Friendships can last a lifetime, even if they are disrupted by a decade or so of absences. Such is it with Wayne and me, the years not diminishing the alliance first established before the Moon Landings. Those formational childhood and teenage years stay with us, often defining the long lines of our later lives. I think Wayne and I must have worn grooves in the road in front of our respective houses (which neighboured each other) from daily kicking a ball to each other, and the divots in the grass at our local park from soccer, golf, rugby, cricket and forcings-back were testimony to our intense sports activity.

Sometime after high school we began to go our separate ways, my moving to Western Sydney for work, the romantic relationships we pursued, the nature of our jobs, creating divergences. Personally, I think my friend made the wiser choices. He seemed to know what he wanted in life sooner than me. It's not something I can account for.

Last night at his 60th birthday gig, there was no need for apologies over the gaps. It was as if they never existed at all.

Parting

"We bid each other farewell beside the hill,
As day meets dusk, I close the wooden gate.
Next year, in spring, there will be green grass again,
But will my honoured friend return?"

Wang Wei


Well, yes, I think that he will.

just a fingernail
of moon through the gums-
winter morning

Now, fast into winter we descend, the shortest day of the year having just passed, frost a constant visitor on the morning grass. The chilly plant that Rick gave us is struggling, even though we nightly cover it with mesh and an old t-shirt. Even so, it has produced two large green chillies and if we can keep it alive until the spring, who knows what a bounty might be realised. This is a household that goes through a lot of chillies; Thai's love them in vast numbers in their food. It would not surprise me to find a red chilly ice-cream on sale in Bangkok one day.

This old house with its thin fibro walls is poorly suited to the Mountain climate, so we tend to huddle in rooms, electric throws abounding. Even so it is still much colder outside, the mercury dropping to zero by early morning. This is where heavy doonas and electric blankets are handy. Tom seems snug enough in his van outside, stocked as it is with all manner of ways of keeping warm. Still, if I wander to the toilet in the middle of the night, I feel sad to see his van out the back, the night-light leaking through the thin curtains, a mist rising in the garden. Like I said a few posts ago, being a parent is a profession for worriers.

David Attenborough, the famous naturalist and presenter of so many wonderful nature programs, has opined that human beings are now so many and so rapacious that they (meaning we) are now a veritable plague on the Earth. It is a shocking statement, accustomed as we are to be seen as lords of this world, afforded a special place in the order of things. Human conceit is in overdrive in this matter and hubris invariably kicks in when comments like these surface. After all, have we not come a long way, baby?

An intelligent visitor from another world might beg to agree with Mr Attenborough. Having collected all the data, such a being would notice one species amongst the many who dominate the race for resources (many times over, really), who bespoil their planet with little regard for the future and who still engage in warfare with increasingly dangerous weapons. Of course they would also notice the many notable achievements of this dominant group, but with the caveat that they were too late to become aware of their own condition, and did too little about it.

Technology alone will not solve our problems.

Like individual human beings, the media latches onto premises and develops theories that are often viewed as being set in stone. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear that such and such a thing is indispensable, that life would be impossibly constrained without it. The case of mobile smart phones is the most instructive.

People somehow managed to get by, to lead even half-decent lives, for thousands of years before the advent of the smart phone. They had jobs, raised families, faced challenges - some even got an education - long before the words, I am on the train, needed to be spoken into a portable receiver. If you took away all smart phones today, some folks (particularly older ones) would not even blink, others would be inconvenienced, some would surely panic for a while, but eventually, it would all settle down again. The landline business would boom, public payphones would reappear. Newspapers would rustle on trains, books and magazines would be read, conversations would re-ignite.

I am sure that an economist would tell me the cost in GDP loss to the economy but that would not matter. There is always a work-around if you want one.

Since JJ arrived from Thailand about a month ago, we have been very busy with getting her set up for life in Australia. There is a lot more to it than you might imagine - beyond the form filling, waits at Centrelink, school enrolment, text books, uniforms and winter clothing - there is the locating of her within a new country. It is more than acclimatising and finding out how to use the public transport system; it's that whole world of a new country with vastly different social mores and customs, not to mention its alien faura and fauna.

As part of this process of finding out, we took JJ into the city last Sunday - to houses of worship quite different to a Thai Wat, on ferries across Sydney harbour to Manly, through historic precincts in the CBD. It was more of a meander than a planned event and we got home late and tired out. It was also, by coincidence, a day celebrating public transport in NSW, so many ancient buses were plying the streets, steam trains spat and gushed on platforms and a classic yellow taxi (an FC Holden, I believe) sat on the concourse at Central.

I think all parents, save those who might be sociopaths or narcissists, are great worriers. The act of creating something unutterably new occasions great joy, seen as it is through the unforgiving lens of modern child-rearing. But it augurs in a lifetime of worry. Initially, this as all about the welfare of the new-born, the health, growth and development of the young child.

Somewhere in the teen years this seguys alarmingly into an array of cares about the uncontrollable. Parenting becomes a kind of crisis management, worse for some than others, but often as not tilting towards looming icebergs. I guess most come through this, though a few unlucky ones go under. There is simply no way of telling how a child might turn out, and childhood being the extended phenomena that it now is, there is not always an obvious point at which one might say, 'the ship has sailed at last.' For the ship may return to port at any time, apparently.

It appears that we live in a more dangerous world, and though I have challenged this perception in previous posts, the obstacle course that is the passage to adulthood is far less predictable than it was when I was a kid. Things are much faster and yet more temporary, there is an air of the contingent about matters that might once have seemed more stable, more permanent. I know that change is all and is an underlying condition of reality, but the stripping bare of necessary illusions strikes me as an opening for mental illness or worse.

Glad to be proven wrong though.