Fresh Words Daily

Tennis is the best game in the world.  Others will disagree particularly the rugby crowd. But nothing beats the tension the athleticism and the intellectual connection that it takes to play this game.  My mother taught me to play tennis on our front lawn.  It wasn’t the full size of a tennis court and there was the likehood of hitting a window in the house but I learnt to run hard and to try for every shot.  She also taught me the manners of the game.  No shouting or throwing the racquet.  I was never a very good tennis player but it was a game I have always loved to watch.  This year the Heineken Open has been fraught with the vagaries of Auckland’s weather but on Monday the sun shone and the clouds stayed away and we saw some good tennis some mediocre stuff and plenty of drama.  It is a bit like theatre we await the players they step into the spotlight and deliver their lines – mostly it is mime but sometimes there are definite grunts.  Not so many squeals from the men.  Six hours of watching the best game in the world. Bliss.

It is never the most exciting appointment to keep – that one with the dentist.  We scrub and floss and hope that when we do have a check-up the drill will be left in its high-tech sleeve and not venture into our mouth.  I have been lucky and for the past 30 years I have had the same dentist – a family friend.  I would walk in and get a hug we would catch up a bit  on families and then get down to the dentsitry business.  It was a very satisfactory arrangement but like all good things these must eventually end and at 70 years my dentist retired. Well earned.  So to find someone new.  I chose someone close I could walk up to the surgery it seemed an ideal arrangement.   So I made the appointment for a six monthly check my first with the new person and walked to the surgery.  I filled in a form detailing my health and circling that I did not want my teeth whitened or any other cosmetic activities in the oral area.

Out came the young male dentist.  “In here Rae” he said.  So no greeting ( I didn’t expect a hug) no introduction of himself to me but I, an obedient woman, trotted in behind him to the treatment room.  I had no sooner settled into the reclining chair when he had me whisked out into another room to have some photographs taken of my mouth.  A procedure I hadn’t experienced before and was not really aware of what he exactly wanted he did not explain.  Back in the room with the recliner and there is my mouth in glorious black and white on a computer screen.  I said “Well isn’t that interesting.”  He said “You have a hole in your tooth did you know that?”   Well I didn’t that was the reason I was there – for him to tell me those things. “When did you see your last dentist? Did you have an xray?” His next barrage of  questions. “About 6 months ago.” I replied.  ” I can’t remember if I had an xray but it should be in my notes which were sent to you.”  I am starting to be a bit antsy with this bloke. “I don’t have any notes.” he says. “Did they email them to me?” 

“I have really no idea.” I am getting even a bit more irritated – I am the client why suddenly does it seem many things are my fault?  He leaves me in the recliner and goes out to the receptionist demanding the notes.  There is a flurry and a flutter and he comes back with them.  At last he takes up one of those little poker things dentists use to pick at your teeth and the tiny angled mirror and starts to poke around in my mouth.  I understand this procedure.  Then he says “You have a lot of tarter build up on the left side of your mouth don’t you clean that side properly?” 

What? Now I am being told that I don’t clean my teeth properly.  I sit up in the recliner remove the bibby things from around my neck and say:  “I am not happy with what is happening here I think you need to look after first time patients better than this.  I am leaving now and I will pay for what you have done today but that is the end I will not be back.”

A shocked silence and I walked out.  I see the receptionist.  By this time I am in a towering temper. 

“That man needs some lessons on how to deal with new patients I will not be back I would like my records and I will pay for the work done today.”  She looks a bit stunned and scurried off to talk to the dentist.  Low noises from the surgery she scuttles back and tells me it will cost $150.00  pretty pricey I thought for about 10 minutes work but I pay and I get out of there and I hardly remember walking home I am still enraged.

Next day my husband calls into the dentist to pick up our records – he too was going to be a patient for this dental practice. 

“Oh I didn’t know you were going to remove your records too.” The receptionist says.  My husband smiles and waits for the documents.

Because of poor people skills this dentist lost two patients in the space of 24hours.  He must have a wealthy practice to afford that loss.  All he needed was to be polite, to greet me, to explain procedures and treat me as a human being.  Very easy I would have though.

There are many terms which have become cliche in recent times but the one that irritates me at the moment is ‘moving on’.  Politicians who are not renown for their originality use it a lot – we have suffered from the floods, fire, locusts, frogs and now we have to move on.  In the devastating floods in Queensland over and over I would hear those words ‘we have to  move on’.  But I want to know is where to?

