25 Aug 2013

GOOD MOVE

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world

the Master calls a butterfly”
Richard Bach
As August and the month of National Family History makes way for our Australian springtime, Good Move is one of my short stories in the collection of family tales published in My Mother’s Harvest book (and ebook).

Leaving behind the cocoon of seventeen years of marriage, it was daunting yet exciting to try on new colours like a liberated butterfly and begin again.

Little Michael and I touched down at Tullamarine airport on a summer’s day in Melbourne. I wondered if the two teenagers of the clan, having made their exodus one week earlier, had not killed each other in the process of setting up our new home. My father was in the terminal to greet us, and as I walked across the tarmac, escorted on the arm of the co-pilot, I felt as if my son and I were arriving home.


Like human batons, we were passed on to another staff member who guided us through the airport to the guest lounge where dad was waiting.

‘Welcome home.’ He smiles, ruffling Mike’s hair. ‘Did you like the plane, Mooshty?’ Michael wriggles free from my arms and climbs aboard the empty trolley his grandfather is wheeling, ready for his next adventure. We scoot along the polished floors to the baggage carousel where my father dives in to scoop up our one and only suitcase as if panning for gold in a flowing stream.

‘Jump off.’ He says to Michael, swinging the red case onto the trolley. He picks up his two-year-old grandson and plonks him on top of the luggage. ‘How’s that?’

Michael’s eyes dance with joy, ‘It’s a giant turtle!’


We swerve this way and that, dad throwing the metal contraption from side to side thrilling his grandson as he dodges human traffic all the way out to his parked Mazda.

Dad guides me to the car and pats my shoulder in his reassuring fatherly way. ‘The kids like their new home.’ He smiles.

His words warm my heart – I am relieved to hear they have survived. I place the seatbelt over my young son and grin. ‘Good boy. We’re nearly there.’ Michael can relax, for a little while at least. He was off duty – there were a new pair of eyes looking out for me.

Michael’s lively chatter fills the air as he spots with great excitement all the different cars and trucks zooming past his window on the freeway as if Christmas had arrived early. ‘Fruck!’ He squeals.

‘What did he say?’ my father asks incredulously.

‘He means truck, dad.’

‘Oh. Good. I thought his brother had taught him a new word.’

Russell cruises by on his bike as my father’s silver car is pulling up beside the kerb.

‘Hey, mum. It’s a cool house.’ He does a u-turn on the quiet road and meets me at the gate. ‘Sharon and I have already chosen our rooms.’

I open Michael’s door and set him free to greet his brother and admire the new bike. ‘So where am I sleeping?’

‘Oh, you’ve got the bedroom at the back of the house.

‘Isn’t there a master bedroom?’

‘Yeah. But I like it.’

‘And where is your little brother’s bedroom?’

‘Right next to yours.’
Sharon and Michael
Sharon and Michael


Half-unpacked boxes with rumpled up newspapers litter the living room, dishes are stacked high in the kitchen sink, punk-rock music thumps out from Russell’s bedroom, Sharon is fussing with  jars and bottles of cosmetics in the bathroom – and I realise I am lucky to have been given any space at all!

‘Michael, don’t keep switching your light on and off, it costs me money’

‘It’s my room,’ he says, ‘I can pay it if you give me the proper money’


Compared to laid-back Narooma, Mornington was a bustling metropolis. As long as I could orientate my senses to the new surroundings, creeping forward step by step, I would eventually find my way around the new neighbourhood. It was a godsend that Mornington had several zebra crossings in Main Street, giving pedestrians right of way to cross the road and so these became my first checkpoints.

Michael enjoyed our shopping jaunts and became highly aware at a very young age that I depended on his eyes for both of us. Strapped into the padded stroller, Michael called out directions as we set off to do our daily shop.



His chirpy voice navigated us safely around our town, the wheels of the stroller shuddering over rough pavement, also helping to define our way to specific places.

I got away with bumping into things as if I were just another sleep-deprived mother distracted by her chatty child.

‘I can do this. I can do this.’ I chant under my breath, lifting Michael from the stroller and shifting him to the navigator seat of a shopping trolley.

We surge forward into the unpredictable human traffic hoping to avoid an accident. I cling fiercely to the handle while wandering in a daze. Thousands of similar looking boxes, tins and packages. How is this vision-impaired shopper going to find anything? The odour of strong chemicals overpowers more subtle food smells.



I rely on my young son who gives me obvious clues among the aisles.

Look, Lollies, Mum!’ We have no difficulty tracking down his favourite foods, Juice. Chippies. Jelly. Ice cream.’

‘Michael. Can you see the canned tomatoes?’ I stop and touch the items on the shelf and narrow down the selection with logical precision. If this is a tin of green peas, the canned tomatoes must be close by. My son watches my hands move from item to item.

‘There!’ Michael points to the diced tomatoes. I kiss his sticky cheek bulging with a lollipop. ‘Good boy.’ One item found, only another two dozen to go.


Some days, my father took us on a shopping raid, scooting around the store with his grandson in the trolley squealing with delight while they spun around the aisles, grabbing packets and tins from the shelves.

‘Juice?’ trills little Michael.

‘That’s your lot, moosh.’ He hands Michael a small orange juice and scans my list. ‘Done.’ He looks proudly at his watch as we wait at the checkout counter. ‘Ha – that took five minutes less than last time.’

I dare not change my mind and take a firm grip of the trolley as we move across the car park, my father dancing a merry jig all the way to his silver car.



Michael and his grandfather sit together looking at a book on the solar system.

“Isn’t it amazing, Michael. To think that our planet is the only one in the solar system with people living on it.”

