Unlock Door Before Exiting

Northern Rivers Storm

 

Unlock Door Before Exiting

I’m in lock-down now — the last week before departure for two months in Oz.  Time mutates.  In fact this theory — one coined by my husband as “Mutable Time” — holds that there is time out of time, parallels to our clocked universe.  

It’s not at all woo-woo.  Our children age remarkably while we age at a much slower pace.  Yesterday, it seems, we were repairing skinned knees and consoling teenagers about lost boyfriends, and today we’re discussing 401K’s and the housing market.  We might see old friends and pick up a conversation as though we’d seen them just last week.  Vacations slide by in an instant and the rest of the work-year stretches out into eternity.  We get lost in a subject of interest and lose all sense of time.  Hours pass without notice.  All these are examples of mutable time.  

Time in lock-down mutates too — stretches and warps so that the days seem longer but the pace picks up a tick.  All of the items that can’t be done long distance or over the web are carefully calculated to be done before the last minute.  This arranged and that sent.  Soaker-hose timers turned on, batteries checked.  Dog food ordered, cat kibble stockpiled and house-sitter updated with new information.  

I’ve worked very hard these last few months on time management, mutable and otherwise.  I’ve worked hard to remain in the moment.  To relish the gifts of the day no matter where I am and hold close the people I cherish.  It was way too easy to succumb to the poignant longing to be elsewhere and fill psyche’s cracks and crevices with wisps of grey disrepair to match the fog outside on the harbor.  

 

So, I’ve tried to craft a way to be here and there with some internal comfort, no matter where I am.  To fashion a perspective that focuses on the present while at the same time maintaining an on-going distant view.  It’s a conscious choice — one that requires attention and cultivation.  Fertilization, even, and a bit of mulch to withstand the drought of departure.  A presence of mind.  

 

Lock-down focus, however, presumes an un-locking at some point — an undocking and preparation for take-off.  Tray tables must be lifted to the upright position, as it were.  For this next phase, I’m reminded of a sign seen on a bathroom door in Tasmania:  “Unlock door before exiting.”  Exactly.

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photo credit:  C.E. Wilkins

Things You Cannot Say in Australia: Homage à George Carlin

Things You Cannot Say in Australia: Homage à George Carlin

We can so easily get into trouble assuming we have language in common — Australians and Americans.  It’s really the slang we sling with such wild abandon that leads us down the path of cross-cultural misunderstanding.   

Here’s a case in point:  

The evening was warm and the doors were thrown open to the night.  The Southern Hemisphere’s stars were close at hand — pinholes in dark velvet.  Candles marked small pools of warm light and the glow of the large TV gave the lounge a slightly milky coolness.  

An interesting and diverse crowd had gathered to watch the season’s finals in Aussie Rules Football, a bruising sport played without pads and no substitutions except for the odd bleeding gash or serious concussion. Conversation was a low murmur, punctuated by shouts of joy or groans of agony, echoed across the cul-de-sacs and escarpments by neighbors watching the same game. 

Guests drifted through the living room from time to time to check on their team’s progress and back again to the bar to pick up conversations abandoned for the instant replay.  Sausages sizzled on the barbecue, the aroma teasing on the breeze, and a salad glistened green on the black granite counter.

We were new in town that year, and included in the guest-list with that wonderful Australian generosity.  In an attempt to get to know other guests, I leaned over and casually asked, “What team do you root for?”  

Now, in the US, this is a completely benign question.  Mundane, even.  A common conversation-starter.  The answer can let you know if a person has moved and still follows the old home team.  Or has become a sports fanatic in his/her new digs.  Or doesn’t follow sports at all.  Any and all answers are perfect conversation openers.  

Rooting for a team is even immortalized in the song played in every professional ball park across America — Take Me Out to the Ball Game.  We all learn it in elementary school and at camps.  It’s part of American culture.  

Of course, put in another context, root has cruder connotations, but in a sports context, I  felt I was on pretty safe ground, conversation-wise.  

Unless the context is Australian.

