There's a bear in there... somewhere.

My friend F is suffering tonight. Her son has lost his teddy. Cue tears, tantrums and complete lack of sleep. I understand the horror. I’ve been through it. To understand the trauma, however, it’s important to understand Mr6’s relationship with Bronte Bear. Mr3 has Alla Hoo Hoo, the imaginary mother of 98 who fights fires, goes to high school, drives trucks, and has done all the things that Mr3 badly wants to be big enough to do. All while wearing high heels (or ‘big shoes’ as he calls them).

Mr6 has Bronte Bear.

A few years ago (when Mr6 was three years old), I wrote a story for Sunday magazine in the Sunday Telegraph about Bronte’s trip to the Sydney Doll Hospital to have reconstructive surgery on her face (the pic, left, is her in Belgium, pre-surgery). This is how I described her:

“Bronte Bear has been a fixture in my son’s life since birth. Over three years, the relationship has developed into a full-blown love affair. The obsessive kind that poets write sonnets about. He goes nowhere without her, can’t sleep without her and worries if he thinks she is too cold/hot/tired/bored. (You haven’t lived until you’ve been informed that you need to come up with a new plan for the day because a teddy doesn’t find the current activity exciting.)

Bronte is a bear with personality plus. She has her own voice (a squeakier, infinitely more irritating version of his), her own favourite colour (pink), her own special seat in the pram at his feet, even her own passport. Yes, passport. Made by a loving – some might say insane – mother to help her son prepare for an overseas holiday, and stamped by bemused passport-control people around the world.”

Bronte’s hospital visit cost me six weeks of sleep and $200. For a bear that initially cost around $14. For a bear that was exactly the same as two other bears in his collection except for one thing – they weren’t Bronte. (They became known as Bronte Bear’s Sisters and Mr3 now occasionally takes one to bed. Loose, that Bear family.)

Some months after Bronte returned from hospital, she went missing. We had been out strolling around the bike path near our home in the Big Smoke and she’d fallen from the pram. A fact that remained unnoticed until two hours later when it was time for bed. It was summer, but the light was fading fast as The Builder hopped on his trusty, rusty old bike, complete with rapidly flattening tyres, and embarked upon a rescue mission. Faced with screaming pre-schooler and a sleepless night ahead, I could do nothing but pray.

He came back empty-handed. Four hours later, the tear-stained, sodden scrap of misery that was Mr6 (then three – must keep reminding you of this, in case you think he’s, um, immature) finally fell asleep and The Builder and I set about hatching a plan. First, we prepared a ‘Have you seen This Bear?” poster, full-colour, bright red headline, appealing Bronte picture and all. Then, we planned the route upon which we would distribute our posters, working through his collection of gaffer tapes to work out which would have the best hold.

Early the next morning, Mr3 (then a newborn) and I dropped a still-wailing pre-schooler off and set off on our mission. I followed our loop of the previous evening, dotting posters on every available space, eyes glued to the ground for a glimpse of manky brown fur. Nothing. As we got closer and closer to home, my despair grew, my gaze never leaving the path and its environs for a second. Surely she couldn’t have gone too far from the path?

It was sheer coincidence that, passing the park shaped like a pirate ship, I happened to look up. I’m still not sure what caught my eye – a bird? a plane overhead (highly likely in our inner-west location)? Superman? Whatever it was, I still thank my lucky stars for it. For there she was, dangling from a branch.

And it was then that I remembered one of the main Commandments of parenting in the inner city – if you find something on the ground – a hat, a shirt, a bear – thou shalt put it on a fence post or gate, out of the way of marauding pets and humans, and at eye-height for a harried mum to spot on her way home.

Someone – another mum, I’d like to bet – had hung Bronte high, out of the way of passing traffic. You only had to look at her to know she was a much-loved bear, and someone had recognised that fact. I was so excited I rang The Builder on the spot, high on excitement. “I found her! I found her!”

His relief was palpable. Then he suggested I retrace my steps back around the path, taking down all the posters so that we didn’t get any ‘weird’ phone calls. It was a busy morning.

So Bronte is still with us. He sleeps with her each night, dresses her up as a Jedi knight when the mood takes him, and still holds long-and-involved conversations with her. Unfortunately, her voice is not getting any less irritating as she ages.

Admittedly the relationship is not as intense as it once was. These days they’re more like a married couple, reading each other’s minds, relaxed in each other’s company, happy to lie on the sofa and watch television.

I confess I’m relieved. I hope that she will one day be a faithful memory of his childhood, tucked on a shelf, becoming less and less relevant. He's growing up and away from her. That's healthy.

But I’ll never be able to let her go. Even after he leaves home, there’ll be room here for Bronte. To me, she is a symbol of his childhood and I want to keep her with me forever. Just as long as she’s quiet.

