letter #71 Loud Memories and Quiet Days

My dear friend

I hope this email finds you satisfied that you have crossed your ‘t’s and dotted your ‘i’s especially if you are Aquarius.

I’m sending this in between one draft and the next of the new story I’m writing for my new monthly series: Sunday Salon: Work-in-Progress Reading. The reading series starting this Sunday. Come along if you like! It’s only five dollars. (And it’s not just me, there’s three of us, and my friends’ readings are brilliant).

I decided to do work-in-progress readings, because in October or November last year, as I stared into the months ahead when I needed to finish both my Christmas letter show and my fringe show, I realised that I’d got too much into the habit of writing in short, intense bursts to get a show on stage. That has worked okay, but it does mean that nothing is getting quite the space it needs to fully grow. After several years of working in a similar pattern, my writing was responding only to the space I was giving it. This meant that the writing process as well as the finished product were becoming limited to the patterns that could be squeezed into the space. On top of that, there’s something about sharing work that gives that work new life and new direction; that helps you take it from ‘good’ to ‘better’.

There’s also something about hearing people’s work-in-progress that is enriching and stimulating and inspiring. I thought to myself, “If I were in London or Melbourne there would be places I could go to read work and to hear work that’s not quite finished, but ready to be shared.” And then I thought, “I could do it in Adelaide, but who will come?” And then I thought, “Just act like you are in London. Don’t worry that you only share the time with a small number people, that can be part of its richness; it’s part of the truth and the essence of writing that comes from here, it’s one of the things that will help the writing to grow.” So, let’s go!

The writing is going a little slower than I’d planned, because for a few weeks now I’ve been on (unplanned) carer’s leave. For a person who works for herself, the leave part of carer’s leave is a nebulous concept. And for a person with my disposition, there is also some ambiguity around the carer’s part of carer’s leave. Caring is a job I do in alternating states of tenderness and irritation.

My shirking of tenderness is not all personality and disposition. Some of it is the stirring of memories; memories that have been in hibernation in the shadows of my soul but are awakened into consciousness as we visit doctors and the hospital and specialists. I wake in the night, filled with the memory of the uncertainty of my father’s illness. The days when an intervention would have a side effect which would become a complication. Each one rolling into the next; each one a quiet, but vivid reminder of what was ahead. Sometimes memories are too sharp and they prick at my skin and at my temper, leaving me intemperate.

While those memories have been real, these weeks have not been like those times. These weeks have been more like the days spent with toddlers or pre-schoolers who are sleeping off a fever. Gentle, quiet, recuperative. There is gratitude that time will pass, and that as it does, bones will mend, bodies will heal, strength will be restored.

Awkward segue: skeletal muscle mass is our friend, my dear friend. Squats! Lunges! Chest press! (Not personal advice, I’m not a professional trainer, always seek professional advice).

Perhaps because of these memories or perhaps because it’s part of the natural landscape of my fifties, I have been feeling a deep mourning for everything I haven’t, but could have, learned.

For example.

In the late 1980s, in my first year of university, I went home for swot vac lugging a suitcase filled with books and photocopied articles. At the end of the first day I left my desk, went to the kitchen table and said, “I’m going to fail.” My mother said, “Don’t be ridiculous. The only way you can fail is if you haven’t read the books.” I suppose she was, in modern day parlance, trolling me; knowing that I hadn’t read the books, that I probably was going to fail. But there was hope there too, she wanted to believe that I had read the books, that I was going to be okay, that I would live up to the intellectual expectations we both held for me.

I spent that November evening curled on my bed, holding back tears, turning the pages of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (chosen because it was so slim that I knew I could read it in one night).

As with so many books, I remember little about the story, the characters or the plot; but a lot about the experience of the reading. As the sun set, as the dark closed in, I stayed on my bed, holding the book at an angle to catch the light, just as I had done when I was much younger, wanting to finish just one more chapter of Jean Plaidy or Lucy Walker or Stephen King before I went to bed. I read The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia determined both to prove Mum wrong and to not let her down at the same time.

I suppose that’s why through the many culls of books across the years, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia has survived. Pulling it off the shelf now, it looks unread. The spine uncracked, no notes in the margins, no dog ears. But I definitely read it, in one huge gulp one summer evening, hiding in the bedroom of a house in an industrial city on the edge of the desert.

Reader, I didn’t fail, but nor did I cover myself in intellectual glory.

I have spent a lot of time lately, berating myself for all the books I didn’t read at university. “Imagine,” I say to myself at regular intervals, “How well-read you’d be if, instead of simply collecting the texts, you’d also read them.”

Of my first year texts, I finished none of the Patrick White we were assigned, and as you can see Tom Jones remains not only unread but possibly not even opened, along with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Although I do remember very much enjoying the lecturer acting out that page from Tristram Shandy (why I was at the lecture and not at home nursing a hangover is something I can’t explain). (Thinking about it, maybe this is a mix of works from first and second year, but the general gist of what I’ve just said remains the same). Some caution is required here, because as noted with Rasselas the cracks in the spines can’t fully be trusted as indication of read or not read—it looks like I’ve given up on Vanity Fair when I have in fact read it many times. It’s safe to assume, however, that I didn’t read (possibly didn’t even open) Tom Jones.

The antidote to despair is action, so rather than despairing of everything I haven’t read, instead I’m focused on what I still have time to read. I’m putting my phone away again, and I’m reading. Of course, I can’t stop myself from frittering my time away altogether, and I’m still drawn too often to reddit. But because I recently checked reddit, a little question that I had has now been answered. I was wondering why, for the last little while, I haven’t been able to find my favourite plain yoghurt in my supermarket. Well, someone on reddit just asked why they couldn’t find their favourite yoghurt! Apparently, there was a surge in demand when a tiktok trend for a certain kind of Japanese cheesecake went viral and suppliers and supermarkets haven’t been able to keep up.

I have to go! I have to finish my work-in-progress. Or at least make it something a little less ‘in progress’ and something more ready to be shared.

I will write again soon. Until then I will think of you often and with love.

Your friend

Tracy x