Of Razor Blades and Memories #NaBloPoMo

It’s funny what banality can trigger memories.

Sometime in the coming weeks, I will undertake a ritual for the very last time. A ritual that has always connected me to my father. A ritual that was ours when my father was alive.

When I was little, I used to be dad’s 2IC when it came to replacing the annual registration sticker on the family car. This used to involve razor blades, hours of concentration, methylated spirits and cut fingers. Back in the day, the Government used to issue each vehicle with a registration sticker which showed the month of registration, the year of validity and the registration number, make and VIN details of the vehicle. It was up to each owner to apply the sticker to the windshield of the car after removing the pervious year’s version as it was an offence to leave the old sticker visible. So dad and I would set off to laboriously scrape off the old sticker which was made of a thin plastic film and applied to the window with a coat of glue. It was a transparency sort of affair which we could only remove using methylated spirits and razor blades. And the reward for persisting? A formerly whole registration sticker now hacked to a million plastic bits all through the car.

Whatever was involved, I loved this father/daughter time. It was him and me against the world.

As I grew, Dad anointed me in charge of the great registration sticker exchange. Out would come the razor blades and the metho (Aussie vernacular for methylated spirits) and out I’d go to the car and do the deed. By this time, adhesive technology had evolved to the point where the registration sticker was less transparency, more sticker in the traditional sense. No water was required to activate the adhesive. This made old sticker removal somewhat quicker and easier, although the razor blades still came in handy.

Every year I change my registration sticker I use the same tools, the same methodology and I think of my father.

Our Government has finally decided to come into the twenty-first century and will from this year rely on its computer records as proof of registration. There will be no more registration stickers to apply and only this last one to remove.

My kids will never experience this ritual.

I will miss it. As I miss him.

In the coming weeks, my final peel will be for you, dad.

Of Tingling Toes and Grandmas

It’s been fairly hectic around Curtaindom for the past couple of months, but in a good way.

The family has survived the final exams apocalypse and the Creature aka my eldest son is starting to stir from the swamp of note paper filled with endless scrawl. The reason I know this is that the swamp of notes, textbooks and other assorted stationery has stopped spreading like the proverbial primordial ooze and now just sits forlornly in a pile like the blob. Except there’s no quiver, maybe a rustle or two, but certainly no quiver.

Just as Creature finished his final exam, my youngest son, started his own path towards the swamp by undertaking his end of year exams. They finish on Friday and …

I CAN’T WAIT!!!

Don’t get me wrong I think education is vitally important and I am totally supportive. But this year has been an exam marathon. I feel like I’ve been pregnant for 13 months! Lots of practice runs and then finally the real deal and well, now it’s almost over.

So it was with some glee and much relief that the family approached this weekend and my mother’s birthday celebrations. My mother, bless her, is now 80 something and has the most fantastic outlook on life. The past couple of years has not been easy healthwise and the changes become more obvious with every passing week. But through it all, she has maintained her peace, graciousness and giving heart. She has also maintained her relationship with my with boys, her grandsons.

: Matti (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Purely and simply, they love her and of course…. she, them. You can see it in the way they support her when she walks, when they drop in on her unannounced for some TLC that only grandmothers do and the highest compliment of all, they have made her their Facebook friend. How much more evidence of her being teenage royalty can you get than a Facebook link? My mum is just plain cool. There is no other way to describe her, well there is actually … I would also say she’s super nice.

This adoration from my boys makes my toes tingle, my mouth curl upwards at the sides and my heart beat a little faster. Observing my boys and my mother together and interacting is one of my greatest joys. Probably because this experience was denied me as all my grandparents had passed before I was born. How wonderful to have the opportunity to seek out wisdom without judgement, to hear stories from another time and country and to have someone sneak you parental contraband!

The enduring relationship is made even more poignant because when they were born my boys had a full complement of four grandparents and now there are only two.

So whilst there was no disco dancing and no rock music at this party, we had a great time and made some happy memories. At this stage, every birthday is a milestone birthday and every birthday is a true cause for celebration.