Out of town

Just a quick post, because shortly I'm off to see my birth mother and sisters up the island. Julio will take care of the house while I'm gone. I've known my mother for close to thirty years, and she's now 91 and in a rest home, so visits have to be carefully organised - she gets tired after about an hour. my sisters will lok after me very well, it's always good to see them. Then on Sunday night I'll stay with a dear friend whom I haven't seen for ages, so all in all it should work out very well.

So many books

This weekend the Downtown Community Ministry held its famous Bookfair. For a bookaholic like me it's a major event. Every year I had to decide how to resist buying ridiculous numbers of books - given that I just didn't have any room for more, unless I removed some first (though I've sometimes resorted to buying them one year, reading them, and taking them back the next year.) This year, with the gaps left by Harvey's poetry collection, I knew the temptation would be even worse than usual.
          For some years, too, I've been wanting to go down and help sort the books beforehand. Of course I really did want to help this brilliant organisation with tis biggest fundraising drive of the year, and I knew I'd be pretty good at sorting. But also - I thought that if I was helping in this way, I would get an early look at what was available and maybe just confine myself to one or two books I really couldn't live without...
          Harvey's illness put this idea on hold, because I couldn't help for long enough to be useful. But this year there was nothing to stop me. Unfortunately I offered my services too late - they already had enough sorters. They did want help, though, on the weekend itself. I thought about it, and said yes. After all, I figured, if I was helping I wouldn't be exposed to nearly as much temptation - but I would still get to look at the books for a little while at least.
            It all worked out perfectly. I got myself down there early on a wet, cold Saturday, met loads of lovely people I knew, and managed to be useful handing out plastic bags, pointing people in the right direction, and above all, giving free rein to my inner librarian by going round picking up piles of discarded books and returning them not just to their correct table, but to the right section. (I even rescued one of my own books from "Women's Health" and moved it to its rightful place in "Women and Politics".)
             And at lunchtime, when the crowd thinned out a bit, I did have a quick browse, confining myself to biography and picking up just five books - such restraint!

The other news of the week (and the reason this post is a bit late, sorry) is that my first paying guest has arrived. I advertised with the universities for short-stay visiting academics, and Julio replied. He's a young mathematician from Brazil, and we're getting on very well indeed (see Something Else to Eat). I'm so pleased I got up the courage to do this. As I told him today, he's setting a very high standard for anyone who comes after him.

Parrots, plaques and prose

As someone who spends a lot of time with words, I really enjoy getting away from them - drawing and painting or, much more frequently, cooking and sewing. This week I did my first sewing for a long time. I had a friend of over fifty years coming to stay, and a week ago I found a remnant of furnishing fabric that I knew she'd love - brilliant tropical flowers, leaves, and parrots.
        Her house is full of bright Pacific artwork, cushions, etc, and she actually has her very own parrot, the devilishly clever Claude. (Parrots are notoriously hard to sex, but she knows he's a boy because he likes to hump her hand.) Whenever he does anything wrong, he tries to blame the cat by shrieking "Puss!" He lives on the verandah, and when a sudden gust of wind toppled the clothes airer, full of washing, he screeched endlessly. When she came out to see what the fuss was about, he was lying on the floor of his cage with his claws in the air to show her what had happened.
         I found a couple of bright red cushion covers and stitched on squares of parrots and flowers. There was just enough left over for a table mat. She loved them, and I loved making them.

I've never felt nervous sleeping in the house on my own, but I'm always just that little bit more relaxed when I have someone staying here. So by the time she left, I was well set up for my next undertaking - going to Guardian Memorials to look at the options for Harvey's plaque. I didn't go alone, I had a steadfast friend with me, and it also helped immensely that the person who dealt with us was a warm, empathetic young woman.
         From a quick look at other plaques in Karori Cemetery, I'd thought black granite was the only option (I didn't want bronze). But you can get different colours, and we chose a lovely dark green that looks like pounamu, a good fit for Harvey's love of nature and gardening. Now I just need to work out the wording, and later we'll get together for an unveiling (I don't think that's at all the right word, but there doesn't seem to be another one).
         And earlier this week, I finally managed to begin work on the next chapter of my food memoir, after a nine-month drought. I used a trick I've often taught to other people: you turn off the computer screen, so you can't see what you're writing and have to concentrate on the words in your head. Two hours later I had 2,500 words, not all of them useful, of course, but still - it's a good start.

Getting there

I'm never quite sure what people mean when they're in difficult circumstances, you ask them how they are, and they say, "Oh, we're getting there". But this week I did feel as if I was getting there too, at least as far as the house is concerned.
         First, I've been moving books around, filling up the shelves which once held Harvey's magnificent collection of New Zealand poetry, amd making room upstairs for a better arrangement of my own books, papers, notebooks, sewing things, cards, photos...
         Today I also managed to deal with a pile of Harvey's files and folders, keeping all the important things, such as his references right back to when he left his first teaching job at Morrinsville (as a writer and former bureaucrat, he kept his paper history in very good order), and throwing away the rest, such as the letters and forms and instructions sent to us by the many, many agencies we had to deal with because of his health problems, from the three different hospitals which took care of him to the people who lent him vital equipment like walkers, grabbers and shower seats. I didn't enjoy any of this, but there was a sort of sad satisfaction in getting it done.
         And on Monday Ali and David came and added the top layer of mulch to my new garden bed. I thought it would be just that dull plain brown stuff, but I was wrong. They brought eight bags of their own mulch, made of trees and trimmings from their section, all ground up and left to mature for a while. Instead of being dull brown, it was a gorgeous rich many-shaded chestnut. The garden looked as if a great pile of autumn leaves had drifted down and miraculously landed neatly in exactly the right place. I keep forgetting to take a photo before the rain and wind come back, but as soon as I get one, I'll add it. (Done!)
        So that was very satisfying too. I'm sure Harvey would have been delighted. And I got Jan's comment (see "Six months", below). All in all, it was a good week.

