Picnics

 A while back now, Hels wrote a post about the history of picnics and it made me think about the picnics in my life.

I don't remember family picnics at all. On weekends, my parents were always entirely bound to the house so we ate at the table, the same as we did every other day. I suspect the idea of packing up food and going somewhere else was all too much work for mum to want to bother with and in many ways i felt the same when I had a house full of people. Cook, pack up, find a destination, eat in an inconvenient location then pack it all up and go home to wash up. Those picnics are not for me but I'm happy to take a bunch of snacks and eat outdoors. Or, as I did one day recently, take my own sandwich and meet up with friends in a park, buying coffee nearby.

What we did quite a bit of when I was a child, was church picnics and the very specific Sunday School picnics. It was common place for our church to declare a "Church Picnic" for one or two of the public holidays each year. A park would be chosen and anyone interested would come along with their picnic chairs, cold meats, canned vegetables, home made slices and cakes, balls, bats and bikes.

Everyone would get set up in a single, ever growing circle. There would be chatting and silliness, people would pass around their cakes and there would likely be sunburn. 

I can't remember what mum took but I know that I was always jealous of other people's food. Pretty much any biscuit from a packet seemed more enchanting, prettier, more perfect than mum's home made things (which of course were superior but try telling that to a kid who was entranced by the perfection of machine made)

The Sunday School picnic, now I think of it, seemed to really hark back to different times. Any kid who attended Sunday School at all was invited to the annual event. We all scrambled onto a bus to a park, usually with a beach, and the ritual picnic would be on. There were games and races, swimming and of course the food. Sunday School  picnics had the same menu every year: sandwiches made by some of the older church ladies, ice creams on sticks which were transported on magical dry ice, jugs of cordial, cream buns and watermelon.

By the mid-eighties somebody had decided swimming was too hard to supervise and keep safe so on this particular, very hot day, there was no swimming (was there even a water course? I don't remember)

I was about 13 or 14, the park was a dustbowl, we were hot and at a slightly loose end, probably waiting for the next  treat to make an appearance and someone started a water fight. I don't remember what we used to carry the water in but we must have had something because very soon we were all taking turns filling containers at the tap and throwing water at each other.

One parent who was known to be very strict indeed, lost the plot about his daughter's lack of decorum and the water fight was shut down. My mother talks about it to this day. 

The daughter went on to have an unplanned pregnancy within a few years. The family had moved away by then but by all accounts, the dad was a changed man under the influence of a grand baby.

As I write about it, I am awestruck by the risk taken, the work load involved and the commitment of people who worked their butts off for us kids to take it all for granted.

I never became much of a picnic person, as I mentioned earlier, but for a period of time I had a small picnic-ish tradition with my own kids. We would spend school holidays going on little jaunts into the countryside. I would take haloumi cheese and cabanossi and bread rolls and drink and we would find a public barbecue, cook up the cheese and cabanossi, picking it off the barbecue like hors d'oeuvres before sitting at an adjacent table and having a slapped together lunch served off paper towel. All I had to wash up when I got home was a knife and a pair of tongs.

Good days.

Fragile

 I'm working full time at the moment, which is good for me and necessary but it makes me feel like I have very little time for blogging. Maybe it's more a matter of time management than hours in the day. I don't know. I miss you and I know I have thought of a number of topics and forgotten them again. Frustrating.

This evening I watched the livestreamed funeral of a man who was once vaguely in my orbit. I mostly think of him as the brother of a school friend, Cath. Chris was in my brother's year at school. The family lived a couple of blocks away from us. 

When my first child was born, Chris came with my brother to see me in hospital. I remember them, two 20 year olds, commenting on the size of my newborn's balls.

Recently Cath made a non-specific facebook post about heart break and not having really been in touch for 30 years, I watched silently. It became obvious as I watched the funeral that Chris took his own life.

Soon after watching the funeral, a facebook post came up about the death of a church pastor in Queensland. The guy's name was unusual and a girl I had known in high school had married a man with the same name. A quick google revealed that he was, in fact, the husband of the girl I knew and he, too, took his own life. 

These events are distant from me because the people haven't been in my life for so long but in degrees of separation, they are incredibly close. Both men died within a month of each other.

I can't even describe why I am writing about it because it doesn't affect me. 

But it does.

Last week I sat opposite an 85 year old who tearfully told me "I promised my sister I would never put her in aged care" and I responded with something I say quite often "Most people eventually become too old to properly care for themselves and if they don't end up in aged care it is usually because something tragic happens"

I started saying it as an attempt at comforting people but now I am seeing just how brutally true it is.

Anzac Day

 

For some time now I have been of the opinion that we need to be very careful of Anzac Day. I am all for honouring the sacrifices made by all kinds of people in all theatres of war, in peacekeeping missions and those who kept the home fires burning.

I am not for nationalistic jingoism. I am not for the propaganda machine glorifying "service" in the hope of influencing coming generations to serve. I am not for honouring one type of trauma over others. I am not for hypocritical displays of reverence for people who we don't support very well when they arrive home broken. 

And now I can add that I most certainly am not in favour of small minded people having a platform they can use to harass and belittle our first nations people.

Aboriginal people fought for Australia at a time when they were not even given the dignity of citizenship. They came home not as second class citizens because they were not citizens. They offered their lives and their health just as others did. 

At this year's Anzac ceremonies around Australia, the Acknowledgement of Country was boo-ed.

I find this behaviour repugnant at any time. Acknowledging traditional owners costs us nothing and actually gives them nothing but acknowledgement. Just words. Acknowledgement of Country does not and can not impoverish anyone and still the haters must boo and jeer.

If a remembrance of our servicemen and women (and others) is going to become an opportunity to grind people down, we have lost the plot. 

It is, for sure, an unpopular opinion but I think Anzac Day has almost had it's day.