Giving the green light to smugness

When you live in the country, there are few opportunities for smugness. In fact, there are just three main areas in which you might manage any form of superiority:

Lovely scenery

Lovely fresh air

Lovely lack of traffic.

It used to be that you could boast of your vegie patch and your chicken coop as well, but every cool inner-city address with so much as a courtyard seems to have those these days, so our opportunities for smugness are fewer.

When they arise, though, they are sublime.

Take today. Fam Fibro all hopped in our new (to us) car to drive Oma (The Builder’s Mum) back to Sydney. She’d come down from The Big Smoke for a few days R&R from her hectic retirement village schedule, and we’d whizzed her around the local wine festival for a spot of tasting and fresh air, and a look at our lovely scenery.

The drive out of Fibrotown was sluggish. The early risers of the tourist brigade had packed up their holiday houses and camp sites at the crack of dawn to ‘beat the traffic’ home, becoming the traffic in the process.

As we crossed the bridge out of town, The Builder and I indulged in some healthy debate about whether tourists are best to get up early on a public holiday Monday and ensure one is home in time to iron the school uniforms, or if one should stay and suck the marrow from the last day of glorious sunshine before leaving for home, after dark and after most of the traffic. (I will leave you to decide who was on which side of this particular conversation, as well as just how much time we spent on it.)

So we deposited Oma at home and then headed inner-West to our old stamping ground, just for old times sake. On the way, we discussed lunch options. And it was wonderful to have such a l-o-o-ong conversation about those options. To have so many options was almost overwhelming. Almost. We managed.

We parked our car and walked through a sun-filled park in which cool people dressed in cool clothes lazed coolly about on blankets, reading (Proust no doubt) and talking (world peace, of course). On the main street, the buzz in the air was palpable. I kept tight grip on both my boys’ hands, mostly to ensure they didn’t get stepped on. We visited one of my favourite bookshops in the world, where Mr6 found a Star Wars book with moving pictures. Could the day get any better?

I’m here to tell you that it did.

On our way home, breezing down the almost empty freeway, away from the bright lights of the city, towards the brighter lights twinkling across a big, dark sky, we passed a line of traffic that stretched for miles and miles. Stop, start, stop, start. For miles and miles and miles.

That moment, when you are on the other side of the road, heading away from that traffic, away from the chaos and confusion, and hours of stop/start, is the moment of ultimate smugness.

Fortunately, we get to live that small thrill every night of the week. Traffic reports shown at around 5.50pm each night on the news show the helicopter view of normal city traffic. And every night I stare at the neverending snakes of stationery headlights clogging the city’s main arterial roads and think: “Geez, I’m glad I’m not sitting in that.”

Every single night.

All at sea without subtitles

It appears my days of speaking fluent Danish are in danger of ending. So too my abilities in Chinese, Swedish, German, French and, er, Scottish. I will be unilingual again – albeit unilingual with a disconcerting habit of mimicking Irish accents (but who doesn’t?) and throwing in the occasional ‘Ciao’ or ‘Bonjour’ just to show I’ve, you know, been around.

SBS, SBS, how could you abandon me?

(For those who have no idea what I’m on about, SBS is the fifth-most-popular television network in Australia. It’s the most ‘multicultural’ one and the one most likely to be broadcasting boobs after 10pm on a Friday night. It’s also, I’m told on good authority, on the verge of losing its ‘fifth-most-popular’ title to GO!, a channel that seems to exist to run reruns of The Flintstones.)

Anyhoo…

As reported in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald, the 30 or so sub-titlers still employed by SBS TV are to be cut down to 20 – with the threat of further redundancies in the future. According to the article, by Cathy Carey who has worked as a subtitler for SBS TV in the past, the subtitling unit at the station has produced “arguably the world’s finest subtitles” since it began in the 1980s.

I must agree that they are good. To the point where if I watched a two-hour block – such as last Wednesday when I stayed up for the finale of the Danish crime saga The Killing – I was so immersed by the end of the show that I fully expected to turn to The Builder and bid him good night in Danish.

I was there. I was hearing those words and those subtitles were almost unnoticeable – like a good ventriloquist not moving his lips. It was only when I closed my eyes for a moment (just resting…) that I realised that I actually couldn’t understand a word and I’d best start reading again or become lost in the mire of politics and rain.

But it seems our days together are numbered. The station is going more ‘mainstream’ and showing stuff like Big Love instead of obscure Lebanese soap operas. They’re planning, according to Carey, to buy in content that’s already subtitled – presumably to a lesser standard, seeing as SBS is already leading the world. In short, outsourcing their foreign language expertise into offshore hands. I feel as though I should be in the streets protesting - holding up very large placards that spell out exactly what I'm on about.

