Write the Day: What’s up, pumpkin?
I brush my teeth upon waking, a habit inculcated in me by my parents. If a friend remarks on the supposed illogic of this for keeping teeth clean, I say ‘Who wants to eat with bed breath?’, adding that I swirl water around my mouth and spit it out after meals, which amounts to a regular washing of the teeth through the day (also a family habit). The order of my perfunctory morning actions is teeth, toilet, wetting of eyes, grinding of coffee beans. I’ve had this steel burr hand grinder for four years now and I think it is becoming blunter; that or these denser, aromatic Ethiopian beans are harder to grind (and blunting the burrs). I use a tea scoop to measure three lots, put the beans in a porcelain Japanese cup, wet the scoop, swirl the beans around the cup (less frenetically than the water in my mouth), then carefully tip them into the grinder in two portions; this seems to prevent the burrs clogging as I grind and the handle flying out of my hand.
This is what I think I’ll be doing as I walk down the corridor from the bathroom, unconsciously preparing my grinding arm. I see that the sky outside is surprisingly light. I could step onto the balcony with a coffee and seek the fleeting sunshine (it’s usually possible to catch it on your face and shoulders from 7.30 a.m., but with the days shortening there is just one small area of the balcony that the sun sometimes strikes, later). Remembering I have the day off work, I instead pack a small bag: notebook, water bottle, the second novel in Cormac McCarthy’s Border trilogy (a hopeful inclusion: I seem to have stopped reading it a chapter from the end).
As I walk out of the apartment and down the stairwell, I begin checking saved locations on my phone. Since moving here I’ve saved four coffee shops that I’m almost equally dissatisfied with. This morning I stop on the street corner, start moving towards one of them, then a few minutes later double back and head towards another.
—
As I’m swirling the foam into my lukewarm coffee, I wonder whether this recent morning dissatisfaction, this hard-to-shake feeling of not-rightness when I enter cafés, is a symptom. I recently told a friend about this feeling. He asked if my compulsive but failed search for a cosy café might be the utterly banal expression of a midlife crisis. In my brief reading about this phenomenon, I came upon the alternative term ‘midlife slump’, which seems more apt to my café crises. I didn’t mind telling my friend about this new disaffection, but I’m embarrassed writing it now.
He may be right. To test his theory, last week I returned to a café in North Melbourne that used to make me feel like myself (it feels just as true to say that the café belonged to a former self). It’s family-run, chatty, spacious, and has naff but endearing signs on the walls – like a glass case half-filled with coffee beans which declares, ‘In case of emergency, break glass’. They moved a few blocks and changed menus a couple of years ago. Having walked into the new Ample and greeted a familiar waiter, I spotted an unfamiliar sign: cursive neon writing near the kitchen which read, ‘Welcome home xxx’. To my surprise (horror), I felt a genuine swell of feeling.
Finishing my coffee, I remind myself that just yesterday – a good day, filled with sunshine and the laughter of friends – the notion of a midlife slump seemed implausible, or at least far away.
—
I’ve only just re-entered the apartment and I’m already contemplating the space beyond it. There is a climbing vine in the planter on our balcony, adjacent to a cyclone fence that partitions ours from our neighbour’s balcony. In the beginning, I gave this plant barely any attention. But after half a year of L and I setting down roots here (more truthfully, after a year), I finally notice its vines bowing forward under their weight. In a few places the vines have grown toward the fence and up it, but they mostly bow away from it from neglect, overshadowing the plants underneath. Their few flowers are on the far, sunny side of the balcony. They’re jasmine, and on this vine they’ve bloomed individually, scentless, not in a blush of collective fragrance. Star jasmine is native to Southeast Asia but apparently well adapted to Australian climates. It’s different to the Indian jasmine my mother wore in fresh bunches in her hair, buying them glistening with water from vendors’ street carts.
I now spend hours routing and securing the vine’s limbs, using clips. Several of them have grown hardy where they’d branched out from the stem, where I now push them through the wire. They bleed sap over my fingers as I bend them; one kinks where I almost snap it, trying to thread it through. Why didn’t I do this when the vine was young and supple? I remove limbs that are growing well away from the fence, cut them in such a way that nothing will regrow there.
