Beth by the Sea, March, 2009

Here I have a new world of friends, friends who have been most generous in welcoming me into their life, into the history they shared with La Professora and the one we are making together. Both Beth and Pat, her partner, have shared their home by the sea with us, including Cello which is no mean feat. He is small but his hair goes everywhere--slivers of tough Schipperkee black hair. Walking with Beth along the Apollo Bay shoreline brings me close to the heart of this land, this continent island, where desert, bush, cliffs end at the immense expanse of the Northern and Southerns Seas at one end and the Indian Ocean at the other. In some odd way, geography here is everything even though it is so finite, so bounded; the Red Center with its holy rock, Uluru; the ancient Indigenous art galleries, protected by overhangs of old, old rock, once bottom of the sea rock, now hidden away in crevices known only to the elders, the white chalk drawings of sea serpents and hands, older gods and their retinue of symbols, cross hatched with ochre and umber and then all of this tumbling to the gleaming cities by the sea--Sydney, with its ferries hurrying workers home across the bay, the shining lights of the Harbour Bridge, the flying roofs of the Opera House, the hanging foxes so close to the engines of commerce, the rich rich living of the Bay Side dwellers. Fish and chips on Manley Beach, the shark nets along the beach seen so easily from the ferry fronting cafes--always a kind of danger lurking in the depths, in the interior vastness where tourists or the foolish can loose their lives so easily, can fall to the desert vastness or the churning turns of the craggy skinned crocs who have seen more then we will ever know. And here I am, trying to learn what I can, trying to edge open the strangeness, the unNew York Cityishness of this place, trying to find ledge of stone I can stand on--and it is my new friends, Alex and Michelle, Karen, Daniel and Joel, Mitch and Rose, Ann and Jane and Jane again, Beth and Pat and more who have propped me up and shown me the possibilities of comfort in this ancient sea made land made island.