In the meantime, I’m just hoping against hope that they hold onto the guy who subtitles Trawlermen. I’ve got no chance with those accents without him – even with my eyes open.

What did you talk about this week?

It’s that time of the week when I share some of the wide variety of topics of conversation that came up through work or play in the course of life in a pink fibro. This week, it's been all about the weather. Specifically, how cold it's been. Though we did manage to fit in some other stuff...

Tax, pay TV, slow cookers, red wine, white wine, how we need more wine, warranty forms, asthma, insurance claims, redheads, Tangle, Ninja grading, moisturisers, agents, revising, miscommunication, magazines, blog stats, sisters, travel sickness tablets, fundraising, writing, waiting, new sheets, physiotherapy, reversing sensors, writing letters, community outrage, walking, irregular heart beat, weight loss, cruising, technology, Luna Park, Christmas cards, saving money, mid-week slump, and how pupil-free days were not invented by a parent.

Stone cold poetry at the Dry Cleaners

Was it only weeks ago that I was blithely regaling overseas friends with tales of our never-ending Indian Summer? Oh, how the warm have fallen. Winter arrived on cue, with biting breath and blatant disregard for the fact that Autumn had missed the party.

It’s cold.

Very cold.

Not sub-freezing or anything and very unimpressive to anyone who’s just emerged from a Northern Hemisphere winter, but still. The shock of going from long, warm days in the low 20s to short, cold days in the low teens is much greater when you don’t get a mellow period in between.

Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. It’s not that we’re not a hardy lot, nosirree. Just fortunate.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was blown through the drycleaner’s front door this morning to discover him standing there – right in front of the freezing blast – wearing a singlet. Not a wife-beater or anything, but a tank top nonetheless. I tried not to say anything. Chances were he’d heard a lot of ‘goodness me, you must be crazy cold’ in the hour since he’d opened. So I tried. I really did.

But I couldn’t help myself.

“Goodness me, aren’t you cold?” says I, throwing out the line that won me ‘wittiest opening gambit’ at the last Small Talk awards.

“I’m from New Zealand,” he answered, as though that said it all.

Mr3, resplendent in the corduroy jacket known by Fam. Fibro as ‘The Furry Bear’ because that’s what every child who wears it looks like, peered out from behind his pram’s plastic windbreak, removed the scarf from the bottom half of his face, and looked up into the man’s face with a raised eyebrow.

It was enough to provoke a further response.

“I had a paper run when I was a kid,” said the meaty, blokey drycleaner, directly to Mr3. “I would go out in the morning and the frost would crunch under my feet. I used to love watching my breath blowing hot into the cold. The air smelt so new and fresh…”

He turned his attention back to me.

“Nothing has ever felt cold since.”

Mr3 nodded. I nodded.

Poetry at the Dry Cleaners. True story.

{image: www.allposters.com}

I'm in training for something big

They say that self-awareness is a gift visited upon those whose time has past. Actually, I just made that up, but it suits how I’m feeling right now. I made a discovery last night. Not so much a discovery as an awful realisation.

I am a Letter Writer. You’re probably wondering how this important point escaped me for 41 years, but clearly Denial is a land I visit often.

But, first, to set the scene (or introduce the backstory as writerly types like to put it).

I was driving up my street yesterday morning when I came upon the very corner where Mr3 and I kicked off the Emergency Services party a few weeks back. Imagine my horror when I found two cars in almost exactly the same position as my (now gone-to-God) Camry and the other big white thing. Another accident. Same place, almost exactly the same time.

As the image gelled in my mind, I remembered a conversation I’d had with my friend L who lives right near that corner. I told her I’d had my accident, she said ‘you’re the second one this week’. Three accidents in three weeks. Outrage!

So I went home and did what any outraged individual would do in the circumstances. I wrote a Letter to the Council. And even as I was doing it – using words such as ‘innocent toddler’ and ‘upset seniors’ (contributions of The Builder, I might add) – I realised that I was peaking early.

In the 18 months I’ve been in Fibrotown, I’ve written four letters. Two to Council, two to the local paper. Four.

Then I thought back a bit. Even in my years in the Big Smoke I had a tendency to whip out the prose at the slightest hint of trouble. I can think of at least three separate occasions where I shot off lengthy tirades to that local Council.

It was then that I realised. I need to stop poking gentle fun at the letters pages of the local paper – in 20 years time there is a very good chance that I will be its single biggest contributor.

Heck. Twenty years? With four in 18 months, I’m clearly in training at elite level already.

If only they gave gold medals for skills like that.

PS: I know that is a huge picture of pencils. But I just love them. They're by Kylie Johnson at Paper Boat Press, available from local gal Lisa Madigan's e-store.

{image: Lisa Madigan}