I must say, when Kath asked me to
launch Recollections 2011, I was a little concerned. Indeed, I wrote her an email
saying something like this:
If you really
want me to launch Recollections, of course, I’d be honoured. But maybe you
should consider someone new? It’s hard to be impressive the second time round.
No need to be
impressive she replied: We’d love you to
do it.
Right, I thought
great. What am I going to do now? It’s easy to create a bit of an impression when
you’re unknown. As long as you aren’t a total disaster, everyone heaves a sigh
of relief that this wannabe writer from Vermont has something vaguely
entertaining to relate.
But when everyone
expects you to be good, when in fact the organising committee has unanimously agreed
to invite you back. You get a queer knotted feeling in the pit of your belly.
You are bound to
fail.
Now Kath is an
organised person. I’ve had months to get used to the idea of launching Recollections, 2011. But I have to
admit, as the date loomed, the knots in my stomach only tightened. When Kath emailed
last week to say Liliana would drop the anthology off at Ashburton library by one
o’clock Friday afternoon, I made a beeline for the eight hundred’s section and
started thumbing through books on public speaking.
Sadly, it was a
waste of time.
I found books on
Fearless public speaking. A volume on
after dinner addresses. A plethora of advice on weddings, anniversaries and
funerals. Even a tome or two on business lectures. But nothing about how to
make a speech at eleven o’clock in the morning to a group of people who have
heard (and probably remember) every inspirational thought you’ve ever had on
the topic of writing.
Friday, I woke in
the early hours of the morning. I had an ache like a garden stake between my
eyes. The words what am I going to say? ran
round and round in my mind. I had nothing, I realised in the toss and turn of
that night. I couldn’t accept the anthology. When Liliana came to drop Recollection off at the library, I’d have
to tell her someone had died. Or that I’d lost my voice. Or worse, that I was
on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That I’d probably be in a straight jacket
by the launch date.
Now, please
don’t think I was reluctant to launch your anthology. I wanted to very much. Only...
what was I going to say? What did I have that was new and fresh and
inspirational? How could I going to honour the treasures you were placing in my
hands?
By the time I
picked up the anthology my stomach
resembled a macramé wall hanging. But I have to say, here and now, that my
fears were groundless.
As soon as I
opened the cover the knots in my belly began to soften. People’s names were familiar,
of course – but the stories and poems were all so very different. I found forests
and farms, in this volume, along with beaches and work postings. Stories about
dolls, treasure chests and teddy bears, about getting a job for the first time,
riding a camel, about charity, the joy of collecting, and strange ventriloquist
dreams. I also found a horse who’d been put together all wrong. The pleasures
of doing up a run down old house. Stories of the depression, a Carmelite
convent and Nazi occupied Holland.
As I sat on the
couch, Monday morning, with a notepad and highlighter pen in hand, I felt overwhelmed.
As if standing
at the base of a waterfall.
My problem
wasn’t what to say. It was: how am I ever going to sum up this stream of growing
and journeying and remembering?
In the end, I
came up with three words: memories,
mistakes and meaning.
Let us start
with memories.
One of the
lovely things about reading another person’s memoirs is that they give you back
fragments of your own life. Through reading your stories, I remembered my first
ever pair of red shoes and how, as a delighted I child of six, I slept with
them on my pillow the first night. I thought of the years my family had spent
living in Fiji and how different theft looked in poverty’s light. I re-called watching
the Salvos walk the streets of my childhood. How I’d been captivated by the
coloured streamers on their tambourines. I remembered being bullied in the
school yard. And, being one of the bullies. Pitted apricots and potato peelings,
conjured up walking to school on cold misty Adelaide Hills mornings. Mum gave
me bus money at the beginning of each week.
‘You can catch
the bus,’ she said. ‘But if you walk, you can keep the cash.’
‘What? All of
it?’ I asked
‘Yes, all of
it.’
Needless to say,
I walked to the three kilometres to school often, stashing the coins in my red rocket
money box. But it wasn’t until I read your stories, that I realised that this was
all part of mum’s clever strategy. She’d wanted me to walk to school. There was
no such thing as childhood obesity in our family.
The second word
I came up with was: mistakes.
As
I read I couldn’t help noticing that word failure cropped in a number of your stories.
One story even asked the question, was it my fault? I felt the ‘failed’ nun’s pain
of facing up to the past. Her struggle to move on. I experienced the horror of
a young soldier being executed at dawn. For what? I asked myself. What was his
mistake? Was it being a bad soldier? Or a decent human being?
Life teaches us
lessons, doesn’t it? About honesty being better than lies, about ingenuity and
letting go of children. About charity and helping others. About how to work hard
and save. As we look back over our journey, we find ourselves wanting to right
wrongs. To stand up to that nasty teacher. To re-live past embarrassments, to learn,
to grow, and to seek resolution for our mistakes. This is all part of the richness
of human experience. I find it wonderfully encapsulated in your stories.
Finally we come
to the third word: Meaning.
Human beings are
purposeful creatures. Not driven by instinct or programmed merely for blind
survival, we seek patterns in the seemingly random events of our lives. It is
no surprise, therefore, that many of the worlds sacred books are collections of
stories. Events related at the fireside, that have grown and changed with each
re-telling, yet somehow still bring meaning to each successive generation. For
aren’t each of us on a journey? Do not we all take wrong turns at times?
Haven’t we all been the stranger? The lost one? The injured one? In writing
stories, are we not drawing threads from the past and joining them with who we
are here and now.
In her story Dream Voices, Valda Martin wrote:
‘What a blessing
to hear this unique voice, absolving me of my inner guilts and everyday trials
of keeping positive in my struggle with sign language and trying to understand
Debbie’s desires and needs.’
In Memoir, Eva Rainow asks:
‘How did the battlers
of those times manage? From what I remember, it was having people around, not
things, and the sense of space, the room to move slowly, to spend whole days in
the blackberry patch.’
‘Who
are you?’ Marg Tucker asks in the story James
Burns. ‘I’m anxious to know more.’
In Acts of Random Kindness, Valerie
Jeffreys concludes: ‘I hope that any Indian lady in Australia would be treated
with the kindness I experienced in India.’
In Forests, Mieke Hammond writes about the
wonder of sleeping out in a forest as a new migrant to Australia, concluding
with the simple yet profoundly moving words:
‘That was my
first introduction to some of the forests ‘down under’ – Australia, my
country.’
The words, my
country, brought a tingle to my spine.
For I too have
learned to call this country home.
So
many lessons. So many reflections. So much meaning. I can’t possibly quote every
story. But if we stand and watch and listen, with the age old wisdom of the liquid
amber tree, we will find meaning in the ordinary event of our lives. For as St
Columba once said:
‘If poet’s verse
be but stories,
So be food and
raiment stories,
So all the world
is a story,
So is man of
dust a story.’
Thank you so much
for your stories, for your willingness to share the dust of your lives with me.
And thank you also asking me to launch Recollections,
2011. It is a wonderful achievement.
