18th Apr – Read some speeches by Desmond Tutu about the concept, ubuntu, and couldn’t remember where I’d seen that word, until logging off my computer and the word appeared on the screen. It’s the name of my operating system! Ubuntu means “A person is a person through other persons.”
19th Apr – Read that Chopin composed some of his best pieces in an abandoned Carthusian monastery, once occupied by ascetic monks who denied themselves musical instruments.
20th Apr – This morning the rubbish truck had a female mannequin’s head sitting on the dashboard, looking out of the windscreen.
21st Apr – Found out that the word Wikipedia is derived from a Hawaiian word, wiki, meaning quick.
22nd Apr – Visited my son and his new wife, and she put a record on! An LP, on an old wooden stereo. Sounded great!
8th April – My son is on a camping holiday for four nights at the Folk Festival, fifteen minutes from home.
9th April – The 100th day of this year. A guest brought us some Hot Cross Buns from a Vegan bakery. On the packet it says ‘cruelty free’. How much cruelty is there in producing a sweet bun in a traditional bakery? (Each of the six buns was wrapped in cling wrap.)
10th April – A hairdresser washed my hair, then massaged my head for minutes and minutes and minutes. She seemed to be luxuriously filling in spare time.
11th April – In a book of short stories I found that the Q is the Queen of Capital Letters with an attention-seeking train.
From "Elizabeth's News" by Monica McInerney, in "10 Short Stories you MUST read this year", 2009
12th April – Survey results today show the greatest editorial barrier to publishing literary translations is the ‘cost of paying translators’. I’ll push on with my novel translation anyway, for the love of it.
13th April – Went to my son’s wedding rehearsal in the forest. The bride’s father was mowing a path, an aisle, for her to enter along.
14th April – The wedding day; the most unusual wedding I’ve ever been to. The bride played a ukulele (which she has just learnt) and sang, in the sweetest voice I’ve heard, a song by Ingrid Michaelson, You and I. (Note the chair – refer to my ‘unusual thing’ for 5th Feb; note the table – she found it at a flea market and painted it this week; note the bunting – she made it.)
Photo by Craig Tregear
15th April – At dinner with my son and his bride, she was still wearing her wedding shoes which she bought online from Sweden. (See photo above)
16th April – Years ago I opened a long-term investment account at the bank with $500, and tried to do it again today. The minimum they now take is $5,000.
17th April – Watched a documentary about an Australian man who gave up a wealthy Hollywood life to establish schools for kids from the rubbish dumps of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. He started the Cambodian Children’s Fund: http://www.cambodianchildrensfund.org/
3rd Apr – Went to the home of a Muslim woman to teach her English, but she wanted me to explain Christianity and to tell her what I know about Islam.
4th Apr – Just read that the woman who found Moses in the bulrushes, and then raised him as her own, was one of Pharaoh’s 59 daughters.
5th Apr – Another Muslim student is going to Saudi Arabia, where she’ll write a draft essay and send it to me in Australia to check before she sends it to her teacher. The essay is on The Metamorphosis by Kafka.
6th Apr – I’m halfway through The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, about a girl preparing for a family wedding; she buys special clothes and wears them for some time in the story. Today I’m preparing my special clothes for my son’s marriage next week when I will be a member of the wedding.
7th Apr – A blog article about a French Catholic church, written by a blogger I follow, was used as a sermon by a Presbyterian minister. Imagine! Your blog words spoken in public by someone you’ve never met! See Dennis Aubrey’s article about the Basilique Sainte-Marie-Madeleine,Vézelay, France: Elle chante, Père.
29th Mar – Spoke to the Housing tenant who was the target of last night’s tirade. He spoke to me politely, without swearing, and was touched that I was interested. The same man once threatened to do terrible things to my head if I called the police about him.
30th Mar – On the back deck there are two spiderwebs, one neat and circular and the other messy like crazy ladders.
31st Mar – This afternoon, two sons worked on serious maths problems while sharing one orange, one slice of fruit toast and one cup of chamomile tea.
1st Apr – Woke at 2.30 am. Still awake at 3.30 am but daylight saving ended at 3 am. At 4 am it was 3 am again. Still awake at 5 am, which was now 4 am. A long night.
2nd Apr – Alone in a gift shop, I heard a beautiful voice singing ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’, and stood still to listen closely. The owner showed me the CD case and told me about Melody Gardot, a prophetic name, as I learnt when I later read her life story.
Yesterday, I posted these unusual things. Today, I tried to add a photo, and then another unusual thing happened. My post disappeared. Poof! Fortunately, my husband, as one of my ‘followers’, had an email version that I could copy. So let’s do this one more time…
24th Mar – My oldest son is 26 today. This is the first time I’ve had such an old child.
25th Mar – Walked past a front yard that is all garden, lush and green and shaded by three big trees. Through the luxuriance snakes a path of imitation grass.
