As the light goes

Cottesloe, September 2012

Living where I do now, it's easy to watch the sun set over the horizon. I am thankful for that. I've caught some splendid views and each one leaves me thirsty for more beauty, perhaps in hopes that it will counter the ugliness I constantly meet at work. Often I find myself so spellbound that I remain long after dark, the memory of the fading light keeping me still and silent whereas I could very well be on the far side of stormy.

Over eight years ago I wrote some reflections on nightfall, on what happens as the light goes and when it's gone. A few days ago, in regard to a specific situation it seemed as though night had fallen with an audible thump. I found myself suddenly in a place I did not recognise and could not see.

I have found once again that there is nothing to fear. Fear is a choice I may opt for by default, but I can also choose to be aware that I am not alone in the dark. I know I am in constant company of the One to whom darkness is as day.

Life has felt unstable for as long as I can remember. I first came to read these ancient lines in 2006 and they have remained at the back of my mind ever since. They returned to front and centre yesterday. I had forgotten the second half of the verse; seeing it again was enough to remind me that the promise of daylight is nearly as uplifting as daybreak itself:

"God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns." (Psalm 46:5, NASB)

Struck

Over Cottesloe, September 2012

I hope I never lose the ability to be silenced by beauty.

Practical crochet, Part I

I asked for timber floors.

More specifically:

Three to four months ago when I was about to begin searching for a home to rent, I made a list of attributes I would like said home to have. They ranged from "sensible" (safe neighbourhood) to "practical" (close to train station and/or bus routes) to "what are you doing asking for something so non-essential, especially in the price range where you're looking?" (timber floors).

I got what I wanted -- much more than I wanted -- and now, months later, still can't stop giving thanks for it. But the thing with wishes granted: you then have to look after them. Make sure they stay in good shape while under your care.

I had all this furniture, a combination of new and second hand but with the common denominator of potentially scratchy metal legs. That beautiful shiny floor needed protecting.

I did have an initial solution, but it was neither practical nor stylish.

And my toes were getting cold.

Enter my  not-yet-one-year-old crocheting abilities. Chair socks! I thought. The perfect plan: custom fitted, and more understated than mismatched adult human socks. A basic square, then a few more rows around the square, taper towards the top...

"Too much time, ah?" my sceptical (and also quite lovely -- they helped me move, unpack and assemble various articles) friends asked when they spotted the first sock in progress. "Wouldn't it be better if you just went and bought rubber feet from the hardware shop?"

And I did consider it, putting crochet hook and yarn aside while I went about finding more places for my various possessions.

But then the very same day I read my favourite crochet blog and lo, her latest post was all about how she'd gone about protecting her hardwood floors from chair scratches.

With chair socks.

So I plunged back in, and soon...

I was eager to test them out straight away, and was rather pleased with the result. Not because they look great; I don't think anyone would even notice them unless I pointed them out and got the person to bring their heads close to ground level for a good look.

I'd like my guests to return for subsequent visits, so I don't think I'll be doing that.

No, I think what I found most satisfying about this project was the small escape it provided from the lifestyle of assuming that everything must be bought ready made, that if you want something you go right out and plunk down money and get it right now.

There are times when I don't want to be instantly gratified.

And I also saved myself the cringe that inevitably comes when I open yet another non-recyclable package of mass produced something and generate more feed for the insatiable landfill.

(Yes, I do realise that I procured the yarn for this project by going to a shop and plunking down money for it, but it's still more sustainable than manufactured rubber feet because if my need for furniture socks ever winds down I can always unravel them and re-crochet them into something else. Rubber feet will always be rubber feet, until age takes over and they turn into rubber flakes. Also, the only packaging on the yarn was a recyclable cardboard band and, for what it's worth, this yarn is purportedly ecologically sound. Natural dyes, pesticide-free cotton or something. I take such claims with shovelfuls of salt.)

As if the square cross section did not provide me with challenge enough, I decided to also make a set of socks for my metal shelving unit. How to make right-angle corners?

Mitre them!

It worked, but the end result looks as though it stretched out into triangles unless you peer very, very closely. I repeat: I would like my guests to return, so don't say I made you do it. All in all, I'm pleased with the result.

I quite like how it feels to evade instant consumerism.

