18 May
This week was going to be all about living in the now. You know the kind of thing – recognising the moment, accepting the present, not letting a single moment of life’s rich tapestry pass me by. I was going to really listen when my son speculates – again – on the likely plot of the next Dr Who episode, and not do my own mental time-travelling and wander off into the past. I would really pay attention to my daughter’s games and readily accept the subservient role as patient/café visitor/pupil that is usually assigned to me. I wasn’t going to gaze off into the distance when the small ferocious café lady tells me I can’t have any of my chosen food preferences, but can have cake with an egg on and hot chocolate, except there isn’t any chocolate. I won’t be somewhere else in my mind when the people I love the most are chatting to me, or let my mind form endless associations so that I inevitably leave to long a pause and give too blank a stare before answering a question. But why is it that everything these days reminds me of something else? What will it be like when I’m eighty, when there’s a whole lifetime of connections and memories to assail me, when the dramas of human experience seem to be permanently on rewind? Naturally, my good intentions fell by the wayside this week. There I go again; what lovely imaginings spring to mind as I write the word wayside. Verges rich with scarlet poppies, with campions and cornflowers. Old men with sticks in days gone by, tramping in the moonlight down lanes filled with traveller’s joy. Words of a hymn I thought I’d left behind in early childhood “He paints the wayside flowers, He lights the evening star”.
Yesterday my son told me about his science lesson, and how they’d learnt about oxygen. No helpful discussions about gases, no pouring over the encyclopaedia together for my poor child; just a mother who’d mentally absconded, again, and was trying to remember who’s sung that late seventies hit ‘Love is Like Oxygen’ (got it in the middle of the night – The Sweet). My daughter is currently obsessed with ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and is nursing a huge grudge that we didn’t name her either Dorothy or Glinda. She asked me to find her special ruby slippers this morning, and I was gone again, hit by a powerful memory as I searched fruitlessly under her bed. I remembered working in a company which was headed up by a terrifying and all-powerful boss. (Yes, she was a woman, but no, that wasn’t why we had trouble with her – I’ve loved many of my female bosses). A whole crowd of us young 20-somethings worked there, the social life was brilliant, the office banter exceptional. A new man joined one day. He was Asian and hadn’t been in the country long; quiet and shy by nature, he seemed to struggle sometimes with our colloquialisms and humour. I remember him having to attend an appraisal with the terrifying boss, and the rest of us crowding around him in the office kitchen when he reappeared. “What was it like, what did she say?” we all wanted to know. “Oh, I think it was something like: Gimme the ruby slippers!” he replied in his soft shy voice, giving the most perfect imitation of the wicked witch of the west. He broke through his shyness that day and I like to think he liked working with us. He died a month or so later, killed in a road accident while on holiday in Spain. So in memory of a quiet man I barely knew who really made me laugh one day, in homage to Eden (of Under an Eastern Sky blog) and her red mary-jane’s, and for all of us daydreamers who can never get anything done, I’ve enclosed a picture of my girl’s ruby slippers, scuffed and worn, but still magic to her (and found, luckily, before she left for pre-school). Buying them gave a little girl her heart’s desire, and she didn’t even have to click the heels. Who say’s dreaming is a waste of time?
