Anzac Day has always been a special time for our family. Ever since I can remember we’ve been up early for the Service, then morning tea at the RSL Sub-branch and a rush to get Dad to the march in the city on time. He’s always marched on Anzac Day and this is the story of his last Anzac Day march in 2007.
I took a call recently and the woman on the other end of the line began; ‘I know it may seem a bit late in the day but thirty years ago when I was working in the Building Society, I sat in one of your training programs and I was thinking today that I never thanked you for changing the way I thought, all those years ago.’
Who hasn’t been on a long journey and said or heard this? The urgency to get to our destination becomes the imperative.
Getting there, wherever there is, has always been a driver in my life. But it isn’t the bee’s knees. In my search for outcomes, destinations and goals, it’s easy to lose touch with the here and now.
I had a conversation I wasn’t expecting with a bloke I know recently. He asked me, ‘What do you think women around the world were marching for on January 21st?’
Siting around on New Year’s Day discussing the previous year, one of the group said, ‘It’s been a terrible year’ and rattled off all the celebrities who have died in 2016 and all the things that will change the world, Brexit, Trump, Trump, did I say Trump? When my husband said, ‘Well it wasn’t as bad as 1665.’ (more…)
It’s a beautiful, hot Queensland summer day at the beach; the water is clear, see-through green. Calm. I look down at my toes, digging into yellow sand. My friend and I are bobbing around in the soft waves; hats perched on our heads, sunglasses shielding our eyes from the glare of the mid-morning sun.
We talk about work, children, food, Chinese New Year and the year of the Rooster, then the mood shifts and my friend asks, ‘Have you two always been good together?’ She looks towards the beach umbrella where my husband is laying back in a chair reading his Christmas book.