Intermittent interment
Posted on 2007-Nov-1 at 05:38
I hate shopping. I really really do. I know I should be unceremoniously stripped of my membership to the Female Gender, but there it is. And it can’t be helped. I never shop for anything if I can possibly avoid it and, indeed, many cashed-up and champing-at-the-sales girlfriends will concur that their retail invitations are always politely turned down in preference to plucking my nasal hairs (or some other less-painful-than-shopping experience).
But last week had to bite the bullet. I had to dust off my credit card and face the fray. That is, unless I want to start my new-fangled, high-follutin’, wingy-dingy job in Perth next week wearing faded grey hand-me-down bum-crack-flashing flares with a red touristy T-shirt boasting a cartoon print of a flamenco dancer (who, on closer inspection, holds her fan like a whip and looks more like Madame Lash).
I think not.
Much as I am approaching this new position with a wry and serendipitous air, something had to be done. Plus, the only decent pair of shoes I own are still sending me subliminal postcards from under my friends coffee table in Dubai. *d’OH!* - I knew my backpack zipped up a little bit too easily on that departure.
And so the retail Gods collectively frowned upon me, pointing their Liberace-jewelled celestial fingers from a brand name cloud. “SHOP THY MUST”, they declared and, to prove their point, my meagre wodge of thin faded grey (yet conveniently matching) backpacker clothing spontaneously shredded in a collective puff of special smoke.
Bastards.
Unfortunately, by the time their instruction broke through my denial, I had already left the thriving metropolis of Perth (and it’s modal malls) to visit my mother in the orchard town of Orange, central western New South Wales. Town of my high school days and other associated horrors. Town where my maternal family have been prescient for several generations. Town where I can’t walk down the main street without feeling somehow recognised or watched.
Of course this is probably just bullshit. It is probably just a flashback to the good old 80’s where, as a method of “teenage daughter control”, Mum confessed to having downtown spies who reported to her directly on my behaviour and whereabouts. Although I mocked her at the time, at sixteen it still spooked me that somehow she immediately knew that I had sneaked out after nine o’clock on a school night to share a mini airline-sized bottle of sickly Malibu in Cook Park with five other wayward friends. How did she know?? It was a Tuesday. She should have been watching Magnum!
Anyway, years later, with dark glasses on, head down and swatting at those annoying little inland flies that stick to your back and your nostrils, I ventured “down the street” to shop.
Not a whole lot has changed since I was last here. The dodgy main street pubs have been ‘done up’ with chrome and earth-coloured paints, but more-or-less the wide tree-lined streets and iron-laced colonial buildings remain. As do a few classic art-deco facades.
Actually, that is not strictly true, either. There has been an irretrievable change since my last visit that will, I fear, not only affect me now, but impinge upon the habits of future generations. A celebrated slice of history is gone. Probably for good.
Allow me to elaborate:
Although I wasn’t born in Orange, on the day I arrived here from Western Australia in 1979, my new and knowledgable primary school classmates alerted me to two indisputable and timeless local facts:
1) The always-closed general store near Stan’s Fish and Chip Shop – the one with only a box of tissues and a couple of faded Shelleys Creaming Soda bottles from 1952 in the window (indeed it has been this way since my mother can remember) - contains upstairs a long dead old lady who is now just a skeleton in a rocking chair. Versions vary from her remains being sporadically attended to by indifferent nesting rodents to her vaporously haunting local buildings wielding a cleaver in search of a long deceased swindling ex-lover.
2) If you walk under the awning of the Funeral Directors, a building just half a block away from the above, you will, without fail or recompense, receive seven years of bad luck. No negotiations can be entered into on this matter. You will receive seven years of very bad luck. Venture under said awning at your own risk.
Of course, after school and on our way for twenty cents worth of chips with tartare sauce from Stan’s, we would invariably push each other under this canopy and then point and laugh at the imminent seven years of misfortune unavoidably bestowed upon the hapless victim. This was great fun as long as the victim wasn’t you. In fact, those of us in the know would always walk on the outside of any group, in the gutter or even across the road if necessary. We knew to Trust Noone near that awning. It wasn’t worth it.
Walking “down the street” on my mission this week, I noticed that many of these old businesses are still there. The Old Lady Shop is still closed and still has the same bottles of soda (the post war shop fittings must now be worth a fortune!) and, although Stan has upgraded his establishment, painting over the Hawaiian Palm Tree scene wall and installing an expresso machine, he still makes the best burgers in town.
But the Funeral Directors is now a Real Estate Agent. A river-clay coloured and cement rendered Real Estate Agent.
The building is still essentially the same, but there are now brightly illuminated illustration boards of local properties in the large and newly re-furbished windows, all backed by earth-toned curtains. The awning is painted to match the now flat, bland, concreted walls.
