Vale Normie

The phone rang today, my mobile, at about 3pm. As it rang I was taking out the cards in the bottom draw of our kitchen with the intent of writing a birthday card for my friend Norma who was to turn 79 years old next Thursday the 9th of June. It has been a custom of Norma and I to send each other a tattslotto ticket and a card on our birthdays for the last twenty years or so. I thought I'd post it on my way up to watch the last quarter of the local footy, to save me having to do it next Monday and risk forgetting.

The mobile phone was in my office and I quickly dropped the stack of cards I'd taken from the drawer and managed to take the call before the caller hung up. It was my friend Craig, a young man of great quality whom I met through Norma some 20 plus years ago, and who through all that time I have had business dealings to our mutual benefit albeit on a small scale. He was a young man just left school when I met him, and with his young lady companion Leanne was embarking on a career in the nursery industry. They married and started a wholesale tube sale business on line and have gone on to great success and have two children. I regularly get plants from Craig, and he regularly takes cuttings at the farm and NHP. No money changes hands, our dealings are on a favour basis in the best of spirit.

Craig told me he had received word from his mother that Norma died on Friday. In the card I was about to write her I was to say that we, Gord and I, would be down to visit her in the next week or so. It has been my habit to visit her a couple of times a year. Gord and I last visited in February, after she had moved from Banyule to Balwyn after the subsidized housing she was in sold up for development and she had to find somewhere else, this time a Catholic church residence, a tiny flat.

Norma had a florist shop in Armadale through the 1970's My father used to sell posies and vegies to her on his deliveries. She married foliage grower Henry from Emerald in the 1970's and lived with him at Emerald in the 1980's after she concluded her business. She visited the farm regularly to buy vegetables and we picked foliage and flowers on their property.

In the early 1990's Henry took ill, Normie went to court, to go for an out of time settlement 19 years after their marriage as they had separated within one year, lived apart for some time then got back together although divorced. It was an an ugly situation with great acrimony between Norma and her husband's daughter, her step daughter. I could write much about the dramatic events at the time which involved me coincidentally but there is no need for it in this post.

Norma came out of it with a pay out which was taken out almost completely by $110,000 legal costs and she was basically penniless for the last twenty years or so, living on a pension and paying rent.

She was a powerful personality who pushed me to the limit of my patience at times but through it all she was a great friend who offered her best wisdom even if it was sometimes a little overbearing. But she was always there as a friend, on the phone, and when I visited. She was a brilliant cook, her soups were magnificent and she taught me much. She was a raconteur and had an interesting life. In the late 1950's she went out with Big Bob Johnson, Melbourne ruckman and forward, and she was friends with Bart Cummings and cricketer Keith Miller.

I will miss her greatly. She has been there to pump up my tyres for such a long time, and I'm very sad that I'll not see her again. Not on his plane anyway.