Second Chances
It’s 7.30am and Spain is playing Argentina in the World Cup final. You’re in pyjamas clutching coffee and your teenager is dressed for school, tie askew, murmuring Spanish responses into his phone. A correct answer earns him a cheerful dinging noise on his learning app.
You watch as Spain dominates in a fast, if frustrating, first half. Messi barely gets a touch; Yamal makes attempt after valiant attempt at goal. Mi hermana es simpática, your son says, enunciating carefully. Ding!
This game takes you back. You spent a sensational weekend early this century in Buenos Aires and, until they showed England the door last week, have always felt kindly towards a country whose national airline seemed unconcerned by passengers smoking at the back of the plane; whose waiters brought skewered hanks of meat to the table and sliced them from a height onto your plate, and where you told a dapper elderly man near La Recoleta cemetery you’d come to see the crypt of Eva Perόn.
“Evita,” he replied pleasantly, “was a bitch.”
A country which, after everything it’s been through, is fanatical about football; for whom winning might matter too much to be entirely healthy, and which seems to believe the end justifies the means. A country forever on the edge of calamity or ecstasy. Spain plays with something closer to joy, although not in this game, which is pure stress from whistle to whistle.
My boyfriend is very kind, your son is saying in perfect Spanish, which startles you into a possible future.
Ding!
You and several Scouts are sitting at your table planning a troop activity for the coming week. You’re calculating quantities with your tongue between your teeth, while the boys talk about things that have nothing to do with the job at hand.
“My Grandad died five years ago,” remarks one Scout, out of nowhere.
“My Grandad died six years ago,” says another Scout.
“I never met my Grandad,” says another. There’s a moment of what feels like respect from the group, before you nudge the fruit bowl his way.
“Have a mandarin,” you say, inadequately.
You’re in a church not far from Karori. You’re collecting your son from his guitar lesson but have arrived a few minutes early.
You linger in the red-brick vestibule, reading the parish notices and browsing a shelf piled with crafted items. A woven basket is crammed with little wooden discs. These are tokens for the Offertory and represent cash (For Those Who Donate Through Internet Banking). A Bible passage is left open for the casual reader, advising that present suffering is negligible compared to future glory.
Your son is sitting in the chancel, really where Jesus should be, and is pumping the distortion pedal. An electric burst of Metallica bounces off the white plastered walls and up to the apex of the ceiling, before rolling down the aisle and pummelling the double-glass doors.
It isn’t what one might expect when passing St Anne’s on a weekday evening, but as this is a parish focused on heavenly reward, the music squeals on. Across the road at the dog groomer’s, freshly shampooed Maltese and Shih Tzu are being collected and loaded into waiting cars. Most have a wild look in their eyes and fair enough, a stranger having just squeezed their anal glands.
You sit on a hard bench and listen to your son’s scales which, on electric guitar, sound insouciant and finish with a crunch. His hands and feet are larger than yours now and his face level with yours if he’s in sneakers and you’re barefoot. When did any of this happen? When did he go from Rubik’s Cubes to hard rock? You didn’t see it coming, though you’ve been here the whole time.
His face shines with pleasure after the lesson. He hikes his case on his shoulder and thanks his tutor with enthusiasm. You’re not religious but in small, thermal moments like this on a freezing July night, it’s not difficult to understand the word blessing.
Karori Park’s groundsman is back! You weren’t expecting him until spring, but his shift pattern has been changed and he’s working through winter. There’s plenty to do, he tells you with authority. Plenty.
He shows you his paint-spattered boots and shins, having pushed a line-marker across the field all morning. It took just half an hour to mark four pitches, he says, because the grass is well drained and it hasn’t rained for several days.
You’ve never met anyone so pleased to be at work.
You need curtain hooks. Nothing ages someone more than a sentence like this.
You stomp around Spotlight, suddenly ground down by it all — Toto too loud over the speakers, blessing the rains down in Africa; the piles of cheap towels and sheets (jacquard, sateen), the plastic plants, the sharp-elbowed quilters examining rolls of fabric. Surely you were meant for something more exciting than these tedious errands, and this suburban life. Why didn’t you stay in Buenos Aires while you had the chance and let a city like that — passionate, chaotic — make the decisions for you? Why did you even get back on the plane that day, do you remember? For something stupid back home, probably, like rent or your job.
