I’ve been preoccupied with the slide.
The Swans CEO, the excellently named Myles Baron-Hay, retried from the club last week. The membership department sent a letter-headed message of thanks for my support and discount offers for the year ahead. Co-captain and number 1 defender, Bolton C. did not return to the starting 22. The coach fore shadowed changing times. The AFL held firm on the second team and the full forward is STILL belting people.
What is there for the supporter who has endured the good times who finds herself on the slippery slope of rebuilding and will not jump ship?
There is the generic re-building rhetoric from club officials, supposed to make me feel as fresh as a squirt of Norsca. There is the basically disinterested and terribly fleeting sympathy of close friends and family. There is the relegation of the commemorative premiership front page to the damp wall of the third bedroom. My mother suggested to me, that belonging to a team which is headed for the bottom eight is a bit like being in opposition in politics – a place nobody wants to be, the yards nobody wants to do. This from a woman who has no interest in team sports, but clearly a fine understanding.
I’ve been wondering how to handle myself.
On Friday, I had an exchange with Coach Ian, direct from the Penelope Cruz room of the 'Hotel Movie' in downtown Zagreb. He wrote:
‘ … it may just be my general tiredness, but the idea of the noble bearing in defeat, the offsetting of the loss by the sense of belonging and stoic endurance etc is just not compelling me.’
It IS tempting to feign a dignified defeat by martrying myself to the next phase in gratitude for what has been. I’ve been tempted to hang my head and grit my teeth and suffer through with a long face, loyal but languishing. I’ve been tempted by the widow’s black garb. But there is something inherently empty about the adoption of this strategy. Ian is right. It gives nothing. And anyway, I was feeling too sorry for myself and the team and the years ahead.
Until Friday.
The Eaglet and I had set ourselves the Friday task of returning the untended winter garden to a state of relative dignity. All winter it has sat floundering, without discipline – no early picks, no promising additions of youth. The broccoli have some kind of greyish aphid on them. The eggplant leaves are mouldy. The broad beans are stunted with lack of fertilising, the spinach littered with the tiniest of snails and the lack of mulch has encouraged a flood of weeds. Only the day before someone had enquired of me: ‘How’s your garden?’
‘Terrible.’ I said with appropriate hopelessness. ‘It’s been so unloved.’
I made it sound terminal as if nothing could be done. My mother once told me that your first garden is always your best because of the enthusiasm of the new.
But as I worked away, drawing at the onion weed and raking the fallen fig leaves with my clumsy gloved fingers … as I roped around those broad beans, pulled the last blackened stalks of basil, pruned the verbena and the rusted lemongrass and the overweight branches of the eggplants … as I cut handfuls of spinach and parsley to reveal the dry and dusty soil below and turned the winter air through it, wishing the great earthworms hello … some kind of airing of all my football tensions came to pass.
I started to look at my empty, fallow garden with acceptance. I was actually relieved, lightened, impressed even, by its barrenness. Could I approach one, two, three footy seasons with the same equilibrium?
The phone rang. I trudged inside, shedding shoes and gloves and soil. It was my father calling from the country.
‘Ma-thildie. Zat’s your dad.’
‘Hi.’
‘I’m calling with zat news of your childoood eero.’
‘Who?’
‘Michael Jackson. He ‘az died today.’
‘Really? He died?’
‘Yes!’
‘Dad, he was Eloise’s (my sister’s) hero, anyway, but … wow!’
I had flashes of lying on my sister’s red trundle bed, staring up at her Thriller poster, under which she slept every night of her 12th year, back in the days when Jackson was black.
Two of the great black Michaels in seven days! The week certainly had that end-of-era kind of feeling.
I went back out to the garden, stacked the brooms and the spare garden stakes, hung the gloves up in the sun and stared at the sparse stillness of my now tidy winter garden. It looked as if it were waiting … for something.
* * *
Saturday afternoon at AAMI delivered one last ‘maybe not’ on the Swans slippery slide. The team looked good, galvanised. They were moving the ball fast, the skills were sharp, new blood in a trimmed team, the rot momentarily eradicated, the seeds of a big win sown. But it never came to fruit after half time. The Crows left nothing but scraps.
As the Eaglet and I endured the third rendition of ‘We’re the pride of South Australia … ‘ I pulled on my black stockings for the opening of Patrick’s opera. I finally felt forced to accept that this WAS it, the end of the era. And I felt strangely composed.
They say you cannot begin to grieve something until you can accept it. The consent was everywhere that night.
I sat, with Patrick, in the front rows of the dress circle for the opera. At the beginning of Act 2 of Handel’s Acis and Galatea, giant projected words appeared across a scrim at the front of the stage, in what could have been my very own handwriting:
No Joy Shall Last.
A chorus sings of the end of love:
Wretched lovers! Fate has past
This sad decree: no joy shall last.
And inside that great big opera house sail, in the stillness and the dark of the theatre, surrounded only by music, it was Acis and Galatea and it was O’Loughlin and his white Swans and my basil and eggplants. It was Michael Jackson (and let’s not forget Farrah!) and it was Barry’s career and Friday and all things that pass. There was nothing stoic about this. It was written up big in caps, sung to the rafters – passionate resignation, standing in the face of fate, in defence of its ground.
From that moment, I had a good inkling about how I want to handle myself.
It could not have been more fitting that I drove home alone just before midnight, in my mother-in-law’s car – her temperamental volume stuck on way too high - to a disco mix of Jackson classics on FBI. And I knew all the words.
You can’t buck the Gods, you can’t buy more time. You can only work with what you’ve got. You can’t always make good times last and you can’t pretend that they don’t end. And it’s not always a good idea to distract yourself with the sweet face of something else. If we never suffer the paucity of winter, how can we appreciate the spring?
You can fist your way through the fear of the abyss or you can simply keep tending. You can wear the boxing gloves or the gardening gloves.
* * *
Back in the ‘Ville, I replaced tights with trackies and a hot cup of tea and found the second half of the Cokesters and the Hawks on the box. Teeming rain, a howling gale, the Gods in full force in the west. It DID look like something out of a Jackson video clip, hair streaming in a too wild wind, palms raised. And as the final quarter unfolded, I asked myself …
So what comes after M for Michael? The answer was right before me: N for Natanui. Nicholas Natanui. He looked that night like fate’s next decree, the next temptation offered up by the footy Gods.
Because under the aphids in my garden ARE the beginning of Brassica florets. And under the rusted leaves of the eggplant, white jonquils ARE blooming.
Happy tipping!
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