Passing Time

Passing Time
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 21, 2015

I arrived at the bus stop, breathless, having jogged across the park and up the grassy embankment to the highway. An elderly gent on the bench seat acknowledged me with a nod. His Labrador, sprawled at his feet, raised one eyebrow in greeting and thumped its tail lazily on the concrete.

“Excuse me,” I asked the owner. “Have I missed the 99?”

“Nothing green’s gone past since we’ve been here.”

Relieved, I sat down and remarked on his dog: “How old is he?”

“Bess? She’s nine.” He reached down to stroke a floppy ear. My bus-stop companion bore a remarkable likeness to Ernest Hemingway: a still handsome face framed by an impressive white beard, trimmed to follow a strong jawline. A navy fisherman’s cap, complete with rope braid, angled across his brow. I noticed the sharp crease in his cotton trousers and his polished brown lace-ups, one of which was wedged under Bess’ barrel chest. Only his walking stick hinted at infirmity. It was topped with a brass duck’s head, the bill worn smooth from constant handling. As we waited, he absentmindedly tapped the footpath with his stick.

“Where’re you off to then?” he said, suddenly. I wondered if he was hungry for conversation.

“I have a dentist’s check-up,” grimacing for his benefit. “Hope it’s a quick one.”

“I’ve given up on teeth,” he said with a chuckle, which turned into a wheeze, exploding into a coughing fit.

When he’d composed himself, I pointed to the duck’s head. “I’m quite taken with your walking stick. I’m supposed to convince my mum to use one – she’s getting a bit unsteady – but she won’t budge. Although I haven’t seen a fancy one like yours.”

“Bought it in London,” he said, giving the handle a twirl. “Been a beauty. Only problem is, the ferrule wears out every six months.”

“The what?”

“The rubber cap bunged on the end here. See?” He raised his stick. “Ferrule. There’s all kinds, but I like this one with the raised bumps underneath. When you’re resting your whole weight on it, it’s the difference between standing up and falling on your face!”

“Who knew walking sticks could be so technical!” I said. He chuckled again, no wheeze this time.

“Do you live near here?” I said, happy to make small talk now it was obvious we’d both missed the bus.

He pointed his stick over his shoulder. “I live three streets that way. Same house for 42 years. My wife died six months ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said quickly, surprised he was sharing such intimacies with a stranger. “It was a long illness,” he continued matter-of-factly. “I was relieved for her at first – she was 81 – but as the months go by, I’m realizing she was the last person I could talk to about the past. My friends are too busy with their own troubles.”

“Do you have family here?”

“One son in Sydney. The other in Albany. They’re good to me, but they got their own families. And I’m getting on for 83. Some days, I can’t imagine getting to 85, but then again, when I was 75 and first diagnosed with cancer, 80 seemed unlikely too.”

“My mum’s turning 80 next year,” I said. “She reckons she’s reached the age of invisibility.”

“Hmmf.” A thoughtful silence stretched between us. “This is the problem for old people,” he said finally. “We’re no longer involved in the main business of life: production and reproduction. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make ourselves relevant again. But at least we can give you young ones the encouragement to keep at it.”

“Quite frankly, I worry more about losing my marbles,” I said, voicing a private fear. “Dementia runs in the family and I’m terrified it’s sneaking up on me.”

“Luck of the draw, ain’t it,” he replied. “I have problems with my lungs and a weak heart. I’m more deaf than not, but I can hear what I need to with this little gadget in my ear. I can’t see properly and my hip gives me hell, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned – it’s that you’ve gotta keep going. Nothing else for it.”

I heard the crescendo of an approaching diesel. I swivelled to see the 99 bearing down on us and leapt up to wave at the driver.

“C’mon old girl,” I said to Bess the Labrador, still flaccid on the footpath. Her owner, bracing on his stick, heaved himself up.

“She’s allowed on the bus, is she?” I asked, scrabbling for change in my pocket.

“Oh, I’m not waiting for the bus,” said my new acquaintance. “Bess and I just stopped here for a rest. We’ll head off home now. Nice talking.”

Mind Games

Mind Games
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 15, 2015

I stood uneasily in the cavernous carpark, marooned in a concrete mausoleum. I steered my trolley left and right around grids of pillars and bays. No boxy black station wagon announced itself with the press of my key; no tail lights winked their happiness to see me. I had lost my car in the supermarket carpark. Separation anxiety set in.

After several more minutes of rising panic, I went into hyperdrive. ‘This can’t be happening,’ I chided myself. ‘How could I forget where I parked my car?’

