Back-in-office update: I spent summer at home with the kids in Australia, camping out at my parents’ home. The idea was what if two years’ of quality time… all at once, which is how many expats parcel out the months of their years. I launched subscriptions for Kafka’s then realized I needed to pause them because I wound up spending an entire season producing nothing at all. Here is a story from that time!
Quality time in a compact
The prospect of rogue cells in a family member seems much worse from far away, mysterious goings-on in a room you can’t access. My dad told me about a diagnosis while I sat on the back porch in Troy one day last spring, and it felt like watching a lamp falling off a table thousands of miles away. I couldn’t blast out of a cannon to get there, I had to simply wait. The outlook turned out to be alright, though, and by the time we made it home in July, the treatments were just background noise — my dad was listening to a lot of YouTube videos about the procedures from his armchair with the speakers of his iPad turned up full ball.
The health condition was a conversation topic that wore thin since there are no real updates day to day for entropy, although VAD is a common conversational go-to for people in my parents’ town. Have you considered, I offered during a discussion about an elderly couple who drove their car off the boat ramp into the bay, living to 100? 100 would be perfect, I think. The radiologist lost track of the one of the gold balls he had placed in my dad’s body to guide the lasers, a rogue planet spinning out of the solar system — where did it go?! — but otherwise there was nothing to be done but check off the days of treatment. My dad had to follow an elaborate prep routine the night before each zap; on the nights following, he would pour a drink with equal commitment. Antioxidants! The kids and I (and Noodles, for part of the summer) were there, but it wasn’t clear whether the chaos of two grandchildren pole-vaulting around the house was helping, or whether we were further complicating a tricky time better spent napping.
Dad had a checkup with the GP one day and while he was there getting bulk-billed, figured he might as well have the guy check on a mozzie bite that was hanging around. "He got out his magnifier," my dad was telling me, a stock-standard health story taking a more thrilling turn, "and, he says, It's a tick! No bigger than this crumb" — he excitedly nudges a speck along the countertop — "tiny!"
I always thought ticks looked like Mr. Men characters, abdomens with faces and giant boots marching off a leaf and behind your ear. Not this one. My dad had picked it up while Scout, Japhy, he and I were scoping out a sketchy bushwalking trail that followed a watercourse down a hill to the sea. The tunnel of brush got lower and more submerged by erosion the closer we got to the beach, which we could hear on the far side of thick scrub. Eventually, looking at Scout rappelling down a muddy headwall, I realized that we had our answer: the trail was not navigable for the 70-somethings in my parents' bushwalking club. One of them used a cane, I’m not sure what we were even thinking for the last half mile of bush-bashing, other than Scout really wanted to make it to the “secret beach.” We backtracked to where my dad was standing in a patch of gnats and wattle glowing in the late sun. Den of the ticks.
This was right before our planned road trip north to my sister’s. Of my parents’ two cars, the one being held together with gaffer tape started to conk out days before the seven-hour trip; while it used to vibrate uncontrollably at 100 kms per hour, it now seemed unable to handle driving at 80 kms. “You could keep to 75 (*about 46 mph) and you’ll probably be fine,” suggested the mechanic. Certainly an idea. The Ford was 16 years old and couldn’t be left out in the rain or it would fill with water. I once drove it into a semitrailer in stop-start Sydney traffic, leaving an enormous hole in the bonnet like a finger jabbed into a layer of fondant. Nobody could have foreseen the vehicle being unavailable for a major road trip.
That left us with the Mazda, a sedan that is miniature by today’s standards, especially when stuffed with the padded thrones that have been legislated for use as children's car seats. On account of having to transport five people and luggage, my mum decided to fly to my sister's, leaving me and my dad to truck the kids across the riverlands. "We can stop at the Big Banana!" said my dad, visions of concrete rebar dancing through his head.
Our childhood was full of these trips, my dad at the wheel, Mum in the passenger seat doling out jubes, and us three kids fighting in the backseat over the invisible borders between one seat zone and the next. The prospect then of a motel was thrilling — add in an algae-coloured pool with a mean fence around it, a fibreglass waterslide stopping short of the water, and we were in heaven.
My mum booked us a motel in Kempsey, around halfway. The Park Drive was a peach cinderblock palace advertised as having “straightforward rooms” and one that my mum felt looked a cut above motel next door. The Colonial Court had an uneasy selection of fonts and seemed on the wrong side of history.
The rooms at the Park Drive were indeed straightforward — you entered off the Jarmuschian motel balcony through door number 7 into a rectangle with a small bathroom cordoned off at back right. There were two double beds and various things bolted to the wall. My dad was next door in Room 8, a mirror image of ours. We had an early dinner at the local RSL, pausing to put down our middies and stand up as someone recited For the Fallen over the P.A. at 6 p.m. For two minutes the room focused on the smell of the metallic beer taps and mats, hot chips sitting uneaten on plates, and the river moving by outside.
After tucking the kids into bed in Room 7, I sat up in the double next to Scout with the light from the bathroom softening the dark, thinking about my dad in his straightforward room on the other side of the wall, probably watching his iPad without headphones. I listened to the kids’ sleep sounds; sighs, whimpers and spontaneous little farts. This was growing up, your own children scattered about the room, a cinderblock wall now between you and your father.
