Month: April 2018

Sometimes life confronts you in interesting ways.  Last week my mother took a bad fall and knocked herself unconscious for a couple of hours.  I did not find out about this until I was driving to work the next day because she did not bother to tell anyone when it happened.  It turns out you can be as relaxed as you like about the reality of your parents aging, but still get rattled when you are sent a photo of your 86 year old mother looking like she has been beaten about the head with a cricket bat.

That led to a pretty long week, with each of my siblings and I taking turns spending time idling around various medical premises while the medical professionals generally stuffed up her initial treatment.  It got sorted in the end and she is now on-track to heal up nicely.

But if that were not confronting enough, I discovered that not even a shared crisis will mend that most cliched of familial situations – an estrangement of siblings.  No, my brother still would not speak to me after a fall-out earlier in the year.  Worse still, I got a little insight into his feelings towards me that has me questioning my own character and behaviour.  Oh well, I have always agreed with Socrates that an unexamined life is not worth living.

The thing is, I get hurt easily enough, but I am resilient.  Nowadays there are better things in life to focus upon than endless self doubt and negativity.  One of those is definitely my yoga classes.

You may recall in a much earlier blog that I told you how yoga saved my life.  Now it is simply a way of life.  I supplement my once a week individual lesson with the wonderful Jac with a couple of small, private classes with a group of friends at the Isaac.

To be honest, I would hesitate to call it a class, because we are more like a bunch of kids doing detention.  At the ungodly hour of 6:30 am on a Tuesday morning, and the only slightly more civilised time of 7:30 am on a Saturday (WHEN ANY SENSIBLE PERSON WOULD BE HAVING A LIE IN!), we assemble before the resolute Bonnie and attempt yoga serenity.

On any given morning there are between 4 and 6 of us out of a total group of 8.  None of us are young, but I am the oldest by a decade or so.  The core group consists of myself (the elder), glamorous blond 1, the tall man, and the building manager.  The slightly less frequent attendees are glamorous blond 2, the snorer, the artist and scowling cat face.  Just so you know, the snorer and the artist, and glamorous blond 2 and the tall man, are each heterosexual couples.  This can have a negative impact on the tone and behaviour of the class.

I have heard it said, and indeed Bonnie herself has said, that yoga is not a competitive sport.  This is, as glamorous blond 1’s husband would say, “a load of shite”.    Actually glamorous blond 1’s husband was initially part of the class, but wisely retired injured early on in the piece.  Having recovered his health and fitness in an actual gym, he has declined to re-join our little band.  I cannot think why.

In fact, our yoga group is nothing if not competitive.  Partners try to out do partners, women to out do the men, men to out do the women, age versus beauty, you name it we compete.  Me too.  The great thing about yoga is that it finds you out.  No matter how fit and limber you may be in some respects, your body will have weaknesses.  Bonnie goes for every weakness she can find.  Everyone of us has things we can do better than anyone else in the class, and things we can barely contemplate doing.  Not one of us is without some significant underlying injury or 10.  Sometimes we will be hanging onto a pose for dear life with muscles shaking and moaning out loud, but no one wants to be the first to release.

Bonnie likes to give us individual hands-on attention.  That means when she spies someone really struggling she will come and make a little ‘adjustment’, or poke her thumbs into the taunt muscle to make it ‘release’.  She talks a lot as she does this.  The tall man has a habit of running off at the mouth while she does this.  The more he talks the more she talks back, and the longer the rest of us hang in there in agony.  Cries of, “keep counting” ring out around the room, but we all get punished for the one who has complained.

The truth is we all like to be distracted.  The essence of yoga is to be deeply attuned to your body, to control your breathing, and to consciously let your muscles do their job.  But we very frequently do not want to be attuned to our bodies.  Bits of our bodies are frequently in agony.  So the comments come loud and fast, and often raunchy enough for Bonnie to have made a 100 Me Too complaints by now.