I replayed my arrival an hour earlier: I’d driven off the street, down the ramp, turned left and lucked a space close to the escalator. My brain seized upon ‘escalator.’ That’s it! There are two them in this shopping centre: one at each end of the carpark. I was circling the wrong escalator.

I strode to the far end of the building. There – in exactly the spot I’d pictured – was my station wagon, rear end on display, nose to the wall. I felt a wave of relief. I loaded my groceries into the boot and drove up the exit ramp to breach the daylight. But a nagging sense of unease stayed with me all afternoon.

Is this how a mind starts slipping away? One lapse of concentration in an underground carpark and my memory had failed me. Had I reached that stage in life when forgetting becomes more important than remembering?

I grew up thinking mindlessness was an automatic condition of old age. Dementia stole my grandmother in her 80s; two uncles in their 70s. In recent years, Alzheimer’s has all but erased the sweetness of a favourite aunt. In our family, forgetting is a red flag.

In her 80th year, Mum’s memory has suddenly become an unreliable companion. Some days, forgetting becomes all-consuming. She is repeatedly distracted by the whereabouts of her keys, her wallet, her phone. Last Wednesday, I answered her mayday call and joined the search for her missing keys. We discovered them in the garden, plonked on the lid of the recycling bin.

“Now I remember!” she said. “It’s rubbish day. I had to unlock the side gate to bring the bins in.”

‘It’s no big deal, Ma,’ I said, noting her exasperation. “At least they weren’t in the bin!” She relaxed and gave me a hug. (In our house, keys favour the top shelf of the fridge, the laundry bench and the window sill above the loo.)

I worry Mum’s fickle memory will sabotage her fierce independence. Already, she’s painfully aware of the small gaps appearing in her daily routines.

“Do I need to take these pills here?” she wonders aloud as she make me a cup of tea. “What are these white ones for anyway?”

She tells me how on bad days, tiredness dims her mind and makes her conversation flabby and repetitive. She describes her frustration when mid-sentence, a word sits just out of reach, refusing to come when called for.

“That’s when I’ll say something stupid,” she says, “trying to cover up my embarrassment.”

“It happens to everybody,” I reassure her. I’m already an expert at clumsy word spillage.

I notice Mum is now clinging to her diary. It’s her antidote to forgetting: a painstakingly transcribed almanac of appointments and errands, birthdays and passwords. Her diary is stuffed with letters and receipts – life’s paperwork, held together with an elastic-band.

“Just a minute,” she’ll say down the phone, when I suggest we meet for lunch. “Let me write that down.” Remembering has become hard work but forgetting has not slowed her down.

She’s still the gadabout she’s always been. Her life is a whirlwind of coffees and dinners and concerts. Her evening constitutional is a seven kilometre bike ride, or an hour’s walk along the beach. She catches the train to every Eagles home game. Afterwards, hoarse from barracking, she’ll take herself off to dinner ‘somewhere nice.’ She’d walk home in the dark if we’d let her.

Now and then, we sit together in a windowless waiting room, hoping a doctor will give her pockmarked memory a name. “Nothing wrong here,” they’ll say, inspecting the report from her latest scan. “Age-related memory loss, we call it. Getting old’s no fun, is it?”

“Better than the alternative,” she shoots back, enjoying her joke.

Last week, as she waltzed in our back door to join us for dinner, I asked if she’d remembered to put her bins out.

She smiled and settled herself onto a stool.

“Nope,” she said. “Remind me again when I leave.” She leant over and whispered to my youngsters. “At least I’ve never forgotten where I parked my car.” The kids snickered.

“Pretty funny for a Tuesday night, aren’t you Ma,” I said, dishing out the casserole. And then I faltered, spoon in mid-air. “It is Tuesday, right?”

Mother Love

Mother Love
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 13, 2015

I joined the tail of the takeaway coffee queue as two women settled themselves at an empty table beside me. The older woman signalled the waitress by gesticulating above her head. The younger one looked away, abashed.

The older woman ordered a latte.

“Can we keep that door open?” she asked the waitress politely, pointing at the cafe’s front door.

“It’s a bit stuffy.”

Her companion appeared mortified. “Mum!” she whispered urgently. “It’s fine.”

The waitress obligingly edged the door ajar. The mother smiled her thanks and leaned across the table, eager to chat. She looked sweet, sensible, middle-aged.

I guessed the daughter was about 15, fully grown but still gauche. She was clearly miffed at having a mother make preposterous demands of a waitress.

My mum and I once inhabited the same parallel universe. Aged 16, I feared a shopping expedition was doomed if Mum suggested she join me. What if she wore her enormous paisley scarf? What if someone overheard her making a fuss in the change rooms? Would she reflect badly on me? I was such a teenaged twerp.

