Uncle Sam

“How about those ’Pies Johnny?” said Sam. His sparse hair stuck out in a way indicating he washed it with Velvet Soap. The adidas shoes he had worn for twenty years were still, unbelievably, able to connect with a football without disintegrating. Uncle Sam was madder than last year but he could still kick a mean drop punt. And he always asked about the ’Pies. Sam came to dinner every Easter and Christmas. He caught the bus from Coburg with the small vinyl travel bag coming apart at the seams that is regulation issue for crazy lonely old men. He wasn’t really my Uncle, he was my father’s cousin and it was never clear how we got him. It took many years of post-prandial talk over the washing up for me to pry his story out of my mother. Sam had come home from the war a young man and had gone back home to look after his “disabled“ sister, and nurse his invalid mother until her death. By the time he turned around his youth was gone. The girls he’d stepped out with were married to other men. The programs to assist soldiers in finding careers were long closed. Sam asked me slowly what I was doing. His stutter and twitch were worse every year, as if the effort of speaking to others was something his quiet mind couldn’t remember properly. He smelt of camphor and had a plastic comb. It took my aunts five years of the 70s to convince him to get a telephone, and another ten years for a television. “I’m doing my honours in English” I told him. He blinked at this, as if trying to imagine a university, students laughing in a cafeteria, a lecturer speaking. In Sam’s mind I suspected the lecturer would be wearing a gown. I watched him turn his roast on a barely touched plate. “It’s wonderful for girls to have an education,” said Sam. He was so polite, well brought up, grateful to be invited. For forty years he worked in the Coburg Post Office. He never took leave or had a holiday. It was only when he retired that Sam changed into the old man riding the bus. A man grown slightly wild and unkempt from too much time alone. When he died the priest said Sam was the only man he had ever seen jogging with an umbrella. I helped clean out his enormous California bungalow, his family’s home, so it could be sold. There was no more of his family. He had never thrown away a newspaper. He ate mostly canned food and was living in one room off the kitchen, sleeping in a chair that was like a nest. Everything was dirty and cosy; even the matches were from the 50s he had used them so frugally. Bryant and May. But there wasn’t anything personal there that I could connect to gentle Sam. Through my aunts he left me money to travel to places he could not even dream of.

Anna Hedigan

 

Craig Powell

 

Too many rainbows

That’s the trouble with living here
On the edge of things at Tamarama
You sit down to contemplate
Your lost love and the browned petals
On the orchid that he promised to get you
But that you had to buy yourself
And you look out the window
At the grey, grey clouds
And the little chink of blue
And there’s another fucking rainbow
Breaking into your cheerless mood!

 

 

dear hoist

dear hoist,
still standing? still spinning?
still lapped by buffalo?
we loved you. weren’t allowed to
of course. but we did.
draped over, swung from,
cranked up and down,
merry-go-round on green sea.
Mum’s peeling carrots voice piercing
the flywire. we loved you
you arthritic backyard myth

 

Kevin Gillam