Crickets? Cobwebs?

I know. It's been quiet (again) around here. I just thought I'd pop in and write something so as not to give the impression that I have spent three months -- really? Three??? -- languishing in concussed grouchiness.

I have not. Indeed, as I did mention at the end of that most recent blog post, the grumpy spell ended before I'd hit "Publish".

Life is good. I found a home to rent in preparation for the cousins/house-sit hosts' return, although the process by which it was secured was so improbable that it seems more as if the home found me. Said home is so "me" in so many more ways than I could list offhand, and here I had been thinking I'd settle for anything that had a working lock. Preferably without a verbose landlord living on the same premises, but when you're desperate...

I have been learning -- and that is part of the reason for this season of blog silence -- the fine art of being blessed. To be precise, I've been learning how to stand there and let the blessing drench me, instead of bolting like a startled pony or starting to pare down what my heart desires until it more closely resembles "what I will only just live with because I think I have no choice". Learning to wait, learning that as I live in my Creator and him in me, our wills come together and what he gives me is what I always wanted.

It is a scary thing, knowing that the One who blesses knows exactly where you live. Physically and metaphorically. For most of my life I have not been able to handle that knowledge. I didn't know the proper protocol for dealing with someone who relentlessly pursues you with goodness. In this life where the mail rarely holds something more exciting than bills; where even friendships too easily turn transactional and some only reconnect with you for the sake of using your social networking contacts to expand their business, how foreign is the concept of someone who gives perfectly.

Some are better than others at the fine art of resting by the mailbox. Image by RJ Roth.

Yet this is who he says he is, and who he demonstrates himself to be. So I believe. And I rest in believing.

Although I don't quite have the photogenic light-capturing attributes of certain grey felines.

While away

A few notes about getting away:

If your destination is not too far from your place of ordinary residence, making travel time negligible and maintenance of food freshness not impossible, you can pack a light meal or two in anticipation of wanting to do nothing that evening but stay in and watch DVDs in bed. Of course, if you're at all like me, it might mean you pack a varied and detailed salad but forget all cutlery, resulting in your having to rip a tomato apart with your bare hands and eat dinner with a teaspoon.

This didn't diminish my experience in any way but if you think it might do yours, then by all means: don't forget the cutlery.

Being away, you might also find yourself spending more time on handwritten text than you would back in your Ordinary World: curlicues make a return, and the signature lavender sprig that was on your plate at breakfast enjoys a short-lived modelling career before returning whence it came.

Away is where there's time aplenty, and space to enjoy that time unhindered.

Away

"Self-care is essential," I have heard from every one of my lecturers and supervisors in this my latest (and, I'm hoping, lifelong) career. "Get away as often as you can," many also said. Enjoy the change in surroundings. Catch a break from containing other people's anxieties. Immerse yourself in beauty.

I ignored them. The excuses fell thick and fast. "I don't need to get away because I love where I live and it's pretty peaceful." "I can't spare a few days away from home." "I have too much to do." "Even if I am stressed, I let it out through baking and craft." "I'm fine. I really am."

I'm glad this time around it didn't take too long for me to realise that the above isn't always enough, that I needed to believe that people with decades of experience know what they're talking about -- and more than that, I needed to go away. Indecisive though I still am, the need to go was far greater than the fear of committing to the one choice. So it is that I ended up in that magical spot not too far from home, yet far indeed.

Where welcome was expressed not only in words and a lift up the stairs for my overnight bag, but in a pair of lavender biscuits and the offer of the programme for the local outdoor cinema.

Where a sandwich, mundane no-time lunch back in my ordinary world -- the very same sandwich! -- turned into a magical meal to the music of galahs and cockatoos conversing as they swooped down to the pool. Eaten here, eaten thus, it was fuel enough for the next few hours' wander through the lavender and through my raggedy, neglected soul.

Where discarded old things aren't made to feel worthless, or at least that's the impression I got. You can't feel worthless, can you, if you're given a place like this to continue your existence?

Where en route to the bridge I could press close to a tree, tracing the story of its years through its resin-coated bark.

Where indoors, too, had many wonders to be appreciated: a thimble-sized couple shyly courting on the windowsill (I gave them their space when taking this picture),

the stage set for that old, old battle between light and dark,

and a former inhabitant of this house reclaiming his favourite spot on the spiral staircase, lying in wait for the odd unsuspecting foot.

