The southwestern rattler that came through a week ago has kept us all humble and blank of mind here on the edge of town. The broken windows reported in Hei Hei (which the NZ Herald reported as “Hai Hai”, overlooking one of the last vestiges of mid-century Pākehā pronunciation) served as a reminder – if we needed it – not only of what must continue to be endured but also of what our friends in the East have been through rather more thoroughly than us.
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My daughter turned one this week. What I have quipped many times remains largely true: that my experience of the past year has split, depending on who is counting, in one of two ways. The first is between the first eight weeks – after which harvestbaby no longer needed my inexpert help to burp – and the remainder, and the second is between the first eleven or twelve weeks, after which came the September earthquake, and the rest. Either way, the greater part of the time has gone quickly.
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Just as the eye of the New Zealander finds the printed “Z” all over the world, so my local eye travels always to the west-south-west in maps of my city, that corridor of suburbs west of Hagley Park that goes Riccarton, Upper Riccarton, Sockburn, and then the exit-town cluster of Hornby, Hei Hei and Yaldhurst. Within that cartography I can pinpoint my family as though markers on a board and, for the last nine months, much of the culture and commerce of our lives.
These neighbourhoods are also one of the long strips of unliquefacted land at present, meaning that our present experience is not like that of so many of our other friends and family around the city. Our daily habits are chiefly to shake, fortify and worry, without the heartbreaking insinuation of silt into land, home and hearth.
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Posterous
Elmo’s World
3 July, 2011
in at home,commentatrix,we are family
We watch a lot of Sesame Street in this house, for the usual complex miscellany of reasons. It is one of the shows I remember fondly from my own early years; it blends the imaginary with the every day; it wears lightly the ways of thinking and living that inform its mise-en-scène, and these in turn are things that sit easily with me. There are other reasons of expediency, not least that, at fifty-five minutes, its episodes are long enough to engage my daughter for significant amounts of time, but also allow her to go away and come back without losing the thread of the action. Television is one of the tools with which I support the simultaneous care of my daughter and getting my work done, a contingency in which I have no special pride, but of which I am, at the same time, not especially ashamed.
[click to continue…]
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