My dear friend
For a moment there I had almost allowed myself to give in to the political despair. I know that we have often discussed this despair, and that you are impatient with my sense of powerlessness which you perceive as an excuse and not a truth.
Power comes in many forms, and for the first time in my life I live in a marginal electorate. (Yes, you are right, I have lived in this electorate on and off across the years, but this safe conservative seat has grown increasingly marginal and in the coming election there is a better chance than there has ever been that we could win it.) I can’t do the doorknocking or the telephoning anymore. I’ve done them before and I know that they are important, but I don’t have the ticker.
I quite like the letterboxing though and I’ve signed our household up. ‘Send us as much as you like,’ I said. ‘There’s enough of us to get it done.’ I don’t kid myself that letterboxing is taking radical action, but it does feel good to be making some small contribution to a campaign that could make a big difference.
So that’s how I started my week. The unradical act of letterboxing. The letters come pre-folded these days (no more guessing which line of text you want to fold the edge of the paper to, no more watching the piles at the end of the table grow, no more paper-cuts), but letterboxing’s greatest frustration remains. No matter how carefully you plan, there is no true efficiency in walking the streets you’ve been allocated.
The mister and I were finishing the last section together and as we looked at the map deciding whether to start in the middle working our way out, around and in; or to start at the top edge and work our way down, I (and this will surprise you) stepped away, saying, ‘There’s not room for two people’s logic here, I’ll just follow you.’ (We laughed!).
This suburb where we are letterboxing was developed during the 50s, 60s and 70s, and is filled with the types of 3-bedroom houses I and my friends grew up in. This was a time when houses would never be described as 3-bedroom/1-bathroom because bathrooms simply came in multiples of one, it wasn’t something to be remarked upon. Carports are added on, galvanised iron upgraded to colourbond. The gardens are planted with frangipanis, geraniums, iceberg roses, and the lawns are hardy couch grass. The eucalyptus trees planted on the footpaths have grown tall, their roots push at the guttering and the roads. The letterboxes are built into brick fences, most of them below waist height, many below the knee, all of them with openings awkwardly angled down.
These houses are disappearing now, blocks subdivided, two houses where there once was one. Two bathrooms, two storeys, a two-car garage. The gardens are soft grass and neatly hedged. Fences are tall, gates are locked. Letterboxes, less often used, more often locked are easier to find, the slots wider, the spiders disappeared.
We are sharing our letterboxing route with two young people from the primary industries department. They are wearing orange overalls, broad-brimmed hats, pump packs on their backs, long metal wands in their hands. Spraying for fruit fly, it’s a 2020 vibe. We exchange smiles in one street and then another and another. I want to ask them what map they are using, how they decided which route to follow, how often they have to double back, but the mister and I have almost finished now. What difference would it make?
Were you in Brownies or Girl Guides? I can’t imagine that you were, unless your curiosity got the best of you as it so often does. I can imagine that you might have joined, because you couldn’t take each Wednesday morning at school when the girls who went to Brownies talked about the mysteries of Tintookies and Tookonies and you were left out (I thought, as I was writing this surely they have changed the names but they seem to remain). My foray into Brownies was (as I’m sure you can imagine) against my mother’s wishes and she never (as I’m once again sure you can imagine) held back on her disdain for this strange organisation. She never sewed my Tookonie badges on. She never ironed my shirt. But while I was letterboxing earlier this week, I was thinking about the time I walked the streets selling Girl Guide biscuits, Mum driving the car with boxes of biscuits in the back seat. All these years later, I suddenly see this thing my mother is doing as an act of love. Leaving her beloved garden to help me sell biscuits for Brownies. I remember the sense of camaraderie as she counselled me, ‘Not that one’ at houses with ‘beware of the dog’ signs on the gate. And at the end of the day, we shared a packet of biscuits, wiping the crumbs from our lips and brushing them off our clothes. Here in 2021 I feel a wave of sadness washing over me that it has taken me so long to see that time for what it was. But I’m glad for the sadness. Glad that those feelings—and the meaning behind those feelings—still live.
(On the matter of dogs, I used to be terrified of walking down streets I didn’t know. I grew up in the days when dogs wandered the streets, going in and out of yards, never on leads, rarely with a human in sight. I almost never see dogs off a lead in the street anymore and yet, that feeling of unease and discomfort has never quite left me).
I’ve had cause to think this week about family and friends and how our relationships sometimes get frozen in time, stuck in a certain time and place when you (and they) were a certain kind of person. I hasten to add that this has not happened to us—to you and me—and I am grateful to you for this. We have let the lessons of our lives inform our friendship and somehow acknowledging the complexity of life has made our friendship simpler.
When I write a funeral, I try to write something about the fluidity of a relationship that can exist even after death because if anything about grief has taken me by surprise it is this. Many people will tell you that they continue to talk to their mum or their dad every day, but this only skims the surface of what it means to sustain a relationship after someone has died.
I remember the night of my mother’s death. One of her best friends came through the door, and I watched as he and my father embraced, in their touch announcing to us all the truth and the depth of what we were struggling to comprehend. That embrace was the physical expression of their love for my mother, a wife and a friend and from where I watched I felt its power. And in that moment, I understood my mother as whole. One entity, made of strengths and flaws. There was no particular charasteric that stood out, no personality trait that defined her. There was no judgement, no thought that she should have been more this, could have been less that. I felt the fullness, the wholeness of who she had been. It was perhaps the most pure my love for someone else has ever been.
Naturally, since that time, as I’ve thought about Mum, I have returned to frustration, judgement, admiration, but that moment has stayed with me. I have never recreated it, never felt it so completely, but I’ve never forgotten it, always remembered it was there. Strange that the first time I should feel it again would be thirty years later, letterboxing an anonymous suburban street.
I do try to remember that time and bring it to my relationships with people who are living too. For example, when the mister is sipping at his morning coffee I try to think that he is much more than that unbearable noise. You will not be surprised to hear that some mornings I am more successful at this than others.
And now another week begins and it’s going to be a warm one. We have had none of the hot November weather that you would remember from your times here. It hasn’t been hot, but it’s been the worst year for hayfever that I remember. If you had to choose between a hot north wind and hayfever, what would it be? I can tell it’s time to end because I’m getting silly now. Next I’ll be asking, 'If you could only have one, what would it be: a kitchener bun or a vanilla slice?’ I’m joking! Of course I know what you would choose … you haven’t changed that much, not in the ways that matter.
I was hopeful that we would see each other soon, but things have taken a turn haven’t they? I might stay close to home a little longer, but I send, as always, my care and love, holding you gently in my heart.
Talk soon? Tracy xx
PS We started our Christmas movie viewing this weekend. We went big and started with (Love, Actually—yes, I know and I don’t disagree with you, but still); and then last night we watched Last Christmas, which must be the only movie in which the appearance of Emma Thompson immediately shifts the movie from pretty bad to truly woeful.
PPS And in case you’ve lost it, here is the link to my world famous Christmas playlist, and I made a little playlist for you of songs that made me think of you while I’ve been writing.