And so it was, my first day away.

I'm quite pleased with myself, writing this post only two weeks after the fact. My blog posts are usually so delayed that seasons change and cobwebs form in between.

Another dream come true

So maybe we're a rare breed, the people who dream of making tau sar pneah. And maybe rarer still, the ones who actually reach for it, but Google would show you more than a handful of food/baking bloggers who have.

I'm neither food blogger nor baking blogger -- and there are frequently times when I can't be referred to as a blogger at all, times when my life is so busy being lived that it won't sit, stay and be documented for public consumption -- but here's my experience of it.

But first. Remember a few months ago, when I posted that tribute to the superlative breed of friends I have? I could add another point of thanksgiving here: For giving me company to make these labour-intensive biscuits with. On my own, it would have taken me at least another year to give them a try and even then, would have been weeping from the monotony and fatigue by the time I reached for the 50th lump of dough. (For anyone who's keeping track of these things: the recipe is supposed to yield 100 biscuits. We made 88.)

I arrived after church, after the doughs and filling had been prepared. This meant I was just in time to sit down to a quick lunch before the assembly began: first the weighing and the rolling into little spheres of the filling,

 the oil dough,

 

the water dough. 

Then the rolling and combining and rolling and rolling and rolling of the two doughs (not pictured, because by then it was all hands on deck and nobody had a non-oily hand for taking pictures with).

Then the egg wash and the baking,

and the laying neatly in rows for cooling and being admired and attracting longing gazes and finally

the being bitten into; the collapsing into layers of light, thin flakes; the revealing of crumbly-soft seasoned mung bean; the bringing of childhood memories and adolescent reminiscences and early adulthood nostalgia into present day.

It's nice, the feeling you get when dreams come true.

Delivered

My parents raised us in a cultural vacuum, or near-vacuum, an uncomfortable space created by one parent's baby-and-bathwater view of cultural practices not implicitly described in the Bible and the other parent's putting up with it. I guess life sans baby, bathwater, towel and tub is easier to bear in the long run than the prospect of living indefinitely with belligerent dogma.

And so I've spent a lot of energy in the past few years trying to learn more about where I came from. One thing I'd observed and wanted to know the reason for: Hokkiens really, really like sugarcane. It's there on altars or near doors whenever there's a big festival; when you pass a bridal car on the street you know if at least part of the happy couple is Hokkien by the four feet or more of sugarcane stalk protruding from the car window. I wonder now why I've never heard of any traffic incidents caused by a motorcyclist or pedestrian getting swiped by sugarcane.

Image by Jesuino Souza

So, the short version of all that I've gathered from talking to relatives and reading strangers' blogs: the Hokkiens were once on the run from enemies. Sugarcane plantations were the only place that provided cover for our trembling ancestors while their homes got sacked and pillaged. And ever since then, the strong, flexible stalks have been a symbol of our thanks. They're present at every major milestone of life to remind us how fortunate we are that life goes on at all.

I also learnt that it's on the ninth day of each year (which falls today and YAY I just proved I still have some level of attachment to this blog and I am so glad I finally have a timely post, even if it did entail having lunch at my desk) that we ritually give thanks for our deliverance as a people. I wouldn't know first hand; see beginning of post. But I have always known that there's a day during the Chinese New Year period when my relatives go the whole hog -- actually, the whole pig (roasted, head on) -- preparing food and paper offerings. By the time I got old enough to ask questions, I was also old enough to decide I didn't want to ask them because I rather prefer sweet silence to another blood pressure raising, high-volume lecture on idolatry.

Much of my energy is spent on understanding why people say and do the things they do; when I fail to arrive at comprehension, I try to accept and tolerate because I think that is how you avert most of life's destructive moments. There are things worth fighting for but once they've been identified, you realise how much else there is, therefore how much isn't worth fighting over. So I don't bear any grudges for having had huge parts of my heritage withheld from me in my formative years. There's nothing I can do now to change it all.

I'm only left wondering: how do you get so hung up on whom to thank and how to express those thanks that you cause your entire family not to give thanks at all?

