and the mome raths outgrabe

On a quiet Sunday morning, I can hear the trains rattling by.

I don't live close enough that they're audible with each passing (thankfully), but when the world is still outside my window then I can hear it, the distant clatter-and-clack, clatter-and-clack of an electric train rushing over tracks originally built to accommodate steam engines.

Sometimes — very rarely — it really is a steam engine, its strident whistle a jarring incongruity against the hum of twenty first century traffic.

Today it's making me somewhat melancholy — or perhaps I'm noticing it today because I am melancholy? Such is the inevitable cycle of these things.

I find myself thinking, today, of R.

I don't know her well, or indeed at all, really. But I think she's a very gracious and graceful woman.

Somewhat to my own surprise, I can do crises. Give me a car accident, or a family calamity, or even just someone in a panic and needing to be talked down, and that's all in my stride. But strangers, and social situations, they can (and often do) strain me to the very eye-teeth of my abilities. If something happens while I'm out there, on the raggedy edge of my coping skills — well, my defences are already stretched too thin, and I take the hurt deeply.

Those situations that undo me, R. takes in her stride. She faces them with manners that are downright Victorian: she's warm and open and engages fearlessly and competently in any conversation. She dares, and she's bullet-proof … or at least, whatever wounds she takes, she doesn't show. She is grace under pressure.

Everyone has something to teach us, and R. taught me that sometimes, all it takes to be amazing is a very small, simple thing — like caring.

There is, near my work, an odd little lane affording free parking (and therefore choked with cars by about 7.30 a.m.) and access to the foot-and-rail bridge which is the quickest way across the river from work.

It runs at the foot of the embankment holding up the rail lines, so along with cars it's also choked with weeds, graffiti, and discarded televisions. (This last bemuses me, and I'm at a loss to explain precisely why, but there really is an inordinate amount of abandoned televisions in this lane.)

And I'm guessing it's a relic of Valentine's Day, but yesterday when I wandered up this odd little lane I found notes tacked to the walls. Probably above where she parks.

Clearly he's a man who has his priorities in order.

There is in Melbourne a little old Eastern European¹ lady, who has the wrong number. Namely, my direct line at the dayjob.

She doesn't call often, all told. Somehow, she knows exactly when I'm not at my desk, be it through illness or holiday or simply the fact that it's 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. That's when she calls. And listens to my voicemail announcement stating my name and place of employment. And finally leaves me a long and rambling voice message in her mother tongue. She's not disgruntled, and though to my ear her language sounds a little growly I suspect she's just chatting. Leaving a message for a family member.

Does she not wonder why her family member's home phone number has such a strange, business-centric answering machine? Is her only contact with this family member through my phone — does she never meet her in person, even once a year, and in the inevitable confusion discover that her messages were never received? One message, which I discovered on my return from Mongolia, was at least five minutes long, full of lilting incomprehensibilities.

I wonder what she's telling me in those messages. That I never return her calls? Not to eat the boiled sheep's head? To get back to work already, lazy sod?

I'm guessing [↩]

Internets, let me tell you about my morning. Because do you know what happened this morning? The world got its crazy on, that's what happened.

Hands up who remembers Mr LOOK! BALLOONS!?

I've seen him around a couple of times since that apparently alarmingly magical morning. He's never been quite so enthused since, and I've always been busy, so mostly we've just wandered past each other with an acknowledging nod or smile. Personally, I've been quietly of the opinion that he's a habitual drug user and gets mildly, amusingly, loopy in the process.

Um … yeah, maybe not quite.

This morning I walked out my front door — shaking my head and wondering what all the commotion was about, who was energetic enough to be making a fuss at 8am? — to find Mr Balloons standing at the mouth of the driveway.

STARK NAKED.

Another neighbour was trying to coax him into going back inside, and waved urgently at me to indicate I should go back inside or get away NOW. I scampered back inside (since I clearly wasn't getting past him for a bit), and as I did so I could hear the lady in #1 on the phone. "Yes, he's just outside. Yes, he says he's fine, but he obviously needs to go to a psychiatric institution. Yes, naked. His mood changes are quite abrupt."

I decided to stake out my balcony as a proper vantage point while I waited for an opportune moment to hunt down a tram. Which is how I managed a birds-eye view of Mr Balloons chasing two young girls pell-mell down the street. I don't know whether he was running after them simply because they ran, or for other more alarming reasons, but he was certainly intent on the chase and the neighbour who'd previously been trying to talk him into going inside was alarmed enough to drop his groceries in the middle of the street and dash off on an intercepting course. Two minutes later (I presume the girls had reached their house, or otherwise vanished from view) he was placidly enjoying the feel of the grass underfoot and asking ingenuously if he could go and talk to that person over there?

I now think Mr Balloons' loopiness is caused, not by self-medicating, but rather by stopping his legal meds.

Sometime last year, my bank (in a fit of promotional madness) sent me a couple of free movie tickets. I can't remember why — I think I answered a survey or some such inanity. Anyway, not the point. The point is that the free movie tickets were for Greater Union cinemas, of which Melbourne has exactly … one. Which I simply never get to.

Yesterday, determined not to waste a free movie ticket, and being near town, and having wanted vaguely to see Iron Man 2, I redeemed one of the free tickets.

Which is how I found myself in a darkened room with a blank cinema screen, alone but for one other man.

Said man was eating popcorn, ostensibly. Well, in fact, he was eating it quite frantically. I have never in my life seen anyone attack a bucket of popcorn with such frenzy. I soon figured out why.

Eating the popcorn was covering (or, in point of fact, significantly failing to cover)¹ the sounds of his real purpose in sitting in the back of a darkened, ill-frequented cinema. Namely a little bit of quality time with Mrs Palmer and her five daughters, as it were.

I wish I was kidding at this point. But alas, there is a distinct and unmistakable quality to the breathing of a person who is, shall we say, rather focussed on achieving an imminent outcome. And that grunting and groaning was not about clearing his throat of popcorn kernels.

Thankfully, I was out of the splatter zone, and he didn't stay to watch (and ruin) the movie.² Here's hoping that redeeming the second free ticket is not quite so eventful, eh?

But hey, I appreciate the effort. I think. [↩]
Although why he would choose to masturbate to a blank screen and vapid advertising when he could have waited for Scarlett Johansson's lycra-clad gyrations I do not know. [↩]

Grace

i for one applaud your effort, sir

dear grandchildren: your grandmother has the wrong number

then posh spice got on my tram

and the mome raths outgrabe