Memories, Like The Corners Of My ... Something

The Age

Wednesday November 12, 2008

BARRY DICKINS

THE other day I was in the bank explaining to the teller that, due to moving house, I had lost my passbook somewhere. She looked at me as if I were insane. Strive as I might, I couldn't explain anything. I told her many things, among them the fact that a payment of a considerable amount was coming to that passbook number. I politely produced a lapsed passbook that had the word "expired" stamped violently upon every page.

"I can give you a brand new passbook immediately," she said with a sigh. "But I can't give you a new passbook with your lapsed number on it."

But my employer only pays my salary into that, and only that, number, I said, and she seemed to age visibly. Her brow became a vortex of concern lines, as though a migraine were coming on.

She then suggested the payment could go into my cheque account, and then I could withdraw money from the ATM.

All I had to do really was swipe my card, fill in a few forms, show my driver's licence and it was a fait accompli. But then she said it couldn't be done. It was my turn to sigh. I was starting to forget where I was.

And then a dreadful thing happened to me in my bank. As she began to speak, I forgot what she was saying the very second she was saying it. It was a kind of boredom married to exasperation. Something that seemed so terribly simple became a miniature catastrophe. I pointed out that I'd banked at that branch for decades; to which she said I shouldn't have lost my passbook. I went completely blank.

Then she said I would have to write to every one of my employers and give them my new passbook number. I told her my employers were endless.

My mobile phone then detonated, telling me it was low on charge, possibly because it had fossilised in the bank due to the longevity of the inquiry. It started to rain outside. Then someone in the line started to shove me in the kidneys and use intemperate language. At my car, I used my ignition key on the door instead of the door key, due to either the downpour or the distraction, or both.

I arrived home and my real estate agent rang requesting a copy of my front door key. But they already had one. They cut me a copy and I then had three copies made in Elgin Street that cost me a small fortune. Spares, in case I got locked out.

But they insisted upon getting the original one back, and signing a document as complex as a Martian dictionary. "Do you mind if I wait until the downpour ends?" I said politely.

For my supper that evening I dined on two splendid eggs on toast and read my street directory, although I had misplaced my reading spectacles somehow and just sort of squinted at it. I sipped my Irish Breakfast tea and looked at Keilor. The street directory was so old it didn't have Essendon airport in it.

I am not quite 59, so it can't be old age, or is it? Getting so mixed up, I mean. I have just become so incredibly forgetful lately.

Because I'm a klutz, I simply can't understand technical things like mobiles. Or inserting coins into meters in Smith Street, Collingwood, because their slots are now different, and the coins won't go in.

When friends scream at me in a pub, I don't know what they're talking about. The louder they become, the less I hear. I would rather they spoke to me in an undertone; the way poetry was once read before it became deafening instead of divine. I don't get modern life.

A friend of mine in publishing was Sandra Gorman at Currency Press. She died of cancer not long ago and I went to her funeral service in Sydney to show my respect because she put me in print with my stage plays. To my utter stupefaction the minister showed my fellow mourners a chilled bottle of champagne in the pulpit, and said: "Let's party for

Sandra." Whatever is wrong with crying your head off when a friend dies?

Maybe it is life itself that is bipolar. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with us or our ability to remember. I do wish that I had a touch more savoir-faire; I seem to drift and float with a mind that just doesn't fit in. But do I want to be Malcolm Turnbull?

It's a real juggling act these days just getting through one infinitesimal crisis to the next. People lose faith just like the way they forget where their car is parked. They forget why they hate each other or why it is they live apart and become so bitter.

Last night I hid my shrill mobile phone in my car because I'd forgotten how to turn it off. My son rang it using his mobile. But it was in the boot and I'd lost the boot key.

Maybe existence is so bizarre that all the angels are scatterbrained? I used to pray for love but now I just pray for order.

© 2008 The Age

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