Twelve years

It seems a lifetime ago that the whole house stood still. So many changes since then: lines on faces, hairs turned grey, a grandson born, all the familiar feline forms that my mother knew gone the way of all cats.

Work and life alike throw me plenty of opportunities to talk about grief, to help others unpack theirs. That's the thing about grief, it really is a package. Its contents are mixed. Some days you reach in and pull out comfort, warm from the sun and smelling of cosy cuddles and laughs, whispered secrets and giggles and Saturday-morning shopping excursions.

At other times you feel bitten, as by a shark rather than by a mosquito: a large chunk of you, the part of you that this person shaped, is gone and you wonder how you go on. They don't make prostheses for that, but the human spirit is a wonderful regenerative thing. What grows back will never be what you had before, but it isn't completely foreign. I see others' experiences of grief, some much older than mine, and count myself blessed for the peace that I have.

I think I would have been a very different person if my mother were still alive. I don't know how much I'd have liked being that person. I only know and love the one I am now. I hope she does, too. From the nineteen years I had with her I've taken a lot, good and bad. A public blog is no place to tell about the bad. The good, no book on earth could hold.

I didn't feel any great pressure to post this today and only today, on the anniversary date. It worked out well that it fell on a Saturday this year, giving me time to blog. But truly, most days are the same. There's rarely, or never, a day when I don't think of her and miss her. It's really hard not to think of a person you strongly resemble in face and voice. But I've had a dozen years to find a way to live without the pillar of my earlier life. So far, by the grace of God, the way has been a good one to travel.

If you're one of those who knew and loved her too, raise a glass (okay, coffee mug -- containing a brew as strong as the mug can handle; we can always have a group tremour-and-tic session after) with me in honour and memory of the beautiful, tenacious, long-suffering, glad-hearted, cat-loving woman who was my (and my brother's) Mummy. Sally Saw Leng Geok, 1948-1999.

Easy

... like Friday mornin'.

Sweet, green, crunchy

My prior experience of asparagus has tended a little too far to the side of "like miniature tree trunks, a little greener but just as fibrous". Chewing like a beaver when you don't have the teeth for it gets old very fast. For this reason, I hadn't bought asparagus for over a year.

But these seem to be an entirely different creature: slender young stalks, making up nearly twice as many in a bundle of the same thickness. Just right for tossing quickly in a hot pan before adding cooked pasta and then, immediately after the heat is switched off, tearing in pieces of smoked salmon and a quick shake of freshly ground black pepper. Grated Parmesan over the top if you like, but the fish and pepper are all the flavour that most would need.

The return of Christmas

Decade-old aversion to Christmas trees broken.

Line from poignant not-quite-Christmas*, yet still moving, "Christmas" song fulfilled.

Donkey unintentionally made to resemble Dame Edna.

What a full Sunday, and what a good weekend. Thank you, Perth northern suburbs friends and family.

*I don't think Christmas is Christmas unless it makes direct reference to Christ, which means I don't think 'When Christmas Comes To Town' is a Christmas song in spite of its title. But it is nice.

Buckwheat granola

I followed Andy Bellatti's recipe for Oil-Free Autumn Buckwheat Granola, using the sweetener-free option. I can't call mine "oil-free", because I incorporated a tiny knob of butter during the last stirring. Neither is it Autumn over here in the southern hemisphere.

Nonetheless, it's a recipe I'm glad I tried, and will probably keep using. Conditions are much less rumbly and churny after eating this, compared with oat-based mixes.

While the mix was still warm, I filled my silicone teddy bears with it and stored them in the fridge (something that Mr Bellatti doesn't mention, but maybe his apples were completely dried and maybe he doesn't live in a place so humid that kiwi fruits sweat).


I have finally discovered a delicious breakfast that will not have me weak with hunger one hour later:

The bear and rye bread go in the toaster oven together, for 4 minutes. Warm, re-toasted granola as a chaser to a soft-boiled egg just done, interspersed with mouthfuls of nutty rye: it's a nice way to see 6.30am in, if you possess a brain that for some reason won't register that you live very close to work and really don't have to wake up at the crack of dawn every day.

Heigh ho, heigh ho

It's off to work we go! The donkey too? You bet your stripey socks. We don't stock pickaxes in this house (or in most counselling offices) but a well-loved Muji pen does the trick.

