the lucky house
• Posted by birdman on May 17th, 2009
This house is lucky.
It lies in Bowden, on the North Western corner of Adelaide city, bounded next to railway lines, a busy overpass, and a 40 hectare land area owned by Clipsal soon to be transformed by the government into a “miniature city”, as far as I hear. The railways’ lines carry trains of people and loads of goods away from and towards the city, in a north west - south easterly direction. It’s as if those trains were a metaphor for this house, which seems to have carried many passengers in its short duration known as ‘home base’.
Things happened luckily - Selina left for a holiday in Melbourne, and in the time she was gone we had two lots of travellers pass through, using her room in her absence. She came back, and things quietened down. She left for holiday in the mid-term break this year for one week, and Yong’s girlfriend came down to stay, for one week. We wanted to do a bathroom renovation (as you do maintenance for trains in constant use) but it was necessary to have no one in the house. It turned out that Yong found a place ideal for moving in with his soon-to-be wife, and Selina got her PR not 3 weeks ago, such that in the last 3 weeks things here have been gearing up for change, bathroom in particular.
And now… it’s just empty. No one is here except for poor old me.
Selina left yesterday while I was teaching Matthew. She took her small suitcase and a red backpack as the taxi she booked had arrived. I said “Have fun!” with a smile, and as she left she asked one more question, “Do you want to leave this door open?” I said that’s fine, you can leave it open. And that was the last piece of conversation we’ll ever have, probably. What fun. I went back to teaching. After 2 years of living together, there wasn’t much to be said?
Perhaps it’s because last night I busted out old tapes of myself and Debbie as a baby. I saw my mum and dad, together again. Debbie’s tapes in particular are surreal - they look exactly like they do “archive footage” in Hollywood movies. The first scene I watched nearly made me cry. It was my mum, all young looking, playing with Debbie as a very young infant. I hadn’t seen my mum so happy in ages.
As for me, by the time I got around to watching scenes of me the novelty had worn off, and I was well on my way to analysing what factors in my upbringing lead me to become so anti-social. Because as everyone knows, there’s a Freudian analysis for everything.
Yong and Selina had two different reasons for leaving, and they left at the same time, neither of them because they were unhappy about the place, or with each other, or with me. They left, and there are two new tenants, who came to see the place twice last week. One of them will move in this weekend. They seem nice, one from Taiwan, the other from Indonesia. I didn’t want to live with a couple, they are not a couple, they don’t seem too stingy, they don’t seem too picky, they are also not kids, doing a masters degree here. They seem nice. The plonked down $200 downpayment for the two rooms with the urgency and enthusiasm of a cow on heat. We’ll see if we all get along like a nice big family soon enough.
I’m sure we will. Cos this house is lucky.
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csodar said this on April 21st, 2010 at 12:23 am