Mama Plog's Special Delivery

Surprise!!!

Hats for me and April and Taryn and Coren and baby Harry!

Gather Your Tribe

If there is one area in life that I feel blessed - blessed - better than blessed (sorry, still in stuttermode), as though by some miracle I've been magically placed in the uppermost echelons of beaming, inexplicably bountiful fortune - it is in the realm of friendship. At every stage of my life - from my first social memory (sandpit with Dewi, digging "down" to Cassie in Papua New Guinea) to the last text ("One of the loveliest texts I've ever received ... Love you so much"), no matter where I am, I always find the good 'uns. The realm of the kindred has been very kind to me.

I am, therefore, a most unlikely expatriate. My home, my heart = my Melbourne (co-opted by a bloody campaign, noch!) is where my friends are at. Alas, life led Londonwards and even though the quantity is paltry, comparatively, the stars have shone again, and deigned to befriend me.

So it is with a heavy heart that I have to fare well April and Oscar (and their beautiful wee PB) who collectively make up a massive chunk of my local mishpokha. Ironically the buggers are relocating to my hometown (or is it ironic? Alanis has made us all fearful now!) ... The silver lining is that we are having a send off at the Big Chill this weekend! So it's after midnight, bags are half-packed and fully-strewn and I need to know how Law and Order, Season 18: Episode 2, ends. (You'd think by now I'd have realised with a court-case. Duh!)

May you all chill, supersizedly

Dr P
x

Farewell To A Father

Thinking today of my friend, A, whose father just passed away after a long illness. I never met him but he was by all accounts a wonderful character, a wise, twinkling, gregarious, Greek (there is a scene in her wedding video that contains the most vibrant, riotous version of the "Zorba the Greek" dance with him at the centre!), kind, warm mensch of a man.

His funeral tomorrow morning will be the first I am attending since my own dad's in October 2006, so I am having the requisite bad dreams and sudden, sinking, sickly day sweats. I am remembering the feelings that A must be feeling: that unreality, heavy waking nightmarishness of going through the motions, accepting condolences, smiling wanly at the platitudes ("No, it's not a relief!"; "No, he's not better off now he's not in pain, he would be a lot fucking happier being alive and in pain with ME!!!"*), the realisation that nothing will ever be the same again, never would I feel as complete again, never would I be loved so thoroughly, so unconditionally ever again. That even happy times, from this day until the day I die, would be tempered with sadness, fracturedness. Maybe that's part of why I rail against the Wedding Industrial Complex to the rabid degree I do - as much as I love Mr. Plog - and by Jove, I do! - it won't be the goddamned Happiest Day Of My LifeTM (C) The Walt Disney Corporation 1956 because my. dad. is. dead.

Apologies to A. This was meant to be a missive of healing, of solidarity. Look, it does get better - it has to. The vomit-inducing cliches are the truest: Time Heals, Life Goes On. Those initial days, months - that unreality, those Moments of Magical Thinking** (mine involved me getting upset each week that passed after he died, because the longer time went on, the less likely it was that I'd get a call saying it was all a mistake - even though I had literally watched him die) - seem like semi-distant memories mostly. But today, this minute, I am reliving them, and the rawness feels stinging, searing.

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*Which in hindsight and with reflection is sadly probably not true (I mean he joked constantly about wanting to make an appointment with his "good friend, Dr Kevorkian" -- but hey, I guess it proves we all see what we want to see, especially when it comes to our parents ...)

**Please read Joan Didion's The Year Of Magical Thinking if you haven't, especially if you are grieving. I bought it at Hong Kong airport on my way back to London after my dad's funeral and was so captivated that I read the whole thing before landing despite the cocktail of Mogadon, Xanax and Nytol I'd taken to cope with the solo 22 hour journey in that frame of mind.

***Please note that the image of woodworking tools is a tribute to one of my dad's greatest passions, not a lazy shorthand equating masculinity with hardware. As if I wood do that!