I'm glad I woke up early enough to post this before I set off. It would have been that much harder to rhyme "ho" with "went".

A borrowed welcome

Dear newest little nephew,

This past Saturday, which I would later discover was to be your birthday, I went to the local library. As usual, I entered with the purpose of unburdening myself of borrowed reading and watching material; I left more heavily laden than I had come in.

For some reason, one of the things I picked up that day was a paperback copy of The Complete Nonsense & Other Verse of Edward Lear. Not that there's anything nonsensical about you, of course.

Today I was thumbing through the pages of "nonsense" (it's terribly insightful, more so than many of the "sensible" writings lying around) and came across a letter Mr Lear wrote to a newborn niece. It's quite long and I imagine your parents are busy feeding, burping, bathing, changing, dressing and altogether adoring you, so I won't require them to read you the whole thing. Only these lines:

"... I congratulate you heartily on coming into a world where if we look for it there is far more good & pleasure than we can use up -- even in the longest life... I therefore advise you to live & laugh as long as you can for your own pleasure, & that of all your belongings."

I look forward to seeing pictures of you that, doubtless, your parents will be sending along ANY MOMENT NOW (no pressure!). I look forward even more to meeting you in person. In the meantime, I give thanks, as I have done constantly from the moment I was told of your existence, for all that you are and were made to become.

Love,

One of your Kor-kors

15: Friends

For company on long, aimless drives when I needed to get out of the home-work-home-work-home rut.

For writing and phoning often and letting me know I'm still a part of your life even though I've moved an ocean away.

For emails that go deeper than "Hey" and Facebook contact beyond sheep-throwing. (Does anyone even do that, still?)

For not being pai seh.

For knowing the worst of me and yet not judging me.

For driving me around the hometown where I no longer have a car.

For lending me your mother when I needed one and my own was too far away.

For hearing me say I'd found the books I'd been dreaming of since childhood, and then giving me the box set before I had the chance to buy it for myself.

For getting me to take the risks that have led to a richer life.

For telling me off when I say or do something bad.

For staying on the phone all night if I needed you to, back in the confused days of our early 20s, and then picking me up en route to uni because I was too tired to drive safely.

For helping to keep my Hokkien skills in shape.

For not being shy to burst into song in public, in three-part harmony.

For getting your family to let me stay in your home for over a month.

For keeping silly childhood languages alive.

For talking me down from my overcompensating Chinese ways.

For knowing when I need to bake, and willingly eating the result even if it's on the far side of edible.

For making me feel I'm not so alone, after all.

For being a one-person online cheer team.

For praying for someone you've never met in person.

For sending me your songs.

For proving that real friends don't have ages.

For showing me good food in far-flung places.

For knowing how to be silent without being awkward.

For baking a birthday cake for a friend you'd just made two weeks previous.

For being someone I am comfortable to laugh and cry with.

For keeping the best of me when I think she's lost for good.

For being someone I can trust.

For the many more that can't be listed because this girl's got to get on with Monday, but we know what they are.

Thank you.

21: Reading

One of the best things about childhood was all the reading I got to do. I was privileged to have parents who read to me every night at bedtime, something I was later surprised (and saddened) to hear wasn't what all literate parents did for their children. All my cousins, at least on my mother's side, were read to, too, so I'd come to assume that it was a built-in component of childhood.

(If I was disturbed that not every child got read to, imagine my response not long after when I read the newspaper for the first time and discovered that not every child gets fed, sheltered from the elements, or protected from harm.)

So I'm thankful that my parents saw it as important that I learnt to read as early as possible, perhaps so that I'd stop pestering them to read to me. I'm thankful that my childhood was a time of relative financial stability in my family when my parents belonged to a club that had a good children's library. I liked that the adults' library had James Herriot, but I had to get my accomplice (also known as Pops) to check his volumes out for me because those stuffy post-colonials wouldn't let anyone under 13 into the library, no matter how quiet and reverent. I'm thankful that my nanny's family had 50 years' worth of Reader's Digest. From those yellowing pages I pieced together a view of how the world had moved on in the decades since the war, just as much through the advertisements as the editorial. The magazine introduced me to some of the authors I still admire now: Torey Hayden, Alex Haley, Erma Bombeck.

