Going Up

Going Up
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 9, 2015

The traffic lights at Labouchere Road flipped to orange and I slammed on the anchors. The car in front sped across the intersection. In the distance I could see cars choking the freeway on-ramp.

“This could take a while,” I said to my three noise-makers in the back, but they were busy singing out of tune to the radio.

Up ahead, I spotted the block of flats I lived in as a four-year-old. I flipped up my sunvisor and counted up four floors to single out the two bedroom apartment Mum rented us after her divorce.

Time had forgotten the five-storey brick box at No. 89 Mill Point Road. All around it, towers of penthouse apartments were drinking in river views. Our 1960s apartment block squatted on the corner, a dumpy brown eyesore.

I studied our fourth floor balcony – a square envelope of concrete jutting out from an expanse of peanut-coloured wall. I could still make out the mulberry-coloured arches painted on the walls at ground level, a clumsy trompe l’oeil stained by the sprinklers with bore water. The umbrella tree in the carpark had grown ten-fold, its flower spikes still catalogued in my mind as giant pink starfish.

Staring at that old building, I was swept away by a flush of early memories. My brain delivered up a snapshot of our flat’s doorbell. It sat just shy of a four-year-old’s straining fingertips, a tantalising square of shiny silver mounted to a green door. I could replay the strangled ‘ding-dong’ of its tuneless chime. I mentally re-traced the swirls in the green carpet on our landing. My mind summonsed the enormous fire hydrant bracketed to the wall beside the lift.

The lift!

I suddenly remembered the lift; could feel again my excitement at being allowed to press the button to summons a ride. The lift announced its arrival with a ‘ping!’ The metal door jolted sideways, vanishing into the wall to reveal a tiny Aladdin’s cave.

Our elevator liked to land where it pleased, forcing me to hop up or jump down to board. I could still recall the tummy butterflies as I contemplated stepping over the two-inch gap between lift and landing. One stumble and I thought I’d fall through the crack and plummet to the lobby. Small girl would be squashed flat by a 2000-pound box. (My brain, enjoying this game, served up a grotesque tableau vivant of the rat Mum once steamrolled with our car.)

Our lift was designed to carry eight people but could only comfortably transport one. It became cramped and awkward with two passengers; incommodious with three. Adult options were limited: stand side by side, shoulders rubbing, or one behind the other, heel to toe. I jammed myself next to the control panel, securing the coveted job of button-pusher.

I tried to identify the smells of the various residents spoiling my ride. Perfumes were stiflingly pungent or sickeningly sweet. Other peoples’ clothing smelt fusty or dank, or reeked of sweat or B.O. Sometimes, Mum got out one floor early and took the stairs.

Later, having conquered my lift-paranoia, I appointed myself elevator-astronaut. Over and over I drove that lift-rocket, cruising down to the lobby then blasting off for Flat 12 on the fourth floor. It mattered not that it was quicker to walk up the stairwell, because I was the pilot in charge of five buttons. (Truthfully, it was only four, because the fifth button was still out of reach.)

Back on Labouchere Road, the traffic lights turned green and my consciousness rejoined the present. As we inched towards the freeway, I wondered if other peoples’ first memories are as equally pedestrian as mine?

The following day, I prodded a girlfriend to tell me her first memory. In vivid detail, she described for me a vignette from her childhood growing up in the Wheatbelt. She remembered being clad in a nappy playing with a toy washing machine on the lid of their septic tank. Her overwhelming feeling, she said, was of the warm sun radiating off the tank, and being absorbed in her domestic idyll, washing her doll’s clothes.

The pair of us were certain our first memories were real, not imagined or distorted by time.

So the next morning, I drove back to my old block of flats in South Perth. A friendly painter allowed me into the building. Climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, I discovered Apartment 12 still had its square doorbell. Bolted to the wall was the very same fire hydrant, (though smaller than I remembered) and the still swirling green carpet.

But unlike me, my beloved lift-rocket had not grown up or moved out. It still had its metal door and faux-timber panelling. Aged 47, I rode that lift up and down – twice – just for kicks, and revisited the favourite scenes from my life, aged four. My job now is not to forget them.

