Joy

This is my son Sam and his friend Todd. They're 14 and pretty funny kids, the house full of the laughter and twisted humour of tweenagers; another life impossible to imagine. What do you do? they ask; and in the alchemy of it all, scanning texts and flipping across points of information; when the kids are old enough to get themselves to school and the peace that had distinguished all the chaotic times. Sammy won a prize to go to Nova 96.9's Christmas Party and to invite three mates. Nova for the uninitiated is the coolest radio station on the planet as far as the youth vote is concerned. They rang up and asked and said he was one in five; and then announced him the victor as if there wasn't anyone else on line; not really. I spent the day in court watching extradition proceedings for a very bad boy. Well for an entrepenarial spirit who took the opportunities created buy the legal status of various things. You're a very good dog and I love you very much, he said to their pet Major, as if these flashes of domesticity were more deeply important than anything else. He crawled into his nest the bed and was never happier; as if these moments were the most important, the warmest, he would ever experience. Another made a dash for the door and he knew in their heart was curdled contempt. The landscape, the giant eucalyptus trees, Yellow Box and Red Gum across the flat, rich plains; these things were part of him even here in the smog soaked streets. We couldn't have stayed on the barstool alone. The fantasies would have been harsher, crueler, more arid and more abstract by the year. I didn't have any contingency plans for after 30, did you? he asked. No, Colin laughed; and in all the puddles of the past we weathered, it was children that provided the most surprising turn around; that redirected anguished rhetoric and warmed his contact with humanity's flow. It would never have been a sunny day. The car, smashed, crumpled in half, out there in the outback where their whole life could have disintegrated in a moment; where instead he was found 200 yards away, crying, a slight cut to his head, but otherwise fine. Where is he, where is he? we asked, upside down, unable to get out the doors. We had to crawl out through the boot; thinking all the while he was underneath the car. He's alright, he's alright, his mother yelled back; and I couldn't believe our luck, with the lurching sinking dread of what could have happened still leaving him shocked; completely apart. But an angel, so it seemed, had reached down in that exact instant, and said: it's not your time yet. And we lived to see our son grow. And we lived to hear the laughter in the house. The great dance that music had become. And to see and tolerate their intense excitement, for Sam and Todd and his mates Kenny and Arial, as they headed to the coolest party of the year. You can be grateful, not just for the small things but the big. For life, and the life of others. For the future, which could have been so easily lost.