In the Wind

       IN THE WIND

The warm northerly breeze drifts across my skin rippling the hair of my body. I wriggle my toes in the dry soft sand and feel alive—a man on a lonely beech in comfortable sunlight. I lift my arms and twitch my shoulders in the magic air. The beech is lonely but I am not. My twin sons play wrestle in the sand, exploring the texture of the sand as much as the strength of their arms. They have exhausted themselves rolling down a sand dune and consume their remaining time at my feet. They are eleven. We do not swim here. The water is treacherous, which maybe why this beech is lonely. I have been coming since I was twenty and have only once seen others here. They were surveyors. It is a secret beach.

I am a photographer. I take no pictures here. The light is a stark brilliance but there is nothing on record to hint at the existence of this place. It doesn’t even have a name. But I have a photographer's eye, and I love the awesome radiance of where the sea meets the sky at the horizon. Just occasionally there is the image of a ship against the terminal haze.

My feet are in gorgeous sand, and behind me tussocks, a few plants, tea tree and a scattering of wildflowers. Screeches of gulls and the chirping of tiny birds in the bushes behind me create a steady symphony with the roll of the waves and the chatter of my boys. Christian and Aiden shout phrases in their own secret language. It is strangely similar to the secret language of my childhood school, but I don’t let them know that, and pretend total bewilderment. They are both curious, aware and observant, which makes parenting as comfortable as riding a dirt-bike blindfolded. Andrea and I used to pretend we had given birth to aliens.

The gusts of wind stir little eddies of sand. This is a special place. The boys were conceived here, though they don’t know that yet. Alison died five years ago to breast cancer—months of gut-wrenching life dominated by a medical madness. We shared in preparing the boys for her death, and did it well, and they survived and grew away from the memory as children can. I was left with the heavy weight of black loss which is still part of me. Some psychologists say that there are stages of grief. Either that’s psychobabble or I’m stuck in one, but it is only a part of me. My work and the boys make up a fantastic life. Alison’s ashes are buried on a mound about forty paces South. She had a lively sense of humour.

“Carl, I want to be buried with just an ancient piece of mining timber to mark the place, with my name burnt in, without a date. My ghost will hang around until some wanderer discovers the post and thinks it is a pioneer's grave.” She grinned.” Perhaps there would be attention from the Heritage Register. And no flowers, leaving a letter sometimes would be nice.”

 The boys find letters too difficult, so each time we come we bring a prayer written on rice paper. The boys wrap it around a stone to ensure that it will perish without litter.

We are mostly over the hurt and celebrate being alive now. There are scars of the past. Welts across my back are the ever-present reminders of a whip in a disastrous childhood. I have told the boys that they were caused by a bicycle accident at school and they should always ride carefully. The truth they will never learn. This is a burden of knowledge they will never carry.

I was bullied by my father mostly because I wasn’t a perfect boy and he declared  that I looked sweet. That probably meant that I looked like my mother. Sweet boys grow up, but enough of that. I have boys now and no one would call them sweet. Maybe Riders of the Black World or Foreshadows of the Apocalypse. I have some jokey thoughts. I am free as a breeze. And my mind comes back to the present.

Aiden came across this in a book, “Daddy, what’s all this mean? ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou heareth the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.’”

I told him, “In lots of languages the word for spirit is the same as the word for breath and wind. This is from the old translation of the Bible. Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit of God, saying it’s like the wind. So bloweth is blows, of course, and listeth means, wants, desires. The spirit can go wherever it wants and you only know by the results, like the wind. Mum’s spirit is here. You can’t see but you can feel.” I didn't tell him that listeth came from the same root word as lust. That could wait.

It is interesting how we anthropomotize (am I allowed that word?) spirit. Lots of us picture God as a human-like splendour in the sky, and this is enhanced by the human Jesus as God, but we can only use symbols for the Holy Spirit. It’s a bit of a mind boggler, but I can sense Alison here on this beach.

The boys are identical twins, very identical. I can tell them apart, of course, but most people can’t. We have always had problems with the school. Teachers wanted them distinguished in some way, and we gave in and provided different coloured tops. I’m sure the boys swapped them sometimes just to enjoy the confusion. Last year there was strong pressure to separate them into different classes but I resisted that successfully. Mind you, it wasn’t helped when the school psychologist suggested to the twins that they be separated, and Aiden said, “Why, we’re the same person?” An alarmed psychologist called me to arrange a conference.

I spent an hour educating a school psychologist on the structure of eliciting meaning from children instead of leaping to conclusions based on text-books written by people who had not fathered twins. The boys stayed in class together. They will grow their individual ways as they mature. Puberty looms.

There is one feature of their identity that is ever before me. The boys have Alison’s eyes and nose as if in sculptured relief. Just looking at them is a morph of grief and glory. I am well pleased.

Here we were now, on the sand in the wind. And it is Spirit to me, enlivening, restoring, vitalizing.

The thought of lust comes back. I have a consuming lust for old books. I love the leather and cloth binding, the marbling of the edges, the smell, the old fonts, and the spelling more attractive to my ADHD mind. I have fourteen ancient books, one modestly valuable. Alison shared in this devotion. We had met in a conservator’s book shop.

The boys stretch out on the sand and sun themselves. They know they have only minutes left. A flock of seagulls descend on the beach chasing whatever the receding tide exposes. They peck and squabble over prizes, some edging towards the boys in the hope of remnants of human food. They will be disappointed. We don’t feed birds—a sign of changing times. As a child I would have fed the birds, now we must not interfere with nature. The seagulls haven’t learned that yet.

I don’t take pictures of birds often. Most of my enjoyment comes from beautiful scenery,  family pictures and portraits. I was trained in the hard world of press photography. We worked on scenes that the editor wanted, taking lots of photos from which he could choose. I provided thirty faces of a politician from which he could pick an outstanding leader or a stupid idiot all from the same seven-minute photoshoot. He liked a group of twenty-five people packed together with bodily edges out of the frame to be headlined, ‘Massive crowd protest stirs country’. I got out of it. Lying for a living wasn’t my ambition.

“It’s time to go,” I shout to the boys. They stand up and brush sand off themselves. There is no argument about leaving. They know that the time in the sun is not negotiable. They can negotiate everything else. I suspect the skills are secretly taught at school, but I am old enough to manage a situation so that my real decisions prevail into a disguised win-win. They don’t understand melanoma, but they know I don’t want it. I toss them their beach-towel hooded ponchos, pull on my matching poncho – I did mention we were identical,  and pick up our gear.

It was a good time to move, in any case. I detected a faint change in the margin of the horizon as the azure begins to darken. The wind is turning to the West, and that will bring wilder gusts. We trot up the faint track towards the car, leaving behind moments of grief and joy, love and memories, history and a glorious present, all left as spirit in the wind.