Finding Ida: Week 7: Blogging for survival.

She is looking for an answer.

Picking up her teacup she artfully swirls the last of the leaves. And waits. When they settle she will know. If it will be blue skies or grey. If fate is drawing near. If tomorrow is something to fear. Either way, she will know.

Today I’m ignited. On a genetic trajectory. Born in the tea leaves and burned in the unforgiving Australian outback. Like the trains that once ran regularly to the outposts, to the folks who were determined to imprint an alternative story on the Australian landscape, the route is no longer serviced. No one in my family has tread this path for 60 years.

I’m a wary explorer.

Armchair anthropologist at best. Taking the richness of the mythology and stuffing into my cushions. So I can sit more comfortably while I ingest. While I make it mine. While I read a chapter and dog ear a page. You know. To come back to later. When I’m up to it. Maybe skipping the end completely. Absolutely.

Skipping the ending, it never happened.  Another book I didn’t finish. A historical re authoring maybe. An alternative version of her life. The version where the future me is a thought that keeps her from the darkness. The version she didn’t read in the tea leaves.

They said she was a dancer. I didn’t inherit that skill. They said she was born for the stage. Or that one either. They said she loved to wear costumes. That would be a negative on all counts.

Today I have my trusty guide. My Muse. Three generations on and I’m staring into the face of another myth maker. Long legged and theatrical, drawing out the story with her probing curiosity. Unafraid of the unchartered territory ahead. And purposefully guiding the way with her handy GPS oracle.

We make good time. Only 6 or 7 hours until we have arrived. At the middle of nowhere, at the heart of everywhere and near the end of the unfinished book. We have handwritten instructions. In archaic Victorian cursive. They are specific. Buried between the Catholics and the Anglicans but not with the paupers or the Aborigines. No head stone. Just a number.

Ida is a number.

Is that the number of the days she has lain alone between the Catholics and the Anglicans? Or the number of drops of rain that have fallen on the red gravel that covers her? Or is it the number of steps that led her to her dusty death? Or the number of times her name has passed between the lips of those who remember her? Partially, sadly, incompletely.  It’s just a number.

We wonder aloud. We ask questions of the earth that holds her. We find her number incomprehensible. And we ask her to answer. To claw back the time between us and add body to the bones. To finish what was started. To make the mythology corporeal.

Here lies Ida Lavinia Craig. Not lost. Still looking for an answer.

Open enemies. Week 1. Blogging for survival.

The ancient Astrologers had a name for those who would bring you undone. The ones that wished you harm, the ones who would happily see you slip on a banana peel during your campaign speech or inaugural oration. The ones who have heat blisters from their boiling core temperatures just thinking about you ever being happy, the ones who just loathe you. Publicly, loudly and daily. These charmers they named ‘open enemies’.

I have a compelling kind of admiration for these guys. They are the burlesque of the hater world. Lots of colour, some snappy moves and a baring of the breast when required. So open are they about the pursuit of your painful and embarrassing demise that they make no secret of their hopes in the matter and often share their vision of a better world. Without you in it.

It’s the hater pantomime that curdles the milk in my morning tea. The benign seeming someone who is really an icy machine, calculating the ways you can be made to suffer. The quiet achiever who during their work hours is researching how to hex you with interminable itching and have you buried alive with your hands tied behind your back. The one who is not in a hurry because they have all the time in the world to think about you. And not in a, shall we say, really uplifting kind of way.

It’s all energy. And I’m thinking a lot about energy lately. How to keep it moving. A bit like a pass the parcel. So even if you unwrap a real stinker, you don’t have to hold onto it for too long. Not so much about shifting responsibility but more a strategic feint. Just moving sideways so that energy doesn’t hit you like a medicine ball.

Open enemies aren’t my beef. I stand a fighting chance with someone so transparent. And although war games do not appeal to me, a couple of strategic hip and shoulders are never out of the question. It’s like bringing in Lion pooh from the Zoo and sprinkling it around your perimeter to ward off the tom cats. I’m not big. But I’ve watched the movies.

So it’s these other someone’s I’m learning how to be in the world with. Learning how not to share my energy with, or send my energy to. Trying to master the Zen of ‘that felt really bad and I’m going to teleport myself to somewhere else right now’. And you know, I really think I’m getting somewhere with the energy thing. Which is good.

Because I need all the energy I have to practice untying myself while buried alive.

The weakness in me

I sweet talk myself into the car after sweeping the kitchen floor for the fifteenth time. Maybe a piece of dirt strolled in and plonked itself there to make a fool out of me. All the way to the airport I reason with my ego and cross examine myself. The young self of many years past. What kind of person were you all those years ago? What if you have morphed into some fringe dweller with a culture deficit and no one’s told you? When was the last time you did an all-nighter in the room of mirrors?

And what of her? What if she’s acquired attitude or she wears ghastly shoes?  What if she’s accustomed to the good life and expects to drink Moet? What if she doesn’t laugh at my jokes or I make her cry? What if she likes Television? What if she doesn’t care that people are not free, the environment is in peril and Australia’s human rights record is an abomination? What if, heaven forbid, she is reading ‘Fifty shades of Grey’?

It’s been twenty five years.

In that time Mother Teresa and Princess Di are dead, mobile phones have been invented, Chernobyl saddened us, Tiananmen Square angered us and Aung San Suu Kyi mobilized us with her beauty and sacrifice. Mandela prevailed but the Birmingham 6 lost sixteen precious years of their lives for naught. The Soviet Union and Monica Lewinsky met the same fate, one we can all read uncensored, unedited and unreferereed in Wikipedia, or if we Google it on the World Wide Web. We have a special hell now for bad guys at the International Criminal Court where punishment is meted out to the victims and the accused, taking suffering and trauma to a whole new level. And I have mourned the demise of the Drive-In movies and eternal love.

On the way to the airport I stop at a car wash. Double foam, double rinse, double sparkly shiny stuff, double vacuum.  I suck up a whole box of KFC someone left on the back seat.  $30 of spare change later and my matchbox sized car is so clean, so neutralized, so sterilised of me. Great. Now I’ll be driving her home in a sanitation unit on wheels. Yum. A dab of air freshener anyone?

Arriving at the airport I take a deep breath. Floral bouquet fills my lungs. I’m at low and glassy eyed ebb. Does she still like Joan Armatrading? Do I still like Joan Armatrading? We were drawn together through a shared love of music and our telling recognition of a kindred social outcast. With teenage elasticity we pulled each other from the perilous purgatory of our Janis Ian suffering. Right now though it pales in comparison. Teenage angst has nothing on mid life torment. She waits. Composed. I’d forgotten that about her. Stillness. We embrace. I let myself glance quickly in her eyes. They shine. Excellent. We are both still alive.

The days together become seamless, new narratives blending with old, remapping past memories with the verdigris of time. In the evenings she invites me into the new world of contemporary music and explains popular culture to me with her refined sense of quirkiness. I’d forgotten that about her too.

On the way somewhere an observation is made about my love of the word fabulous. ‘You would love my local Mayor, he also thinks everything is fabulous’ she says, and smiles. ‘Yeah’ I say, ‘I use Fabulous and Fuck in equal measure’. She laughs. The sound comes bursting forth from her teenage self. Bold. Rich. Musical guffaws of joy breaking around us. Ah yes. I had  forgotten that also.

And so the two versions of us merge. I still see the kid when I look at her, but her words are from an ancient place. Chiseled from the Jurassic period. I take them and I put them in my museum of beautiful things. So I will never forget. It’s the weakness in me.