I knew I’d transgressed when the thick feral fog of silence fell, and the guy I’d spoken to looked at me in horror.  Heads turned.  How can there have been such a lovely comforting burble of conversation and the clink of glasses just seconds before?  I was the deer.  They held the headlights.  What had I done?

One of my friends leaned over, soto voce, and said, “That’s a rude question here, darling.”  She’d lived in the US and knew what sort of trouble I’d gotten myself into.

It appeared I’d asked this guy what team he (a) whored for or (b) with.  Either way, not quite the conversation opener I’d hoped for!

So, here’s what I learned that night.  One barracks in Australia, it was explained to me.  One does not root, unless one is a groupie used to sharing favors, a camp follower with a tattered reputation, as it were.  There will be no “root, root, rooting for the home team” here, my dear, and of course, no 7^th inning stretch.  You barrack for your team, and you may hoot as you watch the game, but be warned — root not.

And one more yellow caution sign for the road ahead:

That pack you wear around your waist to protect your valuables or in lieu of a shoulder bag?  That is a HIP-pack or a WAIST-pack, NOT a fanny-pack.  It would not be a good idea to stroll into a store in Oz and ask where the fanny-packs are.  Eyes would roll and stomachs clench.  Conversations would cease. 

In Australia, fanny does not refer to the glutes as it does in the States, but to female genitalia.  Ah-ha!  Good to know.  I wish I’d known.  

And on the other side of the coin:

My friend A.D., a self-styled Oz-merican who has lived in the States for decades, will tell you on her first trip to the US, she inquired what time the group of friends was meeting in the morning: “What time shall I knock you up?” she asked.  The American response was complete shock — not only because she was a beautiful young woman, but no attempt at a romantic relationship had been made, and foreplay didn’t seem to be in the cards.  Those Aussies!

Yes, it goes both ways. So many ways to get into trouble, so little time.

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For complete lyrics and history of the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Me_Out_to_the_Ball_Game

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Thanks, Ann. 

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Note:  Cross-cultural misunderstandings are as fascinating as they are legion, and seem to occur because of assumptions we make based on our own culture.  The incidents above are just the beginning of a long list.

Tea in Tassie

Tea in Tassie

I’m not a navigator.  I have a hard time reading maps.  The graphic designer in me is looking at the colors and the fonts, ignoring the purpose of a map altogether.  Family members carefully remove maps from my white-knuckled grip and take over.  This usually puts me behind the wheel when navigation is called for, a solution that pleases me.  I like to drive.  

Not this trip, however.  JJ drove.  She didn’t know what she’d unleashed.  

As we left Launceston, me with map in hand in the navigator’s seat, I carefully directed us right back to where we started.  It’s a bad sign with the navigator gets the giggles and a worse one when the driver does too.  We pulled over, took several snorting deep breaths, righted ourselves and sped south to Hobart to catch our plane. 

We’d planned to stop at Barilla Bay once more to pick up some oysters to take back for a Tassie feast at our home base in Byron Bay.  

We made a morning tea stop at Ross, an historic village about half-way between Launceston and Hobarton the M-1 highway.  Aside from its luxurious parks and four-square European

Ross, TAS

architecture, the best part of Ross was the Ross Village Bakery.  

Their  carefully modulated wood-fired oven produces the most amazingly delicate and flaky rolls and buns.  And an incredible variety of mysterious and aromatic shapes and forms.  The glass case gleamed and the aroma of coffee slithered among the baked bouquet.  Each lit shelf held three of four different choices.  The kid in me wanted one of everything.  

I took my time and purchased a Banbury tart, an English tradition I hadn’t seen before.  What a heavenly combination of flaky crust, chopped raisons and currents, with a crossed dough top.  The Ross Bakery’s version was more fruit than dough — just the right amount of sugar, crunch and chew.  

Three more Banbury tarts went home with me, and I ate them sparingly over 3 days — a testament to self-control.  I really wanted to inhale all 3 at once in a flurry of flaky delight.

The charming owners, who dress in the character of the historic village, let us look at the wood-fired oven and the carefully nurtured coals that keep the oven warm and the next batch baking.  And patiently answered all our questions.