A Line to the Past

A Line to the Past
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 4, 2015

Kulin seems deserted this Sunday morning. The town’s womenfolk are sleeping-in after last night’s dinner dance. The kids on bikes yesterday must be watching TV. Two brown honeyeaters pirouette noisily overhead. They bank sharply before alighting unsteadily on a power line. Theirs is the only movement on Stewart Street.

My newly five-year-old daughter, keen to explore, kicks up a shower of red pebbles from the gravel footpath. We wander past a derelict shop. In the window is a faded sepia photograph of a swarthy bloke wearing a mug-shot smirk. His white shirt-sleeves are rolled up above his elbows, business-like. My pint-sized companion is captivated by his eyebrows, which sit on his jutting forehead like two hairy caterpillars. I read the caption:

Norm Tyley – the Red-Faced Crooked Butcher.

We turn the corner but the Woolshed Cafe is still shut – no caffeine heart-starter for me. We double-back along Day Street. That’s when I spot a long-forgotten friend. Its concrete roots are planted at the centre of a barren backyard. A galvanised trunk is poker-straight. From its branches, half a dozen frayed and flapping towels strain against their pegs.

This is the Hills Hoist of my childhood. There’s the winder with the black plastic knob. The four canopy arms are the same dull grey as the clouds scudding across the Wheatbelt sky. I can see, across the fences, that almost every backyard has a Hills Hoist. Some are bare skeletons; some are pinned with full loads, newly damp with autumn dew.

“What’s that?” asks my youngster, pointing to the steel tree I’d stopped to admire.

“That, honey, is a Hills Hoist!”

“What’s it for?”

“It’s a clothes line.”

Showing no interest in either clothes or line, she resumes scuffing pebbles with the now dusty red toe of her sneaker.

But I’m transported back to my childhood, growing up at Nan’s house, the only child of a working mother. Nan’s Hills Hoist had been planted into a carpet of matted buffalo. It stood sentinel between her outside washhouse and the magnolia tree that overlooked Mrs Anderson’s yard at No. 47.

Mrs Anderson’s Hills Hoist was a newer model and came with a trolley on wheels – Nan called it a jinka – that cradled her washing basket. On the east side at No. 43, the Fry family’s Hills Hoist had been planted so close to their sleepout that every time Mrs Fry swung it round to reach a new piece of line, its metal elbow scraped her guttering.

On slow Sunday afternoons, Mr Fry sat in his easy chair on his concrete patio, using the shade from his wife’s wet sheets to read his paper. Every half hour, the sun would find a gap to blind him, or the wind would conspire to rotate the Hills Hoist five degrees. Mr Fry would haul himself out of his chair, shuffle a few inches to the left, then settle himself down again in the shade of a flapping Bonds singlet, or his wife’s underpants. Mesmerised by the size of Lil Fry’s bloomers, I stickybeaked over the picket fence, watching each cotton leg billowing and deflating like an airport windsock.

Aged seven, my job was to lug Saturday morning’s wet washing to the Hills Hoist and hang it out. Mum would crank the handle until the lines dropped within reach, then I’d wipe them with a damp cloth. She’d unhook the wicker basket of wooden pegs and hang the holder at waist-height from the winder instead.

By the time I was ten, plastic pegs had arrived in a riot of colours. I amused myself by matching peg colour to sock colour. On bumper wash days, I created complementary colour arrangements for Mum’s secretarial wardrobe. A modern-day Van Gogh, I paired yellow pegs to Mum’s violet shirt, blue ones to her tangerine trousers. But I came unstuck if her pale-green tennis top was in the wash, seeing pegs never came in magenta.

Nan said to peg whites with whites, and to hang sheets and towels on the outside rungs, so visitors wouldn’t see our unmentionables. If she dashed to the shops, I used the Hills Hoist like a merry-go-round. Every kid did. Ours creaked and groaned and shuddered violently even under my flyweight. A garden tap staked in the lawn obstructed my flight path. I had to remember to jerk my legs up and over the tap, or it would smash into my knees. More than once the tap won, and Nan would arrive home to find me limping across the lawn. She never said anything. The deep blue bruises were enough punishment.

Back on Kulin’s Day Street, small daughter interrupts my reverie shouting: “Mum! There’s a kookaburra o n the Hills Hoist!” For several moments, I drink in the sight of bird on wire. I wonder how many more totems of my childhood are almost obsolete.

