Spring

The closest thing I have to a goddaughter is M, the soccer-playing soprano and third-year Aerospace Engineering student who has made occasional appearances on this blog before, and of whom I stood in awe even before she reported earlier this year that she'd scored a 95 for a subject called Space Vehicle Design.

Her birthday is on the last day of winter -- I remember the first one well; I have a vivid memory of sitting on some hard institutional seat in the maternity hospital with her late father, handing him the hip-flask of brandy that my own father had thoughtfully provided for his use -- and yesterday she turned 21, an occasion celebrated with an afternoon tea party.

As she floated down the hall of her auntie's house to greet me I was dumbstruck by what she was wearing --




-- not only because of its perfectly-preserved beauty as a piece of vintage clothing but also because the last time I'd seen it, her mother (above right, and below) was wearing it at my own 25th birthday party, 30 years ago:




I don't get a lot of opportunities to observe the young en masse, but there would have been about 60 people there yesterday, of whom only ten or fifteen were my generation or older. Most of the more-or-less-21-year-olds would have been from either the soccer team or the Adelaide U Choral Society, though in their tea-party clobber -- there were some very pretty floral frocks, waistcoats, bow ties and so on -- it was impossible to tell these two groups apart right up to the moment, not long after that photo was taken, when it came to sing Happy Birthday, which was the most brilliantly tuneful and certainly the only eight-part rendering of Happy Birthday that I've ever heard in my life. Having warmed up with that, the AUCS members present -- at least 25 of them -- sang several other things, most of them through mouthfuls of cake or champagne, and were magnificent.

To a person, the younguns were friendly, sociable and courteous, some of them showing a degree of social adroitness that I don't even have now, much less when I was their age. I saw a great deal of thoughtful behaviour, particularly towards M. Nobody was rude, nobody got drunk, nobody whined and nobody behaved like a prat. Perhaps young persons who join choirs and soccer teams are not necessarily representative of their generation, but I'd like to think they are. Watching and listening to them made me very happy.

'The music of true forgiveness'

My literary goddaughter, a sometime soloist in her university choir, will turn 21 shortly and my gift to her (as soon as I've picked it up from BASS) is a ticket to accompany me to the opera in November; I offered her the choice between Rigoletto and The Marriage of Figaro, which starts here on August 30, and after deliberation she chose Rigoletto, as I was rather hoping she would.

But in the meantime I think I'm going to have to go to The Marriage of Figaro as well. Because I've never heard the transcendent 'Ah tutti contenti' sung live on the stage, and there's always the chance that one will be run over by a bus before one gets to do things one has always wanted to do. (Should that in fact happen, I hope I'll be hearing this in my head as I lie bleeding in the road.) The music at this point just is not separable from the Shakespearean quality of the drama; as Salieri says in Amadeus, 'Ah tutti contenti' is 'the music of true forgiveness'.

Music, 'whose manifestation is a displacement of air' (Helen Garner), is demonstrably a matter of maths and physics. But I once had a conversation with a hotshot young plastic surgeon on duty in Casualty at the Royal Melbourne, while he was sewing the tip of my left index finger back on after I'd cut it completely off with a vegetable knife the morning after Bob Hawke won the drover's dog election and it (the finger not the election) had been saved only by the quick thinking and take-charge good sense of the man I was living with at the time, about whether the Art/Science divide, by which our respective educations had been brutally shaped at fifteen, was in fact a false dichotomy. We agreed that it was, and that Mozart is the proof.

Serendipitously, here's a bit that made me smile from a novel I was reading this morning for work:

We talked about music, without which, we agreed, life would not be worth living ... He was composing his first mass, for four voices. On a theological note, he observed that some people had been inspired to believe in God by the simple fact that Mozart had been in the world. And he was convinced that Van Morrison was in direct communication ("unmediated communion") with the divine.

Anyway. Here, so.


