The selectiveness of memory

Yesterday morning Mum called to tell me a longtime family friend -- one of the stalwarts of my childhood -- had had a severe heart attack the day before and his kidneys were shutting down. Later that day came Dad told me he had died. By happenstance, I bumped into him last week, perhaps the week before. We traded words, a bit of banter couched as lighthearted, affectionate insults. That was our way, something we had done since I was a child. I walked away, frowning, thinking how frail he had grown. My parents' generation are falling. My mother speaks of what it is like to know she is next (generationally) in line. It's not something I like to contemplate.

Today, Mum composed the death noticed. We to-ed and fro-ed on it: whether to add the strange little joke we'd shared with Nev, the one that no-one else would get but that would have made him laugh (we didn't). Tonight, my parents came over, and we reminisced. Nev was the third of eight children. Only three remain. Mum was talking about the trip we made to his sister's once in South Australia when I was small. Perhaps five? It came up when she was listing his brothers and sisters, and was talking about one I didn't remember, though I knew her name. Mum said I should remember her from that trip as we'd stayed with her.

I cast my mind back. Even now, I remember just three things. I remember going in Nev's station wagon, the long, lonely kilometres (or was it miles?) as we drove all night long. My brother and I were crammed into the back area, with beds laid out, but it was bumpy and cold, and I remember looking up at the glittering stars -- so many stars -- and listening to the voices talking, watching my brother sleep and knowing then that I wasn't going to sleep in this forever night. That car was one we'd go down to Shelley Beach (the Back Beach) in, and we'd all line-up, sitting on the backrest of the back seat, and Nev would slam on the brakes so we'd all go flying. Not like these days where everyone is belted up, and no-one does anything irresponsible. (I remember Nev telling me he never trusted a driver who needed two hands on the wheel, something I often think about when wondering if I'm being irresponsible driving one-handed.) So there was the long lonely night drive, under a thin blanket, being jostled and jounced with every rut in the highway: that was the first thing.

The second was having breakfast at a diner in a service station, and having baked beans on toast. We never had hot breakfasts, so that was something special, something wildly decadent. Why I should remember that all these years is beyond me, but there it is: number two.

And no. three? No. three is a beach, a beach with long, flat yellow sands, too shallow to swim in. And the men going crabbing. Catching big crabs, crabs of a size I'd never seen before, crabs more than a foot wide, mind-boggling crabs for one who was well acquainted with their smaller variety. Hundreds of people harvested the beach. The walk out to the water took forever, and I desperately wanted to swim. I've always joked that I could swim well before I could walk (although strictly speaking it's not true), and talked of the year I went swimming every day with my dad, right through winter. These days they have a name for the people "brave" enough to do it, but in those days it was just something you did -- we did. Neville often came with us. Sometimes his brother, Kelly, too. But that day in South Australia, I didn't get to do more than wade. It felt like we walked through shallow water for more than an hour and never got past our ankles. But when the tide came in, the whole area flooded in a matter of minutes. I'd never seen such a thing -- so different to the miniscule differences (comparatively) between low and high tides at Williamstown beach. Everyone had bucketsful of crabs, and that time I ate crab for the first time. But that's another memory -- discovering how tricky it was to extract meat from the legs and pincers of the crabs, trying to crack them open.

As I'm sitting here, a few more things come to mind. Sunburn. That day I was burnt -- my arms and shoulders and face, tender for days. And I think they had a seesaw -- not the standard type with a wooden plank that used to be so common, but one you sat in, in a big metal frame. Or perhaps it was one of those groovy swings, I used to love, that would seat four people facing one another? Something anyhow. But that's it. There's a vague memory of a woman in a white and blue dress, but that could be pure invention.

And other memories (not of SA) of course. Going to his parents' house in Albert Street and being allowed to play on their piano -- or make noises on it, because I had no idea how to play. And, when my mum tired of the sound and forbade me banging on the keys, playing with the metal crocodiles on the floor -- about a foot long -- lifting their tails made their mouths open. And their mum, who always seemed small and doddery (in a way neither my grandmother nor great-grandmother were) would make us fizzy lemon drinks based on bicarb. How strange. I didn't really like them, but they were so different from what we ever got at home that I quite looked forward to them.

There are so many memories attached to Nev. The summers down at Port Campbell. Summer barbecues at Somers. Perhaps, more than any others, theirs was a family we belonged to by default, and he, more than any other, to ours. Nev never called my mum anything but Aunty. He was hard when he played with us, rough (in a masculine, acceptable way), didn't have kids of his own (at that time -- that came much later), and all the kids loved him and perhaps were a little bit scared of him. We used to taunt him: "Bombev Nev, Bombev Nev". None of us knew what it meant, but we'd hurl it at him and squeal and run, hoping he wouldn't catch us.

I remember him holding me out over a blowhole once, and being scared but trusting him implicitly. He would do things like that -- things that challenged us. We could show no fear. My dad tells the story of sending him overboard on a fishing trip once -- no accident -- and how Nev did the most elegant swan dive. Dad never fessed up that it was done on purpose, but Neville knew, and the two had joked about it for years. There's the story about how he got between our lab, Kim, in a dog fight and got bitten by accident. A severe bite, but not done intentionally. Memories, so many of them -- and as I write they well up, things I thought I'd forgotten. Strange how they do that. Strange how so many wait in there, stacked away in some dark recess, seemingly forgotten until something drags them back into the light.

The stalwarts are falling away, leaving behind holes that will never be filled.