Bite Your Tongue

Bite Your Tongue
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 6, 2014

It was the first roadhouse I’d seen in forty-five minutes and I needed coffee and petrol. In that order. I swung off the Brand highway and pulled up at the pump, feeling dwarfed by the half a dozen road trains stretched out across the carpark.

At the counter, I stood beside a truckie who made me feel petite.

“A coupla cheese sausages and a pie n’ sauce,” he said.

In the bain-marie, two shrivelled sausages with wrinkly red hides lay sweating behind the glass.

“How’d they get the cheese in?” I said, thinking out loud.

“Beats me,” said the truckie, “but they’re bloody good,” and he slapped a ten dollar note on the counter and gathered up his two paper bags.

While the waitress made my coffee, I tried guessing what was inside the crumbed and battered shapes glowing under the warmer. The square ones were likely hash browns, I decided. The yellow rings would be squid. Or maybe onion? I could tell the crabsticks by their customary pink stripe .

My late step-father, Stan, refused to call them crabsticks. “They don’t put an ounce of crab in them!” he’d snort. He called them Sea Legs instead. (Stan was convinced “they” were also responsible for eighteen minutes of missing Watergate tape, the disappearance of Harold Holt and the refusal of a brand new Victa lawn mower to start on the first pull.)

Growing up in the 70s, the arrival of convenience food gave the Watsonia polony knob cult status in our kitchen. “At last!” my Nan’d say admiringly, as she sawed through the rubbery tube with a bread knife. “Someone’s making life easier.”

The polony knob was always served cold from the fridge, sliced into thick discs and sandwiched between buttered slices of cob loaf. Nan called it luncheon meat, and marvelled at its durability. Polony knobs lasted for a fortnight. They never dried out and retained their lovely rosy shade until the very last slice (which was puckered, obscenely, where the metal catch pinched closed the tube.)

For a while there, ‘polony pink’ was my favourite colour. But Nan said polony was actually ‘Baker-Miller pink.’ “That’s the colour they’re painting asylums these days,” she explained, pointing to the little pile of polony slices on my open sandwich. “I read in the Reader’s Digest that a psychologist called Mr Baker, and his colleague Mr Miller, discovered a shade of pink that keeps patients calm and compliant.”

As a child with excitable tendencies, I always calmed down after lunch, which, according to Nan, only enhanced polony’s reputation as a superfood. I was never convinced the Watsonia polony knob tasted like meat, but it didn’t taste like broccoli either, which was all that mattered.

Usually a Nan’s polony sandwich came with a side serving of Kraft processed cheese. We called it ‘plastic cheese’ as a compliment. It, too, appeared indestructible. Plastic cheese came cocooned in Alfoil inside a small silver and blue cardboard box. I recycled those cheese boxes as coffins for pet snails who inexplicably expired on their diet of grass clippings and polony crumbs.

No matter how high Nan cranked the griller, plastic cheese never melted like normal cheese. It sat on my toast like a doormat. Even if the bread was cremated, plastic cheese would only ever develop a black blister. Poked with a knife, the blister would shatter into a fine layer of ash.

By the time I was a teenager, Mum had discovered French Onion dip. She made it from scratch by tipping two sachets of Continental French Onion Soup Mix into half a litre of sour cream. Even now, I can’t understand how a dish so high in calories didn’t make me a fattie. Perhaps because it was too repulsive to eat. French Onion dip couldn’t be saved even by Ritz crackers.

Mum’s coleslaw however, was a triumph of convenience cuisine. It contained the usual shredded cabbage and carrot, but she added a tin of Golden Circle crushed pineapple and a handful of sultanas to give it a tropical edge. Then she took the edge off with a whole jar of Miracle Whip mayonnaise. It was the perfect accompaniment to a mob of lamb chops with fatty tails and a scoop of Deb instant mashed potato.

Back at the roadhouse, I paid for my coffee and contemplated a chocolate bar, casting my eye over the sea of shiny wrappers. Some were new to me with names I didn’t recognise – Crispello, Pods, Bubbly. “Whatever happened to the Polly Waffle?” I said to the young waitress.

“The what?” she said, giving me a guarded look.

“The Polly Waffle!” I repeated. “You know – that chocolate log-thing with the tube of white marshmallow inside!”

