Dust
Friday, 24 August, 2007
It feels so long since Sunday. This week I was supposed to be working on a Guidebook for Life on Faith. Instead, I did lots of Briefing things, wrote a rather lengthy CHN, finished off the Pathway Bible Guide for Proverbs once and for all and went to editorial staff conference up at The Collaroy Centre for Tuesday and Wednesday. I was picking up Gordon on the Tuesday morning and I was a bit nervous about driving somewhere new but he knew the way. Unfortunately, because of traffic, we were quite late. (Blame Simon; he told me that an hour would be heaps of time!)
Editorial staff conference felt even quicker than last year. We opened with Hebrews 3-4 and then spent the rest of the time looking at how we'd gone in the past 12-24 months, what our publishing priorities are, what we'd like to do, where the gaps are, and what sort of criteria we'd use to evaluate manuscripts that came in when thinking about how they'd fit into our publishing priorities. This year, being my third editorial conference, I felt a bit more publishing-savvy but I still spent most of the time just listening to other people talk. I expected to be frustrated by the fact that there's so much we could be doing (as Craig's readers keep reminding us) but only a finite amount of time in which to do it, but I think I've come to accept that that's the way things are.
This is the view from our dining room:
Once again, the day-long meeting was broken up with much eating: morning tea, lunch (and during the afternoon, I did some Pilates for the first time in a very long while, and read Love Ella; the others played tennis and I don't do tennis), afternoon tea, dinner and then supper. While the meeting was taking place, I worked on this shrug but it was quite tricky. (I've had to pull the whole thing out twice because I keep accidentally dropping stitches in between the double pointed needles.)
After supper, it was time for bed. I had a shower, then tried to reach Ben to find out how the Moore College revue went (he was doing stand-up comedy for the first time ever). He said it went okay. (Judith told me afterwards he was the best act of the night.) They had just finished, and apparently lots of people from church had decided to come instead of doing Bible study. They were going out for coffee afterwards so he had to go.
The following morning, after a scrumptious hot breakfast—
—I borrowed Simon's computer to check my email and learned that my grandma, who was 91 (she was born the year of the Russian Revolution—1917!), had died the night before. I had had a feeling that it would be soon; only a few days ago my dad had emailed to tell me she had been coughing and they were worried about her heart. Apparently she had deteroriated a lot during the last couple of years—she couldn't remember stuff or recognise people and she was pretty much bedridden, with three full-time nurses looking after her (they would roll her over and massage her so she wouldn't get bedsores). The last time I saw her was 2002, I think (or it might have been my cousin O'Boon's wedding; I can't remember). My dad had flown us to Hong Kong to celebrate her 85th birthday. (Ben put up the photos online. Please note that none of the indexes work because of that problem with the guy who hacked into our server several years ago.) As she got older, she got edgier about flying, so she never made it to our wedding. When it came to O'Boon's wedding, she was all set to go and then baulked at the very last minute. A relative just happened to be in town, so my dad organised this dinner party at a restaurant in honour of the relative and said to my grandma, “You said you'd go, remember?” So she got dressed up and went, drank a bit of alcohol and got a bit tipsy, and then they went straight from the restaurant to the airport and put her on the plane. And she was fine.
I have a lot of admiration for my grandma. When she was young, she was allowed to listen to the family tutor tutoring her brothers and that gave her a taste for learning. Then her father died and she was older, and she wasn't allowed to have lessons any more. She asked her eldest brother for her dowry and used that to fund her education. She also got a job (not sure what) and worked her way through university, majoring in both Chinese and European history. World War II broke out six months before she was due to graduate, but the university just gave out the degrees anyway. From here it gets fuzzy for me: I know she met my grandfather at some point (who was apparently quite changed by the war—afterwards he became an alcoholic and died in his fifties? sixties? I don't think he fought in it though). I know they went into China. I know they started having kids—my aunt, my uncle (who got polio and was only saved by some westerners who might have been missionaries who just happened to have western medicine on them), my dad and my other uncle. And that's about all I know.
When my parents got married, I don't think she approved of my mum. We always stayed in her little two bedroom flat in Kowloon whenever we'd go to Hong Kong to see her. I don't know if it was her or someone else who bought me my first Hello Kitty soft toy—it might have been; she was always buying me toys. When I was in primary school, my dad would take me and my brother to Hong Kong practically every year. This would always be around Christmas time and it was cold. Sometimes we went into China, and so I got to see the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, beautiful Chinese gardens, lakes of ice with dragonboats, Buddhist temples, and so on and so forth. One time we took the train overnight from the northern part of China to the south. There were no doors on the cabins so you could hear everyone snoring. I couldn't sleep (I was on the top one of the triple bunks) because of that and the tinkling noise that the zippers on the luggage made. My grandma came with us. I remember one night my dad put us to bed in the hotel, and he and my grandma out went out to eat wild game (wolf and venison and rabbit). I remember not liking China very much but China was where I learned to like Chinese tea and fizzy drinks because there was nothing else.
