this and that

This has been a difficult week. Tom was sick with a fever for a few days and has emerged as a thoroughly irritated child. Temper tantrums and a generally foul demeanour have been de riguer since I took over my shift. I find it very challenging but also saddening, because behind it there seems to be an unhappy boy. The causes of unhappiness are possibly complex - he says he doesn't like school, his teacher and the 'hard work'. I'm wondering if the separation between Nadia and me has only just caught up with him, perhaps the realization that it might just be permanent. In any case, it's really hard to be around, distressing really. I didn't get a lot of sleep last night wondering about him. Poor boy! How terrible I feel to have inflicted this upon him and how hard it is to try to make amends. But I will keep trying. I love him so.

Lately I have been trying to keep up my music (a commitment I made to myself) by singing at an outreach cafe in Western Sydney. The patrons are clients of the charitable community support agency ( I am keeping this deliberately oblique) that I volunteer for each Wednesday. It's kind of an industrial kitchen set in the basement of a warehouse - so, it's not that ambient an environment - but it's nevertheless a great place to sing. The people working there and the people who come along each Friday are lovely and supportive and kind. So it's an atmosphere that I crave at present, especially given the kinds of social ostracism I have encountered recently. I bought a second little Behringer amp so now I can power up my voice and my guitar, though getting the balance right has proved a challenge. I have also had to dredge through the lists of typical cafe songs that might prove popular, my own somewhat obscure collection being not fit to purpose. So I mix it up a little as the people I'm singing for are the most important aspect of what I do. I have to remind myself that it not about me and never should be.

anniveraries

I have been so caught up with the events in my own life, traumatic as they have been, that the anniversary of the tsunami in Japan almost slipped by. Reminded by graphic and disturbing images on this mornings news, I was jolted back to the March 11 of last year. Outside a fierce storm was brewing, Nadia's Dad was up from Berry, while in real time the most shocking thing I have ever seen rolled by on our TV screen. There are no words for such a colossal disaster. The homes of real people were ripped apart or floated by, seemingly by magic. These are the same homes that hours before had woken to the sounds of an ordinary day, with the mundane events of breakfast and getting ready to go. Children's voices, cars in the street, the smells, sights and sounds of life lived everyday.

We are never prepared for these things Our lives, so routine, in which the sameness of habit can be mistaken for an unchanging existence, is thrown about like a shirt in a spin dryer. It's there all the time, the veneer of ordinariness that we impose on each day, heedless of the underlying reality. And we all do it, just to survive. Just to get by.

May God Bless all those who suffered and continue to suffer from the terrible events of 12 months ago. My tears and my prayers are for you.