Reading List 2005

Simple Abundance: A daybook of comfort & joy - Sarah Ban Breathnach

Lighthousekeeping - Jeanette Winterson

Hidden Agendas - John Pilger

Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Cats Eye - Margaret Atwood

The Way the Crow Flies - Ann-Marie Macdonald

The God of Small Things - Arandhati Roy

I am becoming the woman I've wanted - Sandra Haldeman Martz (ed)

Away - Jane Urquhart

Loved them all - breathtaking reading!

And what am I reading now?

Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

Stay chooned for my book reviews!

Alex in the 70's

Alex 70s
Originally uploaded by paulakaye.

This is how I remember Alex when I knew him in the late 70's. Quiet, dark, gentle, doe-eyed, wild-maned, slow and quiet talking, committed to his ideals: alternative living, natural foods, peace, reverencing earth and body.

When Paula met Alex - a love story

PART 1 - The phone call

I guess it was about three years ago, now...

A mid-winter's day...midday.

A pale winter's sun suffused the long narrow sun veranda-long-turned-kitchen of the old house on the hill.

Alex sat propped in his high stool, savouring a long midday breakfast and the warmth from the open stove.

Suddenly, startlingly, uncharacteristically, the phone rang.

Roused, he lifted up the handset to his ear, a voice of indeterminate age and gender on the other end...

"Oh! Hi! Is that Alex?"

Hesitant, "Ye-es."

"Hi! Alex, my name's Paula and I think I used to be your friend."

Hesitant, doubtful, "I don't know anyone called Paula."

Continuing, undeterred, "Did you used to have a business called 'Alexx Slow Foods' and bake bread and own a cafe?"

Puzzled, still cautious, "Ye-es, but I still don't know anyone called Paula."

"Well...(pause)...there's a bit of a story to that! I changed my name...and my sex! I used to be called...and I knew you about twenty years ago."

"Ummm! I'm not sure...."

"I was very tall and had really long hair and I used to come to your place and I helped you bake bread and in the cafe and we went to the "Down To Earth" festival in Bredbo in '79."

Remembering, suddenly, now animated, "Oh! I remember you!"

Over the next two hours the pair rambled on, him in the wintry well of light of the small kitchen, warmed by the oven left open, she hunched guiltily over her work phone in the back of the office, only a couple of days away from full-time transition to womanhood.

She told him, surprisingly at first but then it made sense, of her long concealed transsexualism (concealed from him, too, tho' he remembered now that she always wore a woman's watch. Funny that, he remembered that watch, more clearly than any other detail). She told him of her marriage and her step-grandchildren and her years of army reserve service and her work in Telstra, first as a telecommunications technician then as a trainer.

She asked him if he was married (probly is by now - with kids). He told her, "No.", but went on to talk about his work as an activist with a queer disability group. Queer? Disability? He didn't really talk about queer, that came later when she found out that he'd been gay and she didn't know - just like he didn't know about her lifetime identification with the feminine and about always wanting to be and feeling like a girl. Secrets and lies! Secrets and lies!

He told her tho' about the onset of his myotonic muscular dystrophy, something she was only vaguely aware existed. She asked him how it affected him but didn't really understand...not then. That came later.

He told her about the loss of his business and his World Bike Ride for Nuclear Disarmament, cycling all the way from Canberra to Darwin and then by boat up to Japan and his travels around Honshu and Hokkaido. About his mature-age university degree and his increasing disability.

But they didn't really spend much time on recounting historical chronology or the present day. For those two hours they delved back into all that they could remember of their time together, of all that had been significant but unsaid, unspoken, unnamed; twenty-two years ago. Now they spoke of the feelings and thoughts they'd had but never spoken of. Named that which had never been named. Shared that which had never been shared.

She remembered the one time she'd gone to bed with him. She didn't go to bed with men. She saw herself as heterosexual (oh! it's very hard to find the right words when you straddle two genders), only had girl-friends and kept her transsexual thoughts and feelings largely to herself (but periodically flew her little flags - like ladies' watches and long hair and peasant blouses). She used to listen, yearningly, to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Our House": "with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard, now everything is easy 'cause of you....". She would meet the perfect woman and her troubling "impure" (the hippie dream is a "pure" dream - the alternative fundamentalism) transsexualism would melt away and all would be sweet beauty and light, yeah! down to the end of her days! She dreamed incongruously of both meeting and being that perfect, shining, hippie earth mother. Indian dresses and strappy kung fu shoes and shawls and patchouli.

Then, the woman in her had cleaved, naturally, ingenuously, unremarkedly, almost subliminally, to this quiet, gentle, beautiful man who was both like her and not like her. But the man shape she inhabitated, found it problematical. Being with a man while she lived (half-lived) as a man would make her a gay man in the eyes of the world and she wasn't that. Whatever she was, she wasn't that.

She remembered his nut-brown hands and his doe-eyed face, framed with a riot of wild frizzy hair hung over hers, close, reaching, searching. She remembered his smell, an unfamiliar, unsettling man smell, redolent of his Greekness. She withdrew from his advances, left him puzzled, confused.

All this came flooding back and was somehow, now, part of the present. She had, in the dark lonely well of transition simply hoped to find another friendly face, another person who would accept and not condemn. Now somethng else, unexpected, unbidden, destined, was stirring in her, dizzying, tremulous.

In the office, the other women began to return from lunch.

"Well, I s'pose I'd better be going", she said, reluctant.

"I've really liked talking with you", he said, "I'd like to see you."

"Well, this is my last week at work before I go on a month's leave. When I come back, I'll be Paula, at work too - for always, forever. Why don't we meet this Monday. I can come over."

And she did come over and they did meet, again, after twenty-two years.

But that's another chapter; the beginning of another story.

(...stay tuned...)

Frangipani

Frangipani! Frangipani!
Gentle, shady tree,

Drop me down some of your stars
And I'll pretend they're dreams.

End of Day

Winter's dead end of day,
Damp-distressed,
Let's fall
A pall,
Ash-grey,
A-cross my tattered dreams.

Raining its sorrows,
Drumming its dread
Notes on, on
The corrugations of my brain.

A faint, cruel dirge drones
Mocking the false
Oracle of faded hopes;
Wide-eyed fear
Of night's omen-ous coming
Hard on the nailed cross
Of forsaken day.

Cracks craze
The bone-cap
Of the skull
Stretched taut
Over the scream.

Shattered, shivered,
One draws
The close of things
Over hunched, sharp shoulders
Like a threadbare
Cloak of blame.