Saturday, April 3, 2010

A map of childhood

Have you noticed how as a child, things beyond your daily trail seem completely other-worldly?

How when you stopped at an apple orchard in the mountains at age seven, biting into a piece of fruit so fresh it almost hurt your mouth with flavour you felt like you were in tourist commercial?

And remember when you went on a trip with Girl Guides to a namless country town three hours west of Sydney and you camped by a nameless lake, near a nameless road, under a nameless mountain and it stormed and stormed all night and dropped to temperatures that made your hands go numb and stop working when you needed to pack up the tents the next morning? You returned to that nameless town years later, to live and work. It's called Orange.

Or how you drove with your Dad to watch your brother play cricket on the other side of Sydney where people like you didn't live and you passed a grungy hotel on a stop-start road that streteched for miles, a pub you knew hosted gigs for bands you wanted to like but didn't yet. That was Annandale, where you now go to church.

Or how on your way to another game in another part of Sydney you saw that giant billboard advertising Coca-Cola hanging over the freeway like a little piece of New York and you wondered where you were? That was Kings Cross.

How those years felt like sewing tiny pieces of fabric together from the back seat of the car to make a map that would eventually take you somewhere and how inevitably, as the map joined up, how you would tap at the ceiling above you like some arctic animal coming up for air only to realise how little you really knew.

Or how nothing's really changed.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very evocative soph :) I kept waiting for the mention of getting stranded in the middle of nowhere and thinking you were going to get mugged... on victoria road balmain. V x

soph said...

I really should've consulted you before I put pen to paper...

Perhaps I could write Part 2: "Soph's life as recollected by Veronica, written by Soph."

heheh

What gig had we missed out on again? Was it Ben Lee? Im thinking something starting with B? Ben Kwellar? No...

Anonymous said...

hehe :)

I think we were originally going to see eskimo joe at the gaelic club but they were sold out. So instead you wanted to see one of your bands at the annandale, maybe bluebottle kiss?

soph said...

Oh V! your trusty memory wins again.

that's right... we'd decided to go to the annandale. That would be why we were on the 370... because I thought it was a 470. And why we got lost.

This doesn't really qualify as a "childhood" faux pas though really does it...?!


ps. you are definitely doing my eulogy. You will have so much material - you can turn it into a book like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (dave eggers).