In which Papa Cat seizes the day. Again.

Any long-time readers might remember this post from five years ago, when my dad, having blown out the candles on his 80th birthday cake, said 'Right: now I'm striking out for 85.'

Today's the day.

I spoke to him on the phone earlier: he was looking forward to a fancy lunch out with his daughters, followed my garbled account of my not-yet-written conference paper and asked a couple of pertinent questions, reassured me that I would get everything done, asked me what was coming up for Writers' Week, and gave me a thorough and lively description of Lleyton Hewitt's commentating skills as demonstrated during the Australian Open men's final ('I mean, I can't stand the little bastard, but he did a fantastic job') and a quick rundown on the latest in Adelaide's bikie wars. Still driving; stayed up with me last week till after 1 am watching the tennis, with no ill effects the next day; blood pressure 120/70 and the cardiologist doesn't want to see him for another twelve months.

Here he is, with the dog of the moment, 65 years ago.

Spring ...

... in three more sleeps.

Well would you look at that

From the ABC website:

A political party for people with disabilities is on the cusp of winning its first seat in an Australian parliament.

The Dignity for Disability Party looks set to pick up a seat in the Upper House of South Australia's Parliament after last weekend's election.

That will be a historic result and one that will bring mixed emotions for supporters because the party's lead candidate died during the campaign.

Kelly Vincent, 21, is almost certain of winning a seat in the Upper House, which would make her South Australia's youngest parliamentarian and the state's only MP in a wheelchair.

"They would have to put a ramp at Parliament House," she said.

"They would have to change the rules. There'll be no more standing votes or standing. There'll be no more standing as far as I'm concerned.

"So big changes are going to happen just purely if I get elected."

How good is that? What satisfaction there is, as a voter, in seeing your top preference below the line get across the, erm, line.

On the other hand, like my friend R said, how appalling is it that there should be a perceived need for a party called Dignity for the Disabled in the first place? Much less that so many people would see the need that they voted it all the way to the Upper House.

And is there really not a ramp at Parliament House?

Crazy brave

Dear Malcolm,

With all your faults you are still far too good for them, and I am really enjoying the spectacle of you toughing it out to the bitter end. Like the musicians who played 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' on the Titanic as it sank, you are a heartening spectacle and an example to us all.

I use the Titanic analogy advisedly, in the knowledge that your water-wings are of the finest, and that icebergs -- for reasons that everyone except Nick Minchin knows -- are not what they used to be.

Lots of love,
Pav xxx

Tribal

Since the bride and Ampersand Duck between them have already provided lovely accounts, in one case lavishly illustrated, of Laura and Dorian's wedding on Saturday, I don't have much to add except to agree about the total gorgeousness of the entire affair. Highlights included a ceremony that combined a substantial amount of traditional wedding text with some carefully-chosen and beautifully-read Australian love poems by, if I remember rightly, Kevin Hart, Bruce Dawe and Lesbia Harford, plus C.P. Cavafy's classic 'Ithaka', in which a finely judged mixture of feeling, philosophy and Homer goes into the proposition that what matters most is not the arrival but the journey.

Poems were read and vows were taken to the accompaniment of a faint but symphonic soundtrack: the gentle crooning of the chooks, the distant popping of the pre-toast corks, and the occasional sniffling noises of the various female guests. The bride was radiant, the ceremony was a wonderful family affair, the garden looked gorgeous, the weather obliged, and the only real disappointment was the bridesmaids, who apparently spent most of the day underneath the house next door getting their collars, bows and faces covered in cobwebs and dust.

Once I'd decided to go to the wedding and had sent Laura my RSVP, I began to make arrangements to catch up with the various Melbourne friends I've stayed in regular touch with since I moved to Adelaide eleven years ago, and by the time I finally arrived at my Lygon Street hotel, I'd lined up three reunions around the wedding.