Dad is seventy-five years old. He has various ailments which are being managed, and in the last two years has had health crises requiring weeks-long hospitalisations. Mum feeds us regular information about his health. She reported recently that while he’s well enough to come on their regular three-kilometre walks (any more would be difficult for him), he seems increasingly forgetful of recent events, and in general more confused. For most of his life his intelligence has been sharp, stubborn; the change I sense from afar is almost subtle. His announcement last year that he’d decided to write his memoirs surprised me. He sends a short chapter every week or two; it arrives with an unceremonious ping as an attachment on WhatsApp. They’ve been coming in a stream for three months now and to my shame I’ve read barely a word. But the twining of the vine has fortified me. Afterwards I sit and organise the chapters in a folder, then inquire about the missing ones. He has skipped from chapter three to five, chapter five to seven, and chapter seven to nine (I wondered if he’d forgotten which chapter he was up to in the writing, or in the sending, of them; fortunately the forgetting was merely bureaucratic). I should tell him I think this is a good way to spend his time – or talk with him about his life and how he’s written it, while we’re still able to. When I call, which is irregular, Mum ensures he is on the line before she and I begin our conversation; he is a silent presence until addressed directly, when his thoughts rapidly fill the space between us.
Since our balcony is uncovered we’re totally exposed to neighbours when we’re outside; there are three neighbours directly above, three more above to the left and three more above to the right. We could be watched from above by nine individuals or sets of people. In reality there’s hardly anyone out there and you can often watch the sky undisturbed. But the jasmine vine will, if it grows well, screen us from the neighbour who shares our fence. She is outside the most, with her dog, her laundry, or her hose. She can peer directly at us while we’re inside on our sofa, but studiously avoids doing so; she affords us a measure of space this way. We dislike the idea of a curtain but simultaneously crave privacy.
I go again and look at the vine. Will it be unhappy with how I’ve intervened? Having pruned, I read that it’s unwise to cut back all at once, as that can stress the plant. Apparently it’s better to prune gradually over a season.
Two rocks clink onto the far side of the balcony. I once thought children were throwing these rocks off the building’s rooftop, secretly hoping to disturb someone they couldn’t see, far below them. But I’ve decided that the rocks blow off the higher, set-back balconies and then onto ours. For months I’ve been stacking them in a small teacup, thinking I’ll ride the elevator up and return them to their original garden beds – if I can work out which they are. While I realise this makes no sense, I hope that by returning the rocks to their places of origin, I might make up for my mistreatment of the vine. The sky changes as I’m thinking this. The light on the vine grows darker; I feel a raindrop on my shoulder. The weight of the raindrop reminds me of tasks I’ve put off.
—
I turn on the lamp to sit in the darker middle of the apartment. Flipping open my Spanish textbook, I start on homework for the week. Last term was a slog, which I attribute partly to the class dynamics (people drop out as we progress and classes are amalgamated between levels, so the chemistry between us is hard to predict from term to term), but mostly to the subject matter. We were learning how to speak about daily routines, such as when we wake up, eat and go to work; what order we do these things in and how long we spend doing them. I shrank from the activity; while I might be happy to write about my routine in ways that suit me in private, with an audience I don’t know and can’t see, I was loath to share it with a room of acquaintances. I kept my responses minimal; I might have told a few lies. A classmate who seems curious about me asked me to say more, but I refused to elaborate. The teacher interjected, ‘But it’s not serious! It’s just your routine, to practise.’
Such a contrast, I think, to the year before last. In Japanese we were never asked to reveal much about ourselves. The teachers were skilful, the resources helpful, the classes dry: this suited me fine for a while, but I ceased doing it when it became too difficult to seem practical for me in the long term. In Spanish we’ve moved on to describing neighbourhoods, so I’m out of danger. Our teacher also gives primary school classes; while reviewing greetings, she said she often says to her kids, ‘¿Qué pasa, calabaza?’ (‘What’s up, pumpkin?’) I like the casual, friendly air of our classes, up to the point of it feeling personal. I could say that I want learning a language to be impersonal, but that isn’t accurate. I like getting to know classmates in oblique rather than direct ways, as our capacity to speak slowly grows. My articulated reasons for studying both languages were imprecise when I was asked to state them in class. I said I was learning each language for travel. I think now as I complete my exercises that the truer reasons may be that they’re a form of mental exercise – good in itself – and that, while I’m not writing, the weekly classes help to fill in dead, dispirited time.
—
L comes home from work. Usually, one of us cooks and then the other cleans up; today the order is P/L. Afterwards, following some chat about our respective days, I ask ‘Watch?’ We settle into a Scandinavian crime drama we’re halfway through. Some days the prospect of this feels like junk, so we don’t. Today it ought to feel like junk, to me at least – the day has meandered and lacked form. But it unexpectedly feels like a balm. We sit together in silence for an hour, before briefly turning on and then off the lights.
Inspired by a long passage in The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, and by the great diarists of literature, Write the Day invites writers to document a single day in their lives, from waking to sleeping, capturing as faithfully as possible all that passes through their minds and senses. Sign up to our newsletter to receive this and other online series in your inbox.
Series illustration by Ben Juers.