You can’t face a toga movie lasting three hours, however much of a masterpiece. Your family goes to The Odyssey without you and arrive home seeming exhausted, muttering darkly about pigs.
“How was it?” you ask.
“Oscar slop,” your daughter says.
You want to read an obscure book of criticism by Martin Amis, but it’s out of print and isn’t in the library. You find a used copy for $4 at Second Chance Books, an online shop run by a mother and daughter. ‘Martin’ appears to be missing the M but other than that, it’s in mint condition.
It arrives quickly by post, with a charming sticker on the brown paper wrapping. THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING OUR SMALL BUSINESS, it says, beneath a drawing of wildflowers growing from an open book. Inside, a discount voucher and a paper bookmark, thanking you again: this time, for giving an orphaned book a second chance.
You feel so touched by this you stand there with it in your hand, forgetting that at this moment, chicken is browning unsupervised on the stovetop. You think about your other pre-loved books rescued from obscurity — an Edith Wharton, which you found at Shakespeare & Co in Paris; Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, nicked from a skip by your friend Emily, who saw it there and thought of you — which have become your treasures.
We should do this more often, shouldn’t we: extend the lives of things and of relationships by wiping off the dust, rearranging them, giving them some sun? Being the first to say sorry, you suppose. There are so many apologies you could make. You were a nightmare in your twenties; unreliable in your thirties. You disappeared in your forties, even from friends who needed you. It made sense at the time, as your goal was to survive.
There remains such value in worn-out things, even if they’re missing an M. Later you’ll settle with the dog in front of the fire and read the first few pages, which are as stentorian as you’d expect from someone who, in his lifetime, enjoyed untrammelled literary stardom and appeared incredibly pleased with himself.
“All writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés.”
What a windbag! you’ll think. What a pub bore! But you’ll lick a finger and turn the page, wise enough to give him another chance.
Housekeeping
Hello to some lovely new followers! Who can’t quite commit! (I know how it is.)
I’ve been meaning to tell you that this lowly tinted lip balm, which I bought by accident, thinking it colourless, is a game changer. I slap it on every time I go to the supermarket and honestly it makes me look fabulously pleasure-seeking, like I’ve just licked a spoonful of jam.
It’s the perfect budget berry lip-gloss and my mate Vanessa agrees. She says it’s as good as — wait, what was that luxe brand, Ness?
Ness says it’s as good as Black Honey by Clinique. And it’s under five bucks!
My Substack colleague Dan Keane has written this terrific essay for The Spinoff about briefly losing his son on a family holiday.
Instead of focusing on the panic and the police search, he talks about the way his boy found his way back using a piece of public art as a reference point, and goes on to consider what we lose when we don’t invest in shared spaces. It’s a lovely piece and made me feel fondly towards New Plymouth, where I spent my miserable teenage years. Side note: what a great kid!
I must remind you Dan is leading the Write Your Welly Life workshop at a Wellington pub on August 9, with this very blog as a case study. Tickets remain available and we’d be delighted to see you there!
In this week’s Listener, whose cover stories include the death of Sam Neill and our lack of a national landslide response plan, I’m rude about designer kitchens.
The most stylish featured a granite-topped island, gleaming under pendant lights, with specific essentials on display: a set of chef’s knives stuck to a magnetic strip, a pod coffeemaker, a salt pig, and a pepper grinder the length of a human femur. Something — anything — by Le Creuset.
My own kitchen is a nineties nightmare. It’s so awful I don’t even know where to begin so I’ve improved nothing, nine years on. It has hideous red tiles and a stainless-steel bench, and vinyl wrap is peeling off the cupboards in strips. The problem is that after a while, you become so used to the ugliness that you stop noticing, at least until a visitor drops by and you hear them suck in their breath.
I see New World is running another SMEG promotion! I’m still emotionally exhausted by the last one and can’t bring myself to collect the stickers.
💛 At the risk of coming across like Sally Field at the Oscar podium, please like me! By which I mean, please click the heart if you’ve made it this far. It helps new readers to find us, and it comforts me enormously. 💛
Loving You Is Easy ‘Cos You’re Beautiful,
Leah
All of this. Wonderful. Relatable. Cheerful and poignant. Tempted to send you a photo of my Kitchen.....
Honestly, this might be your best one yet (do I say that every time? I mean it). And, the prospect of earning stickers for buying Black Honey cosplay lip balm might be enough to tempt me back to evil NW, thanks for the hot tip!