SEEN AT AN AIRPORT

Carefully arranged brown curls
blowing wild over tanned
and polished shoulders
real snakeskin shoes
one her feet
a dragon tattoo
on her ankle
too much flesh
on her thighs
and a big bag of chips
in her hand

But a nice lady never the less, she let me take the photos.

SEEN IN CROATIA

A STREET IN ZAGREB

Men with beer bellies
strut, hands on hips
even the short ones
look down on everybody

In the cafes
boys with no hips
dart around serving
salads and slivovitz
to sunburned sightseers.

TEEN AGE PREGNANCIES

The local ad rag splashed a story across its front page this week which had been discussed, but not analysed on radio the previous week. A mother was apalled that her school age daughter had been able to have an abortion without her (the mother's ) knowledge. It was all very emotive with photographs of a madonna like teenage mother cuddling her toddler, a foetus and headlines about the PARENT'S RIGHT TO KNOW'.
In an ideal world I would agree. But in an ideal world daughters under sixteen would not get pregnant. Here are some facts about the real as oppsed the the ideal world.
I taught High School a way back in the days when teachers were forbidden, on pain of dismissal, to mention that three letter word to their pupils. Imagine my surprise when I was in the maternity ward, and in the next bed was a fourteen year old girl I had taught in Form 4 English a few weeks before. She had a nice baby boy. No visitors came to see her. And I am ashamed to say I just did not know how to respond when she remarked to me, in all innocence, "I thought if you did it with your brother you wouldn't have a baby." and she went, with the baby, back to the home where he brother, father of her child was still living.

Teachers were forbidden to mention SEX in classrooms but there was no such prohibition on staffroom talk and over the years I heard some horrific stories. Mainly they involved young girls in the power of their brothers, their fathers, their uncles, their solo mothers' boyfriends. They involved girls being kicked to induce abortion, mothers who ignored what their husbands and/or sons were doing to their daughters for the sake of peace. Imagine a girl from a home like that being told, 'but of course we must tell your mother before you have the abortion.'

New Zealand is not a nice society, some awful things go on and are concealed. My experiences are from fifty years back, now at least children have access to knowledge and school counsellors, not enough and not yet highly trained enough can help children in trouble. If the journalist who wrote the 'Parent's Right to Know' article had done a proper job of investigative journalism perhaps the headline could have been, 'Why did this girl have to keep abortion secret from her mother?'

Some enlightened schools have units where teen age mothers can finish their schooling as well as learn to care for their babies. I applaud them.

PEANUTS, MONKEYS & PEOPLE

I am currently between cars, so when Dunedin Hospital informed me I had an appointment for a bone density scan on May 19 I booked a bus to collect me from home, take me to Dunedin Hospital and deliver me home again, cost $75.00.
"The bus will pick you up between 8.00 and 8.30," the booking clerk at La Gonda tearooms told me.
By 8.35 I was worried No bus had arrived and Kaik Road was bare for its 3.29k length. I rang La Gonda.
"He's very busy this morning, but he'll be there," assured a laconic Otago accent. At 9.15 when I rang again a slightly more cultured voice took over. She could find no record of my booking, and Bruce the bus driver was long gone.I quoted the number on my receipt for $75.00. There was a hurried rustling of paper and some sotto voce discussion. The ubiquitous THEY had not entered my booking on Bruce's pick up list, and La Gonda could not offer any solution to my problem except to assure me that my $75.00 would be refunded.
My neighbour who owns a 4 wheel drive automatic offered me the use of it.By the time I reached Oamaru I was simmering. So I stopped and called into La Gonda. A plump female of uncertain age, scarlet highlights covering thinning black hair, like a bald man's 'combover' accosted me with a welcoming smile that ended a milimetre beyond her lips.
"I have a hospital appointment at one o'clock in Dunedin. The bus I booked failed to pick me up. I want to know what you are going to do about it."
Her expression reminded me of the way Sergeant Anastatakis looked when he saw me coming into his Kissamos cop shop, a 'where can I hide' look. But a large, youngish (at my age anyone under sixty is young} moustache rescued her. He held up his phone,
"I was just trying to ring you," he told me. Yes the booking office had made a mistake and had not told Bruce I needed to be picked up. The $75.00 would be refunded. The moustache had rung Merv Aitcheson who would pick me up, deliver me to Dunedin Hospital and bring me home again. Cost $122.00.
"I don't want a refund," I told him, in the voice that used to make form 4B at Rotorua High tremble. "I need to be at Dunedin Hospital at 1 o'clock. La Gonda made the mistake, La Gonda should fix it."
And La Gonda did. At 11.o'clock Merv picked me up in his brand new Toyota 8 seater whose high wheel base and wrap around windows gave a wonderful view of the Otago scenery. He delivered me to Dunedin Hospital in plenty of time. The hospital has a system similar to the Travellers' Aide desks in American airports. I was escorted to the bone density department by a pleasant woman almost my age. And the lady doing my bone scan had done a lot of hiking in Crete. While I was positioned on the table, in a pose reminiscent of birthing, we chatted about Xania, Sfakia and Loutro, and we parted with hugs. Merv was waiting and we drove back to Oamaru. On the way we chatted about the difference between people who get no joy from their jobs and those who are committed to doing the best job they can. The former are not just in low paid drudge jobs. Merv had personal experience of company directors who got no pleasure from their work, only from the power that went with the jobs, like being able to click their fingers at waiters. Yet that delightful lady who helped me find my way around Dunedin Hospital was probably an unpaid volunteer.