Occasionally she will try to introduce some spiritual element into the class.  For a while we had tibetan monks chanting in the background.  That did not last long.  She annoints us with essential oils at the beginning of the class to try and calm our minds.  The men hate the lavender scent and will only respond to the more robust citrus.  The time she accidentally gave us peppermint oil I stupidly rubbed it on my face – VERY invigorating but not calming.  A few times she has attempted to send us off into some higher state of awareness with very mixed success.  The one time she tried to secure our minds to the task by asking us to state aloud the moment we returned from any distracting reverie was somewhat sabotaged by the snorer yelling, “Back”, every 5 – 10 seconds as his wayward mind came and went.

We are not great at yoga, and we are terrible at its associated mental disciplines.  To be honest we are all just waiting to hear the tell-tale snap of a tendon, but it has not happened yet.  In fact we are slowly improving over time.  Some mornings are dire.  Some mornings are great.  But we always feel better at the end.

That might be because our favourite part comes at the end. Bonnie arranges us all into a collapsed position on our mats, feet up on chairs or bean bags, cushions under heads.  The building manager puts on his socks and is given a blanket.  We don eye cushions to keep out the light.  Then Bonnie talks us into a delicious zen-like calm for 5 minutes.  After that all bets are off as we rapidly depart for work, or a date scone and coffee on Saturdays.

The point is, and there is a point to this, there is a lot be be gained from a persistent shared endeavour.  It is very grounding to meet your friends with no make-up, hair undone, still groggy from bed and in lycra to boot.  And then to try very hard, with utmost good humour, to improve oneself.  We laugh at each other a lot, but with respect for what each is trying to achieve.  Miraculously we are all getting stronger, more flexible, and generally fitter.  But even more importantly, at least two mornings a week, we start the day feeling good about ourselves.

 

Hope you had a nice Easter. Mine was lovely.  Three separate family dinners, and I (we actually – Johan did the heavy work) cleaned and sealed my deck, and bought and planted new pots.  Perfect weather and wonderful people.  Who needs the south of France?

After my parents married my grandmother lived with them.  It wasn’t planned that way.  At least not by them.

She had signed over the lease on her little unit, sold them her furniture lock, stock and barrel, and headed up north to live on the farm with older daughter Maisie.  By then Maisie had settled down and married a far North subsistence farmer and eventually they had two adopted children.  Her natural son, born under murkier circumstances, was out of the picture.  The two women clashed when together  under one roof.

Well they would, of course.  They had not lived together since Maisie was seventeen.  The farmhouse was small and isolated.  It had two bedrooms and no electricity.  There was some indoor plumbing, but the toilet was a long-drop outside.  Cooking on a wood range is fun only up to a point.  Then there was the husband, Big Joe.  Good natured, slow.  And later, the kids – Bubba Joe and Delores, although they cannot be blamed for the initial failure to settle there.  The nearest town of any description was thirty minutes away over poorly metalled roads on the back of a truck.  Grandma came home.

She came home to my newly-wed parents, turfed them out of the only proper bedroom, and proceeded to settle in.  

By the time I was born my parents had bought an ex-State house just around the corner.  Still only two bedrooms, and my grandmother had one of them.   I can remember that house, which I lived in till I was seven, like the back of my hand.

It sat up high above the road on the lower slopes of One Tree Hill.  The two bedrooms and the lounge looked out the front towards South Auckland, but not as we know it now.  You could see Otahuhu in the distance, but the main attraction for me was the huge “Wood is Good” sign on the Forest Products building at Penrose.  The floors were dark-stained pine floor boards, with Axminster carpet bought on credit from Smith & Brown (where the Sheraton / Langham / Cordis sits now) in the lounge.  When Dad built two tiny bedrooms on the back for me and my brothers I had Dior-style models in pink for my wall paper, and he had cowboys and Indians on a blue ground.  Both rooms were freezing  – unlined and cantilevered above the sloping section, with feet chilling lino on the floors.

