If only, if only there had been a Wikipedia back when I was a Sydney Anglican.

I remember saying to Christchurch’s Austin Day, rest his soul, that growing up in St Davids Forestville was like growing up in a church made of Tupperware, hermetically sealed from all history that took place between the Acts of the Apostles and the Billy Graham Crusades. He was very tickled: “Hermetically sealed. Funny little thing!” Here at last is the missing context that took me, I’m not joking, about ten years to piece together on my own.

Note especially: “Sydney Anglicans have often been described as Fundamentalist and sect-like by its opponents, but these terms are unhelpful in describing the differences. Fundamentalism, while taking the Bible at face value, has always been anti-intellectual. By contrast, Sydney Anglicans are encouraged to study and use their intellect so long as they continue to hold on to the central truths of the Evangelical faith.”

Yeah, so not anti-intellectual at all. I’m glad we got that cleared up.

I’d like to wind this up with something sardonic, but I’m dust and ashes. People who say that nothing is ever wasted didn’t grow up in my old church.

Reading Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities and feeling humble and grateful, again. San Francisco really is remarkable, and not only for the oligarchic Pacific Union Clubbers and habitues of Bohemian Grove. Jacobs talks a lot about what makes neighborhoods work – a mix of businesses that draw people throughout the day and into the evening, for example.

As I read I found myself thinking, not of Cortland Avenue, which is what you tend to think of when you think of Bernal as a neighborhood, but of my stretch of Mission. Cortland still has some gems: the library and playground, Wild Side West; but it’s gentrifying fast. I really love Chloe’s Closet and Liberty Cafe, but some of the newer places… eh, not so much. Quinn and I took the toddlers to a yuppie restaurant there this evening, and got some glares that made my skin melt off my bones. I get it, I really do, and I hate it when other people’s hyperactive kids put me off my potato and leek filo, but I’m a city girl; eating at home every night makes baby Rachel cry.

Mission between Cesar Chavez and Cortland is another matter altogether. No fairy lights on the trees, no expensive boutiques or vegan ice cream stores, just a manky Walgreens and Safeway, the estimable Cole Hardware, several dozen hole-in-the-wall restaurants representing a substantial fraction of the United Nations (Indian, Cambodian, Thai, Cantonese, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Salvadorean, Peruvian), more nail salons than you’d believe possible (Cortland has them too, now that I mention it), too much traffic, too many buses, dirt and noise.

I love it. More to the point, it loves Claire. I can take her to eat at Angkor Borei, Fortune Cookie or Mi Lindo Peru and not only the proprietors but the other customers will give a very creditable impression of being pleased to see us and amused rather than appalled by Claire’s antics. The food’s fantastic, too. I can catch any three of the five buses and be at work in fifteen minutes. We can take Muni to Dolores Park or the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market. I can pick up my meds, Claire’s bubble bath, organic raisins and three bottles of Martinelli’s and be home in little more than an ad break.

How incredibly scary, then, to reflect that if the good citizens of SF had lost the Freeway Revolt back in the 1950s and 60s, my stretch of Mission would be a freeway. My house, 98 years old, probably wouldn’t be here at all. My neighborhood would have all the charm of SF General or the Dogpatch – pockets of Victorians cut off from real urbanity by concrete, steel and blight.

(Sydney had its own practical experiment in this when it undergrounded the through traffic up and down Bourke Street. The decaying terraces suddenly became hot property when they were no longer caked with black crap. It’s a shame the need to save money prevented a proper tunnel under South Dowling Street, where pedestrian bridges and a big box mall don’t entirely solve the problem of Redfern being cut off from Moore Park and Fox Studios.)

Back to California: thank you, unknown heroes. Thank you for the Panhandle, for Ocean Boulevard, for my beloved stretch of darkest Mission, for Polk all the way up the Tenderloin. Thank you for the Embarcadero and for Octavia Boulevard. Thank you, quite seriously, for San Francisco’s painful traffic and parking situation, and for the fact that it can take forty minutes to drive the seven miles from the GG Bridge to my house. It’s totally worth it. Unusually in the world, almost unheard-of in the United States, this is still a city for people, for pedestrians, and not for cars.

So it turns out that matter – say for example, doll house furniture – when subjected to extremely high energy, decomposes into particles.

We call these particles, choking hazards.

Quinn: Should I tell her my pregnancy joke?

R: Absolutely.