After a blindingly stressful day of cat-wrangling and ominous airport delays and announcements and closures and rumours of lightning-struck planes, Friday night once I'd finally arrived was homemade gourmet pizza with P and S and the kids, two of whom are now at high school and none of whom was born yet when, already old friends, their parents and I and two other friends spent a week in a villa in Tuscany in 1993. Now we sat round talking, eating and drinking in much the same spirit, except with P and S now happily surrounded by kids, cats and dogs. (Only one dog, actually, but he is so big he could make eight or nine Maltese terriers.)

Saturday night was dinner out with L, who heroically came to fetch me and then took me out for seriously good Italian food and some in-depth catching-up in matters of love and work. Sunday was lunch with J in an old Carlton haunt, after which we strolled up to Melbourne University's Ian Potter Gallery to see a wonderful exhibition of Louis Kahan's portraits of Australian, and particularly Melbourne, literati ('Let's go and look at the intelligentsia,' said J).

Many of these portraits were drawn to illustrate particular articles, poems and stories in Meanjin over several decades; both of us knew (or had known) a number of the people in the portraits and had read the work of most of the others, and I was reminded again that galleries and museums are a lot like computers in that what you get out of them depends heavily on what you put in; both of us had brought a lot of history with us to the gallery, possibly too much. (What with J a former editor, the exhibition's portraits of the two editors before her, the presence of the current editor at the wedding and a screening at the exhibition of a 1961 episode of Panorama exclusively dedicated to the magazine, it was a fairly Meanjin-themed visit altogether.)

We know ourselves by the tribes to which we belong, and I hadn't properly thought through the fact that on this weekend I would be rejoining several of mine. Still, I knew that the wedding would be a monster blogmeet and that I would catch up with bloggers of all kinds: some I'd known for years pre-blogging but mainly in professional capacities (Elsewhere, Sophie); others I'd met recently as a direct or indirect result of blogging (the Baron, and of course the bride herself); and yet others whom I'd never met at all, including two in particular whom I felt I knew very well but had never actually laid eyes on, namely the lovely Zoe and the equally lovely Ampersand Duck. If I'd been able to summon just a little more energy or will, I would have kicked on to the Standard Hotel after dinner on Friday night in order to experience the blogtribe even more extensively, and with hindsight I wish I had, but alas one is not as young as one was.

Stephanie of Humanities Researcher is the only person who is a member of all my non-Adelaide tribes (blogging, Aust lit, old-friends network), and Stephanie has thoughtlessly naffed off to Philadelphia. But there was still one point of overlap: the other S is one of the still-in-touch old Melbourne mates and, though not a blogger, is now a work colleague of Laura's and was at the wedding with her husband and their kids. They have had an extremely hairy time of it lately and the prospect of seeing them all safe and well was one of the factors that tipped the scales when I was thinking about making the trip. And for this weekend they were the hinge, for me, between one reality and another.

Mooching down Lygon Street late the next morning took me even further back, back to the first time I'd ever been on it, one day in the winter of 1980 -- my first year of living away from Adelaide, and Melbourne still a total mystery to me; Sydney was my 'other city' in early life -- when I'd travelled up from Geelong with a man to whom I was in thrall in every possible way, something that had never happened before and has never, I'm glad to say, happened since. So Melbourne-centric was he, so tightly wound and swaddled in the cocoon of his own reality at the expense of anyone else's, that he'd said to me 'I'll meet you in Tamani's' and I had desperately wandered up and down Lygon Street at least a dozen times before I thought to ask someone, and discovered that Tamani's had changed its name to Ti Amo (!) some time beforehand and he just assumed I'd know. (Nor was he apologetic afterwards. Yes yes, I know.)

And over that, layers and layers of other memories, all variously plotted along that spectrum whose bad end is the one where you want to curl up into a foetal ball in the gutter and die of shame. Ah dear me, almost thirty years of Lygon Street, as bittersweet to me as the best of its own imported gourmet wares, and a great deal older than most of them. It was a relief to spot J's familiar back in Readings, and to wander off with her to find some lunch and get each other back up to date on life's important developments since last we met. Why it should be a surprise to us here in our fifties that fate keeps on happening, and not just to us but to such of our parents as still survive, I really have no idea.

