Leunig writes:

The leaders may not know what they’re doing – but I do.

I’m making tea. Tea for two!

One cup for the happy me and one cup for the sadder worried self.

We’ll keep each other company: this cup, this pot, this tea – and these parts of me.

Many things don’t work or make sense these days – but the teapot does

It takes in. It holds. It makes. It pours forth.

Like the teapot, prayer holds together ‘the happy me’ and ‘the sadder, worried self’. Not only for myself, but also for the whole world – every situation, joyful or grim or plain dire that I am aware of and those I never will be: I am able to offer these fragments of burning concern to God in the humble receptacle of my prayer.

‘God, bless Syria, and the Ukraine, the girls abducted in Nigeria and oh, the refugees in detention and our leaders who appear so soulless and my friend who is bereaved and the other one crippled by depression and my colleagues who are under so much pressure and that person I have fallen out with and my kids and my church community and Indigenous communities that I know so little about but where things are so tough, and, and…’

All these gabbled, ignorant but well-meant prayers are poured into the humble teapot of my caring for the world and held up, poured into to the immense heart of God.

Then there is the daily joy – the vivid red of the leaves climbing over my back verandah, the crispness of early morning in autumn when the sun is shining, the rain against my window, good conversations with my family, being held by my husband, a walk, an absorbing novel, the clink of a lemony gin and tonic at the end of a gruelling day. And my ever-present insecurities and fretting and expecting the worst: into the teapot of prayer they all go.

It takes in. And then it holds, it makes, it pours forth. It holds all my grief, neuroses, happiness, despair and concern and makes – it melds them, somehow, into something gifted from God, some growing of my heart, some perception I had lacked. It pours forth – a slightly more graced living in the world than I would have managed without it.

* Published in The Age Saturday 3 May 2014

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

To pedicure or not to pedicure? that is the question

A few days after the budget was handed down, I had an experience entirely new to me – watching an hour of commercial television on a Saturday morning. I was putting my mother-in-law on a flight to Launceston, there was a delay, we had spent all the time drinking coffee that we could and were plonked down in hard plastic chairs in the departure lounge, staring dazedly at the box.

The first thing we were subjected to was what I think they call a lifestyle show. Four heavily made up women with improbably glossy and coiffed hair were discussing one of life’s big questions – whether pedicures are a luxury or a necessity.

‘There’s trouble brewing in the suburbs,’ our lovely host introduced the segment, and went on to describe a young couple who were being forced to economise.  He insisted that her pedicures were one thing they could cut from the weekly expense list; she was having none of it.

Well, they pondered and debated this deep dilemma for a while, these Stepford wives. They even had a podiatrist on the show who insisted that pedicures were not actually essential to life, to cries of dismay from the girls.

The happy ending to this story came when they taught the hubby (it was the kind of show where they used words like that) to give his beloved a foot massage – with the help of various products, needless to say. Peace in the suburbs was restored.

From here, we progressed to Dr Oz who, name notwithstanding, is American. He runs what appears to be basically a sales a show with a studio audience of fluttering and swooning women. The good doctor spruiked various products that performed such miracles as de-stressing you, or rendering your skin as smooth as that of someone ten years your junior. He got audience members - all with immaculate make up and eerily clone-like shining locks - to come up and try these, upon which they cooed with delight and burned with conviction that yes, these products (only $19.99 if you buy now!) did all they promised.

It was federal budget week; most people I know had spent four days fretting and fuming about the targeting of the sick, young, old and ill and these women were incensed about someone suggesting they do without their pedicures?  

Where do they get these ladies? It was like a flashback to what I imagine some women discussed in the fifties. Are there women who get excited, outraged and rapturous about beauty products? Are there people who spend mornings watching this dross?

My mum-in-law and I admitted to each other that we’d survived thus far  - 140 years between us - without ever having a pedicure. And then the flight was called and we tore ourselves away from Dr Oz.

I drove home from Tullamarine feeling as though I inhabit a parallel universe. Has the world gone mad? Or is it me who is the weirdo?