A DANCE OF LOVE
A generation ago, immigrant parents endured a great deal to raise their children in a strange new land. Today, we are also navigating a new landscape where so much has changed.
We are all navigating a new landscape where so much has changed.
Yesterday, Dr Fabulous and I were on our regular Saturday morning walk (suitably masked, 1.5 metres apart, not having recently travelled overseas, nor suffering a fever) and two remarkable things happened.
The first was a pod of dolphins. Right there in front of us, not more than 20 metres from the beach, a finned family was gently cavorting and lolling in a perfectly still Port Phillip Bay blithely unconcerned about the fate of humanity. Thirty years I have lived by the beach and never seen such a sight. Another Coronavirus surprise.
But the real surprise was when Fabulous told me he’d been looking through family photos. Him? Nostalgic? Pulling out his phone, he showed me one in particular that had caught his eye. It was of his elderly parents embracing each other on their front porch, his mother with her coquettish smile, his dad’s eye glinting with a boyish spark. He said it stirred something in him. Something he couldn’t identify. “Feelings,” I said, grinning.
Feelings, indeed. The day before, I was stopped by a photograph that’s been hanging in our hallway forever.
It’s of my parents. They’re both aged 33 and at a party. Dressed to the nines and dancing, they’re beaming with the biggest grins I’ve ever seen. My dad is about to twirl his arm over Mum’s head and send her spinning across the dance floor. Their faces are bursting with joy, excited to be posing for the novelty of a flash photograph.
And then my eye is drawn to another photograph. It is 20 or so centimetres to the left and taken 50 years later. They are in their eighties, their smiles are more subdued, satisfied even, and they are surrounded by a field of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Their eyes are willing the camera to bear witness to what they have achieved. Looking back and forth across the wall and the years, I felt a panging nostalgia. Like Dr Fab, I can’t get the photos out of my head.
Lockdown 2.0 in Victoria has been tough. The sourdough we were so giddy about just a few months ago lost some of its flavour, videoconferencing in track pants was no longer a novelty, the memes got tiresome, and I miss my friends. I miss other tiny things, too. Like ordering a coffee and sitting down to drink it. And, I know, I am one of the lucky ones.
After the first lockdown it felt like we had run a marathon and just as we passed the finish line, before we even got to catch our breath, punch the sky and then collapse on the grass, the race officials said, “Time for another one.” Oh, and there could be more to come after that, too.
Every afternoon we’ve hoped that the figures will have come down. “Please not another 400,” my teenage daughter would whisper aloud as we turned on the news (previously news junkies, we now limit updates to just once a day because it is too easy to fall into the rabbit hole of speculation and fear). A friend with little ones sent me a text saying: “I had to yell,
“FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES, THEY SPOKE OF ‘THE TIME BEFORE’ AND ‘THE TIME AFTER’.”
‘No you can’t rollerblade while carrying my laptop!’ and stop the other one from cutting their fingernails with a kitchen knife, and then de-louse them both.”
Another told me how she frets about limiting screen time because she feels sorry for her kids stuck inside the whole day.
Two reflective, intelligent, kind parents, wringing their hands over a whole new set of circumstances.
The photo of my young parents got to me because I could so easily identify with them: full of life, in love, two kids at home and another one (your author) in their future.
But it belied a deeper truth: their day-to-day circumstances were nothing like dinner dances and parties. They had arrived in Australia only a few years earlier, after weeks at sea, speaking little of the language, in debt, and knowing only a handful of people. This new land of theirs was not only a different country, it was a different planet (Dad had thought the ship’s sailors were having him on about kangaroos). They had no idea what tomorrow would bring – employment or not, war, disease… The childrearing was left entirely in my mum’s hands (her parents had stayed behind) and nights out were as rare as a 1960 zucchini or real coffee. Holidays were spent at home fixing, mending, planting. That’s why they were so elated in the party photo.
For the rest of their lives they spoke of ‘the time before’, and ‘the time after’ they’d settled as too separate epochs. The time in the middle, those years of uncertainty, came to be seen from their distancing perspective as a time of finding their feet. As it did, too, for the people they came to love as friends.
Once, when I was younger, I asked my father, “How did you do it, how did you make the transition?” Typical of him, he looked me in the eye, grinned, waited for a dramatic pause then said, “We put one foot in front of the other.” (It was never “I”, they both always used the first-person plural.) At the time I thought I understood: hunker down and get on with the job. Simple.
But now, facing a changed world, a different planet, I think I’m closer to the truth of his meaning. I can appreciate that it is hard to keep calm and carry on when the world is no longer the one I knew. I have renewed respect for, better understand and draw inspiration from their story.
That older generation has given me a sense of how the present is just a moment, a snapshot, of our lives. It is not the entirety. And how, like our parents and their parents, we will adapt and change with the world around us; human beings are, after all, amazingly resilient.
Sometime in the future there will be a hallway, and in it there will be a photo of my wife and me with our kids and grandkids. Off to the right there’ll be another snapshot, this one of a pod of dolphins. And, one day, one of those grandkids will stop, entranced by the image, and ask us about the time the dolphins came to dance in the bay.