But if I rewind my memory further to when I was small, I can remember my desperation to be near her. The smell of her was a heady melange of Oil of Olay, Velvet soap and talcum powder. I can recall the shape of her beautiful hands, the slender fingers, their perfect oval nails. I loved her smooth muscled calves; can still hear the buzz of her Remington Princess electric shaver as she sanded her legs before tennis. I’m still able to summons the scent of her Coty lipstick; how she’d kiss my forehead as I sat in her lap, my head tucked under her chin, breathing in the warmth of her neck. Nothing ever went wrong in my life when she was around.

Until I was eight. I’d started a new school. Mum had a new job and a new habit of arriving late to collect me.

“Mr Elsner needed me to type a letter,” she’d say.

Or: “I had to take dictation.”

I didn’t care about the demands on a working single mother, because I was the last child left clinging to the monkey bars in the deserted playground. All my friends were home drinking Ovaltine and snarfing Gingernuts. My mother was likely dead. She’d been hit by a truck. Or shot by a bank robber. By the time her battleship-grey Sigma rounded the corner, I was already in an orphanage and inconsolable. The world was a fearful place without her.

Age 11, she whacked me across the ear. I’d been whining and thrashing about while she tried to brush my knotted hair. I deserved that slap. But I pretended to be deaf for two days.

“Pardon?” I strained, cupping my good ear so she’d have to repeat her question. On day three she apologised, but I was tired of being deaf by then. It was a hollow victory.

Aged 26 and living in Sydney, I couldn’t wait for her visits. We’d drink G & T’s on my cramped balcony and plan weekend adventures in the Blue Mountains. She was as much fun as any of my girlfriends. They came to her for advice about terrible bosses and wayward boyfriends. She could empathise with any problem.

She walked me down the aisle the day I was married. She was as excited as I was, until she saw the crowd and had to pause to overcome her nerves. When I was pregnant, she’d feel her way around my belly while explaining to her unborn grandchild the importance of following the Eagles.

As I grappled with the stricken nights and foggy days of multiple motherhood, she’d arrive with a cottage pie and a tray of baked apples. Then she’d gather up baby, toddler and nine-year-old and herd them to the park to play Frisbee.

My children call her Noo-Noo. Always have. None of us can remember why. This year, Noo-Noo’s 79th, she and I are spending a lot of time in doctors’ waiting rooms. I now hold her arthritic hand the way she held my grandmother’s. I see her skin has become crepe-paper thin, the knuckles swollen, the fingers painfully bent.

We laugh at what’s become of her beautiful hands, what the years will do to mine. She tells me she found her missing keys in the fridge. Ten minutes later she tells me again. I smile and nod but I fear for the prospect that mother and daughter are reversing roles.

The doctor writes her another script to add to her collection. We go for coffee before I drop her home. She talks about the opera season in New York, how much she’d love to go. “Maybe I should stay closer to home,” she says. I think I hear a tinge of unease. But she’s already up and gleefully inspecting the cake cabinet.

Older and Wiser

Older and Wiser
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 16, 2015

I spot a friend’s elderly father sitting outside the cafe with his coffee. A brisk north-easterly has turned Kirwin Street into a wind tunnel. A gust flaps his newspaper and whips a flurry of dry leaves under his table but he’s unperturbed.  

“Edward!” I say. “It’s freezing out here. Come inside and have your coffee with me.”

He hoists himself up to kiss my cheek. We move inside to a table by the wall. Edward, dapper in a navy sportscoat and crisp shirt, sweeps one hand across his glabrous head, flattening a few token wisps to his pate.

“How are you?” I say. It seems an obvious question to ask an 87-year-old.

“Can’t complain,” he replies. “I can still read the paper without glasses.”

I detect a note of pride.

“But my teeth are wearing out,” he adds. “I’m going to get new dentures and have the teeth of a 20-year-old. That’ll confuse the ladies!”

I ask about his left knee. (Long pestered by arthritis, it was reconstructed last year). He gives it a slap.

“It feels brand new!” he says, then cranes forward as if to tell me a secret.

“You know, I was dying at 71. My aorta was leaking.”

He unfastens the top button of his shirt and gives me a glimpse of the scar he says bisects him from throat to navel.

“They fixed me up with a pacemaker and a new aorta made of Kevlar. Kevlar! Now I’m bulletproof. I could live for a thousand years. The question is: would I want to?”

I wonder what’s coming next.

“At my age, people die. I’ve said goodbye to almost everybody.” He rattles off a catalogue of three dead brothers, long gone friends, neighbours, classmates, colleagues, the dentist.

