David Gairdner - Return

I returned to Australia from China.

Last time I returned from China ten years ago, I dropped by to see my Grandma with souvenirs, evidence of my action. This time I returned with a bag of fridge magnets to manifest my experience of China into an object.

The idea of synecdoche has been attractive to me, the small object/word representing the whole, the protestant cross representing Jesus/cross.

This time I didn't take my fridge magnets to my Grandmother's house. The house is now vacant or filled with someone else.

To be the honest the only time I see my grandmother now is in dreams. 

I don't think there is a way to drop off physical objects in dreams. Such a shame as it is a nice magnet.  It is a palace with red ribbons flowing from the sky and through the palace gate.

I write this with an egg timer, gradually returning to zero. There is something to said about the counting down, a progression to zero. Is it zen? Is it fatalistic? Entropy drawing inward?

What is the sound of my grandmother's old egg timer?

I think her mechanism is built on the same logic as mine,

A manual turning of the northern hemisphere and then an automatic clicking back. I hear a tinny wrenching under the clicking.

Her egg timer was thrown out with the saucepans and cutlery. We disposed of the everyday first. We kept a painting of a bewildered horse and rider. Not sure if my grandma ever rode a horse.

The things kept are ornamental, useless by design.

Sentimentality and practicality can be inversely correlated.

When I cook eggs, I'm sad I don't have her egg timer.

Maybe as time progresses, my egg timer sounds nearly the same as hers.

The click, click and the tinny wrenching.

I partake in the same rites of the everyday.

Boil a kettle,

open a fridge, turn on a stove, pour kettle water in saucepan, put eggs in a saucepan, wait

wait..

wait.

Hear time clicking.

time is more quiet than most things

Pick up egg with a spoon and rinse under cold water.

Fingers feels the cold rinse and shuffle over the surface of the egg,

a tapping and a chipping

dull coldness of tap and the dull pain of the hot surface egg.

Under shell, there is skin, under skin there is egg.

The rites of the everyday practised whether observed or not.

The fact these common acts return again is something.

The act is...

the verb is grace

the noun is dead.

Like a nameless planet revolving around an unseen star. The action repeats. An existence imagined but true all the same.

The senses fashion our imagination to witness this.

The desert planet repeats its movements.