Another day, another word

Ok, time for me to ramble on a bit.

One of the things that fascinates me about language is its organic nature. In that the meaning attached to a word or phrase is mutable, it changes over time and usage. So for the next couple of words' I will look at some words whose meaning has changed or been greatly expanded over time. Which brings us to today's word. (Nice segue, don't you think?...)

Weird

Now, I assume that everyone is familiar with this word, as it is still in general use today. However the common usage of it today, as in 'strange', 'out of the ordinary', and 'disturbing' ("You're really weirding me out, man!") is very different from its origins. The person we have to thank for that is none other than 'Old Bill', William Shakespeare.

His description of the Three Witches in Macbeth (It is OK to type the name, just not to say it. If you don't know what I am talking about, I'll tell you later) as Weird Sisters set the word on the path to the common usage we know today.

Prior to this the word came from the Old English, word of Wyrd which literally meant "That which comes" and was used to describe fate, destiny and prophesy.

Shakespeare used it in this sense in The Scottish Play to describe the three witches when they told both Macbeth and Banquo what their future would hold. One to be King and the other to father a line of Kings.

Now this is what I find interesting, while Shakespeare's intended use of the word was for it's traditional meaning of fortune telling, it came over time to adopt it's more modern meaning of strange because of it's use in the play and the way the witches have been portrayed on stage since the 1600's.

So the man who is responsible for changing the meaning of Weird, did not actually intend it to happen.

Weird isn't it!...

From Messy Junkies, to Archeology of the Future.

Messy Junkies:

This little rant was kicked of by an unknown junkie. I had recently moved to Sydney and was living at a great place on Boundary Street in Paddington. I went out into the back courtyard one day to enjoy my morning coffee sitting in the sun. During the night someone had shot up in the back alley and had thought a good way to dispose of the used fit (syringe) was to lob it over our back fence.

So as I blearily stumbled, bear footed, out to greet the morning I was presented with the sight of an uncapped used fit; with that lovely dollop of blood in the end.

It is no surprise to say that I was not joyously happy at the gift that had been left. I reemerged with a pair of pliers and a used drink bottle to get rid of it.

The morning coffee in the sun was a ritual for me at the time. I was new in town and trying to make way into the photography business; was still not working much so most mornings were my own. Over the ensuing weeks I was again greeted with a couple of times with the same present from out thoughtful local user.

After the third or fourth time I took a walk up to the needle exchange at Kings Cross. Boundary Street, not surprisingly, was the dividing line between Paddington, Darlinghurst and The Cross. The exchange was not far from our place; they were a bit surprised when I asked for several of the small disposal bins, but now ‘works’. I didn’t bother to explain…

I placed one of the bins in the back alley outside our place and kept the rest.

In my wanderings around the area I started to notice the number of fits left lying around. The publicity campaign for Clean Up Australia Day was in full swing at the time. So I decided that my contribution would be to clear the local area, as much as possible, of used syringes. So on the day I donned my old pair of leather rigging gloves, stuffed several bins in a back pack and away I went. Two hours later, with four bins stuffed full I called it a day feeling I had ‘Done my bit’.

It didn’t take long for my clean up efforts to be replaced with fresh supplies. Ah, those junkies, they are a persistent lot. So, over time, what had been a once only gesture on my part evolved into a monthly ritual. Every couple of weeks I would don the gloves, go for a walk around the neighborhood and clear the current build up of syringes.

As I got to know the areas of high concentrations, the ends of several allies, small dark alcoves etc; Where the users could gain a little privacy while they shot up what I began to notice was not how many fits were left behind but how many were not there. Allow me to explain:

While about one third of the fits I would collect would have had the needles recovered with the little Day-Glo orange caps by the users I was amazed by the number of empty caps I would find. In some spots there would be hundreds of them but only a few needles. I realized that the number of fits that were being used was much higher than what I was finding. So many of the users were at least disposing of them, hopefully not into locals back yards as one had done and sparked this whole little adventure of mine.