“People my age are only alive because death’s forgotten to visit.”

“But are you lonely?”

“Of course! No-one wants to be alone. I miss the warmth of another body sleeping next to mine. But my life is never dull or empty. The good thing about getting old is there’s finally time for thinking. I like to speculate on the nature of human beings. In the mornings, I lie snug in my bed for a long time.” He chuckles. “Because I can!”

“Would you like to meet someone?”

“Where would I find another Barbara?” he ponders aloud. “I was so desperately in love with Barbara.”

His voice trails off and I study my coffee foam to give him a moment to collect himself.

“She was a helluva catch. I was eight years older. She died of lung cancer at 65. She was just a kid, for goodness sake!” I hear the bitterness in his voice, but then he softens.

“That’s the unfairness of life, isn’t it? I’ve never recovered from Barbara’s death. I’m not sure I want to.”

I stay silent.

“A man is only the reflection of the woman he lives with,” he says with a smile. “She completed me. We were married for 45 years. She’s been gone twelve years. It feels like an eternity.”

He brightens.

“But a large family is a good shock-absorber: five children, eight grand-children, four great-grand-children. When I’m with them, life’s fantastic.”

I tell him about my middle son’s upcoming birthday and ask: “How do you think of the future?”

“I make plans. I want to putter down the canals of France in a houseboat; go places I’ve never been. In January I cruised from Sydney to Fiji. There were 2000 passengers. I went to a singles night but only four people turned up. And two of them had partners.”

We snort in unison.

“You know, time goes faster as you get older. But it’s not time that’s going faster – it’s me going slower. Old age is what happens as you wear out. Like the soles of your shoes – week by week, slowly, imperceptibly, and then one day they’re just too worn out to put on. They’ve outlived their purpose.” He quotes a Jaques’ line from As You Like It:

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

He inspects the mottled skin on his still manly hands. “I’m doing okay, compared to some. I’m gobsmacked by my own good luck. How have I managed to get this far in such good nick? My memory’s the problem now. I can feel the fine details fading out. I see people I’ve known for 40 years and I can’t remember their names.”

It’s time to go. I feel buoyant after my half hour with this insightful, perpetually youthful old man. He stands up to say goodbye. “Luck is everything,” he reminds me.

I sit in the car and reflect, wondering if he’s right.

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.

When Darkness Falls

When Darkness Falls
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 23, 2014

It was the wind that startled me awake. A gust outside the window buffeted the hibiscus against the gutter. The screeching of wood on metal unsettled my ears. A branch thumped loudly and my heart joined in. I closed my eyes, chastised myself for being lily-livered, and tried to summon sleep. It was no use. I was spooked.

I swung warm feet onto cold floor and padded out to the kitchen, catching sight of the oven clock: 05.22. What now?

I put on my running gear and tiptoed out the door. The dark was thick and soupy. I couldn’t see where the slabs of footpath beetled over one another, eager to trip me. My street felt foreign and menacing. Was I stupid to run at this hour?

Only the house on the corner was aglow. At a desk behind a sash window, I could see a man in a dressing gown, outlined in cheery yellow lamplight. I felt briefly comforted, then turned into the next street and the gloom enveloped me anew. I strained my ears, hoping to hear the first kookaburras calling to each other from the salmon gums, but the wind had dropped. The air was still and silent.

My imagination goes into overdrive at night, especially when my husband is away. Eldest son keeps me company until 9pm, but at 11.30, I’m squirming in bed, sleepless and watchful. A floorboard creaks. Is someone in the house? That’ll be Freddy Krueger coming to fillet me with his razor gloves! (I’m sixteen again, living out my Nightmares on Elm Street).

In my first year at University, (back row, Pysch 101), Sigmund Freud taught me that my fear of the dark was maternal separation anxiety. (Or more likely, having the wimp gene). But lately, I’ve conducted a straw poll of girlfriends and all but one is still scared of the dark. We’re not frightened of the dark itself, but of the bogeymen who still inhabit our nocturnal minds.

My childish terror of lights-out began when mum and I moved in with my Nan when I was seven. It was my nightly torment to dash from back door to outdoor dunny. The brick thunderbox, roofed with an arch of corrugated iron, sat on a cold slab of concrete. The pedestal was white porcelain, with a chain flusher and a fat wooden seat.

On wintry evenings, I’d stand on the back veranda in my pj’s, hopping from one leg to the other to steel my nerves (and distract my bladder). The umbrella trees that loomed over the fishpond threw witchy fingers of shadow. When the wind gusted, those old crones grabbed at my ankles as I leapt off the veranda and tore across the damp grass. From porch to dunny was fifteen steps – fourteen after a run-up. I slammed the dunny door on the umbrella tree witches, only to have relief turn to shock as warm bum met chilly seat.