26th Mar – Reading George Sand’s 1838 travel account, Un Hiver à Majorque – 181 pages. Searched in the library for the English translation, Winter in Majorca, assuming it would be the same size, but found a thin 43-pager. Dead authors are fair game for some translators.
Carthusian Monastery, Valldemossa, Majorca, where George Sand, her children, and Frédéric Chopin spent the winter of 1838/39
27th Mar – At my nine-year-old student’s house, she misheard my question after a woman unknown to me walked past the table:
“Who was that? Is she a relative?,” I asked.
“She’s my grandmother,” she replied.
After a silent moment, she asked, “Why did you say that?”
“Say what?”
“That she’s irrelevant.”
28th Mar – Afternoon: A tiny Housing tenant wandered into my yard and sat on my steps, his parents close behind. We chatted; it was pleasant. Another ‘first’.
Evening: An angry man shouting from mid-street threatened this same little family with unbloggable sufferings, until the police arrived.
19th Mar – Just read that Abraham’s first recorded words are his instruction to his wife to tell a lie, in order to save his own life.
20th Mar – Paid for access to George Sand’s Story of my Life. Translated from French. 1585 pages, 72 chapters, 65 translators. Apparently the largest group translation outside the Bible.
21st Mar – Heard Libby Holman singing Body and Soul (1930). She occasionally uses the OSV word order – object-subject-verb: ‘My life a wreck you’re making’. Like Yoda from Star Wars – ‘When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good, you will not, hmmm?’
22nd Mar – Went to tutor at a house where nothing is thrown away. Found a note to myself that I dropped in the yard last year, a reminder to get The Scarlet Letter from the library.
23rd Mar – Ran into a man who told me his wife, whom I’ve known for 10 years, is teaching French at the local primary school. As a Francophile, I wondered how I could have known someone for 10 years and not known she speaks French, so I had to ask, ‘Does she speak French?’. ‘No,’ he said, ‘she’s learning it at the Alliance Française.’ Hope she’s a few lessons ahead of her students.
14th March – Yesterday I saw a young blind guy walking with a black Labrador guide dog. Today I saw him again closer-up and realised I knew him. I remembered him spectacled and dogless.
15th March – Saw through the rear window of a parked 4WD about ten plastic heads with moveable jaws.
16th March – Offered my figs to a Saudi woman, thinking of her other life she lives, like an Israeli fig-loving friend of mine, near the cradle of civilisation, near the Garden of Eden. But she doesn’t like figs. At all.
17th March – Was given a chance to learn German online for free. I said yes. A mature decision for me, having hated Hitler’s language since childhood.
18th March – This morning I read two 19th-century stories: The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant and Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol. In both, the woman values her existence only when she is pretty and attracts wealthy men. This afternoon I read in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey: ‘If the mind be but well cultivated and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.’
9th March – In a Chinese restaurant, I wanted the “Catch of the Day” until I saw it swimming in a tank.
10th March – Walked up my son’s driveway through a litter of apples fallen from a tree. I looked up, hoping to pick one, and indeed there was only one on his side of the fence, but it was too, too high. The fruit-laden branches were on the neighbour’s side.
11th March – In an alternative café, an old wall vent has had its screen removed and replaced with four brass taps. Vent art.
12th March – Last night at midnight we called the police about a party outside the government flats. This morning I read in Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë, an old cottager’s thoughts on the desirable consequences of being nice to unpleasant neighbours: ‘the very effort itself will make you love them in some degree – to say nothing of the goodwill your kindness would beget in them, though they might have little else that is good about them.’
13th March – Busy selecting potatoes in the supermarket, I heard the sound of heavy leather slapping the floor behind me. When my bag was full I turned round and found a large wallet, but no one close enough to have dropped it. Handed it in.
4th Mar – I read on my father’s army service form that he had blue eyes, a revelation to me; I never looked him in the eye. My mother and three siblings have brown or grey eyes. I have blue eyes.
5th Mar – A rural commentator on ABC Radio today said he wants ‘action, not just antidotal stories’.
6th Mar – Just heard Cupid by Sam Cooke. Sam asks Cupid: ‘Draw back your bow and let your arrow go straight to my lover’s heart’. But Sam loves a girl who doesn’t know he exists. She can’t be his lover then, since a lover loves.
7th Mar – Thought about a mentor’s advice to use ‘perhaps’, not ‘maybe’. Saw ‘maybe’ in an article and found myself mouthing ‘perhaps’, which purses the mouth with its two p’s and a sibilant s and a breathy h in the middle. The song Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps just wouldn’t work as Maybe, Maybe, Maybe.
8th Mar – In a bookshop, I searched for the translators’ names in three editions of Madame Bovary. The most expensive, a Penguin edition, gave a translator’s name; a cheaper Penguin and the Collins edition made no mention of translators. Perhaps Flaubert wrote them in English.