Q: How do you stop a pregnant woman?

Shannon: I don’t know, how?

Q: Punch her in the stomach.

S falls over laughing.

R: Jeremy thought it was terrible…

J: …not in the very best of taste…

R: …but he’s the one who came up with ‘Miss Congenitality: Armed and Legless’.

Nat: …and he called me in to say, ‘Look Daddy, I made a bridge grogan!’

Bryan: You told us that one last time.

N: I did?

B: Yeah, and then Rachel used it as a character name in her Nanowrimo novel.

N: You did?

R: He’s an ex-Morman CEO. He’s dating the porn star Tacoma Narrows.

N: I can’t believe it happened that long ago. I’m getting old! I’m repeating myself! I’m sorry!

B: Don’t worry about it. It’s water under the bridge grogan…

R: There’s my blog post.

N: I have to mail that to my dad…

Too much fun! Lunch with the newlyweds at Bouchon on Saturday; white bean soup with tapenade, a boudin blanc with prunes and wonderful potato puree, a chocolate mousse. Claire behaved disgracefully, but looked very cute in her yellow and purple kimono. Afterwards we wandered through an Argyle Centerish shopping mall filled with cynical tourist art. I was the last one out; the others were waiting for me, tweeting:

“Twee! Twee! Twee!”

Saturday night a vast cold descended over me, so that I could hardly even concentrate on Porco Rosso, except to note that it’s now among my top ten films of all time. Sunday I dragged myself out of my sick bed to go to Ada’s birthday party. I should explain that Claire uses “apple-juice” for a large set of vaguely homonymous polysyllabic words: octopus, obelisk &c. So:

“Can you say ‘Happy birthday Ada’?”

“Apple ju-ju Ada!”

The party was wicked fun, as far as I could tell from my bleary-eyed perch in the corner.

“Ada’s TWO YEARS OLD,” said Danny in amazement. “Do you know what that is in dog years?”

“Do you know what it is in human years?” asked Quinn.

“Do you know what it is in PARENT years?” asked Jeremy.

Last night we ventured out onto rainy Mission to try Fortune Cookie, the new local Chinese. Outstanding potstickers, delicious duck salad and a Futurama-worthy orange peel chicken, according to Jeremy:

“Popplers with a light dressing of Slurm.”

Claire greatly enjoyed the live crabs:

“TURTLE!”

We pinched each other with pincers. On further exploration, she found a small shrine with two candles. She sang to it:

“Apple birdy ju-ju, apple birdy ju-ju.”

I like to interview her at the end of the day, to find out how things went.

“Did you have a nice time at Ada’s party?”

“Ada!”

“Did you see Quinn?”

“Quinn!”

“Did you see Danny?”

“Daddy!”

“Did you see Gilbert?”

“ELBOW!”

Still haven’t finished the wedding album or eaten the cake or preserved the dress.

Still think the sun shines out of him.

I took Claire to her first swim class at the JCCSF today. What a place! Hot tub and locker rooms bigger and brighter than Kabuki! Lovely friendly swim teacher John! Claire squealing with delight and having to be peeled out of the pool after an hour, blue and shivering! I want to be Jewish! Where do I sign?

I’ve acquired some adorable new catchphrases, which I must now inflict on the world at large, because Jeremy has stopped laughing at them.

From the Daily Show’s Stephen Colbert, on being Old European: “Look at my tiny car! Where are my colonies?”

When anyone displeases me for any reason whatsoever: “Why do you hate America?”

You’ll notice these catchphrases are contradictory, not to say mutually exclusive. Kindly bear in mind that I don’t care.

If it weren’t for Hunter Thompson I wouldn’t have started IMing with someone calling himself Raoulduke on the network under the arches at Trinity College, Dublin. I wouldn’t have moved into that godawful apartment in Westland Row, and I wouldn’t have picked up my first copy of Wired Magazine during the Ireland-Norway game of the 1994 World Cup.

If I hadn’t read Wired I wouldn’t have taken the job at Computer Week when I got back to Sydney, so I wouldn’t have reconnected with Big Daddy G, then in his PR phase. And if I hadn’t made friends with him again, I wouldn’t have interviewed Jeremy for the Guava story or met Pesce in an Oxford Street bar.

