LEGACY

/ jonathanrobb / 7 Comments

Today my family and I celebrated my grandfather’s ninetieth birthday. As part of the event each member of the family – children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren – all contributed a few pages of writing detailing their own accomplishments in life and memories they had of Frank Robb. The book that was eventually collated, in no small effort by my eldest uncle, Chris, who harvested well over fifty entries, stands as a legacy of not only my grandfather’s life but of all the lives he went on to father. In a sense, each one our accomplishments are also his, for without him the beautiful collection of talented, kind and incredible people who are my family wouldn’t exist.

For this post I’ve decided to put up my contribution to Grandpa’s book. For those reading who aren’t family, some of the following may be obscure references to people you don’t know, but if you’re happy to preserver let me just state one pertinent detail: I have a twin brother named Damian.

The rest I think you can figure out yourselves.

—

MY first encounter with Grandpa has, regrettably, been forgotten. I was three months old and it was just after my family’s departure from Launceston, Tasmania. My perpetually generous grandparents had agreed to temporarily house the in-transit Robbs, and brave a household that contained four children under four.

Although I don’t remember the first time Grandpa picked me up and held me in his arms, that first contact, I appreciate the effort involved in providing a roof over my young head. I’ve since wondered, as he cradled me, if he had any clue whether it was me or Damian he was holding.

IT was in Barry Street, Preston, that I have my first memory of Grandpa. I remember waking under the layers of sheets and blankets in a foreign bedroom, seeing my brother in a bed opposite me, and creeping out of the room into the sun-splashed bedroom of my grandparents. Grandma would usually see me first as I stood unsure in the doorway and call out a greeting, giving me the invitation I was waiting for. I would crawl over the bed and wiggle down between my grandparents, and Grandpa would wrap an arm around me. I remember the weight from the layers of coverings and the warm clean smell of that bed. I felt safe, and happy, and Grandpa would turn his head, focusing on my face, a smile in his eyes, and ask, “Now, which one are you? Damian?”

THE next memory I can conjure is in the early Traralgon days. These were the days of the mazda van, of a crowd of cousins playing in and around the almost clean pool, of food in huge platefuls emerging from the kitchen, where a collection of aunties and uncles laughed and talked, to be taken to the carport where Dad was preparing the perfect coals for a barbeque. These were the days of long weekends and bonfires.

I can remember the frenetic pre-cleaning of the house and then the silence before the storm as we waited for our family to arrive. Then that first car would appear, its white hood emerging from the head of the driveway, with Grandpa behind the wheel. The bubble of anticipation would burst inside my stomach, sending waves of excited energy through my limbs, because it meant the holiday had begun. Next would follow the cries of happiness and hellos, the procession of kisses and hugs, with Grandpa stopping amongst the activity to hold me at arms length, study me, and ask, “Damian?”

MY teenage memories are of a plethora of Robb-Family gatherings, of the Stewart’s backyard, the Donahoo’s house, and the Benalla-Robb’s shed, of Christmases, birthdays, and twenty-firsts. Of speeches (always peppered with a call-out from Lindsay), of food and dancing, and talking and laughter.

And always amongst the mass of family and the thrum of conversation I could be sure to find the matriarch and patriarch in the thick of it, the foundations stones that had brought us and held us all together. Grandpa would recite stories with nods and smiles from those who had heard them multiple times before, and keen interest in the faces of those first-timers, myself often among them. There was always a hand shake and a hug, a quick query to determine who he was talking to, “Don’t tell me. It’s Damian?”, and I was folded once again into the festivities and family.

AS I moved into working life as a nurse and relocated to Brunswick West and the charm of McLean Street, my memories of Grandpa moved as well to Latrobe Village, which the Robbs quickly infiltrated with our large numbers and animated chatter. The memory that stands out most of the Village actually occurred towards the end of my high-school days. We had congregated in the function centre to celebrate Grandpa’s eightieth and I, against warnings from my mother, had consumed too much alcohol at the after-Deb party I had attended the night before. Alcohol poisoning would later be used to describe my state, and while I, regrettably, was in no form to interact with Grandpa that day (as my sister who found me spread-eagled on the lawn bowl’s field can attest) I was led to his bed where I was left to sleep it off.

