Thoughts don’t come easy to me this year. The once easy web of connections around the wheel of footy and life, which it has never troubled me to spin … now feels sticky and keeps getting broken during the night.
As I searched throughout last week for the clue to this week’s parallel … I realised that a season is really just all the same stories in a different order and once you’ve told them one year and then the next, it’s simply hard to tell them again.
When asked his captain’s questions at season’s start, Chris Judd declared that the biggest problem facing football was ‘over saturation of the media: the more people you get (covering football) in the media, the more attention gets paid to issues on the fringe.’
Is THAT what has happened to me? Have I become a Juddian fringe dweller, scratching for meaning at a boundary line where the throw-in has already happened? (Although I hardly consider the human condition a fringe issue!)
Then, on Thursday night, like a runner blessedly arrived on the scene with advice, a quote appeared to me. It was from a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music in which American composer John Cage described music as: ‘a purposeless play, an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living’.
I have often thought that football has a distinctively musical quality, made by rhythm and tempo and melody as it is, the solo and the ensemble interlinked. Could this be it? Was there nothing more to write, no more threads of human reason to tease out, no more improvements to self for footy to impart? Apart from the essential music of itself? Perhaps it was time to accept the inconsistencies and the chaos, to ignore the patterns, the shapes, the voices of footy, to put down the pen and just go with the flight of the ball.
* * *
Over Friday lunch, I sat down to do the tips with the eaglet. Cats v Demons? Last meeting, the Cats won by 116 points. They are 3 wins, 1 loss and 1 draw, the Cats’ way. Geelong is paying $1.01 and Melbourne $13. $13!!
‘Oh my goodness, Omar. Do you know if you put $10 on the Demons to win, and they won, you’d get $130 – enough to buy that LEGO construction set you’re saving for.’
Before they were out of my mouth, I realised the above throw-away lines now required an explanation of the TAB, of gambling, of greed and chance and unlikelihood and why the bottom hardly ever overcomes the top, of impossible miracles and why people pay to have them even exist as possibilities.
But it was too late. The thought of that bright yellow shovel digger, the 43cm long, 33cm high mobile telescopic crane with elevator hook and the sectioned modular building had taken hold.
‘Can we do it? Can we do it?’ he pleaded.
‘Yes,’ I giggled, trying to make the whole thing sound like a flippant whim rather than the ethical pit it was.
Oh God, footy was supposed to be a purposeless play this week. While I was detaching myself from the meaningfulness of a week of footy, the eaglet was learning to attach a ferocious and unswerving purpose. While my grip was loosening, his was beginning to take hold.
* * *
On Saturday morning, moments before 6am, the eaglet flapped his way into the swans’ nest. He lay quietly for some breaths before inquiring:
‘Did you put the $10 on the Demons? Because I think they have one chance of winning. I think it in my mind. I don’t know if it’s in the Demons’ mind, but it’s in my mind.’
Later that morning, he was dropped at his grandparents’ house. You may know them as Gai & David. Patrick and I headed off for a morning together. We chatted over almost-midday yum cha, I in a state of liberation, as I allowed the bliss of ‘purposeless play’ to wash through me just as smoothly as my chrysanthemum tea. No need to think this weekend. We returned to collect the eaglet sometime just before 2pm.
The match – Hawks v Carlton – began just as the youngest grandson added to a family tree of stains on the living room carpet – having just kicked off a freshly brewed cup of coffee – four adults on the floor for the opening bounce, blotting and foaming – the couple married almost 52 years, mentally separated by their tips – they’d gone with ‘the wife’ and the blues - and she was worried. Minutes in, we’re mopping … and the Blues are already mopping up the mess Roughhead appears capable of. We are attuned to Saturday afternoon footy. We are awake to the life we are living.
On the way home, the eaglet sleeps and the ‘hand of footy’ places a ten dollar bet on the Demons. They’re paying $14 by Saturday.
Home again, and on the couch for the final quarter. Tim lane is riffing on the brilliance of Brad Sewell – ‘He’s a Hercules!’
‘You mean a Hercules Morse as big as a horse,’ corrects the eaglet.
The parents amongst us (and the enthusiasts of small, black Skye terriers or New Zealand children’s literature) will know the reference to Hairy Maclary.
By 5.30pm, the eaglet has become Gary Ablett, under lights in the back yard. He’s playing Demon Dad - Brad ‘Broccoli’ Green – and he’s on top, of course. But will it last? What will win the eaglet’s heart: the desire to ‘beat dad’ or the desire to manifest, by home proxy, the $130 dream of a LEGO construction site? And what is at the intersection of the crossroads? Football.
I can’t avoid it, the confluence of football and life. Try as I might, they are concurring in my home, in my backyard, in my narrative, my child, our next generation. The repetition of the stories, the signposts, the suggestions of footy from season to season, it is not, as I feared, a precursor to ‘the end’ – it is just the accompaniment to the reality of on-going. Our personal stories are full of repetition, our behaviours multiply and then abate. Events position us.
We live, like the Roos, without the presence to stay entirely with what is unfolding; we live by spending just the right amount of talent to get by, like the Hawks; we live with unforgettable, embedded lost opportunities like Fev; we live life in chunks of ‘wake-up call’ like the derby Dockers; we live, often, with little structure or continuity, just hopeful bursts, like the Bombers; we live within the fortressed security of our homes, like the Lions. Sometimes, we survive on the last gasp of a desperate effort, like the Swans; we live, like the Cats, with the certainty of supremacy or we live, like the Saints, with the uncertainty of supremacy; or we live, like the Dogs, without a plan ‘b’.
From Friday to Sunday, we look into the mirror of the oval ball – and without seeking purpose or order or improvement, we are awake. From year to year, the image in the mirror is much the same. The differences are subtle. They take time. But they are there. This season, too, is maturing.
* * *
While the swans are at the match on Sunday, the eaglet has been relegated and is with his grandparents again. Word has it he spent most of the day at GAME DAY LIVE on AFL.com, monitoring the progress of Geelong v Melbourne. It’s a loss, which, thanks to his grandmother’s chicken soup and the spa jets of their bath, he can accept.
In the car on the way home, he notices the lights over the harbour and the city. ‘Just like Christmas,’ he says. Blissful silence follows. Until …
‘When do we get our $10 back?’
‘We don’t’, we reply, secretly glad the gambling experiment has failed.
‘So we don’t get it back?’
‘No, darling, that’s gambling.’
‘In the first quarter, we probably should have been another three goals up – but that’s just the way footy is. You’ve got to take your chances,' said Roos.
‘To be so close to the reigning premier, to match them in every area, but to come down to the last kick … it’s obviously disappointing but .. what can you do … that’s footy,’ said Fev.
That’s life.
Happy tipping!
No comments:
Post a Comment