If I hadn’t met Pesce, Jeremy and I wouldn’t have moved to San Francisco together. Raoulduke wouldn’t have introduced us to bos in Universal Cafe. We wouldn’t have gone to Burning Man and met the Santa Cruzers. We wouldn’t have gone to Orinda to meet Salome and Noah. We wouldn’t have held the chuppah at bos’ wedding to Mamafu. We wouldn’t have bought Eugenia Avenue or had Claire.

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a main era – -the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle – -that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Carole: So I have a present for you guys!

R: Is it a pony?

C: No.

R (still hopeful): Is it like a pony?

J: Where would we keep a pony?

R: Maybe on the roof? There’s enough grass growing from the gutters…

C: It’s not a pony. It’s one of those giant ergonomic balls!

J: Oh excellent!

C: But I forgot to bring it with me, it’s at home.

J: Better still! Think of all the space we’re saving!

I’ve been not-blogging because somehow I seem to have come down with A Life. Consider this: Friday Quinn and I took Claire and Ada to Zeum. Friday night Roberta and I took the Murgisteads to Green’s for a Milo-bration. Sexy Justine was there, and Heather six months up the duff, and Lesley back from saving Africa and wearing the coolest possible glasses, and Kat with left hand weighed down by a flawless diamond Ring.

Saturday night we had a family BBQ with the Moores and the O’Sullibrechts. Sunday, brunch in Berkeley; Sunday night, Barefoot Boogie, Claire went nuts. Monday night the O’Nortojongs came over for toddler mosh and zucchini risotto. Last night Jack, Salome, Justine and David dropped by for stir fry and ice cream. Tonight, Bernal Heights Preservation with Shannon. This weekend, birthday parties up the wazoo.

Who are all these people, and what happened to me being a grouchy recluse?

THE SCENE: In the courtyard of ATLAS CAFE, a Nemiz coffee house and haunt of hipsters, JEREMY, a boy genius turned grizzled Unix geek, breakfasts with QUINN, user mythologist, and RACHEL, wife. Around their feet seethe TODDLERS.

Q: On the flight back from London I was eavesdropping on these two hugely fat American tourists. One was convinced that she was going to die from deep vein thrombosis, and the other hated Europe because she’d had to walk everywhere.

J: Ah; so they had deep thought thrombosis.

Gales of laughter, applause, dancing toddlers, confetti.

R: It’s getting on, honey, shall I drop you at the Caltrop station?

Tumbleweeds, distant flute.

R: Medieval, used for laming horses?

J: Oh, right.

Q: Yeah, that’s quite funny.

Grant and Kirsty, this anecdote is precision-engineered for your delight.

So two-year-olds all make up their own word, right? Kelly’s was Boccadice, and Cian’s was Pittica Tickabwee.

Claire’s, though, is Armani.

Surprise biz trip to Boston. Hello Boston! You’d think that putting 3000 miles between self and sleepless blicket would mean I would NOT wake at 4am just to make sure she’s all right, but no. Odd night trying to reset internal clock to EST. I kept waking up in other hotel rooms: Avanos, London, Portland. I’ve been travelling too much lately. My soul is getting stretched. You can see it in my colleagues, who biz-travel way more than I do. Their souls are just thin slicks, like oil on the Atlantic.

I miss Jeremy, duh, although SMS, my new favourite protocol (is it a protocol? Google google no, looks like a service that runs over the SMPP (short message peer to peer) protocol), keeps us busy bewildering each other with cryptic abbreviations. Last night, for example, he texted “Bluth/Troy?”, which you’d probably need to be me or someone very like me to interpret as a proposal for an Arrested Development/Nip/Tuck crossover, possibly involving a steamy love affair between Michael and Sean. This morning he notified me that he and Claire had “struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering”, which lets you know that Mystery Men was on yet again, as well as just how much TiVo we watch. Oh well, if anything ever happens to J, we can inter him in a bowling ball for Claire.

Biz trips are very clinical these days. Coming across the country was like catching the bus, especially because I used the electronic check-in at the airport and the hotel. Longest conversation I had yesterday was with room service.

“You like it that way,” said Jeremy.

“I really, really do,” I said.

It’s working out as a writer’s retreat; I got five chapters of Breeding done on the plane. My own private Yaddo.

There’s dirty snow piled up everywhere, beside the roads, in the courtyards. My hotel is connected to several office and apartment buildings by huge glass shopping malls. Very Minnesota or Toronto. I haven’t needed to go outside at all, which is good because I left my wool coat on the banister at home. Once a year I get a chance to wear a wool coat non-ironically, and I blow it. Good thing I don’t smoke. There are little cadres huddled outside each airlock, like sad smoky polar explorers.