Michael looks up wide-eyed at his grandfather,

“Oh yeah? What about England?”




A few years later, I accepted the white cane. I learned to venture into the world with confidence and began to see with new eyes and to trust in the world unseen.


Harry and Maribel at St Michael's Mount

Music led me to the creative world of a fine musician and special man. Harry opened his heart and home to Michael and me – sharing the journey, now there are three.



eBOOK: My Mother’s Harvest: a collection of family recipes and short stories

My Mother's Harvest

  
©  2013 Maribel Steel

9 Aug 2013

To Braille Or Not to Braille – That Was My Question



“No soul that aspires can ever fail to rise,
no heart that loves can ever be abandoned.”
Annie Besant




Thirty five years ago, on August 8th 1978, a very beautiful soul passed away. My loving mother had fought her cancer with courage, faith and radiant smiles but at forty-three, when she took her last breath upon this earth, the heart of our family stopped beating.

It was her love, as keeper of the flame, that warmed our home. Her smiling eyes had held a reassuring light that I thought would never go out, her laughter was as sweet as the trill of a lark’s song. My mother was the light that illumined our happy path through childhood, her kisses of faith encouraged us to never give up hope and her loving embrace was like being sheltered from the fiercest of storms.

The 1970s was to be a decade of happiness and sorrow for my family as we came closer to the changes looming over a darkening horizon. At the time, though, I never knew a storm was brewing because my mother was so positive, so full of life and good cheer that we kept doing the things we always did together – drawing on lazy weekends in the comfort of our kitchen, decorating pages of my school books.

  

 

Love and Art – her legacy

Mum had shown me her beautiful sketches in the school books she had kept as mementos of her teenage years in Madrid. She was only too happy to illustrate to her budding artist shadow, how to use her fine artistry techniques.

As her eager apprentice, I learned the art of shading with colour pencils, how to work with nib and ink, and caught her love for creating delicate illustrations but her sketches were always so much finer than my heavy-handed drawings.
“Precioso (beautiful),” she said with a proud twinkle in her eye when I presented her with the most recent decorated page.





Nothing stays the same

But, by the time I was fifteen, the onset of a mysterious loss of sight prompted my parents to seek a medical diagnosis. After visiting fifteen ophthalmologists and being persuaded to undergo tedious tests during a prolonged stay in hospital, my parents were eventually dealt the shocking blow – their daughter had an incurable eye disease, Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP). All my young dreams of becoming an artist like my mother, vanished.

It was not the time for drawing but a time for resourcing. I had to adopt new skills in order to function in a sighted classroom. By Year 10 I was using hand-held magnifiers to read textbooks and a tape recorder accompanied me to various lessons. I copied the classroom notes using large pads of writing paper with dark black texta pen in order to make them legible. In the evenings, I spent hours meticulously re-writing the same work as neatly as possible into my homework book for marking the next day.

Sometimes, my mother sat by my side and coloured in those parts of my work I couldn’t see, adding her artistic flair to brighten up the pages as well as lighten our hearts.

Then came the Question...

I remember coming home from secondary school one day when mum presented me with a huge sketch pad. “Look inside,” she smiled, “I’ve been busy all day creating a surprise for you.”

As I turned the pages as cautiously as if opening a precious archive, a series of rectangular boxes with purple circles in different spacings, caught my eye.

“It’s the Braille alphabet,” said my mother in a proud tone. “I’ve copied out all the letters in large format so you can see to learn them.”

I was more taken by the beautiful symmetry of her work, the precise lines, the exact gaps between the boxes, the fullness of the circles in their correct formations, more than I could accept the concept of learning Braille.

Looking back now, I realise that the truth was, I wasn’t ready to accept how different my needs were. I could not embrace this reality, even with my mother’s effort to hold my hand and walk the path of change with me.

Bell and Piluca on an Ocean Liner
As a young teenager looking toward a future, having the Braille alphabet tucked into my school bag was rejected and instead, I took a course in touch-typing with my peers at school.
Fortunately, the typewriter became a dear friend to take notes and it has served me well all throughout my life for writing personal journals, story books for my children, and in later years, adapting to using a computer to create zillions of pages for blogs and short stories.

I am sure my mother would forgive my earlier refusal to learn the art of Braille if she could see the images I endeavour to bring alive through the written word. Whereas once my mother and I shared the pleasures of a visual art form, today, I honour her memory in the words I feel inspired to write.

My mother’s legacy of love and art also lives on – in reflections I see within my children’s eyes, in the creative hands of my daughters Claire and Sharon, in the teaching desire of my son, Russell, and in the recent handiwork of my aspiring teenage carpenter, Michael.

But one heart keeps mum’s flame alight more than any other – her beloved husband, Brian, and I thank my father for reminding me that today, it has been a total of 12,803 days and 8 leap years since mum’s passing.

As I searched for a meaningful quote to end this story, an amazing ‘coincidence’ occurred.
Looking through my file of quotations, I selected the following verse and then I set off to visit my father to share the evening with him. We sat together preparing for a few minutes of silence in front of Mum’s altar and after lighting a candle he unfurled a small poster.


“I found this in an old trunk yesterday,” he said, “I’m not sure where it came from. But I think it is most fitting for the occasion.”

 He read the first two words – and I knew my mother was near. It was the very quote I had chosen to use, from the hundreds of verses in my collection.  With a broad smile on my face and eyes alight, we spoke the last words in unison . The flame of the scented candle flickered as these words warmed our hearts...



“Time is –
Too slow for those who wait
too swift for those who fear
too long for those who grieve
too short for those who rejoice
but for those who love
time is Eternity.”




From a sundial inscription