When I came into the meeting room for our first session of the second day, I was, quite understandably, a bit upset. Tony told me to go home and spend time with Ben, but Ben was preaching in chapel and I was in no state to drive. So I sat there for a while and knitted while they continued their meeting. They were talking maths and it was going over my head. I thought, “Charlie from Numb3rs should be here; he could give us a formula to work this sort of thing out”. I left at morning tea and drove home without incident.
I was feeling rather down. Ben came home in the afternoon and we watched television. Then Fish and Judith invited us to Fish's place for pizza. I sort of didn't want to go but went. We watched lots of YouTube stuff because Fish is now doing a YouTube column for his job, then ordered pizza and played with his Wii. We left around 11 because I had to work the next day.
Thursday at work I did lots of Briefing things—reading new stuff and logging it, putting together the material for the next issue, making it comform to our template, compiling the next lot of CHN, starting work on the article that I think is the most problematic of all because it currently exists in PowerPoint form and I have to convert it into complete sentences and paragraphs. I didn't get to that last one until fairly late and then it was time to go home. I meant to go to Marrickville Metro to pick up fruit, veg and meat, but somehow it slipped my mind and I missed the turn off. So instead I went to Borsellino Brothers and bought a lot of stuff, came home and packed it all away. I made Thai curry for dinner with chuck steak (which I had bought before Ben told me he strongly objected to chuck steak and that we should never ever buy it) and we spent the evening watching Law & Order.
Today I stayed home. I had been thinking of going into work because I am ridiculously behind, but I decided that I really needed that three-day break over the weekend to do nothing—stay home and potter around the house—and besides, my grandmother just died. Even though I wasn't heaps close to her (certainly not as close as Ben was to his grandma), it's still weird that I'm never going to see her again. Three years ago, no one I knew had ever died. Now the deaths are coming faster, and I suppose they'll get faster still.
Here's an aside: death is odd when you're a child of divorce. When Ben's grandma died, the whole family gathered together to mourn, and his mum was on the phone for ages, ringing up her friends and Ben's grandma's friends to let them know, making funeral arrangements, receiving flowers from her former co-workers, and cards from others. My grandma died on the other side of the world and the family won't get together for another month. Ben and I will be going to Hong Kong for about five days (not including the plane travel which is nine hours each way). Even then, it's only one side of the family. I thought the following day after I heard the news, “I wonder if my mum knows.” My dad certainly wouldn't have told her; they don't talk. So I rang my mum to let her know. I assumed my brother knew but my mum said he was on holidays somewhere so maybe he got the news late. Then I thought, “Is there anyone else I should be calling?” I called my aunt because this particular aunt on my mum's side would have liked to know. But I didn't know who else to call, and it wasn't a lot of relatives getting together to grieve; it was just me, and the whole thing felt so unreal because I hadn't seen her for five years.
Anyway, I stayed home today. I washed and changed the sheets, vacuumed the floor, wiped half a centrimetre of dust off the piano, made inserts for the church music folders (I got sick of the church music folders; for some reason, the music is always out of order and half falling out because the plastic sheet protectors keep breaking because they're in two-ring binders. So on Monday I bought two white four-ring binders and some plastic dividers with letters on them, and I threw out the sheet protectors that were broken and put new ones in, and updated the list of songs in the front. Yes, I know I have a problem; it's just that I find it extremely maddening every time I have to choose the music, and this will make it a lot easier), I won my first game of Scrabulous ever against Joy, checked email, tried to catch up on blog-reading, went out to post letters (I was going to post this scarf I made using diagonal openwork stitch—
—and an Odessa hat I knitted in lavender cotton with no beads to my friend but realised I didn't have enough for postage) and buy milk, and had dinner with Ben. And now it's almost 8 o'clock. I think I'll go watch some Buffy.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
|
|
Disqus comments
Other comments
Hey
What a big week! I’m so sorry about your grandma. I’ve been thinking a lot about mine; it’s a similar situation, she’s in Kuala Lumpur and deteriorating with age, and it’s been a few years since I’ve seen her. I don’t know if I will see her before she dies. But it’s so weird to think that should wouldn’t be around, even though I hardly see her…
I hope you manage to get lots of rest this weekend. Be kind to yourself.
Love
Bec
Hi Karen - sorry to hear about your grandma. Will pray for comfort for you and family.
I live in Hong Kong… You will like it, go visit Sheung Wan, there’s a nice Hamburger place! Happy someone come to my place.
Will quickly say Hugs for your grandma - it’s still a significant death for you and I totally get the children of divorce reference. Tell me about it! Well, actually, you don’t have to, because I know.
xxxooo