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.”

J: I dreamed I squeezed a pimple on your back, and a diamond came out.

R: Bwah! That would be the Claire.

J: You think?

R: I can’t believe Zoe’s really leaving!

Aaron: Yeah, it’s scary. We have to find a new roommate now and she’s a hard act to follow.

R: “You must be a genius cellist, and way cute.”

A: “Funny, whimsical and happy to do the dishes.”

Thirteen or fifteen years ago, no one can remember exactly when, a six-week-old black and white kitten was dumped at the Warringah Shire Council offices in Dee Why. My sister worked there at the time and is a sucker for cats. She brought him home to Bluegum, where he promptly adopted my mother.

Mum named him Monty. He rapidly ballooned to implausible size. Imagine a mink-lined medicine ball with a long skinny tail and four spindly legs. His eyes were huge and manic. He had white whiskers and a long snout. In retrospect, he may have been part badger.

When Mum and Dad ran away to join the gypsies, serially-monogamous Monty transferred his affections to my brother Alain. He and Alain eventually moved out of Bluegum to another house in Frenchs Forest, where their roommates smoked and drank way too much. One of these delightful chaps, in a drunken rage, threatened to kill Monty, so Alain packed the cat and some clothes in his car and drove to Tenterfield to meet up with Mum and Dad. Monty escaped that night and was missing for hours. We thought we’d lost him then, but at last he came to Al’s call.

They moved in with Sarah and Max and the kids in Brisbane. Al got a job and found an apartment of his own, but pets weren’t allowed, so our hero spent his last years lolling in the sun at Patricks Road. Last week my mother noticed he had a respiratory infection and took him to the vet. X-rays revealed an obstruction in his larynx. A biopsy revealed inoperable squamous cell carcinoma. Mum and Al decided to put him to sleep before he suffered.

Nothing in my family happens without large helpings of farce, so when Max dug a grave for Monty, near but hopefully not too near where Sade is buried, he uncovered the well-preserved skeleton of a cat. It probably wasn’t Sade. Even so, this was too much for Kelly, who fled in tears.

Meanwhile Ross, nephew of my heart, inspected the fossil feline and said: “Can I keep it?”

I must get him the Lemony Snicket books.

…as an observation that it’s about time I finished various projects, to wit:

Cappadocia
Wild Horses of the Japanese Tea Gardens
Dead Cinemas of the Mission District
For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey

…oh, yeah, and the novel.

Quinn: So how can you SWIM in the SEA in Australia when EVERYTHING IS POISONOUS!?!

R: Oh, but it’s absolutely gorgeous, I miss it a lot. The water is really warm and clear and the sand is golden. I wasn’t even much of a beach baby – I totally took it for granted that we lived near this mile-long beach with dunes and a lagoon and bombora, and didn’t realize until years later that Dee Why is something amazing… and it’s just one of Sydney’s beaches, and there are dozens of them… Ocean Beach is just awful by comparison.

Q: True. I did love the beaches I grew up around in Southern California. I loved the tidal pools and the wildlife.

R: Yeah, I had these huge shell collections, and I loved touching the sea anemones. The littoral zone is so rich there they say the Eora and Guringai people only had to spend a couple of hours a day collecting food, and they got to spend the rest of their time having sex and telling stories.

Danny: Huh. Just like being a freelance journalist.

(A quick Google reveals that Dee Why is also the origin of both Surf Life Saving clubs and the scientific study of rips. Who knew?)

R: Do you like the name Jane?

J: It’s plain.

R: I like Jane.

J: It’s probably one of those names that’s so common no one uses it any more. Like John. I wonder what they’re going to do about John and Jane Doe? It’ll have to be, you know, Joshua and Mackenzie Doe.

R (talking into imaginary walkie talkie): Chief, we got us an Emily Doe washed up on the shore of the lake…

I dreamed that I was trying to help Gayu and Kamala search for their neighbors in Chennai.

Medecins sans frontieres

Here are the five books that I am switching restlessly between:

Gladstone, A Biography
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class
Night and Horses and the Desert
Snow
What’s Going On In There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life

Christmas Eve. We’re all curled up in bed, sleeping late. Claire turns to me and says: “Peepee-you -” (this is her word for any small bird that makes a peeping noise) “peepee-you is a baby chicken.”

Later I say: “I’m feeling lazy Miss Claire. Would you get up and make us some tea?”

She pads off into the living room and comes back chanting “Hot tea, hot tea.” She’s found the mugs with the dregs from the night before, and brings them to us one at a time. Hardly spills a drop.

R: Save me. There’s a clown.

J: Scary.

R: Would you take a joke for me, if you had to? Do you love me that much?

Later, on the bus.

J: I heard her say she’s going to a meeting. Maybe it’s the clown’s union.

R: No one will take them seriously dressed like that.

J: “Who are these clowns?”

R: “Get this clown out of my office!”

J: “And take your pie!”

R: “No, leave the pie.”

Together: “Mmm, pie.”

We walk out of Sideways together.

R, triumphant: And that’s why you let ME pick the movie!

J: What? I picked it.

R: You’d never even heard of it till I mentioned it this morning!

J, smug: It’s the movie I would have picked, if I’d known it existed.