Thank God It’s Friday!!!
March 23rd 2007 02:11
What a week! I love Fridays. You can see everyone start to relax, and the spark comes back into many an eye. You can see the joy as people plan for time away, time alone, time not changing out of PJ’s, time to read the paper, time to play, time to love, time to recreate themselves. Friday is the day people start remembering who they really are, and start focusing on being that person. The responsibilities and stresses start melting away, and plans are made.
My favourite weekend plan, however, is not having one. No pressure, just, "Make it up as we'll go along." Last weekend was one such time. Cricket season is over, and thus so is widowhood. We decided on a whim to go to Cronulla for a walk along the Esplanade, a swim, and breakfast. Glorious. Though the beach was lake-like, it was a gorgeous morning. A couple sat on the verandah of their beachfront home. The man agreed when I asked him, “How’s the serenity?”
A dip in the Nun’s Pool, after reaching Bass and Flinders’ Point pushing the pram, was refreshing for body and soul. There is something so pure about swimming in the sea. It’s like you become part of the ocean. Stress washes away and tension dissolves. The water was crystalline last Saturday. The pool’s bottom was flecked with purple from shells on it’s floor. Simply sublime.
An islander couple exchanged vows at Shelly Beach, to the chorus of friends and family. It was hard not to wish them well as they began their lives together, on a glorious morning like this. Many outsiders inched closer in an attempt to do so.
For me, Cronulla, and especially the southern, family-friendly, multi-cultural end, reminds me of my childhood spent with cousins. Memories of strange smells eminating from exotic-looking communal pipes and family BBQ’s, and slightly dissonant tunes eminating from National brand tape players. Even for me, growing up in a family where cultures clashed every day, these days opened me up to the sense that this land was not just for the white people, that I would never be part of due to the tainted gene pool I swam in. Time with cousins and in proximity to these other families, made me feel at home. Different from the playground where my brother and I, and the second-generation Hong Kong Chinese kids, were the face of multiculturalism, and the result of the push towards assimilation. Without realizing we had been indoctrinated to do so by society, we rejected the foreignness of our mother’s culture and became as Aussie as we could. These days with cousins was a chance to admit we were part of her culture too, though we felt quite isolated from it by ignorance of language, and unaffected by the nuances second nature to the cousins.
With these memories in the back of my mind, and those more recent and less positive, we strolled and frolicked as a family. It was nice sharing this morning with my kids. It seemed the tensions of 1.5 years ago were a lifetime ago, just like the other memories. Whilst flags still fly in Cronulla, and cars (mostly utes, driven by young blokes, on their P’s, in blue tanktops) are shrouded in them, there wasn’t a huge sense that morning of the traumas experienced on this shoreline.
Perhaps they had been washed away, sucked out to sea by a rip, or eroded by the wind and waves. Maybe the tensions are still there, however, like those purple shells, just under the surface, where every now and then the sharp edges threaten to lacerate the flesh that dare tread there. Occasionally the sea itself cries out, “Why don’t you go back to where you came from!”, and spits a human onto the shore in fury.
My favourite weekend plan, however, is not having one. No pressure, just, "Make it up as we'll go along." Last weekend was one such time. Cricket season is over, and thus so is widowhood. We decided on a whim to go to Cronulla for a walk along the Esplanade, a swim, and breakfast. Glorious. Though the beach was lake-like, it was a gorgeous morning. A couple sat on the verandah of their beachfront home. The man agreed when I asked him, “How’s the serenity?”
An islander couple exchanged vows at Shelly Beach, to the chorus of friends and family. It was hard not to wish them well as they began their lives together, on a glorious morning like this. Many outsiders inched closer in an attempt to do so.
For me, Cronulla, and especially the southern, family-friendly, multi-cultural end, reminds me of my childhood spent with cousins. Memories of strange smells eminating from exotic-looking communal pipes and family BBQ’s, and slightly dissonant tunes eminating from National brand tape players. Even for me, growing up in a family where cultures clashed every day, these days opened me up to the sense that this land was not just for the white people, that I would never be part of due to the tainted gene pool I swam in. Time with cousins and in proximity to these other families, made me feel at home. Different from the playground where my brother and I, and the second-generation Hong Kong Chinese kids, were the face of multiculturalism, and the result of the push towards assimilation. Without realizing we had been indoctrinated to do so by society, we rejected the foreignness of our mother’s culture and became as Aussie as we could. These days with cousins was a chance to admit we were part of her culture too, though we felt quite isolated from it by ignorance of language, and unaffected by the nuances second nature to the cousins.
Perhaps they had been washed away, sucked out to sea by a rip, or eroded by the wind and waves. Maybe the tensions are still there, however, like those purple shells, just under the surface, where every now and then the sharp edges threaten to lacerate the flesh that dare tread there. Occasionally the sea itself cries out, “Why don’t you go back to where you came from!”, and spits a human onto the shore in fury.
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