My Journal - III -

We talk some more about my late parents. Then I talk about my Granny, dad's mother who liked to play Edwardian song on the piano almost everyday and make 'bread and butter pudding' for our teas and we talk about various cousins, all of whom had been either snotty or weird.

But we start praying for all my family, even the snotty or weird or the weird members, and at that points I tell Dr. Collin Jackson I'd like to pary for my father, I'd like to say how greatful I am to him for teaching me a golf and classic music and how precious the memory that all. And after those prayers I think i might be able to talk at last about what my brother - Jimmy - had done to me and why on earth I become hating him, but although I tell Collin I want to try, the words still refuse to come.


Every time I review memories of my father during my counselling, we pray for him, we offer the memories to GOD, all of them, good and not so good, and I say thanks for my father's life, he counted, he made a difference, the pattern he made on those early of mine was important. I tell Collin, I am glad I know what it was like to have a father, and he says he envies me. He never had one. he tells me he had a weird childhood and after misbehaving on the grand scale he wound up living in a churd run by his great-uncle. I get the impression Collin was a teenage tearaway before the word 'teenager' was invented.




'But great-uncle Joseph saved me.' Says Collin nostalgically. 'Great-uncle Joseph was a monastic masterpiece.



I am interested in this Joseph bloke, but right now... right now I can only think of my father.




We're like archaeologists uncovering a valuable artefact. We have to expose it little by little, brushing away the earth so carefully that nothing gets damaged. And my father's now emerging steadily, the father who was the best father, generous-natured, exuberant, and fun. I used to patter along in his wake, very sporty, very clever, very serious, and more introverted.




'Why can't you be more like your brother?' my mother would exclaim when I didn't want to go to the neighbourhood kiddies-parties, but my father would say: 'Let him be, not everyone likes to be sosiable.' My mother hated any dig he made about being sociable. He'd never argue with her, he'd just go into his study room and closed the door.




'My mother was very sociable woman, she will be at every function and every lunch or every hi-tea function in the city.' I try to explain to Collin.




'He is too, but only for formal function which involved with the government and business or fundraiser function, he's more into sport and stayed home person.' I remember, when I was a kid, I spend more my childhood time with him instead of with my mum.




'He played golf very well, we played together a lot when I was a teenager before I move to Melbourne.'



'Did your brother palyed with you?'




'No, he was busy with his study.'




'My brother perferred swimming, so i become the golfer and he is the swimmer, that way there was no competition..'



'Your talents for golf must have created a strong bond with your father.'




'Yes, it did. he and I like part of golfer with Jimmy never seemed to notice.'




This intrigues Collin. 'Such as?'




'The beauty of the landscapes. The feeling of being at one with nature.. Dad talked about it once to me when we were playing one evening.'




'They were looking wonderful that day, the weather was very fine, but there was still a stiff breeze so we playing in optimum conditions, and everywhere seemed to me so beautiful.' I said to dad: 'This is paradise - I am so happy!' and when he smiled at me and said: 'So am I!' everything was perfect, perfect, perfect.




I remember that day because it was the last happy moments that I had with any members of my family before I move to Australia.



Collin offered no comment, but feel the strength of hi sympathy.




'And I'll tell you something else.' I hear myself say. 'Something extraordinary. The last time I played gold with Ian Thompson a bi-sexual man I'd met in Melbourne, we played along under the same identical conditions and suddenly, just for a second, I looked at Ian and i saw my father looking back - and that was so unexpected because usually the person Ian remind me was my brother - Jimmy.




'Ah!' says Collin as if I've suddenly pulleh a white rabbit out of hat, and see I've dealt him a big surprised.





'I realised Ian thompson was special for you?' explain Collin, 'But I fell into the trap of thinking you saw him as a father-figure. Can you tell me why he remended you of Jimmy?'





This was easy: 'Ian was clever, fun with alots of style and both of them were very arrogant toward things.' I say, 'And so Jimmy, they didn't look a like and Jimmy certainly wasn't a gay, but there was still a resemblance in personality.' I pause to remember them both before adding: 'I didn't see the resemblance straight away, at first Ian was just another one night-stand, but when we were going out for dinner one night, the resemblance to Jimmy hit me between the eyes - it was like having the old Jimmy back in front of me.'




'Was that when you strated hanker for the world you'd left behind?




'Maybe.' I try to see the thruth but i feel as if I am standing in sunlight while peering back into a fog. 'Even before I met Ian.' I says. 'Iused to drive down to Kenny Hills the area where my parents live in Kuala Lumpur. So I suppose I was like an emigrant who gets home-sick, but I never seriously thought of going back, only during my first 4 years in Melbourne i visit Kuala Lumpur once a year but not my parents.




'But after you playing golf with Ian?'




'Yeah, you're right, that was when I begun to want to go back eventhought I stll couldn't imagine what would happends if I am really going back to settle in Kuala Lumpur.'




'So Ian re-arranged the past for you, he reminded you of a world where you didn't have to live a life so at odds with your true-self?




I nod as I watch the last of the fog disperse: 'When I was playing golf with Ian it was as if i was back in that world.' I said, 'And Ian saw me then as i really was. Maybe that was when he fell in love with me, before that he'd just been infatuated.'





'But what were your feeling for Ian by then? How did you feel about having sex with someone who remeinded you of your brother?'





I sign as I search for the words which will finally bury George the player, than George the caring bloke who performed a valuable job who's to look after the sick children in the children Hospital.

