A perfect, early summer morning. Absolutely still and the air is cool on the skin. The radio tells me that Abba have the most popular songs in Karioke.
It says something that songs written before 2000, before ‘things started getting grim’, hit the mark when looking for good feeling today.
I’m awaiting a tracking system for a sliding door. Should be simple enough but it’s not. I get told that it will have to come from Melbourne as if this were a foreign country. A few false starts mean that the doors have taken months and that I’m starting to feel as though there’s a wider metaphor involved.
Meanwhile I enter the deck by leaping through the window onto a milk crate or by taking the longer route through the garden.
The garden was bare fifteen years ago. A few trees, a line of sad Camellias and a Rose bush. Not a native to be seen apart from an existing Gum tree.
An unintended consequence of changing my landscape has seen the recent addition to the garden of a very pretty small black bird with a red beak. I cant find it in my ‘book of birds’ which incidently tells me that the parrot I call ‘Splendid’ is actually ‘Superb’ and that, in fact, it’s the Australian King Parrot which blesses me with seasonal visits.
Now that the garden is predominately tree-ferns with liberal mulch for the beds below, the garden is perfect for ground feeders such as the black bird. It’s an exquisitely proportioned bird which darts about the garden disturbing the mulch and burying my petunia seedlings.
‘Patience is a virtue.’ may make it into folk wisdom but I’ve never really developed it. The best I can manage is endurance which I’d define as ‘bottled impatience - shaken not stirred.’
I don’t need patience for chess. Mick and I have made three moves each and it’s his move. We started in March this year and the last game took ten years. We then had a good few years off before starting this game. We play by mail and usually don’t make a move until we’ve got some news to report and as that doesn’t happen often, it can take a few months before an exchange of letters.
Mick lives on the other side of the continent and we meet rarely. Interesting bloke is Mick. Took up both calligraphy and the saxophone at fifty and excelled at calligraphy - the saxophone is cheerfully woeful but Mick assures me that you need new mouth muscles for that.
The chess game is fun but it’s the medium rather than the message. Without the game we’d have lost contact over the decades.
I watched a documentary about gay/lesbian life for the ultra orthodox within the Jewish faith. Leviticus has a lot to answer for but his prohibitions within the Old testaments were based on hygiene rather than ‘Abomination within the sight of God.’
If it weren’t so then shellfish and pigs would have had a better ‘write up.’
If you pour your sewage over the oyster beds then - “better not eat it.”
Same with pigs rooting about in the filth...... better call it an ‘Abomination’ just to drive the point home.
When it comes to tribal life you want heterosexuality for the continuance of the society. Not only do homosexuals not breed, they diminish the wider gene pool by their activity. This isn’t a judgement but a statement of fact and when you take out the old and the unfirm, the young and the barren, it’s easy to see why any sexuality outside of the ‘norm’ would be frowned upon - at least in public discourse.
Fact is ‘homosexuality just IS.’
To deny this is to deny life.
The monsters that I have met in the course of my life have been the paedophile from my childhood and ... heterosexual men of a brutal nature and it’s not that they’ve been brutal to me but women ‘talk’.
My friend has had the phone cut off. A sign of the times. Contact now is difficult and sporadic. Much the same for those poor tortured souls who are just human beings doing the best they can within religions which have no idea of how to treat the power of sexuality and the need for relationships within us all.
Off to track the tracking system and it’s a perfect, still summer morning....at least within the garden.