With Not A Little Help From My Friends

Who knows how the judge scored it, but I reckon I won round one (January 2012) on points. I have some good people in my corner. Reading in my blog about my fall from the tree, my good friend Vince made available his expertise on a trip back to Belgrave when not only did he give me a thorough realignment with his healing hands blessed by a working life's experience as an osteopath(no charge), he also made me a nutritious salad lunch with his home grown lettuce and tomatoes and we talked with frankness about life, spirituality and aspirations. Soul replenishment.

A few days later , on one of those very hot days, I picked up the old bloke who lives in Collie Road and hitch hikes regularly up Launching Place Road to the shops and drove him home. He has long grey straggly hair and his remaining teeth are yellow. "Thanks buddy," he said. He always calls me "buddy". I'd prefer "mate", but it's not important enough to raise it with him, besides, he can call me whatever he likes. "Are you busy", he said.

"Always so much to do," I said. "But it's no good wishing my life away and wanting to be retired like many people do."

"Yes, I'd love to work, but I can't."

I dropped him off and he thanked me profusely. He's a good old bloke, but he stands on the road with his thumb out right in the path of traffic. I fear he'll be cleaned up one day but so be it. The police will have another stat with which to wage war on motorists exceeding the speed limit by a few kph and the community will not be required to fund his welfare in old age, if it doesn't already. They need all the money they can get to fund the capture or kill missions and the occupation of Afghanistan. My concern for the old man's future is tempered by a conversation I had once with Andrea Stretton, ABC arts presenter and daughter of Major General Stretton of Cyclone Tracey fame. I sat next to her at a wedding reception in Sydney some years ago, that of Lib's cousin Shiela, a journalist with the SMH. I was telling her about my old friend Ida who worried me greatly that she'd burn her house down as she chain smoked but left burning cigarettes all over the place with her mental deterioration into Alzheimer's. Andrea said, "What does it matter if she does? If she likes to smoke so be it and if she goes that way, so what? It's better than slowly fading away non compus mentis." As it happened, as the deterioration progressed, Ida forgot about smoking and gave it up without having to try, she was forcibly removed from her house and, after a few years of not knowing what day it was, who she was, or where the hell she was, she died in a nursing home. Andrea Stretton, I read in the newspapers not very long after our meeting, died of advanced liver cancer a few weeks after being diagnosed.

As I backed and turned around in the old bloke's drive I looked up into my friend Vilma's back yard and thought of the young camellias I planted there in the spring. "I hope Vilma has been watering them," I said, to no one listening. I often think out loud. I tell myself my own dark secrets sometimes, then realize I hope no one is within earshot. So I drove to Vilma's house in Launching Place Road and knocked on the door with a watering can I'd picked up in hand. "Have you been giving the camellias and lilacs a drink?" I said as she answered my knock, opening the door.

"Yes I have, they've had plenty of water. Would you like a sit in the massage chair?" She too had read my blog about the tree fall. So I spent a good half hour in Vilma's magic chair while I enjoyed a cup of green tea with honey an lemon, and Vilma and I exchanged views on life and death and old age and life generally. Her passion is painting. I don't think she would mind me divulging her age, I won't in case she does, but Vilma has been married three times, has a son about my age with a terminal illness as well as daughters so she has much to offer in the philosophical stakes. She heads off with her caravan by herself to places like Broken Hill or the Flinders Ranges and paints landscapes and trees. She showed me her favourite painting which is a nude with a lovely pinkish pair of buttocks, female I add. I left Vilma uplifted in spirit.

I get by with not a little help from my friends. I have received well wishes, personal messages and encouragement from many people this year so far. There are too many to recognize all of them and there's a fear I may leave someone out by accident if I name them. 'With a Little Help From my Friends' is a Lennon/McCartney song I think, made famous by Pommie rager Joe Cocker. People of my era would recall the highly dramatic performance of the song at 'Woodstock'. When doing National Service training at Puckapunyal, Barry Tunnecliffe, a Pommie bloke in my hut a couple of years older than I, and the only married one, said he knew Joe Cocker in England, they used to drink in the same pub. He said Joe was a wildman pisspot even then. A bit before Xmas I saw in the death notices that Barry's wife Leslie died. I hadn't seen them for nearly 40 years but it was my intention to contact Barry via the funeral directors if they would give me his address, but I didn't get around to it and lost the details. Maybe this amazing thing called blogger will somehow bring this post to Barry's attention. If so, you have my condolences Barry, and I'd love to catch up with you and share some of the last decades. I'm a much changed man in my thinking to the right tending conservative I was forty years ago.