If I had to pick one favourite from the childhood library years, it would be Capyboppy by Bill Peet: an illustrated first-hand account of living with a pet capybara. It was written way before the exotic pet trade was the illegal, dangerous, irresponsible circus it is today -- or at least, before we became aware that it was dangerous and irresponsible. I was a kid. There were nicely drawn pencil sketches of a gigantic rodent terrorising pampered domestic cats so, unquestionably, a good book. We would check it out from time to time, sometimes getting my mother to phone the library ahead to reserve it for a long loan.

At some point my father, whose business at that time included a photocopier/printer distributorship, must have decided the serial borrowing was getting ridiculous so he photocopied the entire book and bound it into our very own copy, right down to the illustrated cover plate with a picture of Capy sitting resolutely in his inner tube. Over time my father became a staunch anti-piracy advocate, and I eventually followed. But you still can't get me to let go of our family's bootleg copy of Capyboppy, possibly even after I inevitably buy legit copies for myself and for my brother's offspring. It's hard to let go of something you can hold, concrete evidence that my father did try. He did want to be nice to his family. Those are the things that help me to remember that he always has and he does still, when at times the opposite seems to be true.

22: Belonging

I had a working mum all my life. Well, not all. All but the two months after she gave birth to me and the slightly over one month before she died. And I guess I could add the weeks she had to take off each month from work (under heavy suspicion from amazingly uncaring employers who accused of her abusing her paid medical leave privileges) to travel to Singapore for chemo and recovery. While I maintain that I missed out on a lot from not having a mother who was more practically and emotionally available, I know I'll also always have reason to be thankful that this is the way our lives played out: if she hadn't needed a daily babysitter for me, I wouldn't have had a ketchup family.

(The name was coined when I was about 6, adapted from an episode of Punky Brewster, and once my "siblings" [also my real, blood sibling] and I got used to it we found we couldn't replace it with something more sensible-sounding. And we never really wanted to.)

They were the family who looked after me while my mother was at work five days a week, all through the year except when we went on holiday, for 10 years. They were the ones who kept tape recordings of my earliest attempts at speech, who mediated early fights (of the fist, nail and foot kind -- we were pretty badass) between my brother and me, who hold the negatives to that most embarrassing of all baby photos: the potty shot. But I don't just want to be nice to them because they possess incriminating pictures of me. I don't just want to be nice to them. I'm simply steeped, for the rest of my life, in gratitude for all they've been to me.

The babysitting arrangement was informal, unwritten as things were in those days before the nightmare of abuse in child care was widely reported. (But it existed; an older girl who later came into the same family's daytime care had previously been looked after by a woman who would lock her in a small store room without ventilation, food or water until her parents picked her up.)

Anyone would agree that all that was expected of this family was: in exchange for what my mother paid, they'd feed me, change me, bathe me and otherwise see to it that I was well in body.

But being with them did so much for my heart as well. Every child should be so blessed to have just one person love them as completely, unconditionally and irrevocably as Ah Poh (grandma to the non-Hainanese) loved me. Not only her; I grew up feeling so very precious to the entire family. And not, I can tell you, because I deserved it. I was the typical child. (The typical younger/youngest child, even, so you can add the requisite number of Insufferable Points for that.) I fought, loudly and often violently, with my brother and talked back to older members of the family. I screamed when I didn't get what I wanted, and then screamed louder when discipline arrived. I took for granted all that they, with the utmost tender patience, did. I was, in general, a Lot Of Work. Yet they've never made me feel like a lot of work.

Amazingly, 20 years after I stopped being under their daily care, this family is still my family. My ketchup sisters and brother are still my ketchup sisters and brother. They still love me way more than I deserve. Auntie still offers to cook chicken rice for me on the rare occasion I'm back in town. She still clucks anxiously and asks if I need medicine if I so much as sneeze in her presence, even if it's nothing more than a reaction to the chopped chili on the dining table. They helped keep food on my table when I went from self-supporting development sector worker to unemployed postgrad student. They chipped in, everyone in the family, to give me a large Christmas cash gift that first year I spent the season away from home.

It's impossible to reflect on the nearly 31 years I've lived without acknowledging all that this family has been in that time. They've demonstrated to me that you don't love something just because it's yours; it becomes yours in response to how you've loved it.

