In triangulation

Friends, I have been out and about, which is why there has been so little activity here of late.  I italicise those adverbs in order to convey, in some skinny way, the exhilaration of having a break from the every day.  Not the tender pleasures of life at home, in which the señor and I slowly consume our merged collection of DVDs (“it’s only a film, h-bird,” he said as I gripped his arm during the final two or so hours of The Seven Samurai), and in which the too-longness of the dogs’ nails is recorded in the score-marks on our arms as they attempt to insinuate their hairy selves into our couch-sitting, all at once.  No; the every day from which I have happily flown is the predictable minutiae of work: interesting students, affable colleagues, tasks completed without too much throat-clamping pressure of time (unlike the first-semester blues), but a routine so familiar to me I sometimes dream it and think my day’s finishing when it begins.

I went to Auckland for the launch of the RH book.  That city’s lushness compared to the drier climes in which I conduct my daily life always takes me by surprise.  Palm trees and ponga where my mind says they cannot grow, green fringes that extend to the street’s edge in unexpected places, and then the successive dense, populous, low-rise neighbourhoods until the CBD, high-rise like fingers pushing out through a tight shirt cuff.  The parts of me that most accord with those types skewered in Stuff White People Like were well contented: I stayed on Ponsonby Road, went book shopping, drank coffee, ate generous breakfasts and pottered around.

Still, what pottering.  In Sandringham, I received a gym lesson in the elements of fighting from Heather, who then completed a fight proper of her own with an opponent who shared her strength and determination.  They grappled in the ring and on the mat, locked in poses that might have been the kind of demonstration-contortions gymnasts throw on the beam, were the aim not to get out of them.  High-res images of the many fighters of the all-women’s gym were tacked to the walls, Heather’s distinctive among them for the width of her smile, that mixture of steeliness and kindness that saw her defeat her fighting opponent and then laugh about the scissor grips through which each had pushed their heads moments before.

Post-fight, we were transported back to Kingsland by Ben, whom you may see here being hustled from the grounds of Parliament for reasons quite unlike the usual.  At Winehot we were later joined not only by Paul, but also by French and French-speaking wine waiters, who coached us through the finer points of Italian whites and the food to accompany them with smiling reserve.  Our tumbler-type glasses, wine bowls without stems, meant that our own party’s reserve grew in shorter and shorter supply.  Such was the combination of tiredness and tipsy exhilaration that my companions in levity later didn’t flinch (much), when I gave them a late-night talk on the finer points of the artificial insemination of Norwich Terriers.

This was a fine descent into the pleasures of the inner-city suburbs, from which I then rose and departed the next morning to visit a friend from school days and her two small children in Glenfield.  In this Hardiplank paradise, not dissimilar to Sockburn in its construction but rather greener and more undulating in its landscape, I was caught up in a finely-nuanced and pleasingly complex game of shop with my two-year-old co-hostess, preceded by some story-reading and superseded by a display of tap-dancing for which I was the cheerful audience.  I also showed my one-year old companion how to make an appropriately dieselly “brrrrm” when wrangling a toy bus, although this lesson will likely need further reinforcement to last.  We drove round to the playground at Devonport where I learned that a child may swing very high on a very small push, and that swing construction seems rather safer than when I was the small person held in by the loosest of chain-and-tyre combinations.

My friend is a delightful mother: calm, confident and low-key.  Her pleasure in the details of her daughters’ lives inspired me, as did her ability to carry on an adult- and child-level conversation at the same time.  Half a lifetime ago we were fraught and worried teenagers holding on to our optimism with ever-decreasing grip.  What we contend with now seems less overwhelming, by virtue of being grown-up.

In the evening I rode with Mabel, my friend from thesis-writing days, from the university department where she has her home (a spacious office of her own which unfortunately is as easy to see into as out from) to her family in the wild west, to pass an evening at what for many years was my home-away-from-home in that town.  It seems extraordinary that she has been there for nearly ten years, that the slow sideways shift from thesis-writing into full-blown teaching has turned each of us into careerists.  The dying pittosporum trees that crowded out the boundary of the Auckland section have been replaced by a paling fence, and the family home is filling up with people, books and things just as my own home is.  I talked, and talked, and talked, as I used to when we were sharing an office, and my hosts listened, and interjected, and gave me a beautiful mounted photograph by Mabel’s partner to take home.

Time spent with school and university friends reminds me much of how life has changed, how daytime order has taken shape around what used to be open-ended, idle hours.  The pleasure of letting the mind wander has to happen around the discipline of thinking to order, of writing curricula, marking, managing student concerns and not pressing too hard my forehead against the wall of my job’s limitations.  At the same time, I have forgone in the context of my dogs and relationship some of the easy freedom of movement I once had, and while I don’t regret this it was bracing, as the sea wind abrades the traveller’s face, to experience this life again.

It’s my shadow life, I told the fellow-traveller with whom I went to the Walter’s Prize Exhibition and spent the subsequent hours in bars, the way I might have lived if I’d never had dogs, if I’d lived in a walk-up in the inner city, if I were paid, still, merely to think and write.  Even to be able to critique aloud the art works we saw (of which, like Robyn, my preferred choice was the Reynolds, even as I suspect it might not win) is an opportunity I don’t often indulge, saying again and again to my students: our task is not to rank but to analyse.  We don’t evaluate to “good” or “bad”, but to “how” and “what” and maybe “why”.  To say, even under my breath, the forbidden words of judgement, to rate and rank form and impact, was enough of a thrill to suggest I have begun to embody too much in my thinking the qualities I hope to develop in my students’ prose.

We went out, and stayed out, and the next night went out again.  Between these two sorties, on which we were noisily ambulant from bar to bar in the mild, dark evening, was the book launch itself.  Contributors were invited to speak: I was nervous, but said my few words first with the strange parcel of confidence I can unbundle for most professional occasions, and saw not only the people I very much wanted to see but also met some new writers, contributors to the volume of whom one greeted me with the words, “I loved your thesis”.  Not much is sweeter than that.

So the volume was launched, and I got ready the next morning to go home with the kind of violent heart’s lurch toward home that I think will be my continual experience of away now that the señor shares my life.  The pragmatic sceptic, he, the one to hold up other mirrors to my thinking.  “I don’t know about you and your blog,” he said.  “What do you write about?  Dog poo and me.”  It’s true, too, but I’m not about to do without this triangulation of worlds: work, love and adventure, a littoral series of locations that are very occasionally as near to coterminous as I could reasonably ask for.

Now I’m in Rotorua, living another shadow life in which I’m the academic for whom conferences are frequent travel rather than unexpected interruptions to the daily round.  This hotel room is comfortable and pleasingly generic–I could be any minor capitalist afield For Work.  I should make some effort to find my way into town if I don’t want the teeth-grinding experience of the local dinner-and-a-show, but the thought that I might be stepping out into a page from Stonedogs keeps making me smile and hesitate in equal parts.  The conference abstracts are long and in places effusive, as are the contributor biographies.  I will need to secure a good source of caffeine and sit near the front from tomorrow.

Tagged as: adventure, love, travel, work