Xmas Day

I woke up in a pool of sweat at 4am. My pillow and my tshirt were dripping. It was one of those hot still nights, the late night cool only started to blow around 5am. I got up and changed my tshirt, but I had to put on a light to find my favourite, worst tshirt. In the dark of the lounge, who cares what I wear? Sam hissed from the dark "Why are you getting up so early."
"Dunno, just because."
I scratch my arse.

I had a piss. The light was just beginning to break beyond the clouds. I gazed out the window. I looked back at the bed. I felt more awake than sleepy, I could feel that. A quick mental calculation. This is what happens when you go to bed at 10.30pm, I think. 7 hours sleep, I’d had 7 hours sleep. They say that is the optimal amount of sleep. Or the optimal number of hours… 7 hours.

I make coffee, open the doors and windows. Smoke two joints.

The back door blows shut, as this back door always does. By the time I opened it again, Buddy was laying out tummy down on the cool paving. He saunters in at 5.30am, but he wants to go to the big bed straight away. And twinkle toes disappears fairly smartly. I find him at the bottom of the stairs. I stand next to him and he looks up at me with his big brown eyes. I say, “Come on.” And he motors up those stairs, all paw drive, immediately. What he lacks in stature, he makes up for in strength. Sam hissed about being woken up again, but then Buddy jumps on to the bed, and Sam is instantly distracted by him.

6am and I make another coffee.

I was going to wrap Xmas presents, but I couldn’t find the good sticky tape. When I think such things I wonder if I am turning into my mother? I laugh to myself. The magic tape, I knew what I meant.

The air was cool as I sat bare-legged in the lounge room. I edited my photos. I have to go through them. I often take 3 shots of the same image. I culled out as many as I can, all of those exactly the same shots. And all the dud ones, of course. The truth to digital photography is to take many shots, but edit hard and only keep the one true image in the end.

At 7.30am, I decide to go and get some milk. Sam commandeers my milk run to a run for Buddy in the park on the way to Woollies.

We’re back at 8.30am.

We all make a pact that we are to leave the house by 11am, to drive to Jane’s for Xmas lunch.

Mark is bemused by our present of Rosie Batty’s life story. “Oh yes, very clever,” he says. A wry smile appears on his face.

We gave Luke, The Book of He. Funny, Mark read that and giggled through out.

We leave by 11.45am.

The Geelong Road comes to a stand still twice, three times on the way down to Torquay, that is how busy it was. Two of those occasions, it was just because road works signs had been left out by the sides of the road and Muggins and Mrs Muggins live their lives in such 21st Century abject fear that they slow down automatically, we’re in danger of becoming glass half empty kind of civilisations. We are no longer the free sprits who speed on through. “Ha ha, ho ho, it’s Xmas day.”

We fill the car up with juice. We switch the airconditioning to high and motor on down to the coast.

It is really hot. There have been rumours of bushfires at Wye River. I feel a kinship as we had a beach house there once. That is confirmed when we get to Jane’s. A tripled front weatherboard, kind of funky, kind of old. Huge block, so I was mentally renovating from the first moment I stepped out into the desolate back yard, baked momentarily in the sun while I positioned the picnic chair into the meagre shade and lit a smoke.

(brother) Will called as we were driving down. I called him back. He told me that there is a meeting of all the cousins on Sunday 03rd January, we’re all going. Everybody will be there. It is probably some catholic wake by stealth, you know how tricky the Xtian’s are. There could be singing and praying. Ha ha. So, that is something to look forward to. (raised eyebrows) Oh, I am such a hermit now a days, even the thought of such large gatherings brings me out in a touch of the agoraphobia’s.

Luke rolled joints before we left, we smoked one. Outside in the baking sun.

The lounge room was airconditioned, so the first thing we did was to insist that we ate at the dinning room table. It didn’t seem logical but it did, at least, seem neat. However, lunch was grand, plentiful, delicious, fun. Sucking on whole roast garlic. Jay had blue hair throughout.

We watched Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother, after dinner. We laughed.

I think it is the first time I have thought, Jane bares a striking resemblance to Demi Moore. I’ve never thought that before.

Julien arrived back from Melbourne and Xmas lunch with his sister Kym. Toorak, Faulkner Park, something of that combination. It was good to see him. He seems great. Good old Jules.

We laughed. We smoked another joint. Julien smoked too. Welcome back. The sun burned every time we stepped out into it.

Fen wasn’t mentioned once, even if there were a couple of obvious huddles between Mark and Jane to which I wasn’t privy.
Jane has shut her brother completely out of her life. She doesn't feel as though she can trust him. She lives with a huge dog and does her self defence classes regularly, because of him, because of her brother. Fen has never met Jay and Jay is now 12 years old.

Jules and Jane were going down to the beach for a drumming ceremony, no doubt a part of some vegan hippie cooperative Jane is a part off now, at which point we bid our adieu.

It was hot driving home. The Geelong Road was packed with cars, but at least it kept flowing. There was just one trouble spots when a gaggle of black 4WDs gathered together driving at 98 kilometres an hour back to their MacMasions at Point Cook, or Mill Park. They just seemed to gather, taking up all the lanes together, all three lanes. Black Sante Fe, Black X5, turquoise X3, a charcoal grey Q7, a charcoal grey Toureg, silver Mercedes ML. The bitch (I’m sorry, she was. She had bleach blond hair and she talked on her phone the whole way through oblivious to anything that was going on around her) in the turquoise X3 would never get out of the right lane whilst doggedly sticking to 98 kph. The Indian in the spotless white Camry was guilty of the same crime. All the other urban assault vehicles just gathered for a time around these main perpetrators of road etiquette crime. 

A black G Class following me, in my GTI, snaking our way through the conglomeration together. We finally broke free of them. I felt camaraderie. He sped off into the distance, his V8 roaring, his twin tail pipes smoking, like any frustrated AMG G Class driver would, once we made it clear.

Mid point there was road works 80 kph signs for a considerable length of time, 20 kilometres, or so, maybe more. And while the rest of us slowed down to 80, the Indian in the gleaming white Camry and the bitch in the turquoise X3, still chatting away on her phone, caught up just enough, to gathered with us again, you know, just in front of us, when we wanted to return to 100 kph.

Grrrr!

We all accelerated away from them again.

We were home by the evening, 6, or 7. I was asleep on the couch by 10.30pm. I remember, vaguely, Sam waking me repeatedly until I got cross with him. (He reminded me in the morning) I don’t remember anything after that.