“Never heard of it,” she said. “But it sounds gross.”

Talking Shop

Talking Shop
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 9, 2014

Grocery shopping isn’t as fun as it used to be. My local Coles is efficient, but impersonal and bland. I hanker for the shopping strips of my childhood, when a tray of fresh peaches smelt of the sun. Mum would test the ripeness of a rockmelon by lifting it up and pressing her nose against the fragrant dimple where the vine once fed the stalk.

In 1975, all the shopkeepers in my suburb knew me by name. Even when Tracy Sabitay and I got sprung trying to light matches in the laneway behind Mr Rudrum’s electrical shop, Mr Pearlman the pharmacist had no trouble identifying us: “Well, well, well. Tracy and Rosalind I see! Shall we put away the matches or shall I call your mothers?”

The butcher was my favourite proprietor. His name was Mr Butcher, one of those rare but happy marriages between identity and occupation. He was an amiable fellow with a Tom Selleck moustache and Magnum PI’s patience with the lady customers, who vacillated about whether to grace the dinner table with steak or rissoles.

From Monday to Friday Mr Butcher wore a shirt and tie under his blue and white striped apron. On Saturdays, when there were no carcasses to joint, Mr Butcher was luminous in a white coat and matching apron.

Aged eight, I asked Mum about the one-knuckled stump on his left hand where his rude finger should’ve been: “How do you know about the rude finger!” she demanded.

I shrugged.

“Well,” she said, “I know for a fact that when Mr Butcher was three, he put his finger into his father’s mincing machine.”

That story seemed too innocent. As a budding drama queen, I could invent far more bloodthirsty whodunits to explain that missing digit. On our twice-weekly visits to Mr Butcher’s, I took to hoisting myself onto the handbag rail so I could rest my chin on the counter. From there, I could direct all the action.

Enter Ned Kelly stage right. With a metal bucket on his head, I’d have him burst through the door brandishing a rifle as long as his beard: “Gimme all your money!” he’d yell and we customers would dive under the counter. Hearing the commotion, Mr Butcher’d come charging out of the coolroom with a joint over his shoulder and belt the robber over the head with eight pounds of pot roast. ‘BANG!’ The gun’d go off. The bullet ricocheted off the till and tunnelled through Mr Butcher’s hand. I watched in horror as his bloodied finger somersaulted through the air in slow motion. It bounced along the floor, rolling over and over in the sawdust until it came to rest, perfectly disguised as a crumbed sausage.

Satisfied with my ingenuity, I took to being mesmerised by Mr Butcher’s knifework instead. He did his jointing on the lopsided chopping block, a waist-high round cut from a big karri tree. Always chopping from the higher, smoother side of the block, he inched his remaining fingers ahead of his cleaver as he carved up a side of lamb. With a flourish, he whipped out a long slender blade from the knife pouch dangling from his butcher’s belt. Slicing off a rind of white fat, he deftly trimmed the gristle and voila! a dozen lamb chops would be sitting neatly curled on his pad of butcher’s paper. Rolling up the parcel, he leaned over the counter and presented the package to Mum. “There you go, Mrs Thomas, will you be needing some silverside today?”

Like all butcher shops, ours smelled of raw meat and the sawdust that soaked up the drips and drops of scraps that missed the bin. My childish nostrils were easily offended. Following Mum in through Mr Butcher’s front door, I’d screw up my face to block the cloying scent, which vanished as soon as he offered me a slice of polony.

Mr Butcher was the master of customer service. He’d slip into an easy banter about the weather: “Still stifling out there Mrs Fry? When will this heatwave end?”

But then the talk would turn to Vietnam and the Watergate tapes. Or Malcolm Fraser ousting Billy Snedden and my smarts would falter and I’d begin to study the creases on the back of Mrs Fry’s neck.

Even now, I like my service personalised. Grocery shopping has become a chore. But the owner of my nearby supermarket franchise has the gift for making shoppers feel special. He delights his elderly customers by offering to carry their bags to the car. He’ll pack their groceries into the boot, making sure the egg carton is secure, then walk around and open their driver’s door: “See you Friday Mrs Wheeler!” Then he’ll turn to my youngsters riding shotgun on my trolley: “And did you two help Mum today?” They giggle and fib but he gives them a Freddo Frog anyway. They’ll be his customers for life.