Staggering home after a long day of finding nothing I liked in the shops, and after intital wistfulness at the change, I finally had to laugh. Perhaps the legend is not lost? Perhaps it is intensified! Perhaps now if you find yourself under the awning you are doomed to seven years selling houses! EGAD!
I crossed to the other side of the road, just to be safe. :D
But last week had to bite the bullet. I had to dust off my credit card and face the fray. That is, unless I want to start my new-fangled, high-follutin’, wingy-dingy job in Perth next week wearing faded grey hand-me-down bum-crack-flashing flares with a red touristy T-shirt boasting a cartoon print of a flamenco dancer (who, on closer inspection, holds her fan like a whip and looks more like Madame Lash).
I think not.
Much as I am approaching this new position with a wry and serendipitous air, something had to be done. Plus, the only decent pair of shoes I own are still sending me subliminal postcards from under my friends coffee table in Dubai. *d’OH!* - I knew my backpack zipped up a little bit too easily on that departure.
And so the retail Gods collectively frowned upon me, pointing their Liberace-jewelled celestial fingers from a brand name cloud. “SHOP THY MUST”, they declared and, to prove their point, my meagre wodge of thin faded grey (yet conveniently matching) backpacker clothing spontaneously shredded in a collective puff of special smoke.
Bastards.
Unfortunately, by the time their instruction broke through my denial, I had already left the thriving metropolis of Perth (and it’s modal malls) to visit my mother in the orchard town of Orange, central western New South Wales. Town of my high school days and other associated horrors. Town where my maternal family have been prescient for several generations. Town where I can’t walk down the main street without feeling somehow recognised or watched.
Of course this is probably just bullshit. It is probably just a flashback to the good old 80’s where, as a method of “teenage daughter control”, Mum confessed to having downtown spies who reported to her directly on my behaviour and whereabouts. Although I mocked her at the time, at sixteen it still spooked me that somehow she immediately knew that I had sneaked out after nine o’clock on a school night to share a mini airline-sized bottle of sickly Malibu in Cook Park with five other wayward friends. How did she know?? It was a Tuesday. She should have been watching Magnum!
Anyway, years later, with dark glasses on, head down and swatting at those annoying little inland flies that stick to your back and your nostrils, I ventured “down the street” to shop.
Not a whole lot has changed since I was last here. The dodgy main street pubs have been ‘done up’ with chrome and earth-coloured paints, but more-or-less the wide tree-lined streets and iron-laced colonial buildings remain. As do a few classic art-deco facades.
Actually, that is not strictly true, either. There has been an irretrievable change since my last visit that will, I fear, not only affect me now, but impinge upon the habits of future generations. A celebrated slice of history is gone. Probably for good.
Allow me to elaborate:
Although I wasn’t born in Orange, on the day I arrived here from Western Australia in 1979, my new and knowledgable primary school classmates alerted me to two indisputable and timeless local facts:
1) The always-closed general store near Stan’s Fish and Chip Shop – the one with only a box of tissues and a couple of faded Shelleys Creaming Soda bottles from 1952 in the window (indeed it has been this way since my mother can remember) - contains upstairs a long dead old lady who is now just a skeleton in a rocking chair. Versions vary from her remains being sporadically attended to by indifferent nesting rodents to her vaporously haunting local buildings wielding a cleaver in search of a long deceased swindling ex-lover.
2) If you walk under the awning of the Funeral Directors, a building just half a block away from the above, you will, without fail or recompense, receive seven years of bad luck. No negotiations can be entered into on this matter. You will receive seven years of very bad luck. Venture under said awning at your own risk.
Of course, after school and on our way for twenty cents worth of chips with tartare sauce from Stan’s, we would invariably push each other under this canopy and then point and laugh at the imminent seven years of misfortune unavoidably bestowed upon the hapless victim. This was great fun as long as the victim wasn’t you. In fact, those of us in the know would always walk on the outside of any group, in the gutter or even across the road if necessary. We knew to Trust Noone near that awning. It wasn’t worth it.
Walking “down the street” on my mission this week, I noticed that many of these old businesses are still there. The Old Lady Shop is still closed and still has the same bottles of soda (the post war shop fittings must now be worth a fortune!) and, although Stan has upgraded his establishment, painting over the Hawaiian Palm Tree scene wall and installing an expresso machine, he still makes the best burgers in town.
But the Funeral Directors is now a Real Estate Agent. A river-clay coloured and cement rendered Real Estate Agent.
The building is still essentially the same, but there are now brightly illuminated illustration boards of local properties in the large and newly re-furbished windows, all backed by earth-toned curtains. The awning is painted to match the now flat, bland, concreted walls.
Staggering home after a long day of finding nothing I liked in the shops, and after intital wistfulness at the change, I finally had to laugh. Perhaps the legend is not lost? Perhaps it is intensified! Perhaps now if you find yourself under the awning you are doomed to seven years selling houses! EGAD!
I crossed to the other side of the road, just to be safe. :D
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