Sara

For just over a year now I've been reading her blog, occasionally joining in her online community and simply learning how to live from someone who does it so well. Her constant refusal to let chronic illness take her joy while it stole her breath, her energy and her voice showed me that I also had a choice in how I responded to the difficulties of my own life.

Image from GitzenGirl

And now it looks as though soon there won't be any new posts, as she moves on to where life -- finally, after all these years -- won't be constant pain and struggle. But if I know her at all, as she's allowed her readers/book club friends to know her, she isn't focusing on what won't be but on what will: being home. I just didn't want to wait until I had to refer to her in the past tense, because she is and always will be all about the present. I'm so glad that soon, her present will be forever.

Edit 29/9/2011: Sara passed away on Saturday, September 24. Even if you don't visit Sara's blog, please read this. I don't think we could ever stop learning how to live well.

30: Food

I wonder how it's possible to say too much, too little, or just enough about food. For some of us, it never bears thinking about; it's simply what you take at mealtimes to avoid getting hungry and eventually dying. For others, it's an all-consuming passion.

And for still others, it's a dream: elusive, seemingly unobtainable.

See what I mean? So hard to pick just one thing about food to write about. So here's my one thing about food today: the lack of it. Also known as hunger.

I went through a foolish period on the border of my teenage and adult years when hunger was frequent, mainly because of my misguided response to circumstances. But in recent years, there's been only one day when I went hungry because I had no money. I'd started a new job in an upscale neighbourhood where the cost of one meal could literally feed a family well for a day. I had to rush to work that first day, and ended up leaving my packed lunch in my nearly-bare fridge; I'd thrown it together out of the only provisions I had remaining until my first pay.

I still remember how, somewhere around mid-morning, I began to feel the usual rumbling in my midsection. I usually counter that with some low-GI snack to tide me over until lunch. But that day there were no snacks, and there was to be no lunch. The hungry feeling in my stomach went away in the late afternoon as, I imagined, that organ decided it had had enough of being ignored. But for the rest of the workday, I felt my alertness fall, watched the lines in spreadsheets grow blur, willed the words to stop merging into one another and swapping places on documents and getting lost in my brain just as I was going to type them out.

On the one-hour train and bus journey home, all I could think about was that plastic container of food on the second shelf of my fridge. The girl next to me on the train had an open container of trail mix on her lap, from which she would periodically pull a nut, granola cluster or other typical trail-mix component. Every crunch was excruciating, amplified by the juddering across every single rail along the Harbour Bridge that had never bothered me before. Walking through Town Hall station underground to get to the bus stop, I was assailed by the smells of frying chips and seafood, sushi, panini being toasted, dark nutty breads from the German bakery -- all just an arm's reach away, yet they might as well have been half a world away because my wallet was empty.

I had long before that made a habit of saying grace before every meal, and meaning it. So I can't say it was that one day last year that caused me to be thankful for food, because I was already thankful. But maybe it made my thanks into something real, rather than an abstract concept. Now that I had been hungry, I knew now just how privileged I was each time I had food before me.

I resolved that day to go without food every year on that date, as far as health permits, so that I'll constantly be reminded of the many for whom hunger is not a choice. They're not always in some dusty faraway land, and they don't always have the "starvation look". Whenever I'm able, even if in the smallest and seemingly most ineffective of ways, I want to help the hungry to not be hungry. Sometimes I sink deep in ideological questioning, in suspicion over institutional motives and feasibility, or in beating myself up over how little I'm doing to solve a huge worldwide problem, but then I bring myself back to the blank-minded, wobbly-kneed reality of that one day and am reminded of the simple truth: the answer to hunger is food. Will at least a small part of that answer will come from me?

A final note: it's quite rare for me to directly address you, but I'll do it this time. Each of the links in this post is to a different not-for-profit programme addressing the contemporary hunger problem. If you can, please click to learn and give, or search online for other channels if none of these suits you. This post-a-day project has reminded me that there are so many material gifts I could place on a birthday wish list, which I still might do, but right now what would make me happy is knowing that there are just one, two, 13, 58, however many fewer (I know, what an awkward phrase, but the sky is blue and the sun is shining and I am in a hurry to post this so that I can go for a walk) hungry people on earth. For starters.