Rolling in Nostalgia

Rolling in Nostalgia
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 12, 2014

Last Sunday I had my first encounter with a Chiko Roll since 1988. We met by chance, that Chiko Roll and I in Cockburn Sound, on a jetty I hadn’t set foot on since I was in pigtails.

Two hours earlier at home, the man of the house had yelled through the back door: “Hey! Let’s go fishing in Safety Bay!” Of course, I knew the fishing was a subterfuge – what he really wanted was to marry two of his favourite things: his Holden ute and a long drive.

Regardless, the kids know to pounce when an adventure’s in the offing. Inside ten minutes, they’d found their shoes and loaded the hand lines and buckets into the ute. They were sitting expectantly in the back seat by the time their father had jemmied loose some squid bait from the back wall of the freezer.

We took the scenic route – past Kwinana’s industrial estate and the fertiliser plant, belching columns of grey steam. It was not yet 4pm, and the Palm Beach jetty was packed. Bronzed kids with glistening skins sprinted past us, daring each other to climb over the railing and dive-bomb into the deep water.

Fishermen were staking out their territory. I took my youngster to the end of the jetty and baited his reel with a blob of squid while his father and sister horsed around on the beach.

For the next 45 minutes, mother and son caught nothing but a baby blowfish. It flopped and squeaked, trying to puff up into something more menacing. Being a novice fishwife, I had to shut my eyes to extricate the hook from behind two buck teeth. I made a ceremony of releasing the captive back to its watery playground but my six-year-old, bored, had already wandered away to find dad.

I packed up and leant against a concrete bench watching the anglers back-lit by an orange sun. Two matrons with matching perms were enjoying the same view. One of them had a half-eaten Chiko Roll in her lap, still in its stripey paper sleeve.

“Wow!” I said. “A Chiko Roll! Haven’t seen one of those in years!”

They turned in unison and laughed. “We still love them, even though they’re bad for us!” the lady in the cream tracksuit replied. She motioned towards her friend. “Tottie and her husband had the fish and chip shop up the road.”

Tottie was inspecting the paper bag in her lap which was turning grey from the spreading bloom of grease. “Chiko Rolls and dim sims went like hotcakes on Sund’y evenings,” she said, “We rolled them in chicken salt and the kids went mad for them!”

I left them re-living the 1970s and tried to remember the last time I had a Chiko Roll. I could still picture the straw-coloured filling flecked with carrot, but could only recall the taste of cabbage. The rest was a mysterious slurry cleverly named to suggest chicken, without promising actual bird. In fact, the Chiko Roll was more or less an Ocker spring roll, a fat tube of carbohydrate designed to be managed with one hand. The ends were cleverly plugged with batter so the insides wouldn’t seep down your front.

I remembered the Chiko Roll being extraordinarily resilient. It could remain edible after days of sweltering under the glare of a roadhouse bain-marie. The outer shell, a deep-fried chamber of dough, could be sat on without it collapsing. I know this because in my twenties, I once rear-ended one, getting back into my car after a pit-stop at the Myalup roadhouse. I didn’t even dent that Chiko Roll, such was the gentle pressure applied by my then-dainty left buttock.

The Chiko Roll has a larrikin’s pedigree. It premiered at the Wagga Wagga Agricultural Show in 1951. Its inventor, Frank McEncroe, a boiler-maker, had welded together his prototype with a flux of egg and flour. He was inspired to experiment after sampling a ‘chop suey’ roll from a stall at a footy match.

His new snack sold out. With a sausage-machine, he began mass-producing the rolls from the back of a fish shop. Surf dudes and top chicks lived on them. I remember the ads featured a sultry leather-clad blonde astride a Harley Davidson, her Chiko Roll gripped at a suggestive 60-degree angle. Mum complained that the lady’s jacket, unzipped to the waist, was ‘sending the wrong message.’ I thought the Chiko Roll was meant to keep its filling intact but here was hers spilling out. I ignored what I didn’t understand.

That Sunday night, under a pink-streaked sky, the five of us demolished a parcel of fish and chips. At the shop, just the one Chiko Roll lay basking under the warmer, next to a shrivelled pair of dim sims. I eyed-off the trio but wasn’t game to buy. Who knows what’s in them? I’m guessing deep-fried nostalgia.

