One of the Eaglet’s favourite books, Max and the Yellow Tractor, tells the story of Max, a small (red) farmyard tractor who, one day on his usual trip through the woods, comes across ‘a magnificent yellow tractor, much bigger than Max, with huge wheels that made great clouds of dust. And he was making really thick smoke … he beeped his horn and rushed past at full speed.’ Max is smitten by this great tractor and for the rest of the day, cannot go about his usual tasks. He gets stuck in a rut, starts up his windscreen wipers by mistake, beeps for no reason and makes the cows run off in a panic.
* * *
Last Thursday, I was transporting the Eaglet to his grandparents’ place in Bondi Junction. We pass the SCG on our travels and often take Driver Avenue to avoid the snaking, speed-humped, round-a-bouted track around the park.
As we turned left that morning, we saw the familiar red and white and navy blue of the Swans training gear.
‘There’s a Swannie,’ I said casually.
‘Who is it?’
‘Um, Jolly?’
Then getting closer, ‘Maybe Grundy?’
And then as we came side on to that slightly bandy-legged wander, full of the confidence of supreme fitness and youth: ‘No, it’s Marty Mattner!’
‘Marty Mattner?’ confirmed the Eaglet.
‘Oooooo-ee,’ I hollered like a sassy Negress in an evening sitcom. ‘He looks fine!’
We continued on. I held my line on the road. I may have extolled his virtues a couple more times during the short rest of the trip, leaving the Eaglet to make of it what he would.
As we arrived at the grandparent’s door, I undid my seatbelt and turned my head to line up the reverse. You’ll understand the quality of my reverse parking when I tell you I was once proposed to on the back of its merits. The back wheel climbed the footpath with a jolt!
‘Ooh dear,’ I confessed. ‘It must be Marty Mattner. Seeing him’s made mama go all doozie.’
And without missing a beat or raising his eyes, the Eaglet remarked, matter-of-factly, ‘You’re just like Max and the yellow tractor.’
I had considered my reaction to the Swan sighting a pure rush of blood to the head, the nostalgic sizzle caused by dark, fine featured, 20 something year old boys. There is no getting away from the attraction of young male bodies at their peak, engaging in the sorts of physical feats that have gotten the species this far. I’m not above the gaze. I take binoculars to the footy. (The O’Reilly boys think I am a strategist.)
But, at the tender age of four and a half, without a conscious understanding of attraction or infatuation, the Eaglet revealed exactly what he had made of my distraction – it was about admiration, the same admiration that little Max feels for the bigger yellow version of himself – a kind of ‘wanting to be like’. It occurred to me that, as usual, he was onto something.
Few of us, in our daily lives, have the opportunity to push our physical vessels to their extremes, to tone them and tune them as professional sports people do. In another life as a fairly full-time yoga practitioner and novice teacher, I came somewhere close to knowing the discipline and commitment this requires. I admire it. And I revere the mental capacity which allows these players to handle and often surpass their physical capabilities during a match. I often experience real gratitude towards my team’s players for allowing me to touch those places again, by proxy, in watching them, looking at them.
Last weekend at the SCG, as the Sunday afternoon sun crept up the rows of the O’Reilly and warmed my chilly knees, I looked out across the grass at the bobbing bodies in red and white and blue and felt a very pure admiration – for each player’s will to manage and manoeuvre their physical and mental application, to be the right piece of an ever-changing structural puzzle, on the run, all the time.
I even felt a warm admiration for the ‘kids’, with their crude tackles, their unreliable skills under pressure, their lack of awareness but puppy-like enthusiasm and … just occasionally … their sudden flashes of composure and brilliance. By the end of the first quarter, James and I were trying to think up a list of things we could do up in Row U – knitting, crossword puzzles, skittles, drugs - to accompany the next three years, while we supported them through their development. Because the process of playing those kids alongside Kirk and the Boltons and O’Keefe, will be about them feeling the ‘wanting to be like’ and it’s actually a lot of fun to watch.
What that very handsome Swan on Driver Avenue triggered (apart from a loss of control during the reverse park) was that feeling I have when the magnetism of footy distracts me completely. Some days, I think how delicious it would be to get lost in a week, a season, of footy – I mean completely lost, Alice in Wonderland kind of lost. To be lost in the arcs and the marks and the minutes and minutes of small significant events; in the mysterious language of plays, positions and numbers; in the strategies, the preparations, the mental and physical gathering up, the harnessing of information and then the jettisoning of the same when the time comes to run out and ‘do it’; the reflexes, the speed of the switches; all the things it takes to extend far enough to be the best, the hunted - the thick smoke and the dust under the wheels and the rushing by at full speed and …
The Eaglet is right. I am (often) just like Max.
* * *
I was up to here, when ‘it’ happened.
I was parking the car outside preschool yesterday, when I heard ‘it’ on the 3 o’clock news. Where were you when Barry hung up the boots?
As I buckled the Eaglet into the car, I said:
‘You know what happened today? Barry Hall quit the Swans. He quit football.’
‘What does quit mean?’
‘Um, it means leave. Finish. Barry won’t be playing anymore.’
‘But he’ll still be writing, won’t he? (Recall Barry's SMH column anyone?? - ed) About his other life?’
(Don’t let the Eaglet be right!)
I felt a certain humanity as I listened to that barrel of a voice on ABC radio. I’d need to change tack for this week’s bulletin. I’d have to divert it into a tribute issue for the big bald forward with the baby blue eyes. Barry, the footballer, deserves an obituary. But what would I write about? What is there to say that he hasn’t said himself in too many columns of type? As I wrestled (let’s use wrestling instead of boxing … for the moment) with a motif, I recognised a certain parallel with what I already had and what had just happened with Baz.
Cause, in his heyday, there was a lot to admire about Barry. And, in his case, it was never aesthetic. Barry certainly always blew thick smoke at full speed. But sometimes the big imposing yellow tractors of this world, who we look up to, are not always as indestructible as we imagine.
By the end of the Eaglet’s book, the big yellow tractor is broken down alone in a field of barley and Max is given the task of towing him back to the farm. And once he successfully has, driving carefully and slowly and beeping politely, he tells the old green jeep in the barn:
‘Today I felt a little bit bigger.’