Ironic that after all those years I found myself back in the bed of my grandparents, and more so, that the warmth, weight, and cleanliness of those blankets still offered the comfort and safety that they had ten years before.

FINALLY I’ve arrived at the most current stage of my life and the most recent memories of Grandpa. I live in Ardeer, and work as a district nurse across the North-West of Melbourne. My work as a nurse has given me a particular insight, and bred a distinct admiration, for the endurance and energy my grandfather continues to display. At an age where many of his contemporaries settle into a sedate and unchanging lifestyle, bowed by their weariness and ailments, Grandpa continues to make the most from his life, refusing to let age be an excuse, even to the point of having a knee replacement in his late eighties. His love for life and family act as a guide and a benchmark, and are attributes I would be lucky to emulate in my life.

THIS book has been made to commemorate ninety years of living. From the stories he shares, from his collection of memoirs, and from the sheer scope of his progeny, it seems to me that’s exactly what Grandpa has been doing.

And, thanks to him, so are all of us.

AND because I wouldn’t exist without Grandpa, I guess I can overlook his mistaking me for Damian.

WHATEVER HELPS YOU SLEEP

/ jonathanrobb / 4 Comments

Sometimes when I’m lying in bed and can’t sleep I like to picture myself. I see my body sprawled over my mattress, limbs dangling from under the doona. I see my chest rise and fall, and each strand of my mess of hair splayed across my pillow. I picture the room around me, the carpeted floor, the dresser, and myself, a living thing in the centre.

Then I go higher.

The point of view rises through my ceiling until I’m floating over my roof. The corrugated aluminium slopes away and I can see the small square of backyard, half concrete, half fake grass. I hover there a moment looking at my small world, the section I have claimed as my own, the space marked out to house me and my small dramas, then I rise higher.

I see my street, the stretch of asphalt and the homes clinging to either side like ants around a sweet. I see trees haphazardly scattered amongst the buildings, their broad halo of branches overlapping the assortment of roofs. Each house is a bordering ecosystem full of a complex tangle of lives and love and arguments to which I am oblivious.

And then higher, and I’m looking at my suburb, a spider web of bitumen and concrete, a heaving sea of houses, and the thin dark line of a river weaving lazily through the human habitation, a remnant of the natural state of the land. My neighbourhood. The eclectic mix of culture and ethnicity, of personalities. The unchosen community to which I belong.

Higher.

And the city is a glowing, blinking spread of star-dust, a breathtaking testament to electricity. And it extends on and on, and every light is an indication of a spark of life, a human presence. And my dot of a home is lost like a grain of sand on the beach, but I am in that mass, somewhere, lying on my bed.

But I’m still too connected so I go higher.

The city recedes below me as earth rushes in to fill my periphery until I’m so far above it I see the shape of the country, the weight of land so large it bends around the globe. And the twinkling evidence of mankind is painted around the edges of the continent in a multitude that is hard to comprehend. From this height the scope of human life isn’t minimised, it’s maximised, as our touch can still be seen outside the earth that contains us. The endless miles of unfurled cities, the days of unbroken red desert, the unlimited expanse of beach that rings the country like ribbon are all details too tiny to make out. I know if I was to drop back down I would find a swarming hive of life but from here it’s soft blends of browns and greens smeared across a paint palette.

The rush of my rising blurs the edges as I go higher.

And it’s the world. A spinning blue orb drifting in empty black, a tilted ball scrawled with all the evidence of our history. The cut out of continents meandering across its surface and the eons of evolution written in its soil. One half glows, a chaos of colour, of landscape and oceanscape. The other is draped in shadow, its back to the sun, the side of our planet that sleeps. It is a concentrated atom of life and living and it carries every act of existence on the surface of its skin.

Higher now and planets are whizzing away from me, whisked out of focus from the speed of my upshot.

And I’m adrift in a smear of stars, of electric blues and acid greens, of neon violets and throbbing reds, and white, blazing between drifting clouds of gas that traps the light like it’s swallowed it. The belly of the galaxy is heat and colour, the artwork of the gods. And one of those pinpricks is our sun, the titan of devouring roiling fire, the endless burning source of life, the marker of time and the original deity, reduced to a glint among gems, a single flash in a streak of glitter. The Milky Way is a cosmic ocean of tumultuous energy, its scope outside my ability to hold for more than a second.

