jmgoyder

Love story 74 – ‘Daddy Cool’

Way back in the Inna days, Anthony’s mates used to come over and they’d crank up the stereo and listen to Bony M. Even though I would be in the house with Inna, we could both hear the music – loud and clear. She would grimace and I would grin. The following is a youtube of one favourite. It looks so funny now!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxlCsVKkvY

Love story 75 – ‘Staying alive‘

I’m not sure if my facts are right here but I think it was the BeeGees who made falsetto an okayish thing for male singers to do. This clip is, for me, hilarious, poignant and nostalgic and reminds me of when Anthony took me to the drive-in to see Saturday Night Fever. At the time, I was still a naive teenager so, while he sat behind the steering wheel drinking a beer or two, I sat primly next to him, alarmed by all of the f-words in the movie, for which (can you believe it?) Anthony kept apologizing for.

Staying alive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKdVq_vNAAI&feature=endscreen&NR=1

[Note: For anyone reading these love story posts for the second time, since I had them in a separate blog, this is the last of those and, from now on, they will be new and hopefully fresh. Hope you get another laugh out of these two!]

Love story 69 – The phone is ringing again!

After Anthony and I became engaged, I was still living in Perth so he would ring me constantly. Okay, that doesn’t seem like much but during the years before our engagement he would hardly ever ring me, so these thrice-daily phone-calls were a bit of a shock.

I felt like a princess!

Love story 70 – The dreamchild

During the uncertain years before Anthony and I were engaged, I had a very strange certainty that twirled around in my mind, and whirled around in my stomach. So, one day, I sat down in my little bedsit and wrote about our son-to-be. I sent the poem to Anthony.

[Note: it was a poem called “The Dreamchild” which I have posted before so am not going to repeat it here again; in short, it was about a kid waiting to be born].

And a few years late, the dreamchild turned into Ming!

Love story 71 – Wedding dress

As as the wedding date drew closer, Anthony and I decided that we better get some suitable clothes so we went shopping. He immediately bought himself a $1,000 suit which, at the time, was very expensive and, as I knew how careful he was with money, this rather thrilled me! For me it was a little more difficult as I didn’t want to be a bridey bride, so a friend gave us the name of a seamstress and she fashioned a blue silk suit for me – jacket and skirt. Anthony paid for this too because I wasn’t able to at the time. The funniest thing though, is that my suit cost only $450.

I wonder if any bride has ever worn a less expensive outfit than her groom! Perhaps I should contact the Guinness Book of Records – ha!

Love story 72 – The engagement ring

It took Anthony awhile to fork out the money for this appendage but he we did finally go to a wonderful antique jeweller’s in Perth and he chose and bought me an old-fashioned ring for a tidy sum of money. I have never taken this ring off.

Love story 73 – Money

It is very difficult to describe the kind of joy Anthony and I felt in each others’ presence, as our wedding day drew closer. The various glitches we’d experienced since his metamorphosis now just seemed like the tiny midgies I’d wipe off the kitchen table. A few weeks before getting married, I moved out of my flat in Perth and fluctuated between staying on the farm or with my mother who lived in the adjacent town from which I’d once ridden my bicycle to look after Inna.

The only thing that bothered me a bit was money. I didn’t have any. Well, I had a bit because I’d been working at the nursing home where Joe lived for all of the three years since I’d begun post-graduate studies at the Perth university. It was my PhD supervisor’s suggestion to apply for a scholarship, so I did so and I was very hopeful as it was worth around $15,000 per year over three years. I wrote the scholarship application very carefully, outlining that I wanted to investigate how listening to the stories told by people with Alzheimer’s disease, no matter how fragmented these stories might be, could be a much better way of caring than … well, you get the gist.

Just before I vacated my flat in Perth, I received a letter from the scholarship people to say I had been unsuccessful and, even though I wasn’t devastated, I was very disappointed because I didn’t want to enter into a marriage with zilch as I knew I was already being perceived in some quarters as a ‘gold-digger’. At the end of the letter, their was a tiny shred of hope in that I had been placed at the top of the list if any of the recipients rejected the scholarship. I wrote a polite letter back informing them that if that happened my new address would be down in the country and I gave Anthony’s phone number.

