Today was half tedious, half-fun. My aunt called and was wondering if we were going to sign over our kids to my cousin--we love each other so much that I can tell her to shut it and she will just laugh--she's got a deep, great, loving sense of humor that is my grandmother's--but we hadn't run away to Indonesia, we had got stuck at the car place. We got kicked in the rear with a higher interest rate, because we are a people with no history. Sometimes being new is expensive; it is funny how it is--sometimes the more established one is, through years, the less expensive life becomes. I can see that is only one reason, but a real one, why people stay in one place.
I've never done that. The other side of it is that you get stretched, even as you're getting ripped off because you're clueless. I have always deeply loved that stretching feeling, the small 'ahas' when you learn a new way of saying 'lots of stuff' ('heaps'), to the 'AHA' of the deeper things you learn about human nature when you can begin to clearly separate the chaff of cultural differences from the wheat of what we hold in common. Some of what you learn is depressingly real everywhere, most is truly delightful. To me, travel is like doing art: a new palette of colors to provide new inspirations, a meeting of different artists to inspire each other. What do you do with the mudtones, the colors that are hard? What do you do with the very real brutality and deep sadness that began Australia? It does color my way of looking at things here; does it color the way Australians look at themselves?
The fun part of the day was spending time with family, having dinner, trading funny clips online like one trades cards: "Have you seen this one?" We showed them my personal favorites, the streaker fail, the Jackass hand smack and the blowhorn out on the golf course (while people are teeing off):
"Why're you blowin' that?"
"I have bursitis."
"You have bursitis?"
"It helps."
Out of the Australian ones, my favorite was "Dumb Ways to Die" put on by a Metro company for safety education. Little colorful characters got killed in about ten different ways, but handled the terrible consequences of stupidity like chorus line of dancing, mutilated Mr. Circles (have you ever read the Mr. Man series?).
Another one was a short sketch of a backyard Aussie party, where a blind cricketeer wants to show his friends that he can truly bat with a ball that has a bell in it. They attempt to bowl the ball at him, but of course he's turned the wrong way and bats the hostess' cat over the fence.
A third was a film short of an old couple who spend their days trying to fool the other into thinking death has struck. The old man wins the game by icing himself cold and laying still in bed all day. The film ends when he wakes up, scares his wife--to death? Or not? We will never know.
I sense a theme here, in some of these...a great sense of laughing in the face of serious things, but not without heart. I wonder if that is a true statement, or just a shallow interpretation.
Then we tried to watch "Simpsons versus Australia" but only a few days here make me see it differently--it was so absurdly stereotyped that it is now simply ridiculous.
The best moment of the evening was watching my grandfather, Poppo, suddenly show up in an eleven-year-old second cousin, as he told his jokes with a familiar flair that I remember so well; it isn't always something you can describe, these recognitions of a person long-gone, but I recognized a little piece of Poppo in Zach. I have another second cousin, Sawyer, far away in Idaho, who has the same spark, the same flair bordering on the fun-silly. It is almost like seeing Poppo again for a brief second.
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