It was only ever a one-way terror. The return journey was a doddle as I aimed myself at the lit kitchen.

As a teenager, I was both electrified and petrified by horror movies. The bathtub scene in The Shining rattled me for days. One Friday night when we were 18, my girlfriends egged me into watching the late session of Aliens at Cinema City. I thought two bourbons and cokes would give me the requisite dutch courage. But even Sigourney Weaver couldn’t soothe my jitters. Half way through the movie, unable to bear the suspense, I fled the cinema. Sitting on the foyer steps, I waited for my friends, polishing off my popcorn and admiring the plush blood-red carpet under the reassuring neon brightness.

Thirty years later, I’m still a sissy. I can only watch re-runs of the X Files with all the lights on. Even then, I grip my husband’s hairy left thigh, screw shut my eyes and repeat “Is it over yet?” “Yup,” he says, and I open my eyes to confront the gory climax. “You rotten sod!” I poke him playfully where his tummy spills over his trousers.

My fear of fear is irrational but ingrained. Yesterday, I went out running again before dawn. Stretching my hamstrings on the corner, I looked up the street and saw a big bloke shambling towards me. I stuck close to the picket fences as he came closer. True to form, I ascribed Hannibal Lecter to his motives, Quasimodo to his gait.

‘Morning!’ the man said brightly as he passed. Feeling idiotic for my panic, I told myself to grow up. I watched him as he merged with the dark. And then he stopped. For an instant, I thought I saw him glance at me over his shoulder. I brimmed with fear. What’s he picking up? A big stick? Nah. It’s only his newspaper.

I Rest My Case

I Rest My Case
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 25, 20124

Last Sunday afternoon, my husband plonked a small battered case at my feet: “I found this in the tractor shed at the farm. I thought you might not have seen it in a while.”

Something about this case had slipped below the surface of my mind. It was the colour that pricked my memory first: a once-luminous shade of teal blue. I slid my hand around the smooth plastic handle and felt a familiar groove against my fingertips: My school case! My primary school case!

I felt a rush of nostalgia. I flicked open the metal catches with my thumbs. They sprang up with the same ‘thwack’ from forty years ago, still eager to perform despite rusted hinges and arthritic joints.

Inside the cardboard lid was a sticky strip of red Dymo tape. My name and phone number were punched out in white letters: Roslyn Genevieve Thomas, 84 2556.

Mum, being the model of secretarial sophistication, had brought home the office Dymo amid much fanfare. I was so proud to be labelled. (Now my school case seemed so much smaller than I remembered.)

I turned it over and noticed the sturdy moulded fibreboard, once held together by smooth silver rivets, had sloughed off its shiny painted skin to reveal an underbelly of grimy brown cardboard. The rivets were now rough and rusted. The plastic corner protectors had given up trying and were cracked in intricate eggshell patterns. One had split and torn away from the rivet, leaving a jagged edge which caught my wrist. It stung like a cat scratch. Inside my school case, a white cocoon was hanging precariously from a single silken thread, its occupant long since departed. How did it get there?

My case had that peculiar smell common to all forgotten treasures: the mustiness of neglect, a staleness I found almost comforting. I wanted to breathe in the scent of my childhood but I could detect no trace of oily crayons or pencil shavings. My case was worn out with usefulness.

I snapped open the catches again, just to relish the sound. As an 8-year-old, those latches had popped open to reveal a wilting salad sandwich, wrapped in greaseproof paper, the loose ends folded and tucked under. Nothing glad about that sandwich – my school case could not defend its contents against a 38-degree day. (In 1975, freezer blocks were science fiction).

My lunch was always enclosed in a brown paper bag. I could guess at what it contained by the bloom of the greasy stain underneath. Cheddar cheese sweated the most, followed by salami and liverwurst.

Mum was the Thomas Edison of sandwich inventiveness: peanut paste with raisins. Swiss cheese and gherkin (sliced longways for maximum bread wetness). Mortadella dotted with clammy circles of fat.

Leftover roast lamb was the caviar of cold cuts – once a month I could use a lamb sandwich as playground currency. Mine was made from two doorsteps of hideously virtuous wholemeal bread, but I could barter it for a neat round of pillowy-soft white bread and vegemite.

And then in Year 5 Mum started adding condiments: roast lamb and Rosella fruit chutney. Roast lamb and mint jelly. Cornwell’s mint jelly was playground purgatory. The first time I unwrapped that sandwich, speckled green slime oozed out. Sarah Biddles (the willowy blonde I wanted to be) shouted: “Yech! frogs’ eggs! You’ve got frogs’ eggs!”

