This evening using my Microsoft file navigator. Separating items to create collections. This file drop in that folder open on the screen. That file slip into another folder, one also open in display mode.
One file here, another there.
Drop. Drop. Drop.
Botany “the study of plants”
The sound of liquid dropping reminding me I studied industrial process plants for many years, as did my father, he as a senior sales engineer (a man used to contracts, documents, MS-This and MS-That), and me as a lowly PR operative.
He’s not regretted by anyone I know.
I spend an hour or so in my Botany house searching TYB files looking for something but I didn’t find it. I found other things. Things related to when I ended up in hospital in 2000 forcing mum and dad into a panicked lockdown until, finally after six weeks and being discharged from the hospital, I began to butter them up. Here’s dad to Australian family member, 3 Mar 2001.
In my last letter to Matt, just before he left hospital and after two happy telephone conversations—“now to Matthew Dean da Silva who was a most beautiful and happy human being. In the last 20 months we have had two phone conversations that have given me great joy. Something good has happened! Your voice was that of a Matthew we have not heard for years. Our language scholar and speaker, clear and distinct, articulate with a well-constructed delivery. What can we say? Congratulations! We hope that the process of your re-entry into the world has started. Recovery from a traumatic experience, and I have had a few, requires time to restore acceptance of the new status. A new and stronger persona emerges after trauma, for those who survive. Eventually you will be discharged, hospitals are like that, and my experience is that it comes as a surprise, and access to the outside world is a reminder that though one may have changed, the world of human values hasn’t. Thus one must adapt to prevent the return of a problem. You should be planning what you will do and also have contingency plans should the ideal opportunity not be available.”
Relieved but still full-scale patronising, falling back on tired tropes of a man not willing – you could if you were charitable say that he was “incapable” of understanding, but that would remove the element of agency he’s due – to understand the human. What human values he refers to – in a combative, cold, and vain world – I can’t guess, unless it’s the same as “family values” politicians always talk about, or “Judeo-Christian values” likewise.
He had none to do him or anyone else good. A user. But then again most corporate types are well trained in the art of manipulation, it allows them to rise to the top. And stay.
The family tried to help him but he refused it. Here in the same letter talking about a cousin.
[She] also writes that Matt, “needs love because he is a Portuguese boy.” She has never met him. I need love, you need love, men need love and women too. Matt is no boy just starting out, as he will be 39 this year and has not lived with us for over 20 years. As an Australian he has had 100% control over his own affairs since he turned 18. The only thing we have been allowed to do is to give♫♪, whatever!. We have no say and he has, on many occasions when we have been worried about something, said: - “I do not wish to discuss that!” That sounds just like my Papa. On the other hand Yukiko thinks that I am some kind of head of the clan and Matt must do what I say. (i.e. what she tells me to say) What a JOKE! Matt has never deferred to me any more than I deferred to my father, though Sally did until 21 and then left forever. We can but wait and see.
“She has never met him.” Just let’s slow down and go back a minute to what he said at the beginning of this little explosion – to one family member on account of what another family member said to him (he’s surrounded by family members) – scathing, “I need love, you need love, men need love and women too.” Here is dad with his convenient family members busy listening and advising and he says, basically, “Fuck you.” “Matt is no boy just starting out, as he will be 39 this year and has not lived with us for over 20 years,” meaning that whatever problems I had were entirely of my own making and he wasn’t responsible for any of it. 20 years of doing no-good jobs to make men like him rich.
He told me to talk to Centrelink.
Talk to the Australian Consulate in Tokyo
Here he is to the same family member, I mean the same family member referred to in the last letter quoted from.
[Judy’s brother] Geoff’s wife Christine phoned and gave me an earful on the subject of “Judy should come and get Matt immediately!”. Judy was at the Farmer’s Market buying fruit and veg at the time and I was in bed, unable to move, as I had a Spinal Episode when we were in Los Angeles. Had to get wheelchair assistance at both LAX and HNL as I couldn’t move an eyelash without terrible pain. I have been taking dope and am now using a walking stick, a folding one with which we travel. I am now at about the same level as I was on Matt’s wedding day in 1991 when I left the reception with Stephanie and hobbled back home leaning on a walking stick. Today was the first time I have been outside the building when Judy walked me to the beach before breakfast and plans to do so each day. In short, as I have been saying for the last 50 years, “I’m as good as I will ever be.” The only person who really understands is Judy and it took her about 15 years to work out what was meant following our meeting at a theatre party for Geoff’s 21st Birthday 48 years ago next month. Actually I took her to Lady’s Day at the yacht club about a year earlier after which she wouldn’t go out with me again because she was engaged. Christine doesn’t understand as she is only 56 and doesn’t want a 69 year old husband. Gosh! 56, I was still in my prime at Honeywell in those days. Judy is now taking one Voltarin pill each day and her mobility has improved. Just as well I travel with all that dope.
“Gave me an earful.” Poor man. Shrill as a fishwife when he doesn’t want to do something. Big contrast to “now to Matthew Dean da Silva who was a most beautiful and happy human being” when things are going his way. This is dad again writing to the family member I started out with.
We can only hope and trust that Matt can put all behind him, get on with his life, be at peace with himself and pleasant to those in whose company he finds himself. It’s been a troubling twenty years for Judy and me as we have never understood his agenda. Nor could we have believed he could sink so low.
“Hope and trust.” “Get on with his life.” “Be at peace with himself.” He means “get on with the life I chose for him” because even though he says “Matt has never deferred to me” in actual fact when I was 16 I telephoned him in his office when I got home from school, having just learned that French and art were to be held on the same day at the same time.
MY agenda?
I deferred to him
When I needed “You make up your mind” he said “No.”
