Melbourne has rain!

A wet Friday and TGF (Thank God it’s Friday) whirred in my head as I drove home through the dark and down pour. The rain kept the streets quiet. Usually orthodox Jews fill our streets on Friday evening but this evening they weren’t around. I’m use to seeing their black clad figures in Inkerman Street and missed them.

I like Friday night’s gym instructor but not enough to make it there through the bleak winter evening. Now had it been the Tuesday instructor…

I rang my mother when I got home. She has a skin complaint that has covered her body with something akin to hives. The GP had no idea and after a wait of six weeks she managed to get an appointment with a skin specialist. Her name came to the top of the list this week. I talked to her at the same time the gym class heaved weights around. In our modern world we struggle to prolong our lives but the longer we live the more hurdles we have to jump. The skin complaint is just another for my mother. There are more drugs to take and the chance of side effects and no guarantee that the skin complaint will improve.

Not wanting to go there I turned up the gas heater, poured some red wine, heated some pasta and listened to my favourite opera. I first heard Bellini’s Norma in Vietnam when I worked in Qui Nhon . A colleague loved it and copied his tapes for me. I still have those tapes but now I listen to it on CD. It covered the hiss of the heater and I disappeared into the music and left the world behind.

I often think that we like certain music because there was something special happening in our lives when we hear it for the first time. Yet, Neil Diamond drifted around the paddy fields and shantytowns of central Vietnam at that time and he’s not a favourite in the same way. I didn’t see him when he came to Melbourne but I eagerly booked my ticket for the Australia Opera Company’s production of Norma. So much for a theory!!

When I went to bed I found myself thinking about my mother and the extreme discomfort she’s been in for weeks and why it is that the medical professionals can transplant lungs and hearts but can leave an old lady to struggle with something so distressing.