After a weekend with my mother, I headed over to the farm and just as I was cooking fish mornay for lunch (yes, yes, I know – been there, done that!) the phone rang and a woman asked to speak to me, so I said I was me and she said she was from the Scholarships Office and said my application was successful. After a shocked pause, I said, “I don’t think that is possible because ….” But she immediately interrupted me, laughing over the phone: “The initial recipient received a better offer from another university, so you were the next on the list.”

I was so beside myself with glee that I could hardly speak. “Are you sure?” I kept saying, and she kept laughing and finally calmed me down to get my bank details so she could “pop the first little bit in, Julie.” After I shakily gave her my details, I couldn’t stop saying thank you, thank you, thank you, and she was so delighted by my response that she kept laughing in happy empathy (I don’t think empathy is the right word here by why not have happy empathy?)

Once I got off the phone, I went back to the Aga to try and salvage the now crispy mornay which, thank goodness, wasn’t burned. In a daze, I added a bit more milk, stirred it in, then put it on the side of the hotplate and sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. I tried to breathe normally but I was too excited so I jumped up and raced outside to find Anthony. He was with Arthur, his main dairy hand, yelling at him to clean his little hut up.

“I’m rich!” I shouted to both of them, twirling around and around in the middle of the lawn. When I managed to explain, Anthony twirled me around again, grinning.

The fish mornay was accompanied by a hefty glass or two of champagne after which I suddenly pretended to become serious and said to Anthony, “You realize, don’t you, that we will now need a prenuptual agreement!” With that, he danced me around the kitchen much to Arthur’s bemusement.

We already had the joy of each other but the scholarship money was like an extra scoop of passionfruit icecream and seemed like a present from heaven.

Love story 66 – How to cook steak

After Inna died, my friendship with Anthony consolidated itself and developed into an invincible platonic relationship. We became passionately siblingish and avoided the nuances. He was my best friend – simple – and I was his – not so simple.

And Anthony could cook steak to perfection. His method was to light the funny little outside barbecue, toss the fillet steak onto it (it had to be fillet), turn it over a couple of times and voila! I had never tasted anything like it – no blood, no charcoal, just perfect steak.

I would come home from Perth to stay with my mother in the adjacent town, then visit Anthony for lunch and, during one of these visits, while he was cooking the steak outside, the phone rang. Without thinking (after all, I had answered the phone for Inna for two years), I answered it just as I heard Anthony shout from outside, “Don’t answer it!”

It was the girlfriend and, as soon as she heard my voice, she went so verbally ballistic that I actually dropped the phone into its cradle, my hands shaking because I had never been screamed and shouted at before and I had never been called the things this stupid woman called me. Anthony came in and yelled at me and told me to go home to my mother’s place.

Until then I had dismissed this girlfriend as the other woman but on this steakless day I realized that I was the other woman.

Love story 67 – Running

Anthony loved to run. He didn’t need a horse or a motorbike to round up cattle and get them from one paddock to another; he just needed his own legs. Sometimes he would get me to help by yelling, “C’mon, Jules, run!” But I could never run as fast as he did, which was a bit embarrassing.

He had the most muscly legs I have ever seen – huge calves, massive thighs – and he always wore those footy shorts, you know the black ones, and he always wore football socks too. So he kind of resembled a football player I guess – big, strong, energetic and, in my eyes (and his own!) perfect.

Sometimes I would just watch him run because it was like watching someone glide through a mirror, or a window; it was like watching magic.

Love story 68

This love story is mostly of good memories, with a sprinkling of not-so-good memories, but it is the good ones that have suddenly bunched themselves into a fist and smacked me. So today I am having a little break.

[Note: I am copy/pasting these ‘chapters’ exactly the way I wrote them before in the other blog – this latter one is when the story began to upset me a bit].