A friend grieving for her lost son who has now been gone for 4 years was told she should ‘move on’.  I have never had the misfortune to lose my son so I cannot quantify the grief that it brings but I would think the last thing that you can imagine is moving somewhere. What is wrong with staying right where we are?  I realise that the term has come about because we are supposed to be able to pick ourselves up out of adversity and continue living our lives and to say that is not a ‘sound bite’.  But my plea is that we don’t start expecting people to move when they are surveying a wreckage of their life brought on by whatever mischievous gods there are in the universe.

It seems to me that when I am about to entertain or leave the country equipment in my home either ceases to operate or malfunctions usually in the form of puddling water.

A few years ago when we were about to leave for two months overseas travel the day before we left, a Sunday, the washing machine which had been functioning perfectly did not go.  It would have been perfectly alright to leave the machine and deal with it on our return except – we were have a houseminder to stay in the house while we were away and I was pretty sure she would want to use the laundry.  I was in Farmers store in the time it takes to say ‘rinse’ .  The salesman keen to expound the beauties of the various machines was cut in full throat when I said “I will have that one” pointing and can you deliver it before 11 a.m. tomorrow.  He gulped back his spiel and then set about making the arrangements.  It would be the swiftest sale he had ever made.

Now come forward to a night when we were about to have 6 people to dinner.  I came downstairs to find the whole of the hall flooded – the hot water cylinder had decided to show it needed more petting.  A plumber arrived and we had the carpets up and large gas dryers burning away before the guests arrived.  At least the floor was dry.

Today a Thursday we are arranging to have 14 people to dinner on Saturday night.  Drinks and nibbles will be served outside under cover with steps down into the garden and then the idea is that we will all go back upstairs for dinner.  The garden is weeded the paths are swept, but seeping out from under the cupboard at the end of the patio where we plan to have drinks is an ominous puddle.  I opened the cupboard on a stack of old canvas chairs and a pile of leaves and a very sodden looking trap which comes from the kitchen.

A plumber is called and it is fixed $184.00 later.  Now the irony of this is that for a few weeks now we have eschewed the dishwasher.  There are only two of us here most of the time lets just do the dishes by hand – so says my significant other it will save on our water rates .  Part of the problem with the kitchen trap has been that it hasn’t been getting enough rush of water through – which is what happened with the dishwasher action.

This afternoon I loaded the lunch dishes into the dishwasher – we haven’t saved any money and I’m sick of drying dishes.

The i-pad has arrived and there is some excitement although I don’t think it has reached the pitch that the manufacturers had hoped.  The name is a disaster and for many women it has an entirely different conotation, but I won’t explore that here.  The Kindle has a better name – to kindle is to ignite or arouse or inspire and reading should do that.  These gizmos are all the thing at the moment.  You can download hundreds of books and cart the little screen with you to read constantly as you circle the globe.  It does have a place perhaps.  What amuses me the most though is when I see keen owners showing how with just a touch of a finger it will turn a page.  Now I have known all my life of reading that with just a touch of a finger I can turn a page.  The other advantage of course is that it saves paper and fewer trees will be chopped down to serve our thirst for literature.  That has to be a good thing.  But something it cannot do which I always like as a surprise factor is that there can never be any ‘marginalia’ or as we call it ‘the phantom scribbler’.  In a recent New Yorker magazine there was an article about an exhibition at the wonderful New York Public Library where there were examples of famous people’s marginalia.  In a book I had about bombing in England during World War 2 a phantom scribbler had disagreed in several places with the times of the bombing and with the places the author had mentioned.  Or in one book written across the bottom of the page was “This is rubbish!”  I  notice that usually there is a proliferation of exclamation marks with these comments. I have a mental picture of these people always reading with a pen in hand – where is the fun for them with an i-pad. Where is the fun for me thinking about what it is that pressures people to scribble comments in books. Perhaps it is just that we all believe we are writers. We believe that we can all do better than the last person who wrote something.  And that we have a book in our head right now and just haven’t had the time to get it down.  But boy if we did wouldn’t it be a best seller?  So Kindle and i-pad can never take the place of a book for me when I have the chance of coming across the works of stunted writers scribbled over my latest library book.

