My dear friend
I hope this letter finds you well and free of infestation.
I know that feels a little 2020 in sentiment but if I tell you I’ve been reading Wolf Hall I think you’ll understand why such a thought came to me.
I have had a few days of unexpected outage and was forced to sit and do not much in the way of moving across Tuesday and Wednesday.
I did have Wolf Hall to keep me busy while I sat or reclined, but it perhaps wasn’t the best choice for days of emotional and physical disequilibrium. I had started reading it a few days earlier because I want to read A Place of Greater Safety (my recent trip to France sparking an interest in the French Revolution). I did start A Place of Greater Safety but was only a few pages in when I knew I would need to warm up first. There were too many names and too many places and my head was spinning. So I took my unread copy of Wolf Hall off the shelf. Because of my teenage years spent compulsively reading Victoria Holt, Jean Plaidy and Philippa Carr (all the same person I would later discover) I do know a lot about Henry, Cromwell, Anne et al, so I thought I’d be able to keep up with Wolf Hall not too badly. However, it is still something of a challenge staying focused on such a work, and my mind often wanders. This was particularly the case this week.
When my mind wanders, or when I am sitting quietly and trying to make sense of things, my thoughts return often to the trip Adrian and I made about eighteen months ago. We spent a few weeks in England and Europe and took the opportunity to spend some time catching up with friends we’d made when we were living in Abu Dhabi. All of us left the expat life at around the same time and returned to our homes—us to Australia and them to Europe—and our paths had not crossed since. It was lovely seeing old friends again and we all said to each other, ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’
Until we met one friend who had changed. He had a new partner.
We arranged to meet him and his new partner at a pub (it is England after all, where else do people meet?), and there we all were at the appointed time.
Having made the introductions, our friend went to the bar to buy the first round of drinks and Adrian followed, leaving me alone with our friend’s new partner. She was lovely. In spirit she was warm and friendly; and in body she was twice my height and half my width. Naturally, things were at first a little awkward between us, but for someone so tall she was very good at small talk.
‘How long has it been since you all saw each other?’ she asked.
‘Oh, about eight years,’ I said.
Her reply: ‘Eight years. Have you changed?’
I found myself entirely unprepared for such a question.
Have you changed?
I’d spent a month with people telling me I haven’t changed a bit, and in a single interaction my whole world view was altered.
Have I changed?
I said instinctively, ‘Well, I hope so,’ and laughed. But I don’t know what I thought I meant by that. Perhaps I was reflecting on the sensation of having had my thoughts upended. The question have you changed was an upending, not only of the way I was looking at myself; but also of the way we all see, consider and understand each other. We offer those we love consolation and reassurance that the passing of time hasn’t changed us; but if we haven’t changed, then haven’t we missed an opportunity?
Luckily by then our friend was back from the bar, I took three sips of the cocktail he handed me, then several more, got drunk, and it turns out I haven’t changed a bit.
Well over a year has passed since that interaction, but I think about it still, wondering not only about my answer, but also about my immediate reaction to the question.
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My late-midlife to-do list includes the call to arms SORT PHOTOS, and I’ve been scrolling through photographs a lot over the last year. I am intrigued by two photos taken several years apart on two separate continents.
The first is taken at the Adelaide Airport in 2006, one late morning when I had waved goodbye to my father who was taking a weekend trip. At the time, everything we did was tinged with the knowledge that he was dying. He would live for another two years, but we knew that time was limited.
The new airport hadn’t been opened all that long. As a city we weren’t coping with the quirks of the new building, but I loved everything about it. I was particularly enamoured with this lovely piece of weirdness in the lifts:
No first floor! And no one knew where to get off, although there were only two levels.
Anyway, that’s a diversion, and the photo I want to show you is this:
I think we can all agree that $7 to park in the airport carpark feels like a bargain these days. But what I love most about this screen is its promise: ‘Change is possible.’ I do remember taking the photo in the lift, but I don’t remember taking this one and I might have scrolled right past it during this sorting, were it not for my memory of taking another photo several years later.
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The other photo I want to show you is taken at the Dubai airport at 6am on an August morning in 2014. My boys and I had returned from our annual Adelaide sojourn. The schools had closed for summer break, so we had taken the opportunity to do a bit of travelling and then spend a month or six weeks back in Adelaide. By now the direct flight from Adelaide to Dubai had started, so instead of flying through Sydney or Melbourne and on to Abu Dhabi, we flew into Dubai and Adrian came to meet us before driving us along Sheik Zayed Highway back to Abu Dhabi.
The boys were always excited about school starting again, about seeing their friends, about being reunited with our gorgeous dog, but the touchdown back in the UAE was always a difficult moment for me. The heat and humidity were oppressive, particularly in contrast to the Adelaide winter; the cars and the speed were jarring; the endless glass towers somehow claustrophobic; the camels we could see from the highway disconcerting.
By 2014, we had lived there for six years, so even I was finding my feet and feeling at home, but in that moment of landing, I was always thrown back into the memories of our early days there. In those days my grief was so profound I thought its heaviness had made a permanent home in my soul. I had no idea how to exist in the world without any parents; how to reclaim the semblance of any career; how to believe that I would ever feel lightness again.
On this day, in 2014, I remember that as we pushed the luggage trolleys across the carpark I said to Adrian, ‘How am I going to make it work?’
This is the context in which I do remember taking this photo:
Change is possile!
That typo on that screen in that carpark is beautifully and perfectly UAEish. Something I had grown to love was the particular kind of English that grew from this meeting place of many disparate languages. It made me laugh, and it made me feel like I somehow belonged, because it made sense in a way it wouldn’t have made sense when we landed in 2009.
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Every now and then I pull this photo out and use it as the wallpaper on my phone. And I suppose that’s why I noticed the other, otherwise innocuous photo taken in circumstances which were so different and so similar both at the same time.
I hope you do not think that here I am saying a parking machine holds prophetic qualities. It’s not surprising that if it captured my attention once, it would capture it again, particularly given the similarities of the contexts. However, I do like how it reflects the truth that I am the same, but changed. All of these things: the reassurance in you haven’t changed; the promise in have you changed; two photos taken nearly ten years apart are enigmatic to me, their collective meaning clear but clouded. They remind me, as so many things remind me, about my favourite quote from Helen Garner (‘Tess Bows Out’ in The Feel of Steel): ‘Everything around me is seething with meaning, if I can only work out what it is.’
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All going as well as things can go in these strange and difficult days, I will write again next week. Until then, I will think of you often and with love,
Your friend,
Tracy x
