return to whitebread

And so I returned to whitebread suburbia for Christmas, where it's possible to sleep soundly without being woken by someone yelling 'f88king c8nt' in the middle of the night (the refrain of Alice).

I used to call my suburb of origin 'Whitebread' jokingly in my blog.  The word's since taken on a literal significance as my mother now subsists on a diet of white bread, white rice and white pasta after she developed irritable bowel syndrome several years ago, after being lured into a fructose supplement pyramid scheme by an overly-authoritative friend.

Christmas dinner, was however, 'just like a real Christmas dinner', as my 86 year-old aunt kept on reminding us.  I wondered where this sentiment was coming from, given there were only four of us present.  Then I realised; the Aunt shared Christmas dinner last year with her now-deceased 90 year-old brother in a nursing, eating pureed turkey and mashed potato.  How many more years might she able to have a 'real Christmas dinner' herself?

But if Christmas dinner had been staged as a radio play, you might have been forgiven for thinking it had been held in a nursing station.  Aortic aneurysms, radical double mastectomies on Christmas eve, colonoscopies and bowel cancer were all hot topics.   Right now, my friends are starting to talk about failing eyesight and dodgy knees (what is it about men and their knees?) But this is just the baby stuff: it seems there's all so much more to look forward to.  

'I'm bad with trifles, good with calamities,' my mother says, commenting on her inability to find her glasses.

I try to empathise about how hard it must be to see your friends declining and dying off, now that my mother's in her eightieth year. She has on other occasions told me that she feels as though she's living in the Village of Eyam during the plague.

'Oh, I'm a joiner,' she says, ''There'll always be new things to join and people to meet.'

She comments several times on how the trees have grown up, looking out the window and saying, ‘I know it’s fashionable to like trees these days, but some of these really need to be cut back.'

I nod this off, thinking it's some kind of string-saver, senior-citizen fear of hidden and unlikely dangers or minor disturbances to How Things Were Before. As we drive up and down the streets of Whitebread during daylight, I see what she's getting at.   I'm not exactly sure when overgrown begins or ends, but the tree-lined suburb is starting to look like a parody of itself, like the set from the 'Dr Who and the Seeds of Doom', with greenery right up to the roadside and trees scuplted kookily around powerlines.

Later she enlists my help, wrangling her little dogs to take them to the vet.  It's  a big event for all of them.  The dogs are suddenly recalcitrant, distrustful.

'She's the female equivalent of an arsehole,' she says at one point to the vet, perhaps in an attempt to relate to the Younger Generation.

The vet's a Scottish locum on an exchange, about my age.  I wonder how he's enjoying the wilds of Whitebread: he tells me there are 'subtle differences' to Scotland.

I notice he keeps on directing the questions to me: I try to refer him to my mother; after all, I only see her dogs twice a year.  But if I'm at the age when women supposedly become invisible (difficult at my height), people my mother's age are well and truly invisible, even if they are tall, vocal and eccentric.

To make conversation, I ask if he has any thoughts on the dogs' possible breeds (they were acquired through Animal Rescue).  My mother believes that Lucy is a chihuahua-cross-whippet, 'because she shoots so quickly round the yard', something that's always seemed faintly ridiculous to me.  But the Scottish vet concurs: she could have whippet in her.  The little dog has a spring in her back common to whippets, which makes them run fast.

What about the other dog, Bella: 'Is she a black Pomeranian?' I ask skeptically.

The vet thinks she might be a kind of dog with a name that sounds like 'skipper-key', often seen in Belgium.

When we return home, my mother spends the day researching the dog's lineage on the internet: 'I always knew you had aristocratic blood,' she tells her.

Like many of her generation who ended up doing secretarial work, she's very internet-savvy but always quite alarmed, in a string-saver-type way, that I don't know exactly how many gigs my technology has or what plan I'm on without looking.  She refers to me as a 'young businesswoman' (I'm beginning to wonder just when this youth will ever end).  And: 'Yes, dear, I know you're meant to be a writer, but it does seem to involve a lot of international travel.' 

As for: 'Beads at breakfast!  Who wears beads at breakfast?', my mother's salutatory comment last year.

This year I was greeted with 'What's that on your neck, dear? Oh, I thought it was a rash.'

My sister hands me a pamphlet titled: 'For generations to come... Claiming the family allotment.' 

It seems she's been out visiting the rels at Waverley Cemetery while attending a conference at UNSW (as you do).  Apparently there's now room for another two caskets in my great-grandparents' grave, should we wish to claim right of burial.

This is a step up on my mother's offer of 'You lot can be buried in jam jars, if you want', on discovering that up to four urns of ashes could be interred in her and my father's grave.  (Perhaps vegemite would be more appropriate -- Ed.) My family.  Always so much more at home with a funerary than a celebratory subject.

My sister shows me the grave's exact location on a plot map. 

'It has an ocean view,' my sister says.

'It doesn't look very private,' I say.  There are graves all around (not surprisingly). 'I don't know, I might wait and see what the baby-boomers come up with when they revolutionise dying over the next few years.'

Do I really want to bunk down with my father's side of the family?  I'm not sure.  Still, this is the closest thing I'll ever get to a prime piece of Sydney real estate, and all for 700 bucks, if I pay now. And with historic significance: my great-grandfather is the Patriarch, the first out of Ireland.  But what if I die, climbing the Himalayas or something, and people are under pressure to get my body back to Waverley? Somehow, my parent's plot out at Ryde, with its view of the Macquarie Centre (a giant Mall), seems more appropriate anyway.

Comments

[Suze]

My mother's at Ryde too and I've only visited there about twice in the decades since her death, which is maybe why the thought of where I might get to be buried holds declining interest for me, even as I get closer to the event (simply by getting older).

Enjoyed this post!

[TimT]

what is it with men and their knees? I know. It's because we're so kneedy.

Making the progkneesis is easy, but when we get operations on our knees, it's getting pretty hard to find a good akneesthaestist.

[linda a]

I envisage a funeral, a wake, and then the family all gathered round my wheelie bin at 7 one morning, waving champagne glasses, dressed in black, as the puzzled garbo totes me off in the red topped one for the ultimate in recycling.

[Meredith]

Beautifully written El. Tim you're a knut.

[Lucy Sussex]

My mother's ashes are at Holy Trinity Kew, where she designed a rather fine stained glass window. My father's, scattered on a rosebush at Lilydale, as suits a gardener. It's only carbon....Lucy Sussex

[elsewhere07]

Thanks, guys. The instructions are all in my will, held by the NT Public Trustee, tho probably not in the detail I would like. (I only wrote a will because my mother was convinced I'd get killed in America.)

It's only carbon...well, a book is only paper...

[Anonanon]

Fabulous post. Your mum is a very interesting woman - she's a big mind in a little space. Wonder what her life would have been like if born in a different time and place. She'd never be ordinary.

As for the earthly remains, for me, that's a big pffft whatever!

[elsewhere]

I always thought my mother would have been Germaine Greer if she'd been born ten years later (hope she's not reading this!) They even look alike.