i boast about counting Graham Long amongst my friends. i don’t expect anyone to know who Graham Long is but i look forward each week to his letter which might soon cease with his impending retirement. I copy and paste this week’s arrival because I know that some of you might find it heart-warming. There is a bit of sales pitching going on in it. Don’t be put off ….I assure you that Graham is a saint.

 

 
Dear Inner Circle,
Walking through the main street with Wayside’s Assistant Pastor, Jon Owen yesterday, a woman yelled out, “Hey! You’re too sexy to be a priest!” I’ve got a sneaking suspicion she was talking to Jon.
If you’re inclined to be obsessive, Wayside is a place that will either cure you or send you around the bend. To this day, significant things appear and no-one knows where they came from and significant things disappear and no-one knows where they went. In the little kitchen near my office, one of our staff members was lamenting that a piece of her property had disappeared. She told me how she had spent good money on this item and then labelled it in such a way that no one could pick it up and mistake that it wasn’t her property or that it should be removed from this particular kitchenette. I really desired to share her bewilderment and rage but instead I confessed that I’d just raided the fridge and taken a piece of bread, toasted it and raided someone’s butter from the fridge and then opened someone’s Wayside honey. It was lunch and I was still eating it. I could hardly feel indignant with my hands full of stolen goods.
A young, handsome, fit looking fellow lost his life this week at a nearby place for backpackers. I conducted the funeral at Wayside and so had the opportunity to meet his parents and two teenage children. He was an only child and his mother and father were devastated by this loss. On the day before the funeral, I offered each of them the option to speak the following day and although the others were too grief-stricken, the father wanted to speak. At the time he was struggling to get any words out and I doubted his capacity to speak in front of a hundred or so people who would gather at the funeral the next day. Yesterday before the funeral, this precious man visited the backpacker’s place and asked if he could lay on the bed where his son’s life ebbed away. He stayed on the bed until he believed he had a strong connection with his boy and a sense that his boy was OK. At the funeral he shared his broken heart with confidence and love. I was and remain in awe of the grace and strength of this beautiful man.
Many times I’ve conducted a wedding that had no witnesses and so I’ve just grabbed staff members or volunteers who happened to be in the right place at the right time. At yesterday’s funeral, no family members wanted to carry the coffin from the chapel out to the waiting hearse. I ran up to our marketing team and said, “I need pallbearers!” Four of our people just stopped what they were doing and carried the coffin with the same kind of care they would exercise for a member of their own family. Wayside staff and volunteers are the best.
On Valentine’s Day each year we usually ask people to donate money to help us buy underwear for the daily and constant stream of people who rely on us for life’s necessities. Our theme is “nothing says I love you like a clean pair of undies”. This year, our stocks of undies are healthy so we’re not asking for money! We’re asking for good, clean clothes. If it is time you had a bit of a clean out and wouldn’t mind giving your excess clothes to someone who couldn’t buy them, we’d love to accept them. Reg Mombassa, the famous Mambo and ex Mental As Anything band member, has designed a card especially for this occasion. If you donate some clothes, we’ll gladly send a Valentine’s e-card to your loved one this Valentine’s Day. Your special someone will receive an e-card and they’ll love you for giving away your clothes to someone in need. For more details check here.
As a special thank you for your donation we will also be inviting you to attend a special free behind-the-scenes tour of Wayside Chapel on Valentine’s Day, Wednesday 14 February at our Kings Cross and Bondi locations. Email us here to register your interest.
That’s about it. Thanks for being part of our inner circle,
Graham

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The Wayside Chapel
PO Box 66, Potts Point NSW 1335
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To my already impressive portfolio of writing contest failures I can today add another. It is meant to be 1500 words (which it is) meant to be non-Fiction (which …. well, maybe not quite) and meant to be of a high standard (that may have been an issue). The requirement was to describe something that I had had to remember. Or something like that ….

Anyway I was eliminated in the first round. I have a perfect record in that respect.

But …. for better or worse …. in the name of artistic honesty ….here it is

***** have just discovered another reason that it may have failed. It was swallowed by my email system and never left the building ******

An unreliable memory.

I should make something clear from the start and stress, primarily, that I am not a liar. My truth may not always mirror your truth but that is just in the nature of truth itself. Likewise, my memories of certain events may differ from the memories of others but any apparent contradiction can normally be explained with reference to differing perspectives. Distortion may occur through the filter of time or via the influence of external circumstances but eventually all that we need to agree upon is the essential framework. The big things. The little things are unimportant. Or so I have discovered.

Likewise, I would like to be unequivocal in my denial of any direct connection to a moral misdemeanour. If an infidelity has been committed (and I have no specific knowledge to suggest that it has) then such occurred beyond my scope of awareness. I have no memory of it, in other words. When I was asked to confirm certain facts by way of an alibi for an old acquaintance I did so based on the assumption that it was requested merely to bypass what may have otherwise led to an unnecessary misunderstanding between partners.

And there’s something else you should know.

I drink a bit.

****

Allow me to elaborate.

Dave Roberts and I had a difficult relationship at school. We were different sorts of guys. He was a sportsman, I was not. He was popular with the girls, I was not. That sort of thing. He was bigger than me.

So whilst it was common, in later years, for Dave and I to pass each other in the street and exchange glances of mutual recognition it was most unusual to subsequently strike up any sort of conversation. On one occasion, however, he approached me with urgency.

