Bugging out
Time, and patience, are in short supply
“This goes out to everyone who loves Borscht,” said the guitarist in the klezmer band, to modest cheering across the Polish market. Then the accordionist struck up, the double bassist started to whump, and they sang us a song about soup.
What a jolly way to spend a Saturday! Somehow Wellington had turned on a blinder of a day after weeks of lumpy cloud, spring gales, and rain. The temperature inched up to eighteen, nineteen, twenty degrees, the sky was an outrageous blue, and apart from the inflatable sound shell bobbing crazily every time there was a gust, the wind behaved.
It wasn’t a large market — barely a block, on a narrow street beside the Dom Polski community centre — but there was that Wellingtonian determination underneath it all, to have a good time while the weather lasted. The beer tent was doing brisk trade. So was the grill selling pork belly lollipops. There were glossy loaves of plaited bread, jars of fermented vegetables, and girls in embroidered Slavic dresses and floral headpieces, trailing ribbons.
“You look amazing,” I told one, as she walked by.
“Thenks,” she replied, in flat, New Zealand vowels.
It’s not easy being coeliac in Poland. I couldn’t drink the beer, eat the bread, sink my fangs into the pierogi dumplings or the powdered doughnuts. I bought some of those anyhow and stuffed them in my bag, then stood at a leaning table with nothing on it, as the people around me swigged lager and ate brats in buns. But my husband arrived with a large beaker of homemade lemonade (a traditional thing, apparently, in Poland!) jostling with ice and lemon quarters, jabbed with a red-and-white straw. It was the most refreshing drink I’ve had in forever.
This is the Wellington I signed up for, it made me think. The one that can still surprise me.
Later we went up the cement stairwell to the Polish centre, and it was the most darling place: wood-panelled and 1920s-style, with an intimate, low-ceilinged stage. This had little glass windows built into its floor for spotlights. There was a faux-fir Christmas tree, trimmed only with white lights, and faded photos of earlier Polish New Zealanders on the walls. More stalls were set up here — one selling dried spicy meats hung on rails, and one with cake domes full of pastries.
We drove home with a $10 wicket set we found at the nearby Salvation Army. This had been our first daytime date in years. It’s legal, now, to leave our kids to fend for themselves, as Maddie has turned fourteen. Freedom tastes weird, and I barely knew what to do with it. We couldn’t shake them off, these thoughts of the children. The wicket set was for them, and so were the doughnuts. The boring truth is that the market would have been even better if they’d come with us.
George is still 12, but the signs are there. He’s getting restless at his little country school, and ready to move on. He won’t have long to wait, with barely five weeks until the year ends. He’s already drafting his farewell speech for the full school hui in December and has tested a couple of sections out on us.
“I don’t think you can reference Breaking Bad in front of this audience,” I tried to reason with him, to huffs of impatience. “I mean, some of them are five-year-olds-” I held up my hands to stop him interrupting, “even if it is prestige television.”
Lately he’s been cross about small things. “When a bug flies into the classroom,” he said this week in the car, “There’s always one kid who has to stand over it shouting, DON’T KILL IT!” He sighed with annoyance and sank into his own thoughts.
I know he’s ready to move on, but I’ll be a mess when his schooling there ends. You can fit the entire community into half a room. I saw this for myself last week when all the kids, a fair share of parents and the whole teaching staff came together for a school assembly. George was performing Bon Jovi’s Dead or Alive on guitar and I sat in the back and tried not to whoop. There were maybe four rows of children cross-legged on the floor and that was every one of them, present and accounted for. Everybody knows everybody else’s names. There were three cheers every five minutes. Year Ones mingle delightedly with the Year Eights, mainly to the detriment of both parties. Kids are free to be themselves in ways we never could in the eighties. I could weep at the sweetness of it all, I truly could.
And I will.
Time ploughs on, though, like a prow through the waves. A nearby home has gone up for sale, after the dear elderly man who’d lived there since the twenties passed away. The realtor asked to put a For Sale sign in our shrubbery, as his home is along the lane from ours.
Strawberries and asparagus have appeared in the shops; the Halloween sweets have given way to mince pies, Christmas puddings and, in the most glamorous supermarket in the city, panforte. It’s time, if you’re inclined, to order your Christmas ham or salmon. The cherry flowers have been blown from the trees and litter the pavements, browning into nothing. But there are big, purple buttons of wildflowers in the paddocks, gerberas growing along median strips, and the dunes near Mum’s place are waving with yellow daisies among the marram grass.
Halloween, by the way, was the usual mayhem. A neighbour down the block, who has a clicking device, counted 1,976 kids on her doorstep this year, asking for a lolly. This is up 136 on the year before. I was six deep in trick or treaters at one point; I felt what it must be like to be an ice-cream, swarmed by wasps.
We gave away 16 kilos of lollipops and Fruit Bursts and were relieved to shut up shop at half-past six. George was satisfied with his costume – he went as a Louvre jewel thief and posed for many selfies. But Maddie has outgrown Halloween, once her favourite party of the year. She’s moved on to Christmas, and last night we scrolled through novelty decorations for theme ideas.
I’m disgusted to report that tree decorations have gone to the toilets and snorted some lines. Gone are the shiny baubles, nutcracker soldiers and gingerbread houses that have satisfied us for generations. This year you can hang up tiny festive bottles of ketchup to mark the holiest day of the Christian calendar, or perhaps sushi trays, martinis, Nintendo consoles and pizza slices. The real joke is that these cost $15 each. Fifteen bucks a time, to flatten Christmas into even more of a consumerist nightmare! If I come round to yours and your tree is hung all over with miniature take-out coffee cups, I’ll be ringing the authorities from your bathroom. Then I’m deleting my number from your phone.
I’m allowing this one, though. Broccoli, after all, is a cruciferous vegetable.
We’re at the point in this family where I’ve become an embarrassment to my children. I’m told not to talk so much to strangers, often referred to in this country as “randoms”. But talking to randoms gives me life. Talking to randoms might, in fact, be my entire personality.
Did you know that if you sing along to an annoying and repetitive Christmas song, it drains it of its ability to bother you, because you’re stripping it of significance and devaluing it into any other playlisted song? That way you don’t go bananas by mid-November. I learned this from a supermarket cashier.
And that if you check the pockets of a business suit, chances are there’ll be a bag of coke in there? I learned this from a dry-cleaning professional.
When seagulls circle over Karori, apparently there’s storm out to sea. I wouldn’t have noticed them before or given any thought to offshore atmospheric conditions. We don’t have the Shipping Forecast in New Zealand, so seabirds have to do. But that was a chance remark from a lady on the street. I don’t care if she’s wrong! I love the idea of this!
But I have to reign it in. I can’t go on the way I do, or my kids will have kittens, or maybe a cow. Tell Tom, Dick and Harry it was fun while it lasted, but I can’t yick-yack on corners or over counters any longer. It must go the way of childish things, because time whumps merrily along.
Stick to your guns, parents have a right and responsibility to embarrass their teenagers. And the seagull weather indicator is a thing for sure.
Great post!
Please let out your whoops. If years of prizegivings have taught me anything, the teenager secretly loves it. Ditto to chatting to “randoms”, an underrated life skill which needs to be passed down, in my humble opinion. Brilliant writing as always, Leah xx