Dad, a photo by Goop on the lens on Flickr.

Architect, raconteur, bon vivant. I don’t think any woman has ever had a better father-in-law.

I happened to be online when both the Christchurch and Honshu quakes took place. Christchurch was unbearable, of course, but Honshu – I checked quake.usgs.gov and saw the magnitude at 8.9 and thought, nah, that’s gotta be a typo.

If only. Then after I glanced at headlines on Saturday morning that suggested Fukushima was under control I told Claire, with whom I had been discussing the internal design of nuclear reactors, that it was going to be okay. How hard am I kicking myself now? I daren’t even bring it up again. It was another example, and 2011 has been freakin’ full of them, of the sheer hubris of having a kid. You engender these lives that you love past all reason, far better than you love yourself, and you send them out into a world with leukaemia and tsunamis in it. All you can do is bite your knuckles, and hope, and tell them over and over again how perfect they are, how magnificent and unlikely, how whenever you look at them, it feels like the sun is coming out.

You have to set up college funds and lean on them to do their homework and practice their piano and teach them table manners and force them to eat a frickin vegetable at least once in a while: and you must ALSO shower them with your love as if the life they’ve had so far is all they are getting, as if they’re going to walk under a bus tomorrow. Gotta be the ant AND the grasshopper, every second, without fail. Or else.

I ordered an emergency kit off Amazon. I tried to figure out how I can fit NERT training into my already impossible schedule. I kissed them goodbye this morning. But I honestly don’t know how I can do this. I want to grab my little family and run away with them to somewhere safe: but the image I always had in my head of a safe place was -ha! – Christchurch, New Zealand.

I want my mum.

Drew died on Friday. I’m pretty sure Tina waited till this morning to tell me so that I could have a happy birthday yesterday. (I did.) Tina is Jen’s sister. She was with Drew when he died.

Drew was another member of the big Santa-Cruz-Burning-Man-beach-party-with-dancing community that took me to their collective hearts when I moved to California. I saw a lot of them through the late nineties and early 2000s; right up till I had Claire, really. My relationship with Drew was very simple. Every time we saw each other we would give each other huge hugs and catch up quickly on what had been happening (me: marriage, a new job; Drew: cancer.)

Then we would dance.

It’s been, as you may have surmised, a challenging February. I am left with the knowledge of how lucky I have been: to have known people like Jen and Drew, and to have had friendships composed entirely of mutual goodwill. If you are reading this, then you are one of the people I am grateful for. Be well.

Claire in the back of the car with a notebook and pen. “Hey mama, guess what? The eighteenth binary number is 131,072.”

Sitting in the sun at the barn as a Dopey the half-Clydesdale is led past me, and seeing him as he really is: a huge strange alien beast with a vast wise eye. Like a dragon.

Going out on the harbour with Badgerbag in the Daisy, and the marine battery failing, and us having to row back to shore. Two fortysomething Internet feminists, in a boat, marooned, capable, happy.

Dylan Thomas said “After the first death, there is no other;” but he always talked a lot of tosh, didn’t he? It’s not as if I know a great many people but in the ten days since Jen died, three other people have also died. Salome says I am cursed and I am starting to believe her. This morning’s news was the worst, at least to me; a girl I knew back when I worked at the little riding school eight years ago, the year I got pregnant with Claire. She was about eleven then. She would have been nineteen now.

I sat bawling at my desk in my office, as seems to have become my habit, and then I mopped myself up and washed my face in the bathroom and sat down and took three calls. Being a grownup can be horrible. I had no idea. But it’s better than the alternative. On the way home, crushed onto a 14L Mission, it occurred to me that she will not, now, get married or have babies or graduate from college or spend a gap year with Peace Corps or start a company or start a non-profit or negotiate a raise or sign a mortgage or do any of the grown-up things I dream of or complain about.

