Small Things
I’m not going to say much about yesterday. What is there to say? I’m choosing to fight gently by concentrating on the small things.
“They want you to feel powerless and surrender and let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”
Rebecca Solnit on Twitter, 5 November 2024.
I’m not going to say much about yesterday. What is there to say? Many of you are probably on a media blackout. I know our household is avoiding the things we usually devour.
ABC News on television and radio. CNN. The NY Times. Any kind of news website.
When I needed to fill the void while I folded and put away clothes, I put ABC Classic on the radio. Even Spotify seemed too much.
Are we overreacting? We don’t live in that country, why care? There are many reasons, but here’s one: as my brother pointed out yesterday, this will only embolden those of a similar ilk in this country. As the latest Queensland election demonstrated, we are already well on the way down that path.
(And because we seem to be going backwards when it comes to the rights of anyone who is not a white man).
I said I wouldn’t talk about it.
I am choosing to focus on the small things. The things that connect me to the world that is immediate and close. The big things are making me feel powerless and angry. I choose not to be eaten alive by those things. I choose to fight gently.
Small things. Like my neighbour’s niece, M, coming over and asking if she can pick the gardenias from my front yard, for T’s funeral lei. “She planted this garden didn’t she?”, she asked, “it smells like Tonga”.
She was grabbing the flowers roughly. I wanted to offer her scissors so she could delicately remove them, but I let her go. If she was happy to do that and risk damaging the flowers, that is up to her. She is making the lei. And who am I to impose my way on her?
I’ve watched the people come and go from my neighbour’s house. Dressed in black, wrapped in taʻovala. There are marquees in the backyard. Singing. So much life. I wish T was here to see it.
Small things. Like driving M, my neighbour’s sister L and a friend to go shopping.
They wanted fabric from “the China shop” on Marrickville Road. They meant: the fabric shop run by Asian people. I suspect they’re probably Vietnamese but without going in there, I can’t say for sure.
As we drive down the road M neglects to put on her seatbelt. When she notices the car ding dinging to warn me that someone is driving unsecured, she puts it on.
“She is not used to cars”, says L, “only horses. Only horses in Tonga”. The kind of joke I often heard T make at M’s expense, even though M was the one keeping her clean and fed.
I dropped them off at Jack Textiles and waited in the car. It was hot but not too bad. They came back to the car. It’s not the one. Not Chinese. They gave me directions to the one up the road. That’s the one, they reckon.
They go off and get the fabric. It was to wrap T for the funeral.
“We got what we needed, with the money we had”, L says.
Then to KMart for black clothes and shoes. I waited on a chair in the shopping centre. How can someone spend over an hour in KMart?
I tried to be patient. I am being allowed in, to witness this whole operation.
About an hour after we get home, M rings me and asks me to take them to the funeral home. This was unexpected. The person who had promised to pick them up had somehow forgotten them
What’s the address? I said. L didn’t know. M found it on her phone and showed it to me. Greenacre.
Right.
“Are you busy?” they asked. ”Can you wait for us and bring us home?“
I threw some stuff in a bag. They waited out the front. All in black.
Google Maps sent us through the back of Earlwood where there are speed bumps. I was trying to drive as smoothly as I could, lest they judge me.
T’s son called as we drove. M put him on speaker. Everyone talking at once. M was escalating. There was some kind of issue.
“Only two people allowed in. Already people there. How long will it take us to get there?”
20 minutes.
More talking in raised voices. Words are fired about inside the car, bouncing off me because I don’t know the language.
Turn back. We go home, one of them says.
“Now you know”, L says, “Tongan people…” she runs her finger down her forehead, from her scalp to her nose, “half good. Half bad”.
I’m choosing to concentrate on these small things.
As well as to focus, concentrate can mean strengthen.
In the scale of individual lives - set free from the systems that structure our world, from media, from the eternal pressure to bear witness on social media - these things are meaningful. These things help strengthen our sense of ourselves and of our place amongst others.
I know I am a stranger to the customs these women are performing, and I have no desire to claim them as my own, but I am grateful for the space they are allowing me, to be involved in the celebrations of my neighbour’s life.
(Of course, they may just see me as a taxi, but I am choosing to believe that it is more than that).
I am sitting in Greenacre Public Library writing this. It is a small library. There are only two other patrons. A woman is watching yoga videos on a public terminal and a man is sitting at a table in a corner reading. It is very neat and quiet. There is one person staffing the library. She looked at me guardedly when I walked in, as if she wasn’t sure what I was doing there. It smells of old wood. Every window is covered in a grill, we’re sitting inside a cage.
I’m waiting for M and L to prepare T for the funeral. We have made a successful trip to the funeral home. They brought a pile of ta’ovala, a straw basket, the fabric (I assume) in a large candy striped bag. M and I carried it into the funeral home while L went ahead. Like a queen. They directed me to ask the funeral director a succession of questions.
On days like this I remember that even though I am not a fully paid up, productive member of the capitalist machine, I have time to drive people to a funeral home and wait for them to go about their solemn business, and surely that has value.
At times this year I have felt that I am outside of ‘real life’, of society’s system of value, simply because I did not have a paid job.
But I’m not. I’m just in another place, looking at it from a different angle.
Not everything is about clicks, or likes, or money, or bettering another, or ingratiating yourself on LinkedIn, or promotion, or winning, or achieving, or spending, or rushing, or even fixing.
It can be about just being.
Right now, I want to concentrate on this being, to see the joy and pain in these close, intimate connections. It gives me hope that despite what happened across the Pacific Ocean yesterday, we still have the means to make meaning and find truth together.
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