Six months

It's exactly six months today since Harvey died on Christmas Day, and once again it's a Saturday. I knew I'd need to be occupied, so it was good when a couple who'd known Harvey for a very long time, and visited faithfully when he was ill, invited me for lunch. Geoff was at Canterbury University with him, and they'd often been taken for brothers.
         The sun helped too. I took Geoff and Pam a pot of hyacinths, and on the way home I bought one for myself. Harvey loved them and always used to plant a bowl of them for me, then for a couple of years I did it, but last year I bought them instead. Only three, instead of the six or eight we used to grow, but they'll be beautiful.
          

Last Sunday I got through another of the things that had to be done - handing most of Harvey's superb library of New Zealand poetry over to Mark Pirie, who published Harvey's poetry from 1999. Harvey wanted him to have the books, knowing he would fully appreciate them and make very good use of them.


But the empty bookshelves look bereft - "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang". Looking back to last year, the sadness of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 seems to fit perfectly.

  That time of year thou mayst in me behold
  When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
  Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang
  In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
  As after sunset fadeth in the west;
  Which by and by black night doth take away,
  Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
  In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
  That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
  As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
  Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

  This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
  To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Yes. Except that he did manage to sing a little almost to the end, and I need to show the same spirit and courage. Here he is at about 50, looking wonderfully Shakespearian.

Out of it

Only a short post, as it's 11.21 pm. But I wanted to write briefly about what happens when I get completely absorbed in a longish and demanding piece of writing, as I did tonight. I know all the experts tell you to start writing first thing in the morning, but I've rarely done that; mostly I start in the evening, often after 8, and carry on till rather too late. I couldn't follow this pattern while Harvey was ill, as I had to be on deck for him in the morning, but it's how I naturally work. The danger is that I'll get distracted or tired or find some other excuse not to start at all, but providing I can overcome the resistance to sistting down and getting on with it, I'm away for the next few hours. And for that time, I forget everything else.

I remember reading that happiness is a by-product of absorption. (Thanks to Google and Clive James, I can tell you that it was T.E. Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - who wrote this.) Writing is the most absorbing thing I do. I'm not sure that it makes me happy, exactly, but it occupies my attention so completely that I become unaware of anything else. We set up a bell for Harvey to ring when I was upstairs and he needed me, but every so often when I was writing, I would not hear even that. (I sometimes used to wake suddenly from a deep sleep because I seemed to hear it ringing; even now, this still happens at times.)

This deep absorption in writing is somehow necessary to me; if I haven't experienced it for a while because I've been evading writing (and it is evasion, rather than simply avoidance, especially now, when I have no valid excuse for not doing it), I start to feel the way I imagine runners feel when they haven't been running. It's what Tillie Olsen meant when she wrote about the importance of a woman writer working "to the fullest extent of her powers". I don't think I'm doing that yet, but every time I write in a way that takes me "out of it" - completely away from my everyday life - I feel I'm getting there.

Not bad eh

I'm quite pleased with myself. Thanks to the company of friends, I've had one long (for me - maybe an hour?) walk through a bush reserve on Sunday; all the way from Courtenay Place back through town on Wednesday (don't laugh); and along the waterfront today. The weather has had a lot to do with it - still remarkably good for June.
         One of the many advantages of living where I do is that the wonderful Marsden Books is so close. On Tuesday evening I went there to hear sisters Atka Reid and Hana Schofield talk about their book on the war in Bosnia, Goodbye Sarajevo. (New Zealand is such a small place - turns out that Atka is married to a good friend's husband's cousin... )
          Something Atka said struck me as applying very well to my own situation, even though what she and her family went through is of course incomparably more harrowing. She said that during the siege of Sarajevo, "we just had to get on and work out some structure for our life, based on the things we could control".
           I thought, yes, that's exactly what I have to do too. I couldn't control Harvey's becoming ill and then dying and not being here, and I can't entirely control the sadness that wells up in me because of that. I just have to accept those things as a given. But I can control pretty much everything else in my daily life, and that does give me plenty of scope for working out how to live.

Have advice, will try

Thank you very much to all the helpful people who sent me ideas for exercise - though some had more potential than others (I haven't been able to wear even very low heels for years and I don't think they make orthotic-friendly tango shoes). Visitors are about to appear, so apologies for this short post, but I will ponder the exercise question further - and at least I'll have someone to go for walks with this weekend. I like the idea of the rebounder, and they're easy to buy on Trade Me - except that they all have ads that go like this: "My partner used it a few (maybe half a dozen?) times and it's been stored away carefully so it's in perfect condition. I'm only selling it because she doesn't use it anymore." Which is a bit of a worry.... Anyway, just writing about it is a spur to getting on with it, as it would be great to be able to report how well I'm doing!

PS: Today's post over on Something Else to Eat is about another aspect of living alone - the difficulty of deciding what I want to eat now that there's only me to consider.