Weird and Wonderful

20th June 2011 Monday

Saturday - At the Fair

While my husband talks to twenty people about Making Friends with Money in the Performance Tent, I sit behind a table, draped with a white sheet, and watch the faces of the people passing by as they catch sight of my husband’s weird and wonderful clay models arranged on the table. They all stop, they all smile. The children point at the duck with the cigarette, the man with the seven heads, the dragon with the golden toes, the woman with the six claws. If they catch my eye we talk about these creatures. They say things like,

‘They are mythic, wonderful, childlike, imaginative, creative.’

One woman says ‘I love them. I would buy four of them if I had the money’.

What I see is that people like difference and humour and quirkiness and what I call weird. I see that I have been wrong about my husband’s ceramics. He knows I love some of them and don’t like some of them. And the ones I don’t like I don’t want all over the house.

But maybe what I don’t like is that he can let people see his weirdness, his shining light - but I’m still hiding mine.

Sunday - Father’s Day

My father, my sister and I sit at the polished round table in his room. We have laid out his favourite tea - triangular sandwiches of roast beef, smoked mackerel pate,egg mayonnaise, and also cheese straws and a bowl of salad. Bananas and nuts for afterwards.

He says he didn’t sleep well last night. He was worrying that he couldn’t find a letter someone sent him about an organisation which supports the victims of torture. He wants his interfaith group and his church to know about it and to donate money. We can’t find it either and suggest Amnesty instead.

This is what keeps him awake at night. And keeps him going. Believing he can still make a difference at age ninety one. Which he does and not only to people all over the world. But also and especially to me.

Monday - Today

I’m learning that if I wake up early and don’t get up then the demons start their raucous screeching in my head and my day is stained with their ‘what ifs?’

Better to go downstairs and squeeze lemon juice into a cup of hot water, and stroke the pussy cat whose coat smells of early dawn and damp earth Better to watch the blackbird dodging into the honeysuckle hedge with a worm in her beak. And imagine those tiny featherless babies safe for now in their twig nest. Better to think about the froth topped coffee I will have with a dear friend later in town. One sweet moment at a time.