“Pete!” he unexpectedly exclaimed that day, “thank God you’re here!” He had always called me ‘Knob-Head’ at school, incidentally. Everybody had.

“What?” I replied

“We’ve got to get our stories straight.”

“What?” I repeated.

With this he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me a little bit. “Just listen to me,” he hissed, “its important.”

“Right.” I said, without the vaguest idea of what was to come.

****

“So,” he continued, “last night, right?” He was whispering with something of an insistent confidentiality and, in the presence of this local football hero, I confess to having found the atmosphere slightly infectious. “We were at the club. You and me. At the club. Together. Right?”

“Right,” I confirmed whilst attempting to send urgent messages to whatever part of my brain might contain reliable details of the previous twenty-four hours, “what were we doing at the club?”

“Drinking.”

“What?”

“Drinking, you idiot. What do you think we’d be doing?”

“Yes,” I nodded, “but what were we drinking?”

“Oh,” he said. “good point. Beer.”

“Not me,” I said as vague recollections found a path into my consciousness, “I was drinking red wine. Cabernet.” He looked at me with a mixture of confusion and reluctant admiration. “Cabernet,” I repeated, “remember that. It’s the little things that matter.”

“Got it,“ he nodded, “Cabernet.”

***

The fact is that I had been drinking the night before. Heavily. As unlikely as it sounds I may have been drinking with Dave. He seemed certain of it. And who was I to argue? So we continued to reconstruct details of the previous evening as we stood there on the street.

We had met about 7:30 in the car park, decided to share a Chinese meal, discussed old times, had a bit of a conversation about Mr Simms the maths teacher, a few laughs about the school camp of ’74 and played a game of darts.

“Who won?” I asked.

“You did,” he replied initially, before looking me up and down and correcting himself. “No. She’ll never believe that. I did.”

“She?” I queried.

****

It was just at that moment that an attractive blonde woman who I immediately recognised as Amy Tyler, a bombshell from the year below us, pulled up in a car. She leaped out of the vehicle and approached us with what I recall as being an expression of alarming malice before grabbing Dave’s shirt. “Where the f…,” she started to say before Dave interrupted her.

“Amy, Amy, settle down,” he said to her, “you remember Pete, of course.”

She turned to me. “Knob-Head?” she responded and examined me closely, “Is that you in there? You look worse than you did at school.”

This was my cue. “Yes,” I confessed, “I tied one on with Dave last night. I’m a bit the worse for wear.”

“Cabernet.” Dave added helpfully.

****

But I could tell that she wanted further details. We had them. Plenty of them. She didn’t really need to ask the questions. We just provided the answers. Honestly, it was astonishing what we had retrieved from the fog of the previous evening and had now painstakingly recommitted to memory. She was greatly impressed, for example, with our relating details of the guy who had won big on the pokies. “Six thousand, four hundred and thirty-five dollars,” we told her in unison.

In retrospect we may have remembered a little too much. But we almost had her. Her and Dave were getting into the car and bidding me a fond farewell when she turned to ask me a final question.

“The club, you say?”

“Yes,” I replied confidently.

“Which club?”

Dave was in the driver’s seat and frantically feeling around for the keys. Upon hearing this final line of enquiry he started moving his arms around in some sort of swinging action.

“The hockey club,” I offered.

She stared at me blankly. Dave was shaking his head and continuing to imitate some strange sporting activity. I tried again. “The cricket club?”

****

As it turns out there are only two clubs in town. A car club and a golf club. It’s weird that I don’t remember where the golf club is located.

****

I created this page with the idea of enjoying a certain degree of anonymity but I have become alarmed at the number of personal details that seemed to have escaped somehow from it. Evidence of this comes via heartfelt emails I receive regularly offering to solve the everyday issues of old age that I had, up until now, been suffering stoically in ignorance. Most mornings I open outlook to be greeted by several concerned individuals who specialise in conditions that I didn’t realise I had. These range from to the ringing in my ears to the toe fungus which must be obvious to everyone else but has, until now, skipped my attention. The correspondence relating to my erectile disjunction is dwindling and I can only conclude that it has been given up as a lost cause. Likewise the offers of marriage (and much, much more!) from attractive Russian ladies one third my age seem to have dried up. I can’t remember the last time I was contacted by the Nigerian Royal Family, either. I hope they are OK.

This morning I was lucky enough to receive advise on recharging used batteries. In view of the context of previous epistles I am wondering if I should be taking that literally or euphemistically.

Is it just me? Am I special?

But here’s the good news. I checked between my toes this morning (not as easy as it sounds) and found no sign of the fungus.

And that’s before the product has even been delivered!

For #LoIsInDaBl

 

I looked up at her from my bed as she was sitting there beside me. The screen above my head reported to the world, via a series of numbers and a moving graph, that I was still alive. Though we both knew that I wouldn’t be so for long.

It was easy, lying there useless, to compress all of those times when we had laughed, made love, argued, cried, got drunk, lied to each other or fallen asleep in each other’s arms into a single moment. And wonder what it meant. Two ordinary people within two ordinary lives.

She had no expression on her face. Or not one that I could interpret. So I asked, “Do you still love me?”

She looked at me carefully for what seemed a long time and sighed. “Oh,” she said eventually, “I think it’s much worse than that. I’m devoted to you.”