Happy Hours

Happy Hours
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 7, 2015

A new year always brings talk of happiness. We wish it on others, we hope to heap it on ourselves. We fantasise about it, plan for it, burden our credit cards to buy it. We tell ourselves that we deserve it. But how do we measure happiness?

As a child, I remember happiness feeling like my chest was going to burst. An uncle’s gift of a 20-cent piece pressed into my palm made me hyperventilate. I pedalled furiously to the lolly shop, seven-year-old brain frothing with anticipation, my precious coin snug in the pouch of my koala purse.

Smarties were three for a cent, musk sticks and caramel cobbers, two cents each, Gobstoppers, ten cents. Could I, would I, blow 20 cents on two Gobstoppers? I dithered at the lolly counter until Mr Gripps, accustomed to my life-changing deliberations, sighed and hung the white paper bag back on its hook. As he turned to unload a crate of peaches, I leapt to a decision. And then I rode home one-handed, clutching a bag of musk sticks (5) and a single gobstopper in one sweaty palm, wobbling with happiness.

As a teenager, my happiness dipped and soared like my hormones. Some weeks it lasted only as long as my boyfriends. But girlfriends could always bolster my fragile self esteem. At one slumber party, we 16-year-olds stayed up watching Steel Magnolias, stiff-necked in our corduroy beanbags, littering the sleepout with popcorn. We sobbed when Julia Roberts lay lifeless on the porch, howled when they switched off her life support, then fawned over her grieving husband at the funeral.

At midnight, using an ice-cream lid as a Ouija board, we held hands and conducted a séance, feverish with excitement. Happiness was ours when we conjured the ghost of 95-year-old Mrs Werne from three doors down. (She’d died, mysteriously, of old age.)

At 2am, high on Fanta and hysterical when Mrs Werne rustled up a gust that rattled the windows, we mapped out the requirements for our future happiness from the safety of our sleeping bags. Mine was conditional upon marrying Richard Gere, becoming an ABC newsreader with a lifetime pension and giving birth to triplets. (I had the triplets, it turned out, but they took ten years to emerge.)

Unhappiness was Mum arriving at my sleepover house next morning to take me home to my only-child existence, sullen from sleeplessness.

Now, still at the beginner’s end of middle age, I’ve learnt that my happiness depends on relentless participation. I need to be busy and needed and creative. I need daily triumphs. I no longer covet a BMW or a famous husband.

Perhaps happiness is the stringing together of small pleasures. Holding hands with my Collie-bred heartthrob. The sound of my children giggling in another room. Horsing around at the beach. Eating brownies with home-made icecream. A freshly vacuumed floor (do domestic satisfactions count?)

Perhaps happiness is a day of upticks: a sleep-in, a friend’s husband given the all clear after cancer, finding a forgotten block of chocolate behind the cat biscuits. At the salon where I’ve had my hair cut for a decade, the owner, Hans, always greets me by asking “How can I make you happy?” What better way to foster loyalty than by reminding his clients that his happiness depends on theirs?

On a recent drive to the farm, eldest son floated this question: “Mum, if you had to choose, would you rather a broken leg or your dodgy knee?” I chose my dodgy knee. Later, I realised that over a lifetime, my painful knee will deliver far more misery than six weeks on crutches.

My generation has made the pursuit of happiness its crusade. We delude ourselves that contentment is the difference between a weekend at Rottnest and a week at the Shangri-La in the Maldives. Will renovating our melamine kitchen make me happier? It might – for a month. But then I’ll get used to the shiny new cupboards and the self-cleaning oven and turn my discontent to our 80s faux-marble bathroom. (Life-long happiness always lives on the rung above ours.)

Even parading our happiest selves on Facebook is not enough to trump the competition. Someone’s always funnier, prettier, richer, more in love. I’ve weaned myself off Facebook. It makes me feel inadequate for no good reason. Am I happy enough? As happy as everyone else? On Facebook, the opposite of happy is envy. I just want to be content with what is.

In the supermarket last week, some new textas caught my seven year old’s eye. He badgered me up and down three aisles before I snapped:

“For goodness sake, honey, you’ve just had Christmas!”

He looked at me wide-eyed with hurt and said: “That was ages ago.”

Happiness is fleeting even when Santa Claus delivers it.