In which ThirdCat's book is launched

Finally at 2 am this yesterday morning I put this book down, about half-finished in one hit, and went to bed, but I didn't want to.




It's the story of two women, loosely and obliquely connected through family ties, and their complicated relationship with the South Australian town -- regional and industrial -- to which they are very attached, but which they fear may be making their children sick. It's a poet's novel, but it's also an activist's one.

Longtime readers of ThirdCat's blogs, especially the unique and wonderful 'blogopera' Adelaide Sprawls, will be familiar with her style and technique: restrained, almost minimalist, but with a turn of phrase and of observation that nails something you sort of already knew but would never have thought of putting quite like that.

They will be familiar, too, with her subject matter: the lives, circumstances and feelings of 'ordinary people' and all the stuff that seethes under the surface of their days and the physical objects and actions of daily life, the tea-making, the hair-washing and the car-fixing; the unresolved tensions, the suppressed exclamations, the half-understood feelings, the quality and complexity of emotional responses and transactions, the tiny fluctuations of feeling between people, the mysteries that reside in what is not said.

... she had not needed a card to know who the roses were from. But she didn't know what they meant.

Even going over the words they had said on the phone she couldn't work it out. They could mean sorry or I miss you or goodbye, because in the end she had pushed him to say, I will get over you, if that's what you make me do.

(Recycling disclosure: I have said some of this about Tracy's writing before, and it will look familiar to her if not to anyone else.) It's all there in Black Dust Dancing, though less concentrated and intense, making more room, as is proper in a novel, for the story and the setting.

So this afternoon at Sturt Street Primary School, icon and symbol of all that is best in the history of South Australian education and school to both of Tracy's boys, an assortment of family, friends and fans assembled to celebrate her achievement, buy her novel, and queue up to get her to sign it,




and then to see it officially launched by Adelaide's Sheridan Stewart, artist, comedian, radio presenter and MC of the comedy show Titters, which featured Tracy in her other life as a standup comedian and which was practically booked out for the duration of the Adelaide Fringe.


(Sheridan Stewart attended by Wakefield Press publisher Michael Bollen, behind whose left hip you can just see a bottle of the fabled Fox Creek Verdelho.)

Sheridan made a funny, warm speech but was upstaged by Tracy's boys, who came purposefully up to the bar behind her and fetched a cup of what was probably apple juice, but looked a lot like white wine, each, and melted back into the crowd, to its general appreciation. Tracy then made an excellent thank-you speech,




dividing the thankees into thoughtful categories instead of naming names, which is always a minefield.

Before and after the ceremonials I had a nice talk with the lovely Deborah from In A Strange Land and met her beautiful daughters.

Tracy and the boys and the mister have to fly back to Abu Dhabi tomorrow morning. I'm guessing she might try to have a bit of a nap on the plane.

Pollyanna and her half-full glass have a shower

Here's an unforeseen advantage of temperatures in the mid-forties: free solar heating!

Just had a lovely refreshing yet non-heart-stoppingly-cold shower in pleasantly cool-to-lukewarm water that ran maybe fifteen or twenty degrees below body temperature for the whole six minutes I was under the shower. Without burning any gas at all.

Lights out: 5 am

And thank God I work for myself, at home. Probably would have stayed up to watch the Inauguration regardless, though, I think. (And be paying for it now in spades.)

Well. Great speech, of course, although he almost lost me when he overloaded the water metaphor early on and changed it in, if you will forgive me putting it like this, midstream -- from rising tides to still waters vs. raging storms, all in one sentence -- which I put down to the youthful indiscretion of speechwriter Jon Favreau. Actually it would be fun to fisk the speech but one must get on and earn one's living, and in the meantime I thought the delivery was flawless as per.

