freesias and chocolate (in memoriam)

The signs are not auspicious. I think I said the same on my very first post after throwing coins for the I ching at new year. Put it down to a melancholic temperament or the fact that my grandmother was a Jungian analyst and believed everything could be understood if only we knew how to read the signs correctly – I’m not called Reading the Signs for nothing, it’s in the blood, you understand. But listen: the cherry blossom that was so full of itself the other day has withered and gone brown as if to reproach me for wanting to hold back the spring. After a merry evening with friends at an inn last night, I and the others saw something wedged between the windscreen and the wipers of a car. It was a dead animal and looked like a weasel. On the drive home there were two more dead animals on the road – a fox and a badger, large and beautiful, curled around itself on the side of the road. Of course, as we know, spring is treacherous, the way it comes and goes leaving fragile things defenceless against the howling cold. Roads, fast cars, are unfriendly to wildlife. We knew this before Bright Eyes. And some people have a strange sense of humour. It was a joke, said the barman about the animal on the windscreen, we know the bloke, it’s ok, he did it for a laugh.

Still, the small birds are flitting around the apple tree and the buds there are tight closed, protected. Just over three years ago, on St. Patrick’s day, my father, son of the Jungian analyst, died in hospital after a stroke. On that day the signs were obscured. I lingered by a florist’s stand and bought three bunches of freesias to give to him because he loved the smell of them, (they reminded him of some childhood years in Capri) and also because they were three for the price of two and he always had an eye for a special offer. He died before I reached him.

He was an actor, more often out of work than in, usually chosen to play the all-purpose wop, spick or dago “baddie” parts because of his dark, sephardic looks, until the last few years of his life when he was suddenly much in demand. As a refugee from Nazi germany he was shipped out to Australia to be interned during the round-up of “enemy aliens” in this country. Actually they tried to ship him and the others out twice and on each occasion the boat was torpedoed, so they gave up and he stayed here. Years later a man who was on the boat with him said that my father had saved his sanity. When it seemed that the end had almost certainly come and they would all perish, my father sat on the floor below deck smiling. When asked what on earth he was smiling at, my father replied that he was thinking about wholenut milk chocolate.
“We’re going to die and you’re thinking of chocolate”! said the man. My father said yes, because it was something he very much liked so it seemed a good time to be thinking about it. Always one for the joke and merry jape, the sweetness of wholenute milk chocolate belongs to him, I think.

Though I didn’t see his death coming, I am sure that he himself had an inkling. Sitting up in the hospital bed, recovering (as I had persuaded myself he was), after a bowl of apple crumble he had enjoyed, he put the spoon into the bowl and looked at me.
“everything has an end", he said, "except for the sausage, which has two ends.”

It would have been about now that we buried him, the weather so rough, hailstones clattering on his box and the freesias we threw on it still closed up. The golden ones on my kitchen table are open, the sweetness of their fragrance intense. I am thinking of him. I am ready for spring.