With only a slight bewilderment

I heard how it was sad: how instead of interminable lectures about the Pritikin diet, Rife's discovery of excitable pathogenic spores, Jesus in India, the supposedly misleading Kyoto Protocol, the danger in fluorescent tubing, coffee, natural gas, pasteurised milk, the need to reverse and then eliminate poverty, droughts, osteoporosis, religious misunderstanding and to aim our nuclear weapons at the sky for the comets which are coming, he sits in his chair and listens with only a slight bewilderment to the kind of conversation he would never have understood in any of the past decades of his long long life, and when someone leaves the table, he shuffles on after them as if afraid to miss an occasion for something --  but at least, as she said, these days he is able to joke.

About the birds

He was amazed, he told me, about the birds – about their complicated calls and the way they fly fast towards each other but never seem to collide. It was the first of a new kind of conversation with him. In all the years of my life until this moment, I was thinking, my father has never talked to me about the birds.

Bushfire

I note, she told me, during the days that have followed how often I have mentioned the bushfires in Victoria and the terrible toll of lives that is increasing all the time – either bringing up the subject myself or responding when someone else does – and when a conversation occurs where neither of us mentions the bushfires I think all the time as I talk that both of us are enacting a deadly betrayal and that if only one of us would bring up the subject that must be talked about, one less person might be found to have died and one less house been burnt to a grey square of ash.