…even though she keeps waking at 4am with an exhaustive list of complaints.

Roar, roar, roar, roar. Whine, whine. Twist, writhe, head-butt mother square on the larynx.

One small white girl, for sale, cheap.

Claire sang all morning. She sang about her family: “Mummy! Daddy! Bebe! Teletubbies!” She sang about breakfast: “Yummy food! Yummy food!”

I’ve been at work for two hours and I just got a text message from Jeremy: “C still singing bye-bye.”

I feel like singing.

Saturday was wonderful – Rowan’s birthday, music class, roast lamb and pavlova for a late Invasion Day celebration with Ian and Kat. At 3am on Sunday, though, Claire woke up screaming. She screamed on and off for the next, oh, let’s see, nine hours or so. She thrashed in pain, she farted, she groaned, she wept. It’s indicative of how spoilt we are as parents that this is completely unprecedented.

We suspect she picked up the gastric bug Cian had, especially when her temperature soared later in the afternoon. Scary part was that she lost her sense of humour. “Quit yer bellyachin’,” I said, and her father blew raspberries on various limbs, but she didn’t even crack a smile(1). The only time she was not in severe discomfort was when she was in the bath.

She didn’t talk to us all morning. It was awful.

She and her sense of humour came back to us in the evening, when we walked down to Muddy Waters while Jeremy’s shepherd’s pie(2) was baking. At the cafe she sang loud recuperative songs while sorting real estate flyers. When we got home she ate pie, two oranges and a piece of toast, drank apple juice, milk and water and played frenetically with her train set (or as she calls it, TRAIN, WOO WOO). Jeremy has just taken her off to bed. She’ll be fine.

Sickest she’s ever been, though. Be still my beating and so forth.

1. Maybe the joke was terrible, but the raspberries were unimpeachable.

2. The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want …for PIE.

Well, Cappadocia is about half done, and Wild Horses is pencilled in for Sunday morning, weather permitting. Still no progress on Dead Cinemas, Jeoffrey or the damn novel. In other news, I still haven’t finished Gladstone, Intellectual Life, Night Horses, Snow or What’s Going On In There, but I did read Anne Tyler’s Back When We Were Grownups (loved it; Alice Munro meets Helen Garner) and Our Movie Year (HAARVEY!!!)

Right now I am now halfway through both Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (on my second try) and Peggy Vincent’s Baby Catcher (awesome! Must read! Joins Atul Gawande’s Complications, Thomas Lynch’s The Undertaking and Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die on my list of Very Cool Books About Life And Death And Stuff.)

Sigh. I have the attention span of a gnat.

As Mia says:

“I think we should scrap Australia Day, and declare Mabo Day, a day when we can celebrate the courage and determination of individuals, and reflect on the healing and reconciliation process.”

So Phil and I went to the Sydney Jewish Museum twelve years ago, not long after it opened. That’s just the kind of wacky funsters we were.

“Wouldja look at that,” I said, pointing to a portrait in the lobby. “That’s Esther Abrams.”

“Who’s she when she’s at home?”

“Convict on the First Fleet. Transported for stealing a yard of black lace. Before they even got to Sydney she’d seduced one of the officers, George Johnston. Eventually married him, after they had eleven kids. He was the one that dragged Bligh out from under the bed in the Rum Rebellion. He was acting governor for a little while, so the colony had a Jewish thief as its first lady…”

“How’d you know all this?”

“She’s my… lessee… Esther, Blanche, Isabella, Isabella, Brenda, Robin, Rachel… she’s my great-great-great-great grandmother.”

“Oh.”

Later we were looking at a wispy woollen blanket, woven in purple and white squares.

“This was taken from the liberation of Auschwitz on the 27th of January, 1945,” said an older woman to Phil.

He turned to her with his “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, I have an Honours degree in modern history” expression.

“It was the blanket they wrapped around me,” said the woman gently.

We sat down and talked to her for an hour. Her name was Olga. She’d been a child in the camps. Except for one sister, she’d lost her entire family.

“How can you do this?” asked Phil. “How can you relive all of this for strangers?”

“In another generation, all the Holocaust survivors will be gone,” said Olga. “There will only be people like you, who have spoken to us. You will be the ones who will have to remember.”