While mum looked after Peter I was left alone to go back to my family home (I had left it a year before) and wait to be put on a Qantas jet and sent, like a side of prime lamb, back to Australia. Staff gave me three seats and wheeled me onto the plane, just in case I wasn’t able to walk. The funny (?) thing is that while dad really couldn’t walk and had to be wheeled onto a jet at LAX and HNL I was treated at NRT as if I couldn’t walk by an airline considerate of my needs in a way that I hadn’t experienced in nine years.
Or maybe not considerate. Maybe just being safe. Like Yamatake getting the company car to chauffeur me back home the day they sacked me. Back to my family. Like a Dear Guest. Don’t get lost on the way. Off you go, careful of the door on the way out of NRT.
“Poor chap!”
I am not likely at my age to put anything like this behind me. Rather, these pages are my journey. My Leontograph, the making of the past in a way I can grasp in detail.
Multifarious?
Dad and his nefarious tendency to blame other people. Am I like him? For example to a different set of family members on 4 Apr 2003.
We should have had more fun at University than we did but we learnt a lot about the local kids and ours during the Cranbrook years. They didn’t go anywhere else from Kindy to Leaving. Maybe they would have been better off with State School. Too late now. They were both delightful boys until about 16, after which our influence withered.
“Too late now.” “Better off with State School” (knock some sense into them). “Kindy to Leaving.” So old-fashioned. But honestly, as if Cranbrook could do anything for me during years I kept attendance. I know for sure my brother had a hell of a time. Hoo boy. I don’t seek places to apportion blame, this simply takes the cake. Part of the patriarchy like my father, Cranbrook tried to break me not make me. Make me fit a mould.
But I was “romantic”.
Quite impossible
(I’ll get to this.)
Can you BELIEVE it? “They were both delightful boys until about 16.”
We were CHILDREN for God’s sake! Honestly my patience with the STUPID in this man’s mind just gets worn and worn and worn and worn. It’s like a knife sharpener on my WIT, a constant flow of STUPID the ends of which never seem to be reached, every time I turn a page – or rather every time I open a saved Microsoft file – a big, fat, stinking dollop of STUPID falls on my head and me a pig to roll in it, it’s as if the computer had a pipe connected to a chute near the ceiling. Each time the pig uses its pink snout to open a patriarchal Microsoft file with this sort of CRAP in it one dollop of stinking goo pops out of the pipe, down the chute, and onto my head.
Oink.
3 Jan 1997 to family member not Leontographer: “Matt and family have lived in Yokohama since 1992 and it is quite impossible for me to visit them there.”
Splat.
We do hope that you will come and see us when you return to Sydney and if you do and show any interest in the rest of the da Silva clan we can bore you for hours.
Splat.
9 May 1999 from Honolulu:
Matt is better than we expected but very depressed and seems to blame me for his psoriasis, depression and life’s difficulties!
May 1999 – note, this is before I had the breakdown in fact in May 1999 I was living with my family still – and then, in a 1999 letter from family member whom he’d two years earlier invited to Sydney, this.
That Matt’s management of his internal affairs, however they’re being exacerbated, is up to him. He can & will blame anyone he likes, but it’s only when he’s matured by way of his present process that he’ll cease blaming & be accepting of his own rôle at the heart of the matter. It may serve to let him know, briefly [i.e. not a complete assay of how you felt while he was in HI.] how you feel, even if he presently doesn’t acknowledge you. At least he’ll have to take it on board, if he reads your communication, & he’ll have something clear, to which he’ll attend at some future time.
As if dad would HAVE a heart-to-heart with either of his more-than-16-year-old children. Lord.
A generation later and I’m more convinced than ever who was in the right. It wasn’t the psoriasis, though it was that mum and dad could see because it was VISIBLE. Another manifestation of my distress. “Poor chap” dad groaned like some English uncle in a crime drama mum couldn’t watch because he refused to indulge anything for her sake. Maybe he needed a regime of ‘Father Brown’ and ‘Poirot’ at least on Friday nights with his dear wife sitting on the couch and getting a dose of human values. “Judy was at the Farmer’s Market buying fruit and veg at the time and I was in bed, unable to move,” is sort of the story of their lives for this decade. She doing all the housework and looking after him when he’s sick or disabled. But, no, going to Japan to visit his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren was hard. Better wheeled onto a jet in LAX that in NRT.
The heart of the matter was that I was completely unsuited to the kind of work dad’s planning had dubiously assigned for my benefit. Finding that children aged 16 years and older are somewhat difficult was probably the biggest waking-up my father had ever had apart from breaking his OWN neck aged 16.
You can’t MAKE this stuff up.
FRCHRISSAKES.
Microsoft
Anyway let’s forget for a moment the correspondence files but, rather, turn to files containing poetry. “Put away” sounds depressing, I’d prefer the files released into a world, and perhaps that will occur. Not just now. I mean not in an immediate sense. It won’t happen now (it’s 2.48am; no it’s 3.38am; 4.48am; 5.21am; 6.19am) nor tomorrow (today?). But at some point, yes.
There are 5000 words in ‘The Yellow Bin’, there are 27 Microsoft files.
Like a little baby. Micro. Soft. Small and yielding. A little person who listens to you, not a big, pimply 16-year-old who has their OWN IDEAS and speaks them. No wonder dad spent so many hours with his computer typing away assigning blame ludicrously not imagining for one MOMENT that I’d come along one day and turn his efforts the other way.
I’m thorough and particular just like my dead father. Below the files sorted in descending order by the date last edited. Look at them all, ready to go SPLAT on some poor chap’s head.
But it’s only when he’s matured by way of his present process that he’ll cease blaming & be accepting of his own rôle at the heart of the matter.