I had nightmares in that room.  Every night for years, until I learnt to think of the bedcovers as a cave to hide in.  And ear infections that had me awake and screaming night after night until at five I had my adenoids removed in the doctor’s surgery in Campbell Road.  That night I vomited up a bucketful of blood, but afterwards I was pain-free and could eat without nausea.

In the lounge was an old oak dining table and a round-fronted china cabinet.  I used to peer out across the street through venetian blinds that had to be laboriously spring-cleaned annually, and which somehow got into a tangle whenever I went near them.  Against one wall was an old, plush maroon velvet sofa with enormous, curved art deco arms.  Perfect for bouncing on or lying curled up with a pile of Walt Disney comics.  The fire surround was a feature wall, with grooved plywood painted flamenco pink.

Out the back was the kitchen with a built in alcove for the radio (Aunt Daisy in the morning, then The Archers), and a very modern formica and chrome dining set.  We ate there every day except for Sunday evening, when we had a roast dinner followed by peaches and cream at the lounge table.  Although we had a fridge and an Atlas stove, there was also a safe – that is to say a cupboard that had a wire grate at the back cut into the house exterior so that air could circulate and keep the perishable food fresh.  

Between my parents bedroom and the kitchen, at the head of the hall, was the bathroom.  It had a toilet with a varnished wooden seat, a basin and a bath with a shower over.  When I was small there was also a potty with a sort of wooden armchair Dad made me to sit on.  I am told I was toilet-trained before I was one, and I believe this to be true.  But the bathroom was a place of terror to me, because my mother (whose bowels are a lifelong torment to her and to her family) insisted on ‘regularity’; which meant endless hours sitting uselessly on the potty while the more interesting things in life passed me by.

Off the kitchen was the porch and entry to the wash house (laundries were a later invention).  Early in my memory it had a copper and scrubbing board, Sunlight soap and a blue bag for rinsing the whites.  Later there was an agitator washer with a roller mangle on top.  Then there were two cold, grey tubs, usually with washing soaking.   You had to go past the laundry to get down the back steps to the back yard.  But that was a glorious place.  Sunken and set in solid rock with the porcelain mushroom head of the septic tank to sit on, it was filled with sunshine and fruit trees and daisies.  I loved it.

On one side of the house was the trellis gate that our dog, Major, chewed through the one time he was shut in the night before the SPCA came to take him away to be put to rest.  Next to the gate was a wooden door leading to the cave-like area under the house where Dad stored paint and ladders and bits of wood and stuff.  The timber supports were marked with paint stripes where he had cleaned off his brushes, and it smelt of turps and dry earth.  On the other side of the house he built a garage.  The whole section was solid scoria from One Tree Hill, so he and my uncle used dynamite to blast out the building platform and put down a concrete floor.  The garage was fitted with a hoist. When my mother got her driver’s licence he used it to haul out the engine of the little Morris Cowley he bought her so he could re-condition it. 

In those days a father could paint a house, use dynamite, build a garage, and re-build an engine!

He could mix and lay a concrete drive too, and he and my uncles (real and social) built a two-strip concrete drive for every new house anyone we knew moved into.  Paths around the house and to the clothes-lines as well.  I once tested one of those paths for dryness with my little red gumboot (it wasn’t dry!) and got a thrashing for my trouble.  

Then there was the concrete terrace and steps he built to improve the front of the house, which was edged with a flower garden perpetually full of oxalis.  My mother is an enthusiastic but inattentive and untrained gardener.  But the lawn was mowed every weekend, and the edges trimmed, before the car was washed and polished dry with a real chamois.

We even had a white timber rail (not picket) fence that Dad designed and built, and that I promptly appropriated as a balance bar to walk on.  Life was neat and tidy, and everyone had their own bedroom.  My parents went to the movies on Saturday nights, while my grandmother baby-sat me and fed me chocolate.  What could have been more perfect?