The door to my woodheap squeaked at my touch…
“How did you know that I feel just like that too?” I asked with feeling, recalling that my none-too-well-oiled hip joints and knees had been daily voicing similar complaints as I have plodded, with the ever-shortening strides of age, in pursuit of Rosie and Yogi, my equally aged Border Terriers, in our quiet isolation along the beach.
The door kept its opinions to itself.
Then, realising that I was chatting – again – to an inanimate object, I pulled myself up short!
Recognising that I had talked to a door, I re-set.
“It’s odd, this self-absorbed, internalised conversation.” I muttered to the dogs, “Tell me, little friends of all the world … why do I increasingly find myself talking to walls, to doors, and to you as I dive ever deeper into the isolation of this lock-down?”
Realising that I was ‘at it’ again, Rosie’s head almost twisted upside down as she gave a very serviceable mimic of Regan’s head in The Exorcist. She looked, for a moment, to be vaguely interested and about to articulate a response … then clearly chose to hold her council.
Meanwhile, Yogi passed wind – it’s his age, I thought, as I held my nose – then, turning three of four complete circles, he settled again in exactly the same position from which he had started, but, and as is Yogi’s wont, he said nothing.
“Am I losing it?” I anxiously questioned as I stoked the fire. “I wonder if my fellow-traveller isolates in Aireys, Anglesea, Wye River and Torquay are chatting as animatedly to their inanimate accoutrements as I am?”
The coals glimmered in a friendly fashion, the red gum spat, then jettisoned a spark or two that snuffled, then died on my new woollen rug. My source of winter warmth demurred … the fire made no further comment.
“Do the young also self-converse?” I asked the mirror on the wall.
In contrast to its shameless spoiling of my family young with ‘you are the fairest of them all’ flattery, my mirror simply gazed ruminatively back, a myriad lines creasing its honest face into shaded rifts and craterous valleys, and in reflective resignation, held its opinion to itself.
I put the same question about ‘me, and ‘loss’, and ‘it’ to the kettle, but the kettle simply shone a radiant smile, mustered an attack of the vapours, whistled gaily, then fell silent as its auto-switch flicked to ‘off’.
The fridge hummed tunelessly, giving me the cold shoulder. Feeling a trifle peeved, I fired back “and who asked you?” … but it just hummed on, feigning total disdain.
Finally, and channelling my best William Ernest Henley ‘bloodied but unbowed’ impersonation from Invictus, I turned to Google – as most now tend to do when all else fails.
The result? … a gold mine … a treasure trove of like-thinking, mostly aging adults similarly engaging their analytical, methodical left brains in an endless argument with their creative, intuitive, right brain selves. The lock-down, even if socially distancing, appears to have been, if nothing else, ‘self-engaging’.
A plethora of works of art from the artful and artless alike; reams of copy-paper sacrificed to self-published libraries of literary licence – some worthy of another look – most not; an epic profusion of free-form and rhyming poetry; endless novels that ‘have always been in there’ and have simply awaited an isolation key to escape; cottage industry creations from driftwood sculpture to knitted bonnets [and masks!] … an explosion of individual creativity second to none.
Perhaps a new idiom will emerge: Isolate a retiree? Gestate a wannabe!
I, too, have found myself swept up in this explosion of creativity. I have written a novella … for a Higgs Boson of a moment, I [almost erotically] dreamed of the Man Booker short-list until grounded by a trite [but fair] review that suggested Mills and Boon.
I have turned my mind to regaling the unsuspecting – you – with editorial comment [in the Surfcoast Times] and monthly feature articles [in the Lorne Independent].
I have written book chapters for medical texts, reviews and commentary for the dialysis literature … …
All this has brought me to wonder … what other bursts of creativity, what other right over left brain dominance has gestated from others along the surf coast.
How might we quantify this? … for I am sure it has happened. How might we collate this … record this?
The P- 12 Lorne College VCAL students have developed a project … the Tales of a Local Lockdown [T.A.L.L] project … that seeks to capture some of these activities. With Surfcoast support, their project might become the very vehicle to draw these threads together. If you haven’t yet bared your ‘isolate’ goings-on to their project, please do … just visit https://locallockdown.weebly.com/
Meantime, as I chat happily in splendid isolation with the inanimate occupants of my isolate, I continue to ask …
“Who dropped that?” [the 50th drop to the floor for the day]!
“How did you manage to move from here to there?” [my glasses]!
“Why didn’t you warn me I was talking to myself?” [the dogs]!
Ah … the tricks that isolation plays!
Today, I bought oil. Now, at the least, the woodheap doors have fallen blissfully silent.
John Agar