'When I put myself as a player,' Isay: 'Ian wasn't Jimmy, Ian wasn't even Ian. He was just another lump of meat on the block, someone - no, something - I could manipulate for sex. It was like being an animal. Or possibly as a robot. But it wasn't like being human and soing something called 'making love.' I run out of steam but Collin nods and don't press me with another question. I am not being judged here. he's still on my side, still understand.

'Even when Ian reminded me if Jimmy,' I say: 'He was still a stranger when we go to the bedroom, I mean, how could it have been otherwise? Fundamentally I wasn't into 'just sex' and Ian wasn't sexually attractive to me. In fact even if I'd been happy having sex with him. I can't imagine him turning me on - he was like - he don't work-out and wasnt ups to much in the sack, those people who's spend more time in the office never are. Because I like him I did make extra effort to give him a good time, but I was still acting and performing. So, when we were together, I was never having a loving relationship with my brother. I was alway just ripping off a bloke who reminded me of my brother.' I stop, feeling ready to collapse. Is there anything more exhausting than telling a string of shitty truths you'd rather not face? But the paradox is I know I am going to feel better now, Collib still eccepts me. It's going to be all right!



With a huge effort I drum up the ebergy to blurt out: 'I wish Ian was still alive, I wish i could tell him how sorry I am that I had hurt him.'



'That, of course, is very commendable.' says Collin at once. 'But I think you should beware of turning Ian into a victim with a capital 'V'.'


I look up - 'What do you meants?'




'Well, it occurred to me while you were talking that my great-uncle Joseph would have taken a tough line here and he would have taken it with Ian. Not with you. He would have said that a sophisticated man who lies to his wife would have known exactly what he was doing and would have deserved everything he got. But then great-uncle Joseph was always very severe on the subject of immorality and particularly when the immorality was a bi-sexual.'




I am hooked on great-uncle Jospeh. I just love the way he's so politically incorrect. 'Was he closet gay, Collin?'




'I was never able to decide and he gave no clues, but I am quite sure he believed that his sexual preferences were between hin and God and as such were in no way a subject for genreal discussion. In fact he would have said that mordent society's obsession with sex was unhealthy, immature and idolatrous and created a serve distortion of reality.'




'Wow!' I am enthralled by the sheer subversive magnificence of this fearless alternative vision.


Collin smile, and prepares to tell me more.





I like hearing about all these blokes who did without sex, and that's not because I am thinking of entering a monastery. It's because I like to hearing about lifestyle that's totaly different from the one that nearly finished me. Dimly it dawns on me why Collin is keen to spin me these stories. He's saying you don't even have to have a conventional mainstream lifestyle, trotting off to work each day in an office and being couch potatoes with your wife in the evening as you snooze in front of the TV. And you certainly don't have to live an isolated-bubble lifestyle thinking only of yourself. There are other options, other ways of living - and other ways too of looking at the things you feel you can't do without.


'Human being loved idols.' Says Collin. 'Because human being love to worship, but if you worship the wrong Gods, you risk being seriously cut off from reality.'


Anything can become and idol, he says: a political party, a head of state - drink, drug, food - football, rock music, pop star - cars, boat designer clothes - sex, exercise, loads of money - you name it. All these things may be good in themselves, but once they becomes an obsession you squander time and energy on illusion, your priorities get rearranged, you balanced lifestyle goes down the tubes and your true self gets stomped on. Or, in other words, getting cut off from reality can make you physically, mentally and spritually ill.



I pick out my past idols from his list, the addictions I used in order to fill the worship in my head. What I now have to do is fill the worship-space in my head with the right stuff that's codenamed God, but I am not going to be interested in the soaped-up father-fugure who gets wheeled out bore for religion and you can forget the nursery-rhyme old man in the sky. I still like the idea of God as a fraught artist, and Collin say fine, it's a passable image because art is about reality. Collin says, and you become real in your turn, playing part in the scheme of things and feeling fulfilled as your real self has the chance to flourish. BUT -


'But.' warm Collin, 'Remember that no image of God can give more than a glimpse of him that projecting images on to God can be very dangerous.' And he point out that God can be converted into idol too, and when God becomes a false God bad religion break-out. That's why the bloke's so important, I see that now. He knows what the real God is and he can point the way to him.


I mosey around in all this spritual stuff like a dog circling a deeply relevant lamp-post but finally I ask: 'Why doesn't the Bloke just fix me?'


'He's not a magician george, he operates through love, not through a magic hand.'


'That's all very well, but I want him to come along and - ' I break off as I remember. He's already here, working through Collin. All I've got to do is work hard in return, but it's so emotionally exhausting and I am still sick.


'You'll get better,' says Collin. 'I am sure of it.'


I don't know wheter I believe him or not. But i do know I am being given the strength to stagger on.





CHICKEN PEA AND CORN RISOTTO

3 cups chicken stock
3 cups water
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic - crushed
2 cups arborio rice
1 cup frozen peas
420g frozen sweet corn - drained
1/3 cup grated cheddar cheese
1 cup shredded cooked chicken
1 table spoon chopped fresh parsley
salt and pepper

Combine chicken stock and water in a medium saucepan. Bring to boil, reduce the heat, simmer stock, uncovered, while preparing risotto.

Heat oil in a large pan, add onion and garlic, cook, stirring until onion is soft. add rice and stir to coat in onion mixture, stir in 1 cup of hot stock, cook, stirring over a medium heat until liquid is absorbed. Continue adding stock, stirring until liquid is absorbed after each addition

Sir in peas, corn, cheese and chicken. Cook, stirring for 2 minutes or until chicken is heated through, stir in parsley, season with salt if preferred.

Serve risotto garnished with extra choped parsley.