While there are many charming places in Tasmania worthy of a stop, this one’s at the top of my list for tea in Tassie.  You navigate, I’ll drive.  

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Note:  Special thanks to my friend JJ for her generous sharing of the Tasmania she knows so well.  And to my friend AD for translation of all things Aussie.  

For more information:

Ross Village Bakery, Ross, TAS, 03-6381-5246. http://www.rossbakery.com.au/

The bakery and tea room are at street level in an historic building with hotel rooms upstairs.  

Kangaroo Paw

Kangaroo’s Paws 

I lost one kangaroo paw in my yard in Oz.  The orange succumbed, the yellow one thrives.  

I planted them close together so they’d appear as one plant with orange and yellow “paws.” I planted them on the same day in the same construction-debris-filled sandy soil, with the same moisture beads as encouragement and cane mulch to protect them. They’re supposed to be drought tolerant once they get started. 

I planted them late in the spring, in September, near Halloween. They’d have to survive the summer without me, so I put them near the soaker hose I have attached to an automatic timer.

Kangaroo Paw

 

It’s curious.  Maybe orange is more susceptible to molds than yellow, dislikes  regular watering, or is less tolerant of hot, humid summers.  Maybe yellow had stronger roots or a better start in life, more nurturing before it got to my local nursery.

Like houses that survive a fire or a tornado in neighborhoods of devastation, you have to wonder what the quirk of survival is, what odd twist of fate or bundle of genes or moment in the sun that ensures one will thrive while the next withers and dies. 

For all the survival methods we humans try – yoga, exercise, and vitamins, organic foods and wine in moderation, friends and laughter and loving partners — the survival we struggle for and frequently challenge might be just a quirk.  Two quark’s shift one way or the other, a knot in a thread of DNA, and who can tell what one’s chances might be?

A close relative of mine, who drank herself silly in binges, who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for 60 years straight, lived 80 pretty good years.  Her heart couldn’t pump enough blood, ultimately, through clogged arteries she declined to have fixed, so was it a lifetime of butter and mayonnaise rather than cigarettes and gin that got her in the end?  

Maybe her survival quirks were the wild bouts of laughter and a keen sense of the absurd that punctuated her need to “blow the blues.”  A saving grace, as it were.

So, one kangaroo paw survives in the shade of the rangy grevellia, to lift its funny fuzzy yellow blooms half a meter high.  I reckon I’ll try again with an orange companion in fuzziness this year, in another spot in my tiny garden in paradise.  Maybe this one will find its own quirk of survival.  

Summer Migration

Summer Migration

It’s July 2.  The stores are having their summer sales, although summer hasn’t really come to the Northwestern United States.  We all have our turtlenecks on, and while the humming birds, the robins, and the ospreys are here in their summer territory, and the solstice is more than a week gone, it’s not full-on summer yet.  Not here.

I watch the winter weather in Sydney.  It echos the early summer weather here, just three hours’ drive below the Canadian border.  As soon as the temperature tops 65F, I drag out my shorts, hoping against hope for a warm day.  True, I pair shorts with turtlenecks, but a girl can dream, can’t she?  Sandals too.  I’m determined to create a small illusion of the possibility of summer – even a tiny whiff.  

The weather dips and weaves, hanging out a few tantalizing hours of sun after the foghorn stills and the mist burns off.  I long for the sun, to be warm, for a few sweaty hot days.  Not too hot at night, mind you, so sleeping is easy, and not too muggy either, but enough that you know it’s summer. 

I have a couple of days to wait.  The first day of summer in the Northwest is July 5.  Summer skips along tentatively until mid-August and then sputters out in fits and starts until mid October.  

I fly south to Australia on the first day of August so I can feel the sun on my face and smell the salt air — and wrap my arms around my family and friends, too.  As soon as I step on my local beach, I relax completely.  My to-do tick-list becomes far less important, and it matters less that Telstra has disconnected my phone again.  I’m home in a different way than I am in the States.  Not better, just different.  But home, nonetheless.  Ah, Oz.

Photos: Entrance 8B, Tallow Beach.  Pt. Byron.  Credit:  C. E. Wilkins