Grand Daughter

I know it's been a while since I posted, and I'm sorry about that, well, sort of, but I've been away: on the West Island. Sydney is a beautiful city, especially at this time of year, what with the flowers and birds and harbour and lack of heat and everything, but the real reason for nipping over there was not the prospect of time in one of the world's great cities. It was rather, the company of someone I had never met before, yet who has as strong a call on my time and affections as anyone else on the planet: my new grand daughter, Naomi.

Clemency and I were only gone a week, but somehow it felt like a month and for all the right reasons. For the first time in a year or more I felt I could let go of my role and forget about emails and just be. We stayed in the Australian club, which was very nice in a buttoned leather, chandelier, stripy wallpaper, tasteful paintings on the wall kind of way. They let me in, no doubt much against their better judgement, because I am a member of an affiliated club here in Dunedin. It was a pleasant ten minute walk from Nick's apartment, and within a few yards of the botanic gardens and art gallery and downtown, so it was all quite convenient and lovely. We did the usual sort of stuff, wandered about taking photos of things, rode the ferry to Manly, had picnics and held our baby. Which was also all quite convenient and lovely.

Naomi has sharp, intelligent eyes whose shape echoes her mother's Asian heritage and whose colour echoes her father's Celtic one. She has a well defined rosebud mouth, pale skin and auburn hair and her mother's fine, long, beautiful hands. She is set, in other words, to capture quite a few hearts in a couple of decades time as she has already done to her grand fathers' and yes I have put the apostrophe in the right place. She is growing up in the middle of a multi generational family; amongst people who will give her a gift beyond reckoning: the certain knowledge that she is loved.

I did my bit. I held her and talked to her and reacquainted myself with the duty of changing soiled nappies. And for a brief time, perhaps a quarter of an hour, I was rewarded with an amazing treasure: she looked at me and smiled and wordlessly enquired who I was. It is an affirming thing to be seen and known, but especially by someone so utterly undefended and pure.

I came home via Hamilton where I was scheduled to speak at the Waikato Diocesan synod dinner, and it seemed I had been away for months. I flew back into a sunny and crisp and green Otago feeling somehow older and bigger and more in tune with my context. It's amazing the way the world can shift in just one glance.

Comments

Anonymous said…

You're a lucky guy!

every blessing to the doting grandparents.

Brian

20 October 2011 at 19:11

Elaine Dent said…

What grace!

23 October 2011 at 04:23

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Return to Middle Earth

We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night. My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old

Available Light

Search This Blog