November 2011
Life
I am in the midst of the kind of moment that every Jane Austen reading or ‘Dead Poets Society’ inspired English major has dreamt of when reclining ‘in vacant or in pensive mood’, and considered whether to take the plunge into teaching.
It is 5th period on a rainy and gloomy suburban day.
My classroom has been cold for weeks, but today the heaters are on and it’s finally toasty in here.
When I nipped out earlier on to get some lunch, I also bought a fresh bag of coffee for my French Press.
My Advanced Placement Literature students devour the stuff, and now here they are, steaming mugs at hand, deep into a worksheet. They are proving, along a series of eight elements, that Hamlet is, indeed, a tragic hero. I explained the parameters of their investigation at the beginning of the period and now they’re off, tearing across swathes of text in search of evidence for their various hypotheses.
Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is playing gently in the background. All that is left for me is to stand here and drink my coffee, offer an occasional point of clarification, and listen to the rumble of smart kids in discussion – iron sharpening iron – over Van’s murmurings:
And I will never never never grow so old again…Oh my sweet thing…
I sometimes wonder to myself what I would be doing if I had never left Australia. Who would I have become? What paths would I have trod on the journey to becoming that man? What would be my tastes? My desires?
These are legitimate questions, because America has, indeed, shaped me. If objectivity were possible, arguments would probably be made that it has done so for the better and for the worse. But I suggest that objectivity is in fact not possible because those who knew me before I left Australia are necessarily prejudiced by Australia and their Australian experience and, for most of them, their status as Australians. Those whom I have met subsequent to my departure have seen me, for the most part, in my foreign lands and lives, and are necessarily prejudiced by those shared experiences.
I can think of two very different creatures who have been with me through many of my formative experiences and whose ideas on whom I might have become would be interesting to hear: God, and my mate Nat. That would quite the conversation, but they have not been speaking much lately, and once they finally do reconnect and try to pick up the strands of long neglected conversation I believe they’ll have more pressing matters to discuss than my meandering journeys through Frost’s yellow wood.
So I am left to wonder. To wander.
Kookaburra
Editor’s note
The balance of this article by Sean will be in the December issue and will complete the series of a local expatriate’s view of world and Australian events from a distance.
Our thanks for his regular contributions to the
Valley Voice
Implicitly a part of my earlier questions is the question of ‘Who would be my wife’? It’s reasonable to suppose that I would have found someone lovely who, in return, found me reasonably tolerable, though I’ll admit that it hardly seemed that way when I lived in Australia, for as Paul Kelly tells us that,
You know and I know that love never runs on time.
As a young man in Australia it seemed to me as if love did not quite run at all. At least not in my direction. Hardly any wonder that I held TS Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in such high regard:
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.…I do not think that they will sing to me.
As did Prufrock, I had mermaids of my own.
High School was, largely, a dead zone. I suppose (note the casually guarded tone – still protecting the soul of my fragile, eighteen year old self…) there was one girl who was quite lovely, but several things got in the way of that. I saw her again on our last trip to Australia – it was on one of our extended road trips – and Laura and the girls and I stayed with her family for a night.
We all took a non-romantic ferry ride to an island and gave my little American girls a chance to see koalas, wild in the bush. The two families ate well, shared a few drinks, she and I reminisced, and after dinner, in classic Jane Austen style, the ladies talked together a while, and so did the men. There were many laughs.
And the next day we were on our way.
It was lovely to see her, but now, so long on, I can hardly imagine what might have happened all those years ago if only…
I’ll never know.
It is sometimes difficult to accurately plumb the tone of one’s work as it will hit the reader’s ear, so I’ll spell out plainly my happiness with where I am. There’s no wistful ‘what ifs’ attached to these thoughts.
(Heck – all the women in my life will be reading this essay – you honestly think I’d write about it if I was writing in a wistful cloud of what-might-have-beens….? That would be skating awfully close to literal suicide.)
I’m completing this essay at the end of a long work week. Parent-Teacher night was last night and, as a result, I saw neither Isobel nor Molly yesterday. I saw seven week old Lucy, of course. Lucy, the little darling that she is, robbed me of my last hour of sleep this mornig…
(Yes – I know – it could be worse. I’m not complaining. Much.)
I should be home by now but the car’s in the shop and I’m ‘killing time’ by writing this essay in an almost empty school building where the only sounds are the clankings of janitors and occasional screams of over-enthusiastic student athletes from the gym.
Sitting here alone, I realise that I’ll never meet the man I could have or would have become had I not left Australia’s shores at age twenty-one. Or if I’d headed to England to work instead of further education in America. Or if I had travelled abroad earlier. Or never.
What I can meet and consider is the life I live:
God and I are on speaking terms, which is nice. I have a good job and a good home. I come from a good country and live I in another one. I come from a strong family and, inspired by that, I have gone on to build my own. Years ago I met a mermaid who would sing to me and we have a home with three little mermaids of our own to torture the next generation of lonely young men.
…my heart with pleasure fills.