She wouldn’t sit next to me after that. From then on, I guiltily binned every lamb sandwich in the vain hope of restoring the friendship.  

During summer, the gravelly forecourt in front of our classrooms became blisteringly hot. I could feel the heat pulsing up through the thinning soles of my school sandals. Sweat would trickle down my back and soak the waistband of my regulation navy-blue knickers. Even so, we girls would hop from one foot to the other on the baking bitumen pleading with the boys to be allowed to play King Ball. The boys never relented. I cursed them, vowing never, ever to kiss one.

The girls with Great Dane legs would shuffle off to play Hopscotch. Instead, my Corgi-legs would carry me to the oval. There a friend and I would unearth cute beetles to replace those who’d inexplicably died on holiday inside our school cases. (Beetle embalmings were planned with glee, but burials were respectfully solemn).

Reunited with my beloved blue case, I’m tempted to pay my old school a visit. Perhaps I should test my memory, to see if the oval still looks like a vast paddock. But what if it doesn’t? What if it has shrunk and the beetles have all gone? What if the monkey bars are no longer two stories high?

Best I stay away. So what if the King Ball squares are no longer etched into the bitumen? Do I need to recalibrate the length of the school verandah with my giant adult steps? Why mess with memory? I think I’ll stick with glorifying the past instead. 

Keeping Time

Keeping Time
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday October 12, 2013

Memory is a fickle companion. I never know which moments of my life it will choose to preserve. That’s why I like to hang onto things – keepsakes – as an antidote to forgetting.

I still have the doll who followed me everywhere as a child. (She was my favourite because she liked to put me first). I named her Colleen – a good Irish name for a doll made in China. She had turquoise eyes with thick black lashes and strange plastic eyelids that fluttered briefly before closing in forgiveness when I tipped her out of her pram. She also had a blonde cowlick that gave her an unattractive bald spot at the back of her head. But I loved her anyway.

Last week, foraging in the back of a cupboard, I discovered her languishing in a cardboard coffin like Snow White. She was lying on a bed of tissues, wedged into a shoebox – one eye open, one stuck closed – but as lovely as ever. In the bottom of the box was a plastic sleeve containing all the miniature Qantas condiments from my plane trip to Melbourne as a 12 year old (salt, pepper, sugar, mustard and my first ever moist towelette). There was also a collection of faded postcards from an uncle with wanderlust  and the stub of a concert ticket to Duran Duran in 1983. 

Thirty years later, my doll-memory is yet to fail me. I can still remember the embroidered cream flowers on the hem of Colleen’s crimson dress and how her knickers had no elastic. I can recall my 12-year-old urge to pocket the kangaroo-embossed cutlery on that plane. And I can still picture the euphoric teenage me after the Duran Duran foursome emerged from the stage door of the Entertainment Centre and scrawled their initials in my autograph book.

Why cling to such schmaltz? I have kept crates of my relics, rarely opened but dragged from old house to new house, garage to garage. Why do I curate these treasures?

Last month, the pragmatist I live with was cleaning out the carport to make way for eldest son’s new ping-pong table. He pushed half a dozen packing boxes towards me: “It’s time” he said, and we both knew what he meant. Inwardly seething (but outwardly compliant), I sat down on an old milk crate and opened my cartons. I pawed through folders stuffed with school exercise books, runner-up tennis trophies and an assortment of papier mache animals made in Mr Antoine’s Year 5 class using strips of newspaper and Clag glue. (Mr Antoine was expert at craft projects but I lived in fear of his sweaty man-hands brushing against mine.)

For the first time since 1993, I ripped the dusty duct-tape off a box labelled ‘me’. It was stacked with cement-grey Betacam cassettes, an embarrassing archive of my early years of television reportage, when Jana Wendt was my idol. I wore my hair tizzy like hers, with shoulder pads like body armour in my pastel-coloured suits.

Tucked inside a large envelope was a sheath of love letters (mostly mine, unsent). They transported me back to the summer I turned 17, adoring the two lifeguards at my local swimming pool. My girlfriend and I would lie artfully reclined on our towels, basting ourselves with Reef Oil. Those lifeguards never came near us. Perhaps because we weren’t drowning – or because we looked like two rotisserie chickens crisping in the sun.

And so I tipped out the dregs from the last carton and stuffed our recycling bin with wads of Archie comics and school Year-books and diaries doodled with love hearts next to names like Scottie and Gav and Craig.