The link to Archeology:

I came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about an Archeology dig that was going on in the rocks area on a site of a brothel from the early days of white settlement. One if the details that struck me was the discovery of old rags in the remains of a wall that had been used as menstrual cloths by the women and then shoved in the wall as way of disposal. The comment was made that it is usually the junk and detritus of past civilizations that is turned up in digs as it is the stuff that is lost or thrown away and forgotten that is preserved while things that are useful are not.

This rang true for me as what I had so often seen in history programs on the Mediterranean was the shards of broken pottery from amphora, the bottles, cans and plastic bags of the Ancient Greek world that had been used in massive numbers at the time. I started to think: “So, what would have the best chance of surviving from the current times for future Archeologists to dig up?”

Small, pretty indestructible, used in large numbers and considered worthless…

Then it came to me, the little bloody orange caps from used syringes!

All of a sudden I had a vision of a dig in the area, several hundred years in the future, and them uncovering hundreds of these little plastic caps and them wondering and speculation what we had used them for and why in such huge quantities? Also, why did they turn up in large numbers here and not at all in other digs, at sites relatively close by, all of which belonged to the ancient city of Sydney?

I felt two things:

1) Was I doing a disservice to future science by cleaning up the caps?

2) Should I leave some sort of time capsule to explain why they were here and thus make the job easier of any possible future students working on their Doctoral Thesis in Archeology?

Yes, I know, sometimes my mind works in very strange ways.

The Effect of place on memory.

I was helping a friend last Easter. She was holding a yoga retreat in Springbrook in the hinterland of the gold coast and I was going to be on staff for the four days. One of the other teachers gave me a lift from the train station to the retreat centre. As we drove through Mudgeeraba, a small hamlet on the highway that had been a timber town in the good old days, I was surprised to see that my grandparent’s house was still there. It was supposed to be knocked down not long after we sold it 20 years ago.

A coupe of weeks later I was down at the coast again and decided, out of curiosity, to drive out to the old house and have a longer look. While the house was still there the township had changed, almost beyond recognition, from the sleepy little town I had spent summer holidays in. The post office was now “The Old Post Office Café” and there was a post office shop in the new commercial development a couple of blocks away.

When I arrived I was in for shock, the place had not changed at all. The old shed was still out the back etc. Well, it had changed a bit, the veggie garden beside the shed was gone and the place was filled with cars. The house was on a massive block, two titles if I remember correctly, and was being used as a small used car yard. I walked onto the property and looked around.

The shed had been a semi-mythic place for me as a child. Huge (not so big now though), dark and almost filled to the brim with all manner of tools that gave the place a unique smell of dust and rust. It had been a place of discovery and mystery for me. My grandfather was working for the local council at the time. Close to retirement, he had been a farmer for most of his life, the job was more a chance for him to get around the area and chat to the locals or so it seemed to me at the time. I would dive into the stacks of junk in the shed and come up with some tool that I had no idea of its use.

“Pop! What’s this for?”

“Well bring it here so I can see it lad. What you have there is…” and he would tell me at length about my latest find. I would usually only get a vague idea of what he was talking about but it didn’t matter.

“This reminds me of the time…” He would then be off on one of his stories of times past, ancient days to one such as me. A time where horses still worked the land, but only just, they had all but disappeared from the roads and soon too for the fields. Days of no television and no power. I loved his stories and wish I had put them down on paper.

The side door was open, inside bent intently over vice a man was rewiring a starter motor. Patiently, deliberately, he wound the copper wire; oblivious to me standing there almost looking over his shoulder. I didn’t want to intrude, to break his flow. So I stood there and took it all in. The old dark wood, massive doors with hinges as wide as my forearm.

