Month: June 2005

Considering today is Library day, here are my thoughts on such things in terms of favourite books and/or authors of all time…well, as it stands this week:

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
As even though I read Jane Eyre in primary school, this book opened my eyes to beautiful writing, a world of prejudice we still live in, and a display of relationships that were complex, deep and intensely moving. I still harbour dreams of calling our daughter Scout… if we ever had a daughter that is.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The form and structure just blew me away. Again, a benchmark book in terms of opening my eyes to remarkable writing, awesome themes and powerful narrative voices.
The Collector by John FowlesOh my goodness. I read this when I was in year 9 I think and it scared the living crap out of me. That and confirmed my love of all things dark and psychotic.

Anything – as in any of his books – by Chuck Palahnuik
But I particularly love Choke, Survivor and Invisible Monsters. This guy is a genius of contemporary fiction.

Anything by Tom Robbins
In particular Skinny Legs and All – he writes sentences that make you swoon, on ideas that make your head hurt. Again, just showed me a sophisticated writing style to strive for. He also said:

A “perfect” sentence, if there is such a thing, ought to be both vivid and mysterious, lucid and unpredictable. Whether it shakes out like a bedsheet or rumbles like a locomotive, its cadence ought to reverberate in the mind’s ear with an unavoidable rhythm. Whether its images are designed to kiss the reader or spit in the reader’s face, they must be fresh as new violets down by the hog creek, and they should be psychically charged. The sentence’s philosophical and psychological meaning ought to spread in ever-widening ripples, like an echo circle. And, ideally, when the subject meets the verb, the verb ought to yell out, “surprise!” I don’t know if I’ve ever written a perfect sentence. It doesn’t matter. It’s the pursuit of the perfect sentence that’s the reward.

Other books worthy of a mention that I can actually recall:
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The Lovely Bones – Anne Sebold
The Kelly Gang – Peter Carey

I am also LOVING Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott – a guide to writing and life. Its quirky, funny and very good at keeping it real. I loike it, I loike it a lot.

You will have to endure this as after the inaugural Parents & Friends meeting last night for Oscar’s support service (Lifestart, School Age Services, Northern Region) I felt compelled to write this down.

Our son, Oscar, has a rare genetic disorder. His dodgy chromosome 4 as we’ve taken to calling it has impacted him in terms of his intellectual ability, his speech (he has a profound speech disability) as well as mild cerebral palsy. Despite all this, Oscar is divine. He is happy, has a wicked sense of humour, the most remarkable empathy for others and brings joy to the lives of all who know him.

But the early years of his life were really tough – will he grow? Will he walk? Will he talk? What sort of schooling will he access? What sort of life will he be able to lead? How much therapy can we afford? And when we can’t how long is the wait to access community services that are available?

The early years as a parent are always a rollercoaster of emotion, with your stomach giving way, sheer exhilaration and sheer terror as you fling around the next blind corner. Having since had a ‘normal’ child and now expecting a very big surprise number three in October, the early years and adjustment to a life as a parent of a child with special needs is a hundredfold that of normalcy. A friend calls it living grief and she is quite right.

But in the midst of the fog that marred those first few years (and still settles over our lives with jarring regularity), we came into contact with an organisation called Lifestart.

Lifestart provides a community based program managed by families who know what it is to have the rug so quickly pulled from under you, you question if you will ever catch your breath or find your footing again, for families. Lifestart is a parent co-operative providing a family-centred approach to the needs of children with disabilities and their families. It is based on the concept of partnerships between parents and professionals. (as opposed to the conventional and widespread reality of therapists telling you what you should be doing and – probably unintentionally – giving you THE most oppressive guilt complexes for not doing whatever it is they recommend, even if that would mean losing your life (and your child’s) to one massive therapy session.

These people probably saved my life (I was suffering quite severe depression when they came into our world) and our family from one based on stress and grief to one of empowerment, strength and optimism.

And now Oscar is 7. He has been in a special “Start Right” program for two years, aimed at helping kids like him get into the school system to then transition to the mainstream. And that is what we will be doing, with the advocacy and support of Lifestart. As the organisation developed so too did the original children who prompted its creation – parents realised, they needed help at school too. So Lifestart School Age Services came into being.

