500 people: Week Seven

Continuing with the challenge to talk to 500 new people this year. See this post for the brief description of the challenge. Two comments on last week’s post inspired me to aim for more sustained conversations. Or maybe it just happened that way, because I’m not sure I can take a lot of credit for some of this week’s encounters. On the other hand, while I’ve spent quite a lot of time talking to people I see roughly once a year, there hasn’t been a lot of chance to meet actual strangers over Easter. There haS been plenty of ‘Good morning, good morning‘ while out and about, but I’m not counting them.

1. Saturday 27 March, in Murray Art Museum Albury. (Actually this happened before I posted about the challenge last week.) The upstairs gallery invigilator asked us as we entered if we knew about the exhibition. We politely declined the implied offer of an explanation. A couple of minutes later, in the rooms full of the photos of Olive Rose Odewahn (1928–1960), taken as snapshots and now digitally captured and enlarged to show them as she never saw them herself, the invigilator turned up and engaged us in conversation. I don’t know that she learned anything about us beyond that we came from Sydney, but we learned a lot about her biography: migration from England deceived by Australia House propaganda, back to England disappointed, then back again to this backward country, to marry (biggest mistake of her life), have children (not a mistake), have a multifaceted nursing career. She wasn’t white, and I wondered how much of her unhappiness about Australia when she first came here was because of racism – but didn’t get to ask.
2. Sunday afternoon, after we’d checked in at our Melbourne Air B’n’B on the dizzying 44th floor of a residential building, there were two thirty-somethings in our lift back to the ground. I asked them if they lived in the building. ‘Yes.’ ‘How is it?’ A twist of the lips from both of them. ‘How long have you been here?’ ‘Just about two months.’
3. Sunday, at dinner in Carlton with the Emerging Artist and a friend. Somehow the conversation turned to the unpleasantness of ageing. Striking a contrary note, our almost-70 friend stood up in that post-Covid crowded restaurant and touched her toes with straight knees. Not to be outdone, the EA, fully 70, stood and placed her palms on the floor. Our friendly young male waiter stopped by and demonstrated that he couldn’t do it. I stood and showed that I could manage even less than him. It was a joyous moment of connection, all about bodies young and old, male and female.
4. Later Monday afternoon in Swanston Street, a man in an Afghan-type turban went down on his knees as I walked past, then prostrated himself on the footpath. It looked deliberate, but I stopped to check that he was OK. An older, slightly dishevelled woman, seeing me stopped and looking, tapped me on the arm and said, ‘I’ve been following him all the way from Melbourne Central and this is the third time he’s done that. After a while he stands up and raises a fist and shouts. It’s a war cry, like those terrorists did just before the attack on the bridge in London.’ ‘I don’t think he’s a terrorist,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘The army or the police won’t listen to me. It’s happened to me before, you know.’ She had once seen men with machine guns on Melbourne rooftops, and when she told her doctor he made a note that she was prone to psychotic episodes, even though just as he was about to have her taken away by ‘the men in white coats’ they heard on the news that there had been a security drill in preparation for the Commonwealth Games, in which men with machine guns were all over rooftops on the Melbourne CBD. We were now walking back the way she had come (she had decided to change course to avoid any terrorist action). She told me she comes out to draw on the footpath, because it gets her out of the house, and showed me a phone photo of one of her beautiful drawings. We swapped names, and said goodbye when she stopped to talk to the man begging with his dog at a station entrance. ‘I hope we don’t see ourselves on the news,’ she called out in parting.
5. Wednesday morning, descending from the 44th floor with our bags, we shared the lift with a young woman. Again, I decided to break the Silence of the Lifts. ‘Do you live here?’ ‘Yes.’ The EA: ‘Have you thought about what you’d do if there was a fire?’ (This had been the subject of some discussion during our stay.) ‘No, I haven’t. And I won’t in future either.’ Pause. ‘Do you live here?’ ‘No, we’ve just been staying for a couple of days.’ ‘I was wondering when I saw your bags. Can you stay here like a hotel?’ ‘No, we’ve done it on Air B’n’B.’ ‘Ah!’ Somewhere in there she mentioned that she actually lives nn Geelong, and stays here a couple of days a week.
6. Sunday afternoon, at Airey’s Inlet, where huge waves are breaking on the beach and there’s a steady flow from the ocean over the sand barrier into the inlet, we meet a man in budgie smugglers with ‘DUBROVNIK‘ blazoned across his bum. ‘I was going in but it’s too rough,’ he said. ‘High too,’ I said. We communed, more or less wordlessly, in our sense of the sublime, and went our separate ways

Running total is now 64. I’m falling well behind my goal of roughly 10 a week.