Dad

It's Sunday, and there was housework to do before I felt free to go to the studio.

I didn't mind too much.

Even on arrival - already lunchtime - I was waylaid by a gaggle of local kids selling homemade lemonade from their front porch. All profits were to go to charity, "So you'll be saving someone's life!"

Who could resist?
I decided to buy two cups' worth to take back to the studio and have with my lunch. It was stinking hot. But as it turned out, take-away was not an option, and I was offered a garden chair on which to sit under a birch tree, and a child's melamine mug full of cold, tart lemonade. It was delicious, and I chatted with the other neighbours who had been lassoed in from the street.

In the studio, I ate a lunch of leftovers, made a cup of tea and wrote my diary. I set up my camera on my new telescopic tripod. The tripod is special. It appeared serendipitously at the op shop last week, the kind Universe furnishing me with the only thing I lacked to make the animation I had dreamt up the day before. It is a pleasing thing, too: spindly and elegant at full extension, it folds, with pleasing clicks, into a neat baton, and zips into a brown case. There is no doubt in my mind that it belonged to a gentleman hobbyist with a homburg and a box brownie.

Today I was filming my progress on the second parasol.
The work is pinned a little high for the tripod, which stands on tiptoe, as it were, its legs pulled precariously close. But I know where it is, and I won't knock it over.

After a couple of hours, Dad came to visit with my grandmother, his mum.
Having visitors is always risky. The equilibrium in the studio is delicate and hard-won, and, while stable enough for solitary me, it is readily unbalanced by the presence of others. But I was feeling strong. Yesterday's completion of the first big parasol had left me almost breathless with awe. I had stared at it, astonished that it had come from my own hands. I felt powerful and blessed at once, and cycled home in the balmy evening with a full heart. So I said, "of course!" when Dad asked if they could come for a brief visit. I was excited for them to see the new wonders I had made.

I wanted to hear Dad say, "WOW!"

The studio sits deep in a warren of white, makeshift corridors. I greeted them at the front door, linked arms with my grandmother and walked at her pace while Dad loped behind, chatting.

"Now, Moss. Do you need a radio?" he asked.
"No." I said.
"But - have you got one?" he persisted.
"No."
"I've brought Mum's old one for you. It works great, you just can't turn it off."

We were still walking through the labyrinth, but slowed while he fished in his supermarket bag and I protested that I have an iPod with hundreds of songs... my voice faded and my heart gave a sad little skip as the radio emerged in his hand. The cube!

The clock-radio cube - that wonder of function and design that had sat on my grandmother's bedside table since 1989. It had been one of Dad's more successful gifts. A triumph that brought his mother to hand-clasping exclamations of delight. It was cream-coloured, with one clear-plastic face, a window to blackness through which shone digits in digital red. It was there to be covertly inspected and admired on sleepover visits, when my grandmother was still strong and quick, and when I was a loose-limbed, buck-toothed day-dreamer, transported by her stories of long-ago loves.

And there it was, under the flourescent corridor lights, inert, clunky and small in my Dad's hand.

And obsolete.

"I don't need it," I said again, wounded by the very fact.
I don't need any more stuff.

Dad looked wounded, too, and wrapped it back in the shopping bag.

And then we were at my studio door - I swung it open with a proud flourish and led them in.
"Well, then!" said my grandmother, "isn't this nice?" We urged her to take a seat in my new old chair, where her small, neat form sank into its depths. It's the only chair in the room, so Dad and I stood awkwardly around. Dad noticed the tripod.
I knew he would.

"If you knock that, your camera is GONE," he said, our great worrier, daily fantasising catastrophe.

I assured him I was aware of it all the time, and would not knock it. For some reason, my heart had commenced a drumming panic in my chest. Anxiety had infiltrated my haven, my studio. My gleaming, god-sent tripod was under question. I was firm and insistent in my reassurance. I had known he would say it, and had known there was no way to stop it. My brilliant parasol quietly held its ground behind Dad as he shifted restlessly from foot to foot. I decided quickly that it was still brilliant to me, even if no-one else thought so. Dad joked that a cocktail umbrella could be a murder weapon in an Agatha Christie novel, then promptly considered the logistics and decided that it couldn't. We all laughed, directionless. Dad said he still felt sad about the radio.

After they left, Dad helping my grandmother carefully down the dangerous steps and along the cobbled lane, I sank into my new old chair and tried to calm my heart. The white walls reverberated with my strange anxiety. I could almost see Dad's words flying wildly across the room and rebounding in all directions - thin, white, violent streaks of panic. I couldn't make sense of my reaction, and, finding no sense, I also found I couldn't subdue it.

Until I looked again at the parasol.

All my life, I've felt pangs of real grief on behalf of inanimate objects that have been discarded, damaged, forsaken. My sister has it, too. We each mourned, at primary school, for the yellow texta, passed over by most children for its insipidness against white paper. We each, in our different classrooms, made a point of using it to make it feel included.
It wasn't till years later that we discovered we shared this specific, weird sympathy.

It is a cute quirk; a humorous affliction; a completely unjustifiable source of sorrow.
But with it, I have forged my own particular understanding of the unfathomable world.

It has become my art.

And I got it from Dad.