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The call came in the dark of the night. With three children one answers the phone, no matter the time. Tomorrow, this rush of energy in response, will be paid for, bones will ache and muscles will refuse to respond. Apparent calm reigns now, but externally only, as the blood pressure increases and the heart thumps in its cavity.
This is not the first rude awakening. That was forty year ago now, the call coming to the shop in the middle of a very nice sale of the latest Frigidaire (“better than ever before”). All followed by a pathetic journey to Holdsworthy, and the tugging of the forelock to Fairhall - bitter chipping away at the concept of self as a pillar of the establishment.
Would parenting never cease? Would this journey ever end? But to end might be more than the heavy heart can bear, and continuation mere blessing.
7 comments:
I don't know how you do it. I just saw old folk on a train.
All rather mysterious, the words loaded with tension. As they say, it’s the journey, not the destination that counts.
I love that each day’s riff is so different from the last.
Ah I sense the autobiographical. The old man's thoughts are rhetorical ... he knows the answers.
Hey, I just realised this is an intercity train ... he's off on a longish trip.
Joan: Hah ... this is the first one where I could not escape the familial. Not autobiographical, but biographical. I tried quite a few angles and thought patterns to avoid this nano-story, but this is what kept on coming out. So, eventually, this morning even, I went with the inevitable.
And yes, an intercity train. With Ann, as you can sort of see from her comment. You will see where tomorrow on Sydney Eye.
Vicky: I desperately tried to give only information about the old man's feelings and not the specific circumstances of the situation at the core of the "mystery". But to root it in reality I threw in the two solid proper nouns, Holdsworthy and Fairhall. You being a K1W1 will probably not relate to either of them.
I think you captured all those people's thoughts!
But that's the beauty of the written word. Each reader brings his or her own experiences to it. It doesn't matter that Holdsworthy and Fairhall mean nothing to me.
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