But there’s more to go, and I soar higher.

And I’m looking down at a jumble of glowing shapes, our galaxy now just one more marble amongst spheres of speckled light, spiralling lines of linked suns whose reach is beyond human measuring. I float above the collected mass of nebulas and galaxies surrounded by the cold infinity of the universe. I am a child in a dark pool without edges, the entirety of all raging life at my feet. I could go higher into the fathomless breadth of existence but I am at the edge of my knowledge, so I stop, and look down, into everything.

And somewhere down there, through the clouds of stars, through light-years of sheer space, though a dense fog of burning orbs to a handful of planets is one tiny blue and green dot circling one tiny orange sun, and somewhere, all the way down the other end of the telescope, is me. A speck on an electron. A wink of life sprawled on a mattress, entirely overlooked by the universe at large, chewing over my pathetic worries.

I picture this, and feel my mind ease, and sleep.

ANGRY MAN

/ jonathanrobb / 4 Comments

I’m screaming at her and my voice is hoarse with spat words.

An angry man. I never thought I’d grow up to be an angry man. I was a meek child. I would hunch as I was dressed down by my father. I was not a screamer or a rager. I would sit there, cowed, and sob once it was done.

I stop, and she’s looking at me with the flat eyes of a stranger. I’m breathing heavily and I realise that my hands are shaking, and I have no idea what the hell I’m doing.

—

I wrote this about a year ago, but only rediscovered it a few days ago. I was clicking through my folder of writing and by chance opened the document that had this small snapshot. On reading it I was both satisfied and frightened by how accurately this tiny sliver of writing portrayed how I had felt.

I remember I wasn’t angry at the time of writing. I was on that post-fight plateau where all emotions are muted. Numbed. I no longer cared about achieving happiness. I was in a space where I was so worn out it was a relief to give up and resign myself to the knowledge that I could not make things better.

The scene described had taken place a few hours beforehand. In the midst and fury of an argument I’d had a horrible insight into my own behaviour. It had been like stepping to the side and watching as a third-party, and discovering that scarlet hiss of anger in my features. It reminded me of times I’d seen couples fighting in public and wondering how they could have so little self-control and such little respect for one another. Only this time I was the embarrassment. I was the infant throwing a tantrum, the man not in control of himself.

It’s the final line of the piece that resonates strongest. I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was so far beyond my threshold of patience and unhappiness that I was lost. I had reverted to the animal instinct of screaming and lashing out in frustration. All the moral codes I thought I followed, all the constraints I put upon myself and proudly thought I upheld had disintegrated under my torrent of anger. I felt helpless. I felt all my happiness and effort slipping away over some triviality, and had no way of stopping it. I felt encased and my battering only served to solidify the barrier around me.

These are not efforts at justifying my behaviour, only reflections on how I had come to a place where I had lost myself.

I don’t like feeling out of control. It’s a point of pride that I can keep my composure, that I can rationalise any heightened situation enough to keep the important things in perspective. But when it came to my relationship I seemed to invest too much into it, and that maintenance of perspective became skewed. This meant that any imbalance in understanding between me and my partner rocked the foundations of all that investment, and it scared me. It scared the shit out of me. Unfortunately my response to that fear was anger.

What struck me most when reading my story fragment was how I had discarded my perception of self. I walk around every day with an image in my head of the man I am. I picture my strengths and weaknesses, my ideas and beliefs, and believe they are unwavering. That I am who I think I am. But that image of self was torn like tissue paper the moment my stress overwhelmed me, and I became a man I didn’t want to be. A man I didn’t even like, and one I didn’t want to be able to relate to. And what made it worse was I did it without any insight until it was too late.

The thousands of thoughts and convictions that made me up were forgotten in one scalding instant.

What I like about this snippet of writing is it so clearly demonstrates that moment when I realised I had lost control. The juxtaposition between who I thought I was and who I was being. It’s a hard thing to see in yourself, but that just makes it more important. It’s necessary to be reminded that the border between restraint and abandon is more easily crossed than I like to think. It’s not something to be ashamed of, but it is something I should be aware of.

I hope I’m not that angry man anymore. I hope the trials I’ve faced and the reflection I’ve given have taught me to avoid my own pitfalls, but it would be foolish to forget what I’m capable of. By writing this, by reading my own illustration, I hope I can keep in mind how fragile a sense of self is.

