Good News This Week

After last week's sad news came some good this week. Sister Meredith received a letter from our Aunt Hatsu who lives in Adelaide. We had presumed that she had passed away as she had not written for a few years after exchanging letters with Meredith every year for perhaps 30 years. She's well and enjoying life at age 80. Her second husband died ten years ago and she lives quietly with the company of a few good friends from the Japanese community.

Our Uncle Ron, Elvie's brother, always a bit of a weird turkey, married Hatsu after corresponding with her by mail in the early 1960's I think it was. She came to Australia and we liked her enormously as kids for the short time we knew her before she and Ron moved to Narracoorte then Adelaide. They had two children, Lester and Nerissa. Lester is an airline pilot and lives overseas but has regular contact with Hatsu while I believe Nerissa is in Melbourne but her Mum does not hear from her often.

Ron and Hatsu became estranged and Hatsu left him, I'm not sure when, perhaps early/mid seventies. I went to Adelaide in 1977 to a Bee Congress and stayed a few nights at Hatsu's flat, the kids were at school and Hatsu worked as a waitress at a nearby hotel. I met the fairly elderly man Hatsu was later to marry. He was a patron at the hotel and apparently a kind man.

I'm just so glad Hatsu is well and enjoying a happy and quiet old age and I would love to visit her one day. I went to Adelaide a year or two ago for a holiday with Lib but I didn't know she was still alive. I did visit Ron, he was in a nursing home and confined to barracks as he was on the way to losing the plot. He remarried to a Filipino lady and had another daughter, Emily. That wife also became estranged and left him but I knew where he was through letters the daughter and Meredith exchanged. Ron and Elvie exchanged letters for decades until Ron said it was too difficult to write due to his arthritis and Elvie was the same due to Macular degeneration.

Ron remembered me clearly and saw me as a light at long last who could save him from his imprisonment. He said Emily and her boyfriend had taken his house and he had no money and she never visited. I inquired from the staff as to Emily's contact details, of course they wouldn't tell me but they said Emily visited regularly and brought Ron anything he needed. Lib who was with me and has worked thirty years with geriatrics said paranoia is common with onset dementia and they often don't remember family visiting.

A funny story about Ron. When we were kids and at Nanna Wilson's house Jod, a bird egg collector, found a blackbird's nest and stole the eggs. He showed them to Ron who was infuriated that this kid had done that and he broke the eggs in Jod's face. About forty years later, Ron was on one of his perhaps biennial pilgrimages from Adelaide to visit his sister Elvie at Chamomile Farm. On this particular day Jod happened to be in the kitchen after having had quite a few beers and with his razor sharp memory he recalled this incident to Ron and went to the fridge, took a couple of eggs, and broke them on Ron's bald head.

My bad news of the day was I was got the better of by some prickly pears at Marguerita's. She rang me early this morn asking could I come out and pick some for her with my ladder. I wanted to pick some holly berries there so out I went about midday, starting on the pears first. I got her a big bucket full but learned the hard way that prickly pear have these needles like brown dust that get into your clothes, into your face down the neck and I was so badly afflicted I had to go home and shower and change clothes but my skin came up in a dreadful itchy prickly rash. It was 33C and I have been sweating like a pig because of the cortisone I think so it was frankly a bugger of a day for me and I'll have to go back for the holly tomorrow.