Loved all the shots of the crowd, one by one and en masse. Thought the First Lady carried off the OTT dress (which I hope hid thermal underwear), with the aid of her own radiance and of the brilliant combination of contrasting heavy, dark, saturated colours on and in her hands and hair. And as for Aretha Franklin's hat: if you look like that, dress up to it, I say. I loved the way people's clothes reflected the cold: the crowd in ear-flap caps, Franklin all bunnyrugged up below the hat in a matching soft all-enveloping winter cape, even the pianist (of all people) complementing her speccy three-string pearl necklace with a fetching pair of fingerless mittens.

Apparently Teddy Kennedy collapsed at lunch after the inauguration and was taken out on a stretcher, but I was glad he saw the important bit and I bet he was too. Clinton, Bill not Hillary, looked monumentally pissed off about something right up until he walked outside. Jimmy Carter looked almost unchanged since the 1970s. Bush Senior looked scarily doddery and perhaps should not have been outside and walking around. Bush Junior looked haunted, miserable and scared. As well he might.

After I decided to stay up, I went to the great big 24/7 servo up on Grand Junction Road for an early paper and some strengthening snacks and the joint was jumping at 2 am, including a couple of graveyard-shift coppers with blood sugar issues. Back home again, I settled down to watch, determined not to get all emotional no matter who said what, but didn't even get as far as Obama's speech; I was reduced to a wet mess the minute the ranting-Baptist-type chappie who made the Invocation mentioned Martin Luther King, and again at the end when the Navy launched into four-part harmony one verse into the Star Spangled Banner. There is something visceral about that harmony moment in choral music, the moment when the music spreads out sideways, like the opening of a fan. Or, as the great Dorothy Dunnett once remarked, 'Music, the knife without a hilt.'

Also loved the poem after the oath. Obama commissioned poet Elizabeth Alexander, Harlem-born and now a professor at Yale, to write the poem for the inauguration ceremony. It was not the usual official state-commissioned stuff but a beautiful, simple set of clear images celebrating the value and virtues of ordinary people's everyday lives, their capacity for dignity and beauty. Oh and with, in the middle, a sharp truth and another wet mess moment. 'Say it plain: that many have died for this day.'

What was even more fabulous than the poem was the fact that thousands of people shut up and listened to it, as they did when that quartet of legendary musicians played John Williams' intriguing arrangement of 'Simple Gifts' (from traditional Shaker music via Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, and that article suggests the extraordinary depth of reference that characterised almost every segment of the inauguration ceremony), which is one of my favourite pieces of music. I was reminded of the two things I love most about Americans in general: their beautiful courtesy, and the fact that they love and respect music and poetry.

Apparently the cello was made of special cold-resistant carbon fibre. And speaking of the cello, never mind how cute Obama is; I think I'm in love with Yo-Yo Ma.

Patience is a virtue, my mother always said

Over two years ago, I went to the Royal Adelaide Show and bought, among other things, two beautiful and elaborate iris plants. At least the pictures said they were beautiful and elaborate; all I had was two rhizomes with some baby sword-shaped leaves, photos of what the flowers were supposed to look like, and some instructions about Seasol.

And from that day until about two or three weeks ago, they sat there in the ground, doing nussing. Ze Seasol, it did nussing. Ze watering, it did nussing. Every now and then they would sulkily lose a leaf and reluctantly grow a new one. They did not get bigger, they did not die, and they most certainly did not flower.

So this year winter melted into spring and the nearby Dutch irises grown from bulbs did what they usually do --




-- but again the fancy rhizomes did not follow their example.

HOWEVER.

Out I went into the garden one day earlier this month and something strange appeared to be happening:




A week or so later:




And yesterday ...




Sexiest flower in the universe.

Blogger gets gong, friend not surprised

And not just any blogger but my dear friend Stephanie of Humanities Researcher, who feels that her blog played no small part in winning one of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council's 2008 Australian Awards for University Teaching, as announced in today's Australian HES.