But also to remember to be proud that I’m getting some kind of idea of what the hell I’m doing.

STARTING SOMETHING

/ jonathanrobb / 2 Comments

I started writing a novel today.

It’s a strange thing, starting something. I always seem to have a nervous energy when I begin a project, and that energy is always somewhat driven by fear. Fear of failing. Fear of it not being as good as I can picture it. Fear that this time when I put pen to paper I’ll find my ability is gone, that the spark of creativity in me has fizzled out and I’m boring again. It’s irrational, but I’ve found a way to overcome it.

Start anyway.

This seems to be the hardest part. That first burst of motivation and inspiration. Until that initial moment of creation, my idea is perfect. It’s in the starting that I open the door to faults and flaws, that I can introduce my imperfect technique and see my ideal concept become something common. Of course the irony is that a concept is nothing, and so much lesser than a flawed something.

A lesson that has recently crystallised for me is one of the path to success. My sister once showed me a diagram that displayed the two perceived paths to success. On the left was a road that diverged to two outcomes: Succeed or Fail. This is the commonly believed path to success. Win or lose. To the right was an image of a road which zigzagged, and at each bend was a signpost which read “fail.” But at the end of the road was a trophy which read “succeed.” The actual path to success.

The problem with the former view is you only get one chance; you win or you lose. There’s no room for error in this path to success, and this makes starting something a nerve-racking voyage to make. With this concept in your head you launch yourself into the unknown and are snatched down the first time you trip up. Done. You failed. Thanks for playing.
This daunting potential for failure can be enough to stop someone from even starting. Much safer to avoid the risk and stay off the path all together.

Luckily this view of success is entirely wrong.

It’s the latter that encapsulates any experience of success I’ve ever had. This truth became starkly apparent when I first attempted to crochet a beanie. I’ve mentioned in a previous post that after envying a beanie my cousin owned I set out to duplicate the garment. Since then I’ve made about ten beanies and it’s gotten to a point where a person can’t visit my house without leaving with crocheted wool draped over their head. This end result shows I succeeded in my goal. But that was the end result; the path to that point was a bloody mess.

To begin my beanie I first had to master the initial ring of stitches. It’s called the magic circle. The magic of this circle proved to be its ability to provoke a string of curses from a man who normally remains quite calm. The wool slipped from my fingers, the hook refused to weave through the gaps I wanted it to, and the stitches were either too loose or so small that no grown man’s fingers could hope to navigate them. After hours of work, after a conglomeration of failures, I had a rather rough, but technically correct, magic circle.

I then laboured in mastering the following rings of stitches. After hours of studying the YouTube tutorial I was watching, stopping, rewinding, rewatching, and stopping, I had added a further six rows to my creation. I was feeling good, I was about halfway through, and the tangle of stitches was starting to resemble a beanie.

But as I bent to watch my online teacher begin the next ring I noticed something. Her needle was slipping through two loops each time she made a stitch whereas mine was only slipping through one. I looked back at my work and immediately saw the neglected loop I had been failing to hook with each stitch. While my beanie still held together, the missing loop meant that it wouldn’t be as strong as it should be and prone to stretch. I was doing it wrong. I would have to start again.

It should have been demoralising to have to pull apart the hours of hard work I had spent sweating over wool and crochet needle, but in all honesty it was a relief. I didn’t trust my new skills enough to presume I had been proceeding errorless, and I now felt I had caught my error. I may have been back to nothing more than a tangle of wool and the prospect of reattempting the magic circle, but I had learnt from my mistakes, which meant this time I would do it right.

And this is the lesson of the latter: the path to success is littered with failure. But each failure isn’t a slipping down a snake back to the start, it’s a step forward with new knowledge earned from that failure. Each mistake I made was a lesson in how not to do it, meaning all other attempts were done with a higher ratio of success.

With this in mind, starting something is a much easier journey to make. I may trip the minute I step onto the path, but each trip is something I can improve on, and something that is now behind me.

So today I started my novel. I did it with the belief that all errors I made could only, inevitably, make it better.

For those of you playing at home, the first word of my novel is “The.” An auspicious start in its vast scope for potential words to follow.

And it can only get better from here.

