The Black Page
Start smart
by Joanne Black
Counting your blessings is the best way to begin the New Year.
New Year, like a perfect hotel room, is filled with promise. It contains everything you have not yet mucked up and every good intention that has not yet been ignored, broken or forgotten. Everything worthwhile is still possible because real life with all its disappointments, failures and tomato-sauce stains has not yet got in the way, as it inevitably will. December 31 is also a time to reflect on the year just passed (or about to). When I compare the reality of 2008 against the goals I had for it a year ago, the successes are not overwhelming. I vowed to lose weight but it didn’t happen – in fact, I added some. I also vowed to reduce household debt but added some of that, too. I meant to eat my greens but have only been successful if you count the lime Fruit Burst my youngest daughter gave me from the school’s lolly scramble before Christmas.
Mostly, though, I will remember 2008 as the year my son had his awful mountain bike accident. As he lay unconscious in Wellington Hospital and a neurosurgeon warned us of the possibility Seb might require months of rehab at Starship, I knew in that instant every wish, hope, dream and resolution I’d ever had was dust. All I wanted was his complete recovery. It happened quickly. And it has changed me. Sure, I still know my life would be enhanced by owning that shiny purple handbag in Bello or the one with the coloured leaves on it at Small Acorns, but do I want them like I wanted Seb’s recovery? Of course not. Actually, there is nothing I want for.
My hope for 2009 is that it is someone else’s turn to receive the kind of good fortune my family experienced this year and which restored to us the life we had, until the accident, rarely paused to appreciate.
In the wake of Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi throwing shoes rather than questions at US President George Bush, it was reported that in the Islamic world the soles of shoes are particularly insulting. It is an interesting but redundant insight. There is no part of the world in which hurling a missile at the head of a visiting president requires cultural interpretation.
I have good news and bad news about Lottie the tadpole. My daughter’s aquatic pet spent much of December floating bloated and belly up in her tank. But when I finally persuaded a visiting tradesman to remove her corpse (being too squeamish myself), she wriggled away. So now, when I cheerily and compassionately call out to my daughter the now-familiar question, “Is Lottie dead yet?”, the reply comes back, “No, and she’s the right way up.”
I happened to mention Lottie’s predicament when I was a guest on Radio New Zealand National’s Afternoons with Jim Mora. That show, and perhaps every RNZ National show, has a listenership that collectively knows everything and demonstrates its omniscience by sending in texts and emails on even the most obscure topics. So after I talked about Lottie playing dead on the surface of her tank, someone rang in to say the problem was the tadpole’s swim bladder, which apparently controls its buoyancy. The second I heard that, I was convinced – even though the listener had never seen her. Amazing. Diagnosis by public radio really works. Someone else rang or wrote in to say I should take Lottie to the vet. Better parents may well have done so but I never had much intention of doing it because, although I do not like to see suffering and while she might be one of God’s creatures etc, she is still, when all’s said and done, only a tadpole.
So that is the good news – in the course of my benign neglect, Lottie recovered and got her swim bladder under control. However, the bad news is that she is very thin. “I think she’s anorexic,” says my daughter, who’s 11 and goes to a girls’ school, so knows that tadpoles can be anorexic. And Lottie is definitely getting thinner. “I can see her ribs,” said my daughter the other day, although personally I think that might be something of an exaggeration. Do tadpoles even have ribs? I don’t know, and may never know, since Mora’s programme is off air for the holidays.
