Saturday Morning
Footy talkback. Interviews with local players their names linked to memorable games, who their father played for. Their brief wisdoms, more potent than sound bites, are the closest we get to God on Saturday morning, where my father eats All-Bran with prunes, my mother fusses around making tea almost dancing to the rhythms of the callers’ voices, Some of who are women and like her fanatical, reverent and well-informed. Footy is religion in a house where the radio is in the shape of a football.
Saturday morning, always loaded with expectation – peeling back caked mud from my footy boots on the back doorstep, my brothers handballing to each other in the kitchen, jumpers on the backs of chairs, footy socks that hadn’t been washed since training. Each of us measuring the world by last weekend’s scores. A kind of muddy folklore like my mother’s posters of Pat Rafter still stuck on the laundry door. After all these years, the commentators’ voices haven’t changed, haven’t strayed from the common language of screamers, big man advantage, of kicking into the breeze – words without the baggage of Federal government initiatives.
My parents read and munch quietly the radio keeping them in the moment. Noting news of another funeral to attend, hands blindly reaching for sugar, toast, passing the milk jug – their act of communion, until my mother carries the radio into the bathroom. My father and I read on expecting the other to say something.
Conversation at a cemetery
A small rise overlooking the town and further off, the mountain that hovers into view. Up the back in a dry spot shadowed by a gum tree is where my parents will rest. This is the place, he says, near the gravestones of friends – farmers who died too early, farm accidents that claimed children, funerals he was too busy to attend. Now he has the time to organise his own attendance. Five years before he wouldn’t have stopped to consider the cracked clay on this rise. It was simply a place to be passed each day on his way to the farm. Reading the mossy dates, old names that have come back into fashion, some part of him has opened up, allowed him to accept the death I am fighting against. Here, people either died young or lingered, their dreams and worries becoming our history. He likes to be around young people who