I had this plan that I would make lots of younger friends, so that when my peers started dying I would still have friends. The possibility of burying children was something I managed to overlook.

I can’t trust myself to write about it.

This can’t be happening.

Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, on the other hand, are terrible, atrocious people.

After my first year at uni I got a summer gig on an archaeological dig at Port Arthur, the big Colonial gaol site and open air museum on the Tasman Peninsula. It was fantastic, my first adventure away from home, prefiguring Ireland and America. I got to try on different selves and to spend my days in hard physical labour and my evenings flirting and learning to cook. (Zucchini should be peeled and sliced and blanched and served with pepper and too much butter. Whatever you do to them, eels hand-caught out of the well are gross.) And despite its awful history Port Arthur was, and is, gobsmackingly beautiful. Every Benthamite Panopticon should be built out of sandstone and set in parkland, on a cove.

In 1996 there was a huge, terrible massacre there. The person responsible has said that he did it in order to be famous, and so I have not spoken or written his name since I read that, fifteen years ago. (Boy, I sure showed him!) But my desire to expunge his infamy reflected a deeper conviction that the massacre was an aberration, a rain of lead from the sky. It wasn’t about Port Arthur. It wasn’t some terrible reflection on human nature (Port Arthur’s awful history is that.) It wasn’t how life is. I resist all efforts by heartless men with guns to define the human condition.

The Columbine book is super-interesting in this way, because it discusses Eric Harris as a fully-fledged psychopath. (Dylan Klebold’s is a very different case.) Harris was, as far as anyone can tell, clinically aberrant; as if incapable of empathy at the genetic level. He was a rain of lead from the sky. He doesn’t tell us anything about bullying or nerds or people who wear trench coats or social life in American high schools. He is a natural disaster, like a hurricane or a flood. And this is most movingly expressed by Patrick Ireland, who is best remembered for climbing out a window with blood pouring from the bullet wound in his head. What kept him going through the hours it took him to crawl to the window? Not hope, as it turned out. Trust. At his valedictorian address to his class, Ireland said:

“When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me. That’s what I need to tell you: I knew the loving world was there all the time.”

Life is mysterious and amazing.

Oh yeah so I have a blog.

Homeschooling Claire: I have Google Translate open in another window. She is reading Isabel Allende’s La Ciudad de las Bestias. When she comes to a word she doesn’t know, I translate it for her, and she enters the word and its translation in the dictionary she is compiling. We picked up a typo on the second page.

Very late night last night scaring myself with mystery stories off Wikipedia. “Research.” The stupid novel is, well, coming along.

Lunch with Kay and Kelso yesterday: pies from Chatswood Chase. Kay’s mother Ros turned up. Her interests these days are Antarctica, astronomy and Aboriginal politics. We had a lot to talk about.

Q: What does Antarctica sound like? A: Calving icebergs. Seabirds.

Q: What does Antarctica smell like? A: Fishy penguin poo.

Note to self: send her Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. And Big’s Rach would like The Middleman.

Kay and Kel had their interview at the American embassy. After eighteen years of trying, they won the green card lottery. So they are moving! To New York. Look, I know New York is nice and all, but we counted it up and we have spent like five of the last 22 years in the same hemisphere. (She went to France. I went to Ireland. She went to America. She came back, and I went to America.) So she’s moving to the West Village? I told her Berkeley is the West West Village.

I am restless in Sydney. I miss my Barraba family and my San Francisco family. It’s overcast most days, so we haven’t been to the beach. I read Black Chicks Talking and am halfway through Best Australian Essays. Bought at Berkelouw’s and Ariel, respectively. I will keep the dead tree book industry alive single-handedly, if I must.

It is my favourite dish at the Moroccan place Francis found in Midtown, where we always have dinner. Rach H. made it for us last night when we went over. Between Jeremy’s visit in September and this trip, Rach’s mother passed away very suddenly from cancer. Seeing her face I was reminded how exhausting grief is. It is very hard work.

