Dad beams triumphantly. ‘It’s two cents cheaper up the road from us.’
‘Three cents!’ Mum corrects him but, if he hears, he doesn’t respond. Like directions, if your opinion or recollection differs from Dad’s, it’s just plain wrong.
Mum and Dad have been known to drive over two hundred kilometres to save half a cent a litre. If you tally that up over their sixty years of driving, they have gone out of their way to circumnavigate the globe three times to save themselves the grand total of four hundred bucks. But petrol price spotting is one of their favourite games and one upmanship in identifying the lowest price before the other has gone into overdrive in recent years. Even when not in the car, the fascination with all things petroleum is never far away.
‘I had to go to Emergency at Maitland Hospital last night,’ I might say to Mum when I visit her one Monday for our regular cups of tea, expecting a flood of shock and sympathy.
But instead I’m likely to hear: ‘I hope you filled your car up while you were there, petrol in Maitland is usually a good two cents cheaper than it is around here!’
Today in the car I participate, much to their joint delight.
‘I should have filled up near you,’ I throw in my ten litres’ worth. ‘I could have saved a buck twenty.’
‘Better in your pocket!’ Dad quips. ‘We bought six kilos of onions from Aldi last week – cheapest I’ve ever seen them!’
It will likely be me who decides that they’re mouldy enough to chuck in the bin when I next look for a bickie in their pantry.
‘It all adds up!’ Mum says.
‘Who could be bothered?’ Jeff asks bluntly. ‘There are more important things to worry about than half a cent a litre.’
‘What’s he got to worry about?’ Dad asks, having miraculously understood (and heard) Jeff’s accent for the very first time in eighteen years. I silently rejoice, ready to retire from my role as his personal interpreter.
‘Structural pine and decorative cushions,’ I say, nudging Dad with my elbow.
I’m not sure whether he’s heard me but he is smiling appreciatively.
‘Piss off!’ Jeff says, followed by a cheeky smirk. No doubt he’s got used to my own price-obsessed hobby: How much has Jeff spent on cushions this week?
‘There are lots of people in the baths today,’ Mum says as we pass the local swimming pool. Her fingernail taps against the window again. I am reminded of those water-filled bird ornaments that some people keep to rock back and forward on their desk for no apparent reason.
‘You never did keep up your swimming did you, Jude?’
‘I went once . . . or twice . . . but it just wasn’t for me. Oh, I dunno, I just like to be kept busy,’ Mum says flatly. ‘Otherwise I’ll go insane.’ Then she adds just soft enough for Dad not to hear. ‘I can’t watch telly all day.’ Jeff and I know precisely what she means.
Come retirement, Mum and Dad had to learn a brand-new dance, navigating around each other as Mum went about her chores and Dad did his best not to get in the way, or have Mum’s constant buzzing about bother him too much. Why did she have to use that loud vacuum cleaner right in the middle of one of his programs?
It’s true that whenever I visit my parents they can usually be found in their natural habitat. As I walk past the TV room, Dad will be in there, slumped in a chair with the blinds drawn.
‘Hey Dad!’
‘Hey Skeet! There’s an Aussie in the Finals of the Senior Women’s World Croquet Championships and it looks like she’s going to win!’
‘Woo-hoo!’
If he’s not watching sport or the news, it’s likely to be a black and white film (westerns) or else a 1970s women’s prison flick. Needless to say, our tastes are not exactly aligned but that doesn’t stop me from trying to find some middle ground.
My first attempt at sharing interests occurred when I was in my twenties and had in my sights what I felt was a modern cinematic masterpiece to interest them. I thought Jane Campion’s The Piano was quite possibly the best film I had ever seen and Mum and Dad’s life would be enriched for seeing it also. Their lives, I thought, would be radically impacted by its brilliance.
I took them to see the movie at the Cremorne Orpheum, a beautiful old cinema on the North Shore of Sydney. After squeezing Dad’s hand tightly inside the Maltesers box because he was making too much noise shuffling around the plastic, I settled in so we could let the best film ever made blow us away. I was excited to hear what they thought of it afterward.
‘Yeah, it was . . . different,’ Dad said on our way back to the car.
Undeterred, a few weeks later, I took them to see Baraka at the same cinema. Really, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. Baraka is a documentary film . . . without dialogue. It is a series of sequences set to evocative world music. It includes a lot of nature, then morphs into a commentary on the destructive realities of industry, commercialism and waste. So maybe not to everyone’s tastes. That spelled the end to me introducing my parents to life-affirming cinematic brilliance.
I still tell Dad what I watch and love, but as I stream most things on Netflix and I absolutely do not want to open that gateway to hell masked as a technological lesson at their house, he says he’ll try to find the same movies on Foxtel, but he never does.
Like a lot of men of his generation, work gave Dad purpose. His knowledge and expertise in an industry he loved made him feel valued and important. Being the co-owner of a business, he was continually thinking about how to expand his range, entice new customers, or design new products. Aside from watching Grant play sport on the weekend, and cheering on his racehorses, Dad didn’t have many hobbies outside of work.
Retirement hit him like a truck. Theoretically he saw it as his chance to finally slow down and relax, but this was something he didn’t have much experience with. As Mum had always done most of the cleaning, washing, cooking, ironing and shopping, there wasn’t a lot for him to do around the house. Oh, he’s very quick to point out that he completes most of these chores for Mum when she’s had enough or her back hurts too much, but aside from mowing the lawns, his home duties more or less end there. He hasn’t been one of those men who take over the kitchen or relocate furniture or generally reorganise home life that had been functioning pretty smoothly to that point.
If his well-worn beige leather rocker is empty, it’s likely the TV will still be blaring but on the other side of the hall I will also hear the running of water as he fills his bath for his twice- (sometimes thrice-) daily soak. Taking baths combats the monotony of having little to do. He doesn’t take any reading material with him and wouldn’t know how to stream sport or black and white movies on a device, so mostly he lies in the water staring at the ceiling as he idles away the time.
I will then continue walking out the back where I’ll see Mum consumed by one of her more regular hobbies.
What to do when you retire? It’s a question that no doubt does (or will) plague all of us. When suddenly you have lost the sense of purpose you once had and instead of seeing freedom and opportunity in your less committed days you wonder how on Earth you’re going to fill them. Never before has every single day been completely yours to map out.
Sure, over centuries there have been numerous activities that seem to have been designed exclusively for the pleasure of those no longer working. If you don’t have grey hair you’ll likely be excluded from the club, unfortunately. Bridge, mahjong, lawn bowls, ancient handicrafts, bird watching, orchid growing, train spotting, model trains, bingo . . . the list goes on. Others take up volunteer work or a more active role in helping with the grandchildren. Hell, we’ve even created specific vehicles for your retirement pleasure and good on those grey nomads for getting out and about in their Winnebagos and spending three nights in towns whose only claim to fame is the world’s largest sundial, and the like. But what if none of those socially endorsed senior activities appeal to you? Or even if you find some of them both entertaining and accessible, is there really enough longevity and enjoyment in them to get you through your fifteen waking hours every single day?
To prove the point that she does indeed have other things to keep her from getting bored, in the car Mum pulls some knitting needles and wool out of her bottomless bag. It doesn’t take long before the noise of Mum’s places-of-interest-spotting fingernail-tapping is replaced by the click clack clicking of her knitting needles from over the back seat.
‘What are you knitting now, Jude?’ Jeff asks.
‘I thought I would make Jess another beanie.’
‘Oh,’ I pipe up, ‘is she going skiing again next year?’
‘No? Why?’