My detritus gone, I felt a pang of despair. Could I mark the passage of time without these mementos? And if these precious souvenirs meant so much to me, why had I spent so little time poring over them?

The next morning, the rubbish truck pulled up and I watched as its robotic arm snatched our bin and dumped my memories amongst its smelly innards. Now the proof of my past was churned up with everyone else’s.

I drifted back into the house and surveyed my modernist existence – mass-produced beds and televisions, computers and plates and cups. If a chair breaks, I’ll get another one from Ikea. But against the loungeroom wall, I saw with fresh eyes my grandmother’s sideboard.

That rosewood buffet is the one piece of furniture that wasn’t sold off after she died. Instead, it sits in awkward conversation with my sleek new sofa and funky swivelling armchairs. It’s a relic of Nan’s world, clashing with mine. All the same, I couldn’t bear to part with that shellacked showpiece – it’s one of the family, like a faithful old dog, following me across suburbs on its unsteady cabriole legs.

Why am I so sentimental about heirlooms I don’t much like? Perhaps collecting memories is less about the memories and more about the collecting.

Down Memory Lame

Down Memory Lame
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 29, 2013

I have been cursed with forgetting. I forget new names and old acquaintances. I forget what people do and who they’re doing it with. I have sudden panics at the supermarket when a face I know (attached to a name I don’t) stops me at the fish counter: “How are you? It’s been ages! Have you seen any of the gang lately?”

Gang? With rising panic, I point to the seafood display and launch headlong into an embarrassing non sequitur: “No, I haven’t seen the gang lately, but hey! Have you ever seen such sad little prawns, I bet they got bullied at school for being shrimps!” Good grief! – I keep up this moronic prattle whilst simultaneously pleading with my brain to please, please deliver the name of this person. Then at least I can spare her (and me) the agony of my tediously inane small talk.

Suddenly the penny drops and I blurt out: “So, Penny! How are the girls at Pilates?” Gotcha! The relief is instant. For the next thirty seconds I say Penny’s name in every sentence. Our conversation becomes the festival of Penny from Pilates. She seems pleased. Penny and I part ways with a girly kiss and I promise to go to class more than once a month. As I walk back to the car, I begin a mantra of repeating her name over and over in my head. I pray ‘Penny from Pilates’ sticks firmly in there somewhere for next time.

I’ve always been conversationally absent-minded. But I’m getting worse after four decades of meeting people. What if my forgetting is laziness? What if I am just not paying enough attention to what people tell me?

Would it be less awkward to admit: “I’m really sorry, but who are you and how do you fit into my life?” But then I realise I’m not ready to be a social pariah.  

I have the same problem with reading. My book collection is a vast catalogue of forgetting. I was enthralled by “Cloudstreet” yet retained virtually nothing of the experience. I can give you a line about the plot, (neighbours) and the locale (West Leederville, wasn’t it?). Maybe a character’s name if I’m lucky (Rose Pickles?). But my affection for Cloudstreet is nothing more memorable than a warm feeling. Ask me about books I’ve devoured and all I can give you is a vague idea of a story “liked”, “loved” or “hated.”

Forgetting has consequences for my vanity, too. Deep in conversation with someone cleverer than me, I’m holding my own nicely when suddenly, I’m unable to pluck the word I need from the left side of my head. Inwardly cursing, outwardly stammering, my unfinished sentence hangs in the air. My listener kindly tries to fill the awkward silence by changing the subject, but our conversation has lost its momentum and lurches to an uncomfortable end. We make our excuses, and I slink away, mortified.

Yet I can reel off reams of useless trivia, without even trying. I can recall watching a documentary that said Charlie Chaplin once entered himself in a look-alike competition and came third. I can tell you that no matter how high you throw an egg, it will never break if it lands on grass. (We just tried it at the park). I can remember my school project from year 5 revealing cows have no front teeth.  And I know no-one can lick their elbow. 

But can I remember to dress my 6-year-old lad in a beret and moustache for school French day? Nope. And that’s after reading the note from his teacher a fortnight ago and writing a reminder in big red letters in my diary. Let’s just say I forgot to check my diary. A small boy rolled up to school in his regulation blue shorts and white shirt to be met by a crowd of petits enfants oozing Gallic charm. I made a mad dash home to fetch sobbing child a stripey Breton shirt and a jaunty knotted scarf and missed my Pilates class with Penny.

Lately I seem to be unable to picture my children as babies. This frustration is particularly acute with my eldest. As a toddler, I knew every dimple and freckle on his little face by heart. I thought I would never forget the sight of him crawling commando down the hallway. Or how at age five, he would slurp jelly through the two-finger gap in his teeth. Now I can only summon the 13 years of memories by consulting photographs or watching old home movies. My mind will not reproduce even the things dearest to me.