Mozart - Le Nozze Di Figaro - Ah Tutti Contenti via Noolmusic.com

Strange days

Nine years ago as my mother lay dying in an upstairs room at Adelaide's Memorial Hospital, with a formal rose garden under her window and the scent of it coming in through the curtains on a warm wind, a fey Irish nurse leaned over her and gazed into her unconscious face. 'What are you waiting for?' she murmured to my mother.

It was my father's 72nd birthday, and my mother was probably waiting for midnight, so he wouldn't have to live whatever was left of his life remembering her death on his birthday. He hasn't, either; she died early the next morning, just before dawn.

At 81 my dad is still going strong, after having said over the cake and candles on his 80th last year 'Right: now I'm striking out for 85.' Last night the family was out for a birthday dinner, and we went back to his place for coffee and the cake I'd baked, and a very nice chocolate affair with silver cachous and candles it was too, inspired by the birthday cake that Suse from Pea Soup baked recently for one of her boys.

So every year it's celebratory cake and champagne with my dad on the evening of his birthday, and then waking up the next morning to the anniversary of my mother's death. I'm still not used to it.

Elsewhere has a great post here about the 'death-day', and the weirdnesses of mourning and grief. I've spent the day feeling mutedly sad and a bit ill, distracting myself by having a nap and reading Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men instead of getting on with the work novels, doing the housework, and/or preparing for the writing workshop I have to teach on Monday afternoon.

Given the death-saturated subject matter of the McCarthy novel (my friend D, who will never see the movie because she hates violence on the screen -- over the years we've seen several movies together that have made her clap her hands over her eyes and hiss 'Tell me what's happening!' -- delivered a spirited disquisition this morning over our usual Saturday coffee on the excellent press the movie is getting, and the weirdness of the fascination in popular culture with psychopathic killers and the proof it provides that America 'is a death culture'), it was inevitable that the novel would resonate repeatedly with my own personal Day of the Dead.

And in a book full of eminently quotable moments, this one from the musing, apprehensive Sheriff Bell was particularly resonant, given what day it is:

... the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed.

He's right. I should have done the housework. As an offering.

Taureans Rule, Part 2

Next time you find yourself trashing Her Maj, stop and ask yourself if you'll be able to make it alone up those stairs in those shoes when you've just turned 81.

Even if you haven't just had to endure the company of George Bush all through dinner.

Yes yes, I'm sure the Brazilian aquamarines and diamonds help to ease the pain. But still.

That's one serious birthday

William Shakespeare turns 443 today.

Taureans rule.

Let her eat cake

This cake, whose name is Dotted Swiss Dream and upon which you must imagine some lit candles fetchingly deployed among the marzipan roses, is for ThirdCat -- who has given me an excuse to write about the book from which it's taken, which is one of my all-time favourite books on the entire planet.




The recipe for Dotted Swiss Dream takes up three pages and involves some really majer esoterica, like wooden supports, framboise, non-bendable plastic drinking straws and something called Lemon Curd Mousseline, which is, says Ms Beranbaum, 'a thrilling buttercream to prepare because it starts off looking thin and lumpy and, about three-quarters of the way through, starts to emulsify into a luxurious cream.'

You can tell this woman is a professional cook from the way she is able to use the words 'thrilling' and 'emulsify' in the same sentence.

Copyright laws forbid me to give the recipe here for her Gingerbread cake, but let me just say that it contains golden syrup, dark brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger and marmalade, and that the method by which it is rendered sticky, moist and immortal is that you bake it first and then brush or baste it while it's still hot with a syrup made out of sugar, unsalted butter and lemon juice and then wrap it in Glad-Wrap till it's cool.

My personal variation, ginger and lime being so elegant a couple, is to use lime juice in the syrup instead of lemon. It tastes even better if you grew the limes yourself.

I bet he does, too

'Right,' said my father last night after he'd blown out the candles on his 80th birthday cake, 'now I'm striking out for 85.'