Sunday October 02, 2005

This is my friend Joyce. She is eighty years old. She is a wonderful person. We go to movies together. She lives down the road in Refern, Sydney, Australia. Yesterday we went to see Cinderella Man with Russel Crowe. There were so many things calling beneath the surface. He was propelled into greater light. It's funny being friends with an 80 year old woman, I said to a colleague at work. And she said: you just get each other. Yeh, I said, that's it. We laugh at the same things. I often laugh at different things. Emotional roller coasters. Appalling scenes. We see the earing pain of someone elses Bali disaster on all the front pages. We make as if to stoop and solve something that cannot be solved. He had known this was coming for a very long time. We all waited for it to happen here, for Australia to change for ever. She joined Legacy and goes out with the other old ladies, tells funny stories about them; and her with them. Good old country girl, Pete said, and we stood there transfixed. Too many things were going wrong in a terrible way, while his own ship righted. The sails were cut to fit. He acquired an image that bore some shred of dignity. He washed his clothes and bought new undergarments and bathed every day, as if he could never get clean enough or healthy enough. He felt coherent and focussed, and his mind swam rapidly across pools of data. This wasn't going to be the final time, or even the final triumph. His own flowering began in the renaissance. He saw the new possibles of everything before him. And blood poured all over them and the death toll mounted and he felt sick in his stomach with encroaching fear. This was the world we had created now. There was no way back.