She cut and peeled garlic cloves and crushed them in a mortar and pestle. She mixed them with cilantro, olive oil, turmeric (instead of saffron), chopped onions, lemon juice, salt and pepper and marinated chicken legs in the mixture for a while. She added a cinnamon stick and water and put everything in her Le Creuset on the stove to simmer for almost an hour. When the chicken legs were falling off the bone, she took them out to brown and let the liquid reduce with green olives and preserved lemon in it. She served it over couscous. It was divine.

And then there was pavlova for dessert.

So we’re back in Sydney, I guess. It’s overcast.

We visited Ric in Lulworth. He was okay. Afterwards…

Claire: Why do we have to visit Ric?

Jeremy: Because he’s my Dad.

Me: If your Dad were sick would you visit him?

C: But I’m shy of Ric.

J: I’m shy of him too.

Me: I’m not shy of him but seeing him this way makes me really sad.

J: Yeah. It’s not shyness. It’s sadness. And you don’t want to cry in front of him because that would just make him sad.

Me: Right, so I do this horrible smiling-all-the-time thing. I’m hideous.

J: Don’t be silly. It’s obvious how much he likes to see you.

At this, I burst into tears.

Me: Oh, to get through a single day without blubbing.

Next we visited Thussy. Thussy and her Reg are two of my favourite people on earth. She is Austrian. He is a former RAF pilot. In their house, it is always World War Two. Reg has walked away from plane crashes and fought off cancer and is now a bouncy and bellicose 87. I suspect he will outlive me. We whisked Thussy away to Cottage Point Kiosk for awesome fish and chips.

Thussy! Has met! George! Morris! She says he is very nice. Thussy has also tickled a rhinoceros named Ferdinand and hiked in Nepal and ridden in Iran and Patagonia. Good luck having an awesomer godmother than mine.

Next we met Mary and Andrew and Vincent at a chocolate cafe in St Ives. The chocolate was delicious and the company was even better. We have been making an effort to meet new people lately and have had a 100% They Are Lovely, We Like Them Very Much result, which seems absurdly yet gratifyingly high.

Morrisa lost her father today. Jen is still fighting her way out of a bone marrow transplant. So it is inappropriate for me to be feeling as sad as I do. But my brother drove back to Brisbane this morning and we will fly back to Sydney tomorrow. We are disentangling my things from my sister’s. It hurts.

The time I spend with my family gets better and better as I get older and saner. We do nothing, essentially. The kids watch as much TV and play as many games as they like. The girls regard their older cousins as near-Gods. We old people play mahjongg and gossip and gorge on Christmas cake and swim rueful lengths of the pool. Barraba is beautiful, too; it is the shadows of clouds on wooded hills. I feel myself untwisting every moment I am here.

I am more grateful than I can say to have both parents and my brother and sister, and to be able to spend this time with them, and to realize how completely and crazily I love them all, how funny and wise and perfect they are.

This afternoon the thunderheads assembled like giant iron anvils in the sky, and rain came down in bucketfuls. There are still drumrolls of thunder and blue-LED washes of lightning as I lie here in the hotel, ready for sleep.

Whatever nice things happen, a week with a bullying suicide is always a crap week. I am nearly forty and I am a proper grownup now, with a green card and a 401k and a personal style (yes I do, it’s cowgirl-librarian, shut up) and Optimal Husband and the Sproglets and the sorts of achingly, awesomely sympatico friends I only dreamed about and read about in books when I was growing up. I can drive stick shift and cook a delicious meal for an impromptu dinner party of 12 and write a publishable short story or eight, and I jump Thoroughbred horses over fences for fun.

Back in the day, though, I was the weird nerd, with stupid glasses and horrible pimples and bad hair. I was hilarious. I stank of fear the way roadkill stinks of carrion, and like roadkill, I was irresistible to the grosser sorts of vulture. It was side-splittingly funny to point out that my skirt length was incorrect, that my shoes were not approved, that I had said something that I had apparently read in a book. The fact that I read books was just beyond funny. I was frigid, and a slut. I was uglier than shit. How about a little kiss?