I know Merv from previous excursions with the Women's Institute. He and his partner run Oamaru Tours Ltd and they have an encyclopedic knowledge of interesting places all over Otago. I will probably join one of his tours to Stewart Island later this year. Back in Oamaru he dropped me beside my neighbour's car in the carpark where it had been all day at a cost of $2.00; so Oamaru does give something back from those obscene rates it charges - cheap parking. And Sally at New World smiled as she packed my groceries, she had probably been on her feet all day, but she really gave the impression she was enjoying her job.

DYING PIGEONS AND UGLY BABIES

There is a whole urban mythology about writers and their rejected manuscripts. James Mitchener wrote (in his novel THE NOVEL) about having work rejected, something about a manuscript returning and flopping about on his desk 'like a dying pigeon.' All too real. Writers' magazines try to cheer us, 'turn the rejection slip over and write the opening sentence of your next story,' said one. Another would be writer claimed to have papered her study walls with rejection slips. Rejection is like a mother would feel if someone looked into her pram and said, 'What an ugly baby!'

What brought this on? Last month I posted one of my dying pigeons to a blog, specifically asking for feed back. Well, I got no feed back, not from either of the two people, one in England one in New Zealand,who clicked on to my story. So seven billion people did not even bother!

I was saved from total despair by a call from a lady in Oamaru who is reading my current work in progress, a novel about a dairy farmer and a rugby player, the rugby player being the heroine, I admire the Black Ferns. Would I please hurry up and write the next bit, my reader asked, she wanted to know what was going to happen. Now that gave me enough confidence to keep on writing for a while.

And to the two nice people who clicked on http://waiata's witterings,blogspot.com thank you anyway, even though you were too polite to comment on my ugly baby.

Something for Free

At four minutes before seven o'clock on a lovely autumn morning, My computer is doing as I tell it and I have posted one of my unsuccessful attempts at a short story to Waiata's Witterings.blogspot.com

What I am hoping for is feedback - Why is this one not getting published? I have had a lot of short stories published on radio and in anthologies. If you read it and enjoy it, please say so. If you find a glaring error please point it out to me. But I want people to read my stories for pleasure, so I am now giving them away by posting them to Waiata's Witterings.

I have progressed as a poet over recent years because I subscribe to an on line poetry group, Poetry Kit. I really miss the writing groups I belonged to when living in the Wairarapa.

So please read the stories and comment.

NICE TO BE BACK

Maybe there is some malign gremlin lurking in my desk top because every time I have tried to post a blog it it has refused to let me in, until now.

I read an interesting feature in the Writers' Magazine about a writer, Scott Siegler who publishes his novels on line free of charge. He must work very hard because I receive installments twice a week. To be frank his style is not one that appeals to me, but that does not mean he is not a good writer, just I am a fuddy duddy. Scott Siegler has an audience who enjoys his style.

Anyway, his blog gave me an idea. I am going to post some of my rejected writings to Waiata's Witterings.blogspot.com and see is anyone enjoys them. Also I plan to return to Crete in June (Sgt Anastatakis take cover) for two weeks, and will be in Liverpool for World Poetry Night in September. That sweet patron saint of performing poets, Jim Bennett, has asked me to talk about New Zealand Poetry at the Liverpool Library during the weekend. The main night was booked for the third room of Everyman Theatre, redolent of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and other luminaries. Now it is to be demolished, so we will have to meet elsewhere. I read some of my poems to the third room during the first World Poetry Night in 2007, so I can feel honoured to have performed there. I hope the fact that I was coming this year has no connection with the developers' decision to knock it all down!