My host in Sydney was a Kiwi, oddly enough. And my host in Auckland was from Newcastle-on-Tyne and spoke eloquent Geordie. I could barely understand him.
So like the first night in Auckland, I say to him: "Where do I get a transit card? You know, like the Opal card in Sydney, that allows me to ride the buses and trains?"
And he said, "Oh yes, they're called the Op card here."
Puzzled, I said, "Op card?" and he said, yes, op card.
I said, "O-P, op?" And he looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "Haitch oh pee, 'op"
ANYway the story is that my husband, his maternal uncle, and my father-in-law all died in a three-month span between September and December of 2017. Then my mother-in-law (who had just lost a son, a brother, and a husband) was in the hospital with pneumonia. Then her condo got flooded because a drainpipe burst during a freak thunderstorm, so she had to live in a hotel for several months while the damage was being repaired. Net result, I spent several months in Vancouver in late 2017 – early 2018
To recover from all that, I decided I needed to go some place far away where I didn't know anybody and where I could speak the language. That meant either Fiji (where Hindi is commonly spoken) or New Zealand. I guess I could have gone to Guyana as well, but that didn't occur to me at the time.
So I went to NZ, but I had no idea what my financial situation was going to be like after my husband died. My sister paid for my plane ticket as a gift. So I just spent my days walking around Auckland, which is spectacularly beautiful so it was a good thing to do.
I did spend a couple of days at a place called Rotorua, because it's a center of Maori culture and it seemed silly to go all the way to NZ and just hang out in Auckland where the Maori culture isn't as front and center.
And as I said, I did go to Sydney.
But like an idiot I never made it to the South Island, because I thought I was spending too much money already. That was dumb, because as it turns out I could have afforded it, I just didn't know that.
This passage is from The Children's Bach by Helen Garner
In the huge room beyond the partition the phone rang and she heard
Elizabeth pick it up. Before the caller had a chance to speak, Elizabeth said
in a slow, low, very distinct voice, ‘Don’t ever ring this number at this hour,
ever again. Is...
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
This Be The Verse [Philip Larkin]
If I attempted something of that sort (starting a poem with the F-word) I'm sure I would be basted.
I sometimes...
