Message in a Bottle
Have you ever thrown your life overboard like a message in a bottle and watched it float off into the wild blue yonder, hoping with all hope that one day it’ll wash up on some far away beach? From time to time I think about that, yet the realities of the thought and it actually happening miss the boat as it were. Or so I thought! Until today. I’m unwell, finding one hundred and three ways to be in bed. It’s never as glamorous as ‘they’ say, this bed-sitting business! I digress. My darling friend Jen in Sydney cast a message into a social media ocean this morning that pushed my thoughts out to sea into one of “the two great current systems between our places of residence, the warm sub tropical Gyre and the cold Antarctic Circumpolar current.”
As it happens, I was beachcombing when the bottle she sent me bobbed up to within metres of where I was foraging. Serendipidous right? Totally! How does that happen. Well, “in the north, warm water within the Tasman Front section of the Subtropical Gyre travels from Australia to North Cape where most passes along the eastern North Island (where I live) as the East Auckland Current and East Cape Current.
En route, these flows spawn giant eddies that slowly stir waters to depths down to 2 km. Near there the East Cape Current deflects eastward into the central Pacific.” You could have knocked me over with a conch shell! Getting the cork off the bottle was worth it. Jen’s message was simple, “tell us about the view from your bed Gail.” I opted for a single-magnum with everything that drifted into my waterlogged mind reply.
BLUE SKIES
And so I began. “Blues skies today Jen and for some unfathomable reason Willie Nelson’s version of the ‘Blue Skies’ song immediately comes to my mind. What is that? I like the perspective that lying down gives you, it’s a bit like sitting in trees in Petersham. It takes a moment to get your bearings and then, you discover an overlooked element of daily truth right under your nose. Life has another perspective, if only one had done it sooner. Hung upside down on monkey bars, crawled through a concrete tunnel pipe, stood at the corner of a shop window and made that ingenious ‘looks like you have three-legs’ thing.
When Dan was small, he and Josh shared a bunk bed. He had the bottom one. He hated it. Dan never said, it wasn’t really his way but we were born on the same day and somehow or rather, for better or for worse, I can kinda feel inside his thoughts. One day after the children had gone to school I crawled into his bed to see and feel what he felt when he lay there. I wasn’t there two secs before the thought occurred to me that it’s very boring looking at the bottom of your big brother’s mattress.
WHERE’S WALLY
I went out that same morning and brought some ‘Where’s Wally’ material and sewed it to the bottom of Josh’s mattress. It kept Dan’s waking moments more interesting. It was a new perspective on an old passage of rite that as a middle child can definitely suck!
What’s different about lying down is the feeling that being upright is so incomprehensibly common. Lying down, whether inside or out causes us to reflect on matters that we might not. Like how it must feel to be elderly and where the only thing you see from your bed is the sky. Today, I’m forced to compensate so I listen more.
I can’t see the paddocks but I know they’re there. I hear lambs and we all know that lambs mean lamb-tails! I have two of the world’s most interesting cullinary genes :: Maori and Chinese, one eats almost anything that moves and the other, almost anything else including the table if cooked just so!
BARREN GROUNDS
I mention that Raoul, who was the Ranger at the time, at Barren Grounds taught me to listen better when we were all down at Barren Grounds Nature Reserve, Jamberoo in NSW. My eldest son Josh was fascinated by all the bird calls he knew and made. Me too! Here outside my windows are the sounds of house sparrows (Passer domesticus) cheeky chatter. The kereru or wood pigeons are infrequent in town here compared to when my Dad was on the farm. From time to time a tui sings in the trees down the back garden.
The sky is a pot pourri of stratus and cumulus clouds with the odd cumulonimbus thrown in to torment old candy floss memories. They make me hungry looking at them! Upstairs, someone has traded the Willie Nelson blue skies for a grey suit. I think that means it’s time for a cuppa Jen.
