The ties that bind

By RED SYMONS
The Age
Tuesday 4 September 2001

Oh, so now I'm supposed to write a nice little light entertainment?
Maybe not.

I've had a busy week. My rather public friend died rather publicly. I
feel like the boy who brings a note from his mum, saying that there's
been an upset in the family so could the teacher please go easy on
the lad.

My children have been a great comfort in the last few fraught days.
Their reactions are varied and dependent on their maturity. My wife
was weeping and my three-year-old looked up, distracted from the
important work of concocting a contretemps between Thomas and Gordon,
the big engine.

"Mummy sad", he pronounced, drawing on the full range of his
observational and communicative faculties. Having apprised us of the
situation, he went back to playing with his trains . . . and singing.
It was quite nice really. There is a place for oblivious
heartlessness in the spectrum of human emotion. Life goes on.

My eight-year-old, on hearing the news, immediately rushed to the CD
player and pumped out Living in the Seventies. He was well-
intentioned but, somehow, pushy, look-at-me, frock-rocking didn't
quite capture the tenor of the occasion. Then there's the subtext –
living in the '70s as opposed to . . .?

I picked up my 10-year-old from the school disco on Friday night and
apprehended him playing the piano. Then I noticed he was playing to
entertain a little friend of the female persuasion. Gawd, here we go
again, I thought.

There are very few situations from which you can't draw at least some
mordant humor. There are Jack Newton jokes and John Lennon jokes. Why
should my friend be denied his place in the pantheon?

It occurred to me that, had he made his exit 15 years ago when he
hosted the lottery draw on television, newspaper editors would have
been unable to resist references to his number being up. Also,
Wednesday is a fairly convenient day to die, in media terms, because
it is just enough time for newspapers to stretch it over the weekend.
A lift-out maybe? Iron-on transfers, remember them? Not that he would
have given a toss.

Interestingly, although I was asked for comment from lots of
different sources, radio stations that play music were noticeably
under-represented. I guess they didn't want to let an external
reality interfere with the hermetically precise play-list of songs
that they smart-bomb into their buyers' world.

You've heard the music now . . . that telephone number again . . . we
play the same songs in a better order. FM stations are more generous
with their prizes than AM stations for the simple reason that they
have more digits in their call-signs.

I toyed with one really wicked idea. When a prominent person dies
there is always the opportunity to those closest to them to fabricate
some phoney last words to push whichever personal barrow.

"Yes, I spoke to him only hours before it happened. We were talking
about the current refugee crisis and he said . . ."

I've enjoyed people in the last few days.

Friends that I haven't spoken to in decades have been in touch and
I'm determined to draw them back into my life. On Saturday I went to
a launch for Tim Robertson's gorgeous book about the Pram Factory
theatre and the Australian Performing Group. It busks on the same
intense period of artistic and social life that my friend was first
part of.

I was so fashionably late that I missed the whole thing. Beyond cool,
that's me. I walked home, solitary, through a Carlton and Fitzroy
that was no longer the '70s. In Brunswick Street, an open-faced young
man came out of a restaurant and our eyes met. He correctly deduced
from my gaze that he could dispense with pointless deference and say
hello. He offered his condolences and we chatted briefly.

He had a sunniness, an ableness and a readiness that I found most
pleasing. He told me that he worked in a wood-yard.

As I said goodbye, I paid the young man the highest compliment
available to me on the day.

"You remind me of him," I said.