Tomorrow ...

The removal van about to leave with all our stuff

On Thursday 28 July we we handed over the keys and departed our Brisbane family home, 17 Frank Street, for the last time after what seems to have been a very brief 23 years. The process of leaving has been fraught with tumultuous emotion, most of it intensely personal and therefore perhaps of little general interest. Nevertheless, a momentous event deserves to be acknowledged in a formal and proper way.

It’s a strange sensation walking through the shell of your former home. I listened hard but I couldn’t hear the empty rooms reverberate with shouts of joy or groans of frustration. There was no echo of great triumphs or bitter defeats. But while standing there I could sense the rhythm of years past: the blisters of summer both on the hands (rowing) and the feet (new school shoes); the anticipation of football season in the autumn; the chilly westerly winds of winter and the inevitable question of whether we would go the the Ekka this year, followed by the "maybe next year" mantra (fortunately "next year" seldom came); the smell of sunscreen, the flash of lycra and the whisper of disk wheels signalling the pilgrimage to the Noosa triathlon in spring; and the anticipation of Christmas and huge platters of seafood to round out the year. Even recognising the benign influence of  hindsight, there is nothing I would want to change about our years in Brisbane. Indeed, how I wish I could have been afforded a glimpse of the future during my agonising years at boarding school or the lengthy spells of insecurity and angst as a university student.

Our official family lore is codified in a myriad of very unexpected places: in the pages of J.RR. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling and Raymond E. Feist; in the staccato utterances of Hornblower and the unflinching steeliness of Sharpe; and even in the banter of the Jamaican bobsleigh team. Regular readers of this blog will know that one of my personal favourite repositories of wisdom is The West Wing. In very last episode of the show (Season 7 Episode 22), President Jed Bartlett leaves office at the end of his second term and takes one last flight on Air Force One to his home in New Hampshire.  One of the final scenes has him staring out of the plane window in sombre and contemplative mood. His wife asks, “What are you thinking about Jed” to which he replies “Tomorrow”. 

This is, I think, a profound philosophy of life. And so, Cath pushed the button to shut the garage door, we drove down Frank Street one last time and pointed the nose of our Ford Ranger towards the south and tomorrow ...

What is all the fuss about? Let's get going!