Double the Fun

Double the Fun
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 15, 2014

The Two Ronnies were a Saturday night institution when I was eight. At 7.25pm, my Nan would untie her apron and announce: “Off you go then. Do the honours!”

That was my signal. I’d race down the hall to the good room and switch Nan’s hulking Thorn television to ‘ON.’ We didn’t call it TV in those days because Nan was a stickler for formalities: “Abbreviations are uncouth. We have a television set and a refrigerator and a lavatory and a lounge suite. These are their proper names!” Nan referred to the on/off button on her television set as the knob.

The station dial was always set to Channel 2 – we were loyal to Aunty no matter what she gave us. I would kneel on the carpet and wait, the television staring blankly at me on its splayed wooden legs. Studying the inky screen I’d begin counting: One thousand, two thousand, three thousand… And there it was! A pinprick of light, right in the middle of the screen. It grew larger and brighter, flickered sideways, and then Peter Holland and his moustache filled the screen: “That’s all from the newsroom. Good night.”

“That Peter Holland speaks the Queen’s English,” said my Nan, clearly smitten. Twenty years later, I got a tongue-lashing from that handsome baritone as I bolted into the edit suite with a late-breaking story about Alan Bond. Minutes earlier, I’d screeched my car to a halt outside the newsroom’s back door. I  commandeered the first available car space: Holland’s. His Queen’s English became laden with expletives.

My Nan and I had Saturday nights to ourselves. It was Mum’s date night. She’d be off to dinner at the tennis club with my soon-to-be step-father. Mum had sashayed out the door in her most flattering frock – sapphire-blue polyester blooming with giant yellow hibiscus.

Nan and I would settle into the paisley armchairs that belonged to her Merry Widow lounge suite: great hulking chairs with sweeping arms and plush upholstery. Mine engulfed me. I would sit cross-legged on my velvet throne and wedge my knees into the padding to balance my tray table on my lap. There we’d eat our savoury mince on toast, watching The Two Ronnies, my Nan tittering away –  she was quite the merry widow herself.   

I was confused by the sight gags: Ronnie Corbett, the publican, standing on two boxes to see over the bar –  one marked ‘Agnes,’ the other ‘Champ’. It took me a year of French lessons to work out it was a Champagne crate cut in half.

The sketch that had Sid and George drinking pints and discussing women went way over my head:

“You’ve heard of erosive zones, ‘aven’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I seen pictures of ‘em in holiday brochures.”

“Nuh, erosive zone – it’s the medical term for a place a woman’s got, you see, where if you touch it she goes mad! I bet your Edie’s got one of them.

“Yeah. Her wallet.”

Every Saturday night I’d watch an hour of television I didn’t understand. But it didn’t matter – I loved it because Nan loved it. Ronnie C was my favourite because he looked like a glove puppet, Ronnie B was her’s because his elocution was flawless, even when he was deliberately ‘pispronouncing.’

Their double act would never have survived today’s political correctness – all that groping of buxom maids and lewd patter about knockers and the clap.

Admirably, my husband has a touch of the Ronnie Barkers – a ribald wit (and a shapely figure in a dress).  He also wears square glasses with thick black rims which he uses to score cheap laughs at parties. He’ll wave them in the air and announce: “Whenever I go to buy a new pair of specs, I ask them for the cheapest, plainest, least breakable glasses they have. You know – like Ronnie Barker’s. And every time I walk out looking like Ronnie Corbett!”

I was in London, aged 37, when Ronnie Barker died. I overheard someone relaying the news on the tube from Notting Hill. My eyes pricked with tears and I was transported back to my childhood, enthroned in my velvet armchair watching television with my giggly Nan.

I chastised myself for being a sentimental fool, then saw that the businessman and the matronly woman sitting either side of me were both reading the tributes in the paper. We three strangers were from different worlds but I bet we’d shared many a Saturday night with The Two Ronnies.

As I breached the pale daylight outside Oxford Circus station, I caught The Sun’s headline on a placard propped against a lamp post. Ronnie had the front page all to himself: it featured a giant picture of his glasses and just four words – “It’s Goodnight From Him.” God must have needed cheering up.