Please Don’t Let Me be Mizunderstood
Most times when you’re growing up I can’t help thinking how little we pay attention to the details in our lives as they unfold. I was thinking about Miz who was my literary mentor many years ago now. She’s since passed away having accomplished for herself the title of novelist. She always told me, “you should always attempt to go out with a bang!” She was quite understated like that.
I met Miz through my old school friend Sal’s Granny. I have a gaping soft spot for Sal’s Granny, she was a Music Teacher so she always tuned her radio to be playing some interesting musical piece or other. And though she was a great deal older, I found her to be among one of the most articulate and independent of thinkers that I’d met in my short life.
I loved that about Granny, her independent thinking, though I’m sure across her lifetime it caused her and others to be bothered more than it should have. Today she’d have probably quite rightly earned the title. ‘pocket rocket.’
More famously to me though, Granny simply made the meanest Gin & Tonic I know. Hers weren’t for the faint-hearted. She was wonderfully generous with the gin part of the equation and thankfully the musician in her was equal (in every sense) to the mathematical know-how also required to ply her trade. 2 parts (or perhaps generously thereabouts) gin, one part tonic, squeeze of lemon juice and a blonk of ice for good measure. But more about Granny another day.
Miz called me “Young” and only called me by my real name when what she was saying to me required more thought than your average 17 year old is want to give to the weightier matters of life. At 17, I thought matters of life had an order-of- things and generallly speaking, I set that order. What can I say! I was young!
Among other things, Miz taught me the art of stone throwing. It’s the careful yet gentle art of acquainting oneself with patience. It has taken many years for me to perfect this art.
The ingredients are simple. First of all, find a quiet spot beside a river. Take two small river-stones (of roughly the same size and weight). Place both stones in one hand and when you’re ready, toss one vertically and in the same movement as that one is falling on its downward trajectory throw the second stone horizontally to (hopefully) hit the other one at what would be their intersection. Simple enough, yes? Sure! Or perhaps I’m just a slow learner.
With time I’ve found my hand-eye co-ordination and my patience has improved though in the absence of a local riverbed here in the city I’m want to sit on a roadside kerb on my street using loose stones that missed becoming part of the bitumen road as a stop gap measure.
People, well let’s say, some city-dwelling people can misunderstand actions like these of course (sitting on kerbs might easily be construed as gutter-sitting which it is) but sadly onlookers rarely ask what I’m really doing there. And neither am I inclined to explain my actions these days. City people can be so perculiar like that, so literal, as if kerb sitting were quite an unnatural thing to be doing.
The other thing Miz taught me was the art of living naturally with the dead. Her instruction was simple. She took me to her family cemetery one warm autumn day whereupon she introduced me to her Great Uncle so and so. I must say, he had a terrifically grand grave.
Deciding that he was a perfectly good foot stool and rest she plonked herself down on top of him and suggested I pull up a pew beside her. She opened up Shakepseare’s Othello and proceeded to read it aloud to us both. She told me later it was one of his favourites and she was sure he loved it every bit as much as I did.
That day was a huge cultural leap for me. I mean, sitting on ancestors is kind of a no-no in maoridom. But I learnt that day, that some cultural mores are unhelpful in the context of a person’s life and the death of loved ones doesn’t have to be such a huge estrangement because of them.
Years later I sat on the grave of my mother, my back against her warm granite headstone and read her poems from my much thumbed through, much read Rod McKuen Omnibus. I think she loved it, every bit as much as I did and going to spend time with her after that wasn’t quite as hard.
I try to write a little each day Miz, thanks for teaching me how. I can hear you now … “from the heart Young, from the heart.” Where else Miz, where else but there?
