On Visiting Parents
Last week I visited my parents at The Entrance, on the Central Coast, about
an hour north of Sydney. We holidayed there every year when I was a kid,
and I sometimes even got the last week off school to do so. My parents
always said that when they retired they’d move there, and that’s what
they did.
When I visit now, I arrive as a ten year old, excited at being back in a place of childhood delight, my muscles and synapses defying time.
The choc-dipped ice cream, probably deficient in dairy, is still to be found, though the price is not, with 40c transformed to $4.50. The pelicans are still fed, but now it’s a daily 3pm tourist attraction. The jetty where I used to fish is untouched, though now seems so much smaller, just like the bream. The Housie Hall is now one of those Base Warehouses, where quality is an apparition and everything is cheaper than you’d imagine.
This year is different. My parents are living in a new place, closer to the water. When I scan the rooms, I see furniture in three worlds at once: in this new address, in their first coastal house, and in the ghost of our family home in Maitland.
But that chair never used to be near that table. That wall hanging, which I never really liked, should be to the left of the table, not the right. And why that new fruit bowl?
“Where’s the brown bookcase?”, I enquire, affecting calm.
"Oh, we gave it away. It was too heavy to move and it was old.”
Too heavy? Isn’t that what removalists are for? Don’t you remember that it was MY bookcase, the first I ever owned. Why the fuck didn’t you ask me about it?
I didn't actually say those things, because the adult subsumed the boy. I now realise that after decades of unbroken neglect I no longer have rights over the bookcase, any more than I have rights over the presence of a fruit bowl. Physical ownership is now a memory, just like the books the bookcase once cherished, books now lost to student days, though still written, shakily, in my thinking and feeling. Newer books live in a new home, where I live, where they stare at me from new shelves, some grumbling at not being read, some waving at me with their pages, reminders of love and loss.
You can never truly own a book, only the paper it's printed on. Nor can you pin the past to a wall, like a tortured butterfly, demanding it remain in an eternal present. To do so is to mistrust the future, and that is a crime.
When I visit now, I arrive as a ten year old, excited at being back in a place of childhood delight, my muscles and synapses defying time.
The choc-dipped ice cream, probably deficient in dairy, is still to be found, though the price is not, with 40c transformed to $4.50. The pelicans are still fed, but now it’s a daily 3pm tourist attraction. The jetty where I used to fish is untouched, though now seems so much smaller, just like the bream. The Housie Hall is now one of those Base Warehouses, where quality is an apparition and everything is cheaper than you’d imagine.
This year is different. My parents are living in a new place, closer to the water. When I scan the rooms, I see furniture in three worlds at once: in this new address, in their first coastal house, and in the ghost of our family home in Maitland.
But that chair never used to be near that table. That wall hanging, which I never really liked, should be to the left of the table, not the right. And why that new fruit bowl?
“Where’s the brown bookcase?”, I enquire, affecting calm.
"Oh, we gave it away. It was too heavy to move and it was old.”
Too heavy? Isn’t that what removalists are for? Don’t you remember that it was MY bookcase, the first I ever owned. Why the fuck didn’t you ask me about it?
I didn't actually say those things, because the adult subsumed the boy. I now realise that after decades of unbroken neglect I no longer have rights over the bookcase, any more than I have rights over the presence of a fruit bowl. Physical ownership is now a memory, just like the books the bookcase once cherished, books now lost to student days, though still written, shakily, in my thinking and feeling. Newer books live in a new home, where I live, where they stare at me from new shelves, some grumbling at not being read, some waving at me with their pages, reminders of love and loss.
You can never truly own a book, only the paper it's printed on. Nor can you pin the past to a wall, like a tortured butterfly, demanding it remain in an eternal present. To do so is to mistrust the future, and that is a crime.
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