Greener Pastures

Greener Pastures
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 17, 2015

I’ve never understood the relationship between man and lawn. On any summer’s morning, I can wake to find my live-in greenkeeper out the back, in the smallest of silky pyjama shorts, inspecting his Sir Walter buffalo. Hands on hips, he meanders back and forth tracing grid patterns in his turf, engrossed in the grass at his feet. The swell of his New Year’s tummy throws a soft round shadow on his beloved lawn.

I lean against the kitchen bench and admire his XL silhouette through the glass doors. Something catches his eye. He drops to one knee and prospects in the grass with a stick. I predict a lone dandelion weed, or some marauding clover or – quelle horreur! – a lumbering black beetle.

Watching him worship his lawn, I feel a surge of jealousy. Why is he yet to descend on bended knee before me, the saintly mother of his children? I brush aside my Virgin Queen fantasies as he rises and greets me with a winsome smile. He points triumphantly to the leafy weed he has snuffed from the grass. Such devotion to his turf!

Our lawn spreads from the back veranda like a viridescent carpet. It’s eye-calmingly green but has become inexplicably brindled with two brown patches along the south fence. By day’s end, I’ll find my man crouched beside one circle of yellowed thatch, hose in hand, lovingly coaxing four small green shoots to proliferate.

In summer, the soundtrack to my weekend becomes the absonant roar of his mower. My bloke emerges from the house in a Panama hat and shorts, printed with a vivid pattern of interlocking elephants. The garden shed is emptied of trimmer, edger, whipper snipper, blower and broom. He lines them up along the driveway and stands back to admire his arsenal of gardening tools. (In our house, a chore can be elevated to a hobby if it requires a trip to Bunnings and the purchase of a power tool.)

He flexes his biceps and leans down to grasp the pull cord. With a single powerful jerk, his periwinkle-blue Victa Vantage coughs, then screams to life.

“And that’s how it’s done!” he calls over his shoulder to seven-year-old son. Small boy bolts inside, hands clapped to his ears. As his father marches the mower across the lawn, small daughter pinches her nose, choked by the smell of petrol. I remind myself to appreciate the sight of man and machine in perfect congruence.

The lawns of my childhood were swathes of spongy buffalo needing constant nurturing. In the early mornings, our street thrummed with the tic-tic-tic of sprinklers, calling to each other like birds. I practiced my handstands and cartwheels on the front lawn only to be rewarded with a patchwork of grass cuts that stung like blazes.

In the summer holidays, it was my job to shepherd our Beagle on his morning constitutional. We’d sniff our way around the golf course. Even at 6.30am, I could smell the heat riding in on the easterly. Then the greenkeeper would climb aboard his ride-on mower and saturate the air with the humid sweetness of cut grass. I warily skirted the par four fairway, where the giant sprinklers spun around on their tripod legs, trying to blast me with machine-gun jets of water.

On drowsy February afternoons, our back lawn would be baked crisp. My job was to water the garden with the hose. Cranky and hot, I haphazardly squirted the grass, yanking on the hose and cursing the kinks. More often than not, I heard the sound of the kitchen window being wrenched open and Mum’s voice shouting: “And if you break that hose, young lady, you’ll be watering ‘til April!”

Thirty years later, I live with a man who has joined that great confraternity of lawn devotees. How green is it? How lush is it? How neat and clipped and weed-free is it? These are the questions that try men’s souls.

I asked the local lawn-mower man, Selwyn, about his philosophy of lawns.

“Mowing grass is therapeutic,” he explained. “It’s about power and control: crisp lines, clean edges. A perfect result in a crappy world.”

That made sense. At 78, my mum still cuts her own lawn with a hand mower.

“I do my best thinking when I’m mowing,” Mum says. “In any case, a lawn should reflect nicely on a house.”

Arriving home yesterday, I discovered my lawn-lover face down on the verge. He’d hacked up a square foot of grass and was elbow deep in dirt, swearing over a retic pipe I’d driven over. I sat beside him and gently suggested his lawn fetish was becoming obsessive.

“Honey,” I asked. “What’s that relationship in nature when one organism lives off another?

“You mean marriage?”

“No,” I bristled. “I meant symbiosis. But feel free to sleep out with your lawn tonight.”