This was at high school; at university, I realize now, it actually got worse, because it was subtler and more barbed. It was howlingly funny that I said “mankind”; Glenn, obviously a far better feminist than I would ever be, corrected me to “humanity” with an indulgent chuckle. I was, hilariously, “the most pretentious person” Julian had “ever met.” “I knew there had to be something I liked about you,” said Alistair, and the entire cast of the play fell about laughing. Twenty years on, the memory of these exchanges, preserved in far more vivid detail than anything nice anyone ever said, can still make me angry and ashamed.

If the bully culture I grew up in was meant to make me want to conform, it failed: all I wanted to do was get away, or failing that, set fire to the entire city, and I’m still awkward and uncomfortable whenever I go back to Sydney. I am on the defensive there, and constantly surprised when people treat me with ordinary courtesy. But I don’t think it was meant to change me. I think it was just meant to hurt. I think hurting me made the bullies and their hangers-on feel safe and included. A nice little bonding ritual for them. Bless.

I think it’s how privilege works, and that’s why it was worse at Sydney Uni. They were Grammar boys and college boys. They knew exactly how to shut people out, and why.

And even that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was how desperately I craved their attention and approval: how badly I wanted Glenn and Julian and Alistair and others like them, many others like them, to be my friends. That’s why I didn’t walk away. They couldn’t hate me any more than I hated myself. It’s still hard to forgive myself for that.

Anyway, my point is, Tyler Clementi was actually way too cool to have been friends with then-me; he could play violin fantastically well, and he got into Rutgers. And the thought of him closing his computer and his cellphone and stepping off the George Washington Bridge, the thought that there will be no more violin solos, the thought that he won’t move out to San Francisco after he graduates, and get his heart broken by some asshole he met at Center Camp, and cry into his mimosas at Mission Beach, and then meet a nicer guy on OKCupid and settle down and adopt a couple of kids and join the PTA… Well, fuck you, bullies. Fuck you. You have no idea.

And to the people I bullied myself: I am beyond sorry.

Schoolgirls

Originally uploaded by yatima

Seven hours and 38 minutes until I get home.

Driving to the barn first thing in the morning, red brake lights and the cars slowing up ahead, flares in the fast lane. We all eased down to a stately second gear and looked left to see what had happened:

A police car.

A woman with her hands over her mouth, staring in distress at:

A deer, sphinx-like in front of the woman’s little hatchback and looking around, its ears erect, its lovely legs folded badly.

The deer was not going to be okay.

The morning light slanted through the haze, and we all sped up and drove away.

Jesus, what is it about this time of year? My ghosts walk; the past comes squirming Buffy-like out of its grave. Hand me my shotgun and swear to me, if I become one of the evil undead, you will kill me.

Meaning, I think, comes from doing a full accounting of your limitations and assets, your passions and your weaknesses, your belief system and your fears, and then rubbing up against the things that cause you to panic, like an allergy skin scratch test, and find out what your reactions are. Once you figure out how you can contribute to the greater good, once you’re able even to define that, you take that information and pour yourself into one direction. Regardless of discomfort or regrets or what-ifs. (And then doing that over and over again, until death.) That does not fit on a T-shirt. That to me is more important than bliss, which would really just lead me back into bed, maybe with a bowl of corn flakes, or maybe I would become like an elderly widower, and just Wait for Death. Or become Alice James.

I dreamed I was trying to tidy up my room at Bluegum Crescent. Stuff was stacked six feet high and sliding; a maze had been built between the stacks. “Got somewhere for this little one to live?” asked Sarah, who had caught a shiny brown mouse in her hands. There was also a rat, which turned out on closer inspection to be a calico guinea pig with a baby.