Is there a remedy for forgetfulness? I’m yet to find it, though I know paragons of memory who swear by Sudoko and crosswords. And bridge. The closest I’ve come to mentally stimulating card games is Strip Jack Poker. Come to think of it, I’ve never forgotten anyone I played that with.

Writing on the wall

Writing on the wall
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 6, 2013

Memory has a mind of its own.  At random, it chooses what to keep. My grandmother’s handwriting is writ large in my memory. I remember her ringing me on her black Bakelite phone: “I’ve posted you a surprise, darling.” She knew my little legs would be dashing to the front  gate every five minutes to see if the postie was a speck up the road.  

I could pick out my nan’s penmanship in an instant, even before the perfumed envelope gave it away. Her capitals had graceful loops and flourishes – an artistic hand that also embroidered daisies on dresses for my doll. I watched mesmerised as the same hand whisked eggs into a blur to make dainty sponges.

It was there, in my nan’s kitchen, that she wrote me her shopping lists: long columns of her handwriting showing off her beautiful curlicue C for corned beef – 1 lb. Potatoes with a flouncy P, a firm downstroke for the B in Bovril, an exaggerated T for treacle and Sago – the o with a hook that swept the next word ‘Pudding’ into brackets – so I’d know what Sago was for. Such foreign-sounding things she wanted. I tucked her list into my koala purse and pedalled to the shop. First hurdle: deciphering her script. Second hurdle: matching the groceries to the strange words on the list. Then I’d ride home with bulging string bags hanging from my handlebars, banging on my knees or swinging dangerously into the spokes.

Even now, her writing goes hand-in-hand with how I remember her: graceful and neat. She left behind that permanent imprint of her 90 years on the planet. My nan’s lovely cursive resides on the backs of family photos. It lives inside the letters we keep as treasures under the lid of the piano stool at mum’s house. The seat of our family.

My own handwriting is as erratic as a chicken scratch. I’m so out of practice I can barely jot down half a page without writer’s cramp. I used to write my television stories long-hand on spiral notebooks, a welter of script. I sweated on the fire escape stairs outside the newsroom, scribbling away as deadline approached. Sentences that didn’t sound right when spoken aloud were roughly scrubbed out in favour of rhythmic ones. Sudden brainwaves would force themselves onto the pad, squeezed into margins  – a scrawl legible only to me. It was always a race to see whether inspired thoughts would vaporise before I could get them on paper.

No such trouble now. My laptop and I are intimates. My fingers fly over the keys – brain and hands finally in unison. Typing fast feels masterly. With such mechanical clarity, should I ever bother with pens?

My children won’t remember life before the internet. Their ideas will be pressed onto paper by the clicking of keys rather than the scratching of biros. For them, postcards will be quaint reminders of holidays before Facebook.

In high school French I decided my number 7 needed the European sophistication of a cross bar. I was a maths dunce but with one horizontal stroke, I became numerically glamorous – those 7’s of mine were so continental they could have been smoking Gauloises and eating croissants. Smitten, I have written my 7’s with a bar ever since: seventh heaven!

As classmates, we took great pains to graffiti our fanciest handiwork all over each others’ diaries. We changed our writing styles as often as the hems on our pleated beige dresses. Even now, I can instantly picture the cursive of my closest school friends: all those birthday cards and books gifted with their funny, affectionate inscriptions.

Curious, I don’t know the handwriting of newer friends. We talk and text and email, but don’t pen notes. Will their writing be bold or slap-dash or in beautiful italics? Are they right-handed or mollydooker? I’d like to know.

My husband hides a handwritten note each time he creeps out of the house at dawn for the airport. I wake up in our bed and feel less empty for the small thrill of finding his letter. Usually it’s tucked under my laptop or in the Cornflakes box. Silly I know, but it’s comforting to see the essence of him on paper, a billet-doux tiding me over until his return. I return the favour by planting an even more effusive love letter in his suitcase. (I usually wrap it around nasty household bills, each one annotated with a love heart in the hope he’ll pay them and leave me flush with cash.)

Now I’m mourning a graceful skill that has had its day. Handwriting is an art because expressing ourselves in ink is an exercise in restraint. Even a rude letter starts with ‘Dear…’ before roasting the recipient. How many times have I dashed off an email forgetting my hasty reply might be mistaken for bluntness – I’m always embarrassed at sounding impolite. Perhaps I need to slow down and reacquaint myself with the gentleness of handwriting. If I concentrate, I might even be able to make it legible.