More about Books - and Other Stuff

 

I have been overdosing on books, lately. Rereading old favourites that I have picked up on my Kindle. Paging through others that I read quickly for the plot. I do that – read at my full speed, which is fast, scanning for the action, running my eye past description and detail. Then, when I reread, it is almost as if I have a new book, but one I can put down, if I must, since I know what is going to happen. If there is anything worse, for a reader, than to have to put down a book right at the suspense point, or the denouement, it is hard to imagine. And, if you are a wife and mother and there are meals to get, children to move around and manage, a husband ditto, interruptions at the best part of the book happen all too often Rereading in tranquility, with time to savour the book as a whole, is precious.

 I am about to start a re-read for yet another reason. The ED tells me that there is a book we have not read available in a series by an author that we both love, Guy Gavriel Kay. She HAS the book, in fact, and was planning on finishing it while here so that she could pass it to me. But she went off for a hike instead and did not get it finished. A Good Thing. I now have time to fish up the first two volumes and re-read so that I am current to start hers when she passes it on the next time we are together. Not that she would have had much reading time this weekend, as she and partner moved the daughter into her apartment ready to start her second year at university. Move around and manage time does not stop just because they are grown up. In fact, the YD is about to land home and have a scant few weeks to reorganize her life and get off to a new job in a new city in a new country. I think I get the cats to manage. Luckily, cats mostly let you read, although they do not encourage knitting.

 

Well, most cats let you hold a book. Whether you can use your computer without serious bribery is another kettle of, as they say, catfish. I have a blogging friend whose cat, immortalized in Caturday posts once a week or so, demands things like hand feeding. The YD’s cat resents my iPad. I suspect she thinks my fingers would be far better employed in ear scratches and turning the key on the can opener. However, if you want a cat with personality, Miss G’s elderly sort-of-Siamese is a study. She loves her arthritis medication and slurps it off the eyedropper. Amazing.

 Arthritis medication. Ah yes. I spent a strange half hour on Tuesday having painkillers injected into my neck, shoulders, upper back and left leg. This, I am urged to believe, is a mitigation for my lower back pain. Pain is referred, you see. Numbing the neck will help the back. We shall see. The shots are taking place at a ‘pain clinic’ to which I was referred by a sports medicine doctor to whom I had been referred by a surgeon that my family doctor booked me to see and who (the second one) pronounced my back problem inoperable. So, referrals got me there and we will see if the referred pain locations chosen by the Expert (who is, in fact, an MD) actually work. I was urged to try acupuncture in my ear lobes, also as pain relief. After the puncture, a seed is pasted to the hole left by the needle and the patient then presses the seed into the hole at intervals. Are you still with me?

 That was Tuesday. Today is Wednesday and I have to say that the walking today was easier and I was in less pain overall. Not NO pain. But better. I may have to apologise, if only in my mind, to the doctor who chose the spots to inject. I will have to see how long this effect lasts and if I can get some muscle tone back while exercising and walking are a little more possible. Well, no one promised me that old age was fun.

 And speaking of fun. The shameful, hide from your friends and family kind. I have downloaded a modern version of Lemmings onto my iPad and am playing with it a bit. Well, if honesty serves, I have gone up seven levels and won two eggs. Lemmings is a game in which a line of small idiotic figures

is launched into a maze with traps and it is the player’s job to get them through the traps to a glowing door into which they vanish, crowing with triumph. Or they all go ‘bang’ and die, wailing. I found this game way back when – mid 1990’s I think – and I loved it. It is the only ‘game’ game I have ever played although I play chess and cards with the computer from time to time. I played it obsessively and got all the way to the end of the very top level. Total win. It disappeared, and I sort of forgot about it, and although I did troll through cyberspace from time to time looking for it, I never found a newer version that would load and play the way I remembered. Until last week. It is beautifully crafted. It is also full of updates that you can buy. Of course. And cheapie me will probably resist. But it is as much fun as the old one. And famous. I had no idea. (The link is to a really comprehensive Wikipedia article.)

 The really funny thing is that I played the old one a lot when I was really hampered by a pinched sciatic nerve that prevented me doing much walking. Luckily enough, nothing so far prevents me from reading, thank you, modern medicine’s cataract replacement miracle.

 

On a rainy August Thursday

 

JG’s phone cheeped, and although he missed the call, the alert proved to be a Facetime from the YD, presently on a hiatus from her clamber among the mountains of northern Pakistan, a hiatus that provided her with internet. We caught up and I got a look at the view out of her hotel window. Absolutely amazing, and if I can, I am going to steal it and post it here. Added - nope. The photo I want is on JG's phone. So I will add my favourite - a typical trek shot. 

I chatted, and JG was off to town to have coffee with his Thursday morning group and do the grocery shopping. And somehow, between the call and an interview I found on Facebook, the morning is just about shot. Eight minutes to Thursday afternoon and the laundry is still where I left it yesterday. For all of me, it can stay there. Much more important is my need to report on the the interview, which was with Wendy Quarry of the Merrickville Bridges group and Khatera Saeedi, a daughter and sister of the Afghani families sponsored by Bridges and CARR2 to come here.

 Here is the link to the radio interview, as it tells the start of this saga in detail. But, in summary, a group in Merrickville has managed to support the arrival of part of a family that had to get out of Afghanistan when the Taliban swept in. The matriarch of this family was a judge, and the grown sons and daughters were variously involved in human rights and women’s empowerment, through a radio station and, I believe, legal issues. This made them a prime target of Taliban reprisal. She, a daughter and the daughter’s two children, made it out of the country, sat in limbo while immigration was worked through, and have just arrived here. They had to leave the rest of the extended family behind.

 In the interview I heard, Khatera spoke, beautifully and at length, about the terror her family felt when the Taliban swept into their province. The family members at risk ran for Kabul, hid out there, the matriarch and one daughter with her children managed to get a plane out and ended up, weirdly enough, in Greece. It has taken this long to get them here. She is, she says, amazed at the generosity and friendly gestures of the Bridge group. She repeated the words ‘safe’ and ‘peace’ many times.

 The group, CARR, with which I previously volunteered, put a subgroup (CARR2) back together a few months ago and we are bringing in two more couples, with small children, from this family. From Kabul, they managed the nightmare trek to Pakistan and were admitted there short term. At present, I believe their paperwork is in order and we are waiting for the travel arrangements, which could be provided soon. I seem to have put myself into the mix as an English coach and have volunteered as a driver, because the housing that can be supplied to them is close to where I live. I am also involved, as we all always have to be, in fundraising to support these people until they can find their feet here.

 It is impossible for us, in our gentle life here, our safe and peaceful life, to really feel what these people have had to endure. How can we even imagine being holed up in a stuffy apartment in 40+ degree Celsius heat, in a fairly hostile country, waiting on word from strangers, doing paperwork in a barely understood language, hoping without real understanding of the process, in limbo, totally. No home, no livelihood. I think that the phone is the lifeline, the window on the future, and the suspense must be hellish.

 I worked with several of the Syrian refugees that the first incarnation of CARR brought to Perth. And I learned a lot from those contacts. The acquisition of enough English so that they can manage is so desperately important to them. The stress of trying to learn a new country, work in a strange language, find their feet, is huge. The work ethic of the young men I coached was incredible. Their courage under those stresses was amazing and humbling to see.

 I spent a happy half hour on the Amazon website last evening ordering some beginning materials to take to my fist meeting with this new group. One of the things I learned from the last round is not to waste time.

 And, speaking of time wasting, the laundry is still there.