I focused on a mozzie bite that was still itchy, and something clicked — mozzie bite?? I got up and went into the bathroom, where I lifted my top to try and see it. I had to bend my abdomen out and angle the iPhone towards the spot without being able to see the viewfinder. At first, it was a blurry black dot on a pink mound. When I got a good photo, I zoomed in. It resolved itself into a fully articulated insect with a napkin tucked into its collar, undeniably feasting on my flesh.
"I think I have a tick!" I texted my dad. The bubbles lit up.
"Uh oh! Gotta kill it!"
“Fucker!” I said. We compared notes.
"What do you have that I can douse it in?" I asked. The bubbles paused. I was sitting back on the bed reading a webpage of home remedies for deer ticks on dogs (“consult your vet for more professional advice”) when I heard a rap at the door.
I opened it, and my dad handed me a small bottle of Chivas Regal with a knowing nod. Toothbrush, pajamas, emergency Scotch. The man had packed light but come prepared. “Thanks,” I whispered.
I made a donut out of toilet paper and centered it over the bump, then filled the centre up with whisky to make a little paddling pool for the tick. The scent captured the essence of the Park Drive motel: grain alcohol on skin, in bed, next to children. As the toilet paper turned golden, I added more whisky, the whiff of 80-proof growing stronger, to be sure, to be sure.
After 15 or 20 minutes, I decided to take another photo. The black dot was now a bloated white balloon, like a gambler tumbling out the far end of the Las Vegas strip. He had transmogrified into a husk.
“I need tweezers,” I texted my dad. According to the internet, you had to get ticks out once they died, because that’s when they released the secret substances that crept into your system, resulting in terrible op-eds.
“Your mum’s spongebag is in the car,” he replied. I dashed out down the stairs to the Mazda and riffled through her things.
If photographing a tick on your abdomen is hard, removing it is more so. In the harsh light of the Park Drive bathroom, I managed to maneuver around my own thorax to remove the husk. I snapped a photo of it sitting on the edge of the sink looking like a beached manta ray and texted it next door. The triumphant reply came quickly.
“Got him!”
A nice thing
I love Molly Idle’s books — the soft, glowing pencilwork and stubborn characters — and her “Halloween” offering is just so lovely on both the adult and kid levels. In Witch Hazel, an old witch tells a child a bunch of stories. By the end of the book, the child is reciting the same stories back to the witch, who is now confined to her bed. “Wait, did she die?!” asked Scout, a full beat later. It’s really a goodie, and out October 11 from Little, Brown, Books for Young Readers.
More goodies
A fab essay by Rivka Galchen about her father:
I think Tzvi said little to me about his own childhood because he wanted to let me have my childhood, and not crowd it out with the inner lives and melancholies and anxieties of adults. He did say to me once, “Your mother and I did one thing right. We made sure that you and your brother got to be children for a long time.” What he felt worst about was that the family had to move so much when my brother was young; after I started first grade, we stayed in place for more than ten years. I’ve come to think that maybe my childhood was happy mostly because it was childhood. When I moved in with my partner and his children, and later when I had a child, my own childhood returned to me. I believe that children arrive with their own life of the mind, and that to the extent that they get to spend time in that world which they themselves have invented—that’s pretty good. Much of the rest is roulette.
Tarence Ray on the flooding in Kentucky:
Everyone, rich and poor alike, is wearing that vacant face you see boxers get after taking a hard one to the jaw. This didn’t stop the sheriff and Whitesburg city police from bringing in a humvee and cruisers from at least six different regional municipalities, enforcing a curfew from midnight to 6 a.m., and towing out flooded cars from downtown without notifying the owners, then making them pay an impoundment fee. The cops’ actions infused a situation already rife with fear and paranoia with even more fear and paranoia, when what people really needed was safety and freedom of movement. This immediate rush toward a law-and-order crackdown is probably as good a harbinger of the new climate-crisis paradigm than any other thing I’ve witnessed.
Fire season by Sarah Miller:
There was no reason not to go to Reno. The fire wasn’t going to get to us. We were about seven or eight, possibly ten miles away. Going would leave our house empty for evacuated friends. But what would it be like to go out of town and try to have fun?
Pretty incredible interview between Rachel Handler and her father-in-law, shortly before he ended his life through VAD:
I’m not going anyplace. I just won’t talk back. What I represent is always there. I’ll always be there, what I represent, and I’ll always be with him. I don’t know where I’m going. If I could tell you, I’ll tell you when I get there.
Loved this miscellaneous list from Edan Lepucki
And the ill-fated appointment of some guy to be the first Period Dignity Officer in Scotland:
“Employing Jason was a no-brainer” because of his vast experience in project management from both the private and public sectors, “coupled with his passion for making a difference to the people in our community, period!”
Will leave you with this miscellaneous time capsule of Australia:
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S! Do share if you feel like it! And if you thought this was a bit of alright, you might like some previous KAFKA’S on:
<3 <3
What a story , well lived .
Love it!❤️❤️❤️