The shed was full again with stuff. Tools and what looked like projects started and put aside to be completed for another day. I remember it had taken us at least two days to clear it out when Pop came to live with us. The shed was big enough to park four, possibly six at a squeeze, cars; but there was only room to inch in the tiny old 323 that Nanna and Pop had at the time. There were enough tools there to give half a dozen workshops a good start in life. Wire tensioner, saws from tiny fret saws all the way up to two man cross cut jobs, awls, planes – both metal and wooden, picks, shovels, augers, plum bobs, axes, mattocks and lots I stuff I hand never gotten around to showing to pop for him to explain to me. I stopped counting at six hammers and that was the complete ones, there were at least that many heads without handles as well. I don’t know where it all went. I was too young to worry about such things, or to muse on what effect such an event was having on my grandfather; what was it like to see tools one had used to shape and create a life, many of which had attached to them memories of people and places long gone, be taken up and removed from your life as well?

The guy working in the shed noticed me, after a time, and turned to ask what I wanted.

“Just having a look around, you see this used to be my grandfathers place…”

I went on to explain how it had been a long time since I had been in the area etc.

“Ah, Tom Burton, my mother used to live across the back lane over there. She know him and Eddie quite well.”

We chatted for a while about this and that; he had been using the shed for a workshop almost since the day we sold the place. Slowly refilling it, with the clutter of a lifetime, that had been emptied when we left. I thanked him for his time and let him return to his work. I smiled as I turned away, the shed was still there and someone was using it to fashion things in wood and metal with their hands. Pop would be so pleased.

I turned to the house. The old back landing had been enclosed. I stood there for a while just taking it all in. The owner came over after a while to see what I wanted; I didn’t seem to be interested in the cars. I gave him the same speech I had the guy in the shed and was surprised to find that this was the same man who had purchased the place fro us twenty years ago. He had planned to develop it but it had ended up staying as a car yard. We chatted for a while and he asked if I would like to come inside and look around, which I did.

Beside the old back door was the old wooden clock face with the sign above it saying “Sorry, we are out. We will be back at” and you would let the visitors know when you would return. There used to be a pen and paper attached, for your visitors to leave you a note. A relic from the days when people never locked their doors. Well not the back door anyway, anyone who knew you always came round the back. The front door was only for strangers. As we stepped in the kitchen, I was suddenly ten years old again and half my height. The place was the same, nothing had been changed. The same lino on the floor, paint on the walls and those off green doors on the cupboards with the funny little circular air vents in them. I felt as if all I had to do was close my eyes and when I opened them again it would be 10 am and we were arriving for a Sunday lunch with Nanna and Pop. As we walked in the back door, nanna would be sitting at her usual seat at the kitchen table getting things ready for lunch. Pop would be either out in the garden or if it was summer in the next room waiting for the cricket to start on tv.

Nanna died when I was quite young. Cancer. The word still brings a chill to the heart and the slight intake of breath now, but a generation ago it was much worse. With all the advances that have been made in treatment since then, I think that the big leap has been made in early detection. Through better methods, greater awareness and vigilance. When it was finally picked up, it meta-sized so long ago and her body was so riddled with it, it was hard to tell where it had started from. It was not a question of treatment, but simply of time. She passed in the night, a couple of days into her first stay in the hospital.

I remember coming down for the funeral. We walked in the back door, as usual, but she was not there. Everyone settled down to talk, to exchange the memories one does at a time like this. I was restless, I found myself aimlessly walking around the house, then outside. My father found me not long after, standing alone at the side of the house with tears streaming down my face. I known she was gone, on an intellectual level but it had had no concrete meaning till then. While they had often been to our house I had never been there and not seen her. Dad found me about an hour after we arrived. I had been unconsciously looking for her, wandering around the house; trying to see if she was still alive, somewhere. When I could not, the loss became real. I was out in the back yard crying with my whole being, the way only a child can. I had lost relatives before but had been too young to really understand it all. That was when I said good bye to her. The actual funeral, sitting in a strange church, had little effect on me.

All this had come spinning back to me in the moments I had walked into the kitchen. I pushed down the lump in my throat and continued the tour of the old house; other rooms brought back memories but nothing like the first steps in the kitchen. I thanked the man and made my leave.

I have many photo’s of her to remind me but the one I wish I had would be of her, sitting at the kitchen table, peeling veggies, smiling and looking towards the back door as her grandson walked in.