So Oscar will be in Year 2 next year, with his peers, having the opportunities and experiences afforded to other children his age, irrespective of their abilities. He will be able to learn from his classmates and his classmates from him. There will be a generation of children who grow into adults knowing Oscar and therefore knowing that just because you can’t talk or you don’t quite learn in the same way, you have value and purpose in life. And most importantly, that you are not to be feared, taunted or spurned purely because you’re different.

Lifestart will be working with his teacher, the classroom aide and the school community as a whole to help make it happen and be successful.

This is about people making a difference every single day in small and quiet ways.

But we have a problem. The service in our area has not secured funding from the relevant government agency yet. So the 31 families in our district who will be using the service – and dependent on it in ensuring positive education outcomes and experiences for their children and the community in which they will be, are facing the prospect of raising almost $100,000 to make sure that can happen.

So yes, I guess this – as everything seems to – comes down to money.

But I don’t have high-flying friends. I don’t have big corporate clients I can turn to.

All I have is my voice and the experience I have had. So I guess its my turn to shout from the rooftops.

As we all face a future of uncertainty due to terrorism, reforms focused on the bottom line not on lives, and an every changing world, it needs to be heard amidst all that clanging, that life goes on, that there are people doing good deeds every day that are worth shining a light on and supporting.

That’s all really.

Going to a school in a town known to the rest of the world only for its extraordinarily high rainfall, I hear you sister. I most especially empathise with the desperate hope that the rain would cancel sport: Saturday morning sport, Wednesday afternoon sport, and any time PE was scheduled sport. I hated ’em all.

But perhaps even more vivid in my school memories was the heaven of going back in Term 3 (none of these fancy four term years in my day) and finding that it was September, and Spring, and there were daffodils and pale new green leaves. There would always be a breeze blowing on that first day back and it wasn’t quite warm, but it felt like cool water on your skin – so different from the Term 2 gales that sent the rain sideways into the corridors and wet your bags on the bench outside the classroom.

I share the wet uniform smell of school winters. In spring it was more like fresh earth; nothing had been dug, but the thick red volcanic earth had been pounded for months with heavy rains and it still let off a smell as it healed under the spring grass.

The best smell of all was Day One, Term One: nothing inspires a fresh start like the smell of an entire football field of freshly mown grass.

None of the above schmaltzy sentiment should be taken as any kind of endorsement for growing up in a small country town with an under-resourced high school and a disproportionate number of students able to show two left thumbs and only one set of grandparents.

mtc
Bec

Remember when you went to school and it was raining. Not drizzle but the long hard rains that marked our youths and that some of us prayed for so Saturday morning sport would be cancelled?

That you would then spend the day damp, your school shoes faithfully retaining that rainwater so your toes ached by recess. That smell of damp wool – from stockings, skirt, jumper and blazer – permeating every single classroom. That weird matted down hair from the dampness in the air and walking the last several hundred metres to school in the rain as the wind had busted your umbrella.

God I loved those days.

One of the shining lights of my year at uni started one of his first pieces to air with this line.

It was his intro for a story about a plane crash. As in:
“It’s an all too familiar story. Planes go up, dead bodies come down.”

I am not kidding.

While its certainly not an auspicious start to a television career, it is the perfect segue into my comments about plane crashes and air shows. Besides, is there anything more enjoyable that regaling the world with humilating tales about other people, particularly ones they hope to the core of their soul, everyone has forgotten?

But peoples, why why why is the heir to Walmart flying around in a h.o.m.e.m.a.d.e plane??? I mean really, the dude could have bought a couple of leer jets?

And why why why would anyone in their right mind go flying in a group of 22 light planes – IN FOG – and not realise the stats were certainly favouring the floor not the air?

How many air shows must we endure before we realise, “oh yes, all those planes in one place, doing wild and wacky things that defy gravity – what’s the likelihood one of them will come crashing to the ground in a ball of flames?”

I mean, derrr.