ENCOMIUM – PART 2

/ jonathanrobb / 3 Comments

My last post detailed a typical visit to a patient named Ted, an eighty-four year old man I saw twice a day for over a year. Ted lived alone in a run-down unit, due for demolition, and had such severe short-term memory loss that within the course of a visit he could tell the same story multiple times. Luckily Ted retained his long-term memories, and, even luckier for me, the stories he told were so interesting it was no burden to hear them repeated.

As nurses we assisted Ted by administering his medications, ensuring he was having something to eat, moisturising his legs, and occasionally dressing any wounds he developed. We also gave the solitary man company, and, uniquely, Ted gave back. Some days it was hard to tell who was accompanying whom.

Ted was a joy. Normally seeing a client this often, particularly one who offers up the same conversation like a meal repeated until you’re sick of the sight of it, would become wearisome, but Ted was so genuinely happy, and so sharing in his happiness, that visiting him felt like recharging. Each rendition he gave of his stories was animated and energetic. His jokes, which after a few months I could mouth along with him, were always delivered with such sincere amusement and enjoyment that it was impossible not to laugh with him.

I was moved from the area where Ted lived and began nursing further north, and my visits with Ted were cut off. It was a different nurse who got to hear about the time his car broke down on a set of train tracks and was hit, with Ted still in the car, by a train. Ted walked away from the accident, went to get a beer at a nearby pub to steady his nerves, and decided the car was probably a wreck, and so hitchhiked his way home. True story. I heard it at least seventy-eight times.

A few months ago I found out Ted was no longer on our books. Ted has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is a fancy way of saying his lungs are shot. He spent his early adulthood chewing on cigars, sucking on cigarettes, and even having the odd puff of a pipe. His later adulthood was spent working in a pottery factory at a time when OH & S didn’t include face masks, and so, even though he had quit smoking, the deterioration of his respiratory system continued with lungful after lungful of ceramic dust. Because of his COPD, Ted was particularly prone to chest infections, which made him particularly prone to hospital admissions. And so the decision was made by his case manager that Ted wasn’t safe to be living alone and a nursing home was arranged. This meant district nurses were no longer required.

The abrupt departure of a patient is an aspect of my job I find disorientating. Let me set the stage: we go into the intimate confines of a person’s home, are welcomed and offered tea. We administer care, which by its nature creates a bond between patient and nurse. We talk as we work, and learn about out patient’s lives and families. Then, as inevitably happens, one day they’re gone.

Sometimes it’s due to death, but more often it’s that they’ve been put into a nursing home. Or gone to live with family. Or are in hospital. The latter is the hardest because they disappear into the hospital system and it’s not until months later that you realise they haven’t returned and are left wondering what happened to them.

District nurses are, at best, a band-aid. We are a temporary fix, and the best we can hope to achieve is to maintain the status quo for a while longer until health deterioration catches up with our patients. Please don’t let this observation cheapen the profession. Those extra few years we buy our clients at home are years of comfort in a familiar environment, but it’s still frustrating to know we are a quick, and non-lasting, solution.

So Ted had disappeared into that world of post-district nursing, but because of where he had lived I still found myself driving past his unit most days. (Despite his absence, the demolition has yet to commence). And each day I was reminded of the man and what an incredible life he had led. I would remember the story of how, on an impulse, he quit his job in New South Wales and travelled to Melbourne with a friend to visit his friend’s aunty. And how, six months later, he married his friend’s aunty. She was twenty years his senior and initially refused to marry him, stating that he could stay until he was bored with her. Ted was outraged at the suggestion that he wouldn’t make an honest woman of her and slept on the couch until their marriage day.

And I remembered how, twenty years on, his wife had a stroke and, mentally, reverted back to an infant. And how Ted fed her, and washed her, and cared for her whilst she called him “Mum,” until the day she died.

An encomium is a tribute, either spoken or in text, to a person and their accomplishments. My previous post set out to capture just a slice of what it was like to know Ted. To immortalise a fraction of a fraction of his life, but one that demonstrated his humour, and his vitality, and his kindness. To protect and praise a man who had done some incredible things but who had been largely forgotten by the community he lived in.

Ted will undoubtedly have no memory of me and the small part I played in his story, but hopefully these posts will preserve my memories of Ted and the part he played in mine.