When I’m 64… I guess I will sleep-in unintentionally, not waking till almost 8.30am. I will have coffee at Petty Cash Cafe with my girlfriend Samantha. Feel a little forgotten or out of the loop with life, an unspecific loss like something is slipping away. Drive through rain and sunlight around the city, listening to old songs like Flame Trees and Misfits, Dreams and Landslide. Write a story about black ribbons and white flowers and the rain in the afternoon. Come to the end of day faster than I understood how. Have dinner with my kids and Samantha, my daughter arriving with boxes of dumplings from Shanghai Night as a birthday meal for us all. We will talk about football, social work, Taylor Swift, Cold Chisel, MMA fighting, racism, Tokyo. We will share a set of fortune cookies, inside them messages for each of us. My eldest son will not be feeling well, a mild cold, so he will return to his bedroom after dining with us in his pyjamas. My daughter and younger son will go with Samantha and I to Bar Italia… gelato for them, homemade chocolate mousse and flat white coffees for the two of us. I will unwrap a gift from Samantha, a book of images by a photographer I love, Saul Leiter. I never knew much about his life, certainly not that he was a painter too… it will be a surprise as I leaf through the pages making a connection between the photos and his paintings, the colours in them, as if he were painting with light. I will talk to my two youngest about their ambitions for work, how maybe I can help them. About their brother’s dreams too. What the near future might be for each of them… a trip to Africa, cutting hair, working with children. Where will they take themselves, where do they want to go in life? It will be time for us to part. My daughter will head off to get her boyfriend from work, a young chef she loves. She will drop her little brother to Rozelle to meet his friends, to play pool, a young adventurer released into the night. Samantha and I will return home to watch the end of the television series ‘Ripley’, so lavish in black and white, a litany of murder and laughable insincerity and slick-but-ominous storytelling, a fine and malicious entertainment. It will just as suddenly be after midnight. My birthday over. I will go up the stairs to check on my eldest son, insist he gets a good night’s sleep. ‘Okay dad.’ I will kiss his forehead. I will sit in a kitchen, the back door open, taking a while to realise how cold the night is getting till Samantha closes the door and hands me a favourite drink, nothing but hot water in a coffee mug. It’s a habit I picked up in China long ago, this thing of drinking hot water. I like it a lot. I will think of how much I want to restore this habit, ascetic, pleasing. I will look through my new Saul Leiter book of photos as if my life might be present in ways I can decipher or find, a secret and reflected biography I have not seen before. I will write a series of notes detailing incidents and moments across my day, as cryptic and vital and open as the fortune cookie messages we found earlier and the photos I study. I will look at my birthday card beside my book, a picture of two birds flying away from red trees around a lake. I will see their deep blue bodies. I will count myself lucky to have been granted a good day.
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Good to read that you spent your birthday well, with those who love you and you them.
Saul Leiter book....I'm just a bit envious.
Many happy days for the future.
Happy birthday, Mark! Sounds like I turned 60 around the same time. Feels a bit like a milestone around my neck.