Eighteen: a winter’s tale.

On a north-facing block that slopes down in that direction, the house takes advantage of low-slung winter sun, which slides up onto the couch in the front room, a warm slab of mid-morning gold, falling off the other end later, like a guest that came for lunch and drank too much sherry.

No sun today; steel-grey sky over a pale lemon rim and a mean wind swirling. I walked out the front gate and around the corner and up the next street where  autumn’s last yellowed leaves, tossed in the air, flickered gold like the last frames of a super eight film.

Home movies. Silence, flickering, peopled by the dead. Relations. They call them relatives now. Aunts, uncles, bearded, spectacled, tentative smiles, lost, dead. Mechanical movements, except when they stood still like my grandmother who thought my father’s super eight camera was a box brownie. ‘Stand still,’ she said to the younger ones, blond haired heads flying around down among the adult goal-post immovable legs. 1967. Manfred Mann. Summer of Love. Grade Five, St John Bosco’s, Niddrie. Cactus and geranium outside the classroom window. The door on the other side opening to fierce summer dust-laden wind. Shut the door! cries the teacher, the blackboard behind her decorated impossibly with chalked drawings like stencilled lace by ten-year-old girls who would surely become artists. But I never see them again,  except one: last January, at the funeral, ironically or coincidentally, of one of those very teachers. Maureen Kavanagh, as Irish as the green fields. A mathematics book, unintelligible. Reading cards in colour-coded stages, straight to purple, the top level; smaller type, fewer pictures. Where do I go from here? 

*

Winter is ahead of itself. Impersonal time is relentless, but humans hang on to the past. That hot night at Port Melbourne beach is remembered like last week. You thought you switched on that cooler yesterday. It was months ago. I started the book I’m reading on a thirty-degree Celsius day one late afternoon in late summer, and I’m drawing to the end on frozen June days in pale sunshine in the mall at Coburg where, hilariously,  people think I am reading the Bible. All right (again) it is fifteen hundred pages long, and it is a red hardback, and it has a yellow ribbon to mark the page, but still. 

*

Late afternoon. The boys and their friends came in after school in a dustcloud of noise, like a small football crowd, echoing off the factory wall at the end of the street and bouncing along the pavement before that rise in volume as they right-angled in at the gate. It's like seeing your life over again; every stage of children growing up is the same. You relive that time when you were the same age over again; some kind of weird semi-reincarnation, your life is a television re-run, except they had more friends and clothes, were better educated and maybe had more fun. We just drank and smoked more. And we had more time to read. 

*

I'd had this mince thing brewing away on the stove, with onions and garlic and coriander and cumin and chili, to serve wrapped up in those flat corn breads with sour cream and lettuce; commonly known as eating 'Mexican'. The supermarkets are full of kits, a whole wall of them, boxes of bottles and sachets and jars all packaged up in chintzy yellow and red and green.

I had roughly mashed two ripe avocadoes (cheapest they've ever been right now) and thrown into the mess half a red capsicum, finely diced, along with a couple of chopped garlic cloves and some sea salt and white pepper; some of these recipes add sour cream or yogurt.

I had also thrown a whole packet of corn chips into a big baking dish, chopped a chorizo sausage into small salty fragments and scattered these over the corn and loaded the whole thing up with grated cheese and baked it and, once out of the oven, poured over some tomato sauce and topped the lot with sour cream and some of the pre-made avocado relish. And a squirt of that chipotle sauce.

He’s eighteen next week.