It was very quiet in the auditorium.  Usually the set builders are talking, arguing, hammering or there is the swish of the paint brush.  They were silent, the temperature was cool and every action was definite. Things were not going well with the director.  There had to be changes made. “Bloody directors” said one of the men to me daring me to react.  When a play goes on in any theatre there is often more drama before the opening night. Set designers are fantastic people but it is the set builders that I take my hat off to.  The ones at Howick Little Theatre are the best – they can build from a shaky bit of a drawing dashed off on the back of an envelope to a sophisticated plan with all the measurements.  They try hard to do what the director wants but not everyone who can direct, or act can hold a colour in their head – understand dimensions outside of reality, or realise the size of furniture in relation to the set – the set builders accommodate, and if it is sometimes with gritted teeth I don’t blame them.  What always fascinates me that through the maze of irritations, grumbling, director’s mind changing, out of it all comes a play. A set which is spectacular, a play which entertains. Howick Little Theatre do it well – always worth going to perfomances in this jewel of a theatre. When the play ends the set gets broken down, furniture goes back into store or is sold on Trade Me and they are ready to start the process all over again.  A cheer loud and long for the forgotten heroes in the theatre – the set builders.

It has hit New Zealand after many years in the UK.  The Master Chef programme on television.  All the hopeful cooks have lined up in fact queued way down the street in the hope that they would be the chosen one.  I have to ask WHY?  What is it about winning the title of master chef that is so seductive?  Is it merely a chance to be on TV to cry a little to hug the judges when they give you a pinny.  Gosh my mother used to make masses of them for the Presbyterian Church Bring and Buys – florals with matching plain bindings.  Works of art really.  But maybe it isn’t for the apron because every contestant talks about their passion for food, their passion to cook and they want one day to own their own restaurant.  STOP!!  It is a rotten job cooking in heat, trying to make food that fussy customers will like.  Spending huge amounts of your life cooped up in a kitchen with people you may not necessarily like.  Trying to pay the bills for rent, wages, product, and then the staff don’t turn up.  Madness I say.  I also have a passion for food, but I am happy to cook a little in my little kitchen for my family and friends, and then to eat a few times at restaurants I like – but doing it every day for a living.  Never Never Never.  I would be weeping on the programme too if I knew that I would have to have three fussy men looking at my food as if I have resurected it from the dustbin.  Forget it folks.  Go to the beach, go to the library, read a book,  but cook every day of your life nada.

In Mexico they have a “Dead People’s Day”  and those who have passed before are remembered.  On the Marae when entering the meeting house after having removed your shoes you walk to the end and honour the ancestors – pictures of those who have gone before.  Today I had lunch with a friend whose son would be 40 today if he had not died from an infection which spread like liquid silver through his body 3 years ago.  We talked and wondered how those mothers whose sons went to war ever survived the grief of their death far from where they can be remembered.  Then I said that at the weekend I had made a pineapple mustard sauce to go with the hot ham we were providing for a dinner of 12 people.  It was my sister’s recipe and it was in her handwriting. And so there she was again in my kitchen over 30 years since her death.  Not all memories are unhappy ones and we remember our dead often not from a gravestone which can become overgrown and rotten as time passes but through the tangibles we pass on. Recipes, books.  And then there are the intangibles like laughter and ideas.

Borders UK is under management and it seems about to go under but with the hope that it can be held bouyant and that jobs will not be lost.  There have been a host of owners for Borders UK.  Transferred from one investment company to another all hoping that it will be the golden goose.  What the investment companies have forgotten is that books are different from any other product.  It isn’t like selling a jar of jam.  A book has a different genesis.  It is created from an intellect, worked and re-worked and then finally produced for enjoyment, instruction, or illumination from one human brain to another.  So selling books is not just cash and wrap, though I have to say that is about what you get in the Borders bookshops.  There is no knowledge of the books, there is no love for reading.  Most of the people employed are there for a job to enable them to live – and that is a good reason too – but they are not there because they love literature.  I once asked a assistant at a Borders bookshop if they had a book on Ernest Rutherford, the famous New Zealand scientist.  She looked a bit puzzled and said she wasn’t sure and then brightened and said:  “What has he written lately?” 

The only good thing about a large conglomerate bookshop going to the wall is that it allows space for the small independent booksellers.  These small usually owner owned businesses do know their stock, and they do try to get to know their customers. They are in this world of  selling books because that is what they love to do.

I am sorry that Borders may be on its way out – it employs a large staff and they will be amongst the many looking for jobs, but I know that I will always prefer the small independents.  A real place for real book lovers.