25.03.2025
Was It Ever Something to Jump Up and Down About?
It was a three-minute stroll.
For a short while I fancied the proximity of my local grocery in Brisbane, a cornucopia, to be somewhat a pinnacle of modern living. It is a convenience no longer enjoyed as I’ve since moved elsewhere. It’s a two-suburb drive now for the few favourite comestibles not available at my new location. But it suits me to go back from time to time, its kiosk has good coffee and pastries, and the store’s guilt gauntlet of fresh cut flowers opposite the fruit juices offers a pleasing brocade of scents and colours up to eye-line as one moves toward the exit, queued for the checkout. What the item is that is on the very short shopping list—to the extent I don’t even need a list—I’ll mention further on because a diverting recollection is suddenly under consideration. The head says make a note, the gut says run it down while the spore is fresh.
The grocer’s establishment just mentioned had a sister store open up anew in Sydney while I was based there some years ago. As it happened, that new shopping zone too was mere minutes walking distance. That was the destination. I will get to it. But before arriving there, first, it was a turn out the gate onto the street and up a hill.
Near the beginning of that walk is an almost bucolic setting, which I passed most days on my neighborhood perambulations. It’s aside a railway line running through a deep cutting. The plot has substantial trees out front, and is a place of worship, with its attendant school on the farthest side. The whole of it is pleasantly quiet for a suburban location on a street of fine older houses. A half dozen or more stairs descend from street level through modest landscaping to a set back forecourt, which leads to walkways and the building’s entrances.
Once-a-week, the street grows to appear as busy as a village square. Worshippers walk from their homes nearby, or from their parked cars, come along the footpath, arrive good-naturedly and enter. Two, or three serious-looking young adults, equipped at the hip, chaperone the weekly gathering. They observe the street, eyes to passing vehicles, left and right, intently on unfamiliar pedestrians going by. The chaperones remain on duty until all the attendees depart for home, or go on to visit with others. The street quietens again, and is once more sparsely dotted with parked vehicles.
When it was, exactly, I can’t be sure. There was the year of dust, the year of fire, then the year of mask, the year, or years of isolations and flat-lined memories. At some point during those times something came that was most peculiar, although it made chilling sense. The change was anthropological and it appeared in the street where I lived.
Nothing I myself could point to presaged a specific change, or, if anything, had brought even a subtly discernible effect. Whatever, if anything, it went by unseen, unheard, by me and most others. But somewhere, somebody’s sensitive vein had somehow divined an alteration…in the colour of a closing sky, or in an oncoming one, in a current, or in unknown gyres forming intent. Something must have indicated a shift, had its effect upon them, turned up suspicions…or deeper back, felt a wind of change, accepted a rumour, or received a communique.
On an early morning walk, with sunshine on the bridge over the railway line, there came into view a new sight: tall fence uprights cemented into the ground outside the place of worship and its school. A regularity of spacings had appeared amid the random line of the substantial trees. The commenced construction seemed to have taken place with a suddenness, as if while all the lights were out. Surprise drew me to cross the street, see at close quarters the large panels of mesh awaiting installation. Mesh, not of style, but of banal utilitarian purpose. Invulnerability. These would straddle the spans between the tall steel posts, superimpose across nature, cast a shadow down onto its forecourt. An enclosure was coming into being. Several hundred metres of once unimpeded perimeter to the light was being bifurcated by steel; wired-in security gate technology, sensitive all-seeing surveillance.
The quiet street had come to the anxious count of the quickened pulse. Behind closed doors, furrowed brows had come to determinations. If nothing else, but to invest in assessing the insurance risk tables. An ill-wind had been factored-in. I continued past, decided that on that morning, rather than make my own breakfast after a long walk, a stop for coffee and pastry ought be made into a deliberate silver lining.
That new commercial development was a welcomed addition. A strip of early twentieth century stores, with a single level of flats upstairs had had to come down for the muscular modern replacement to go up, six flights, I think, apartments above street-level businesses, assembled in short order. Essential services, no surprises: cafés x four, food and booze, bakeries x four, a travel agency, and two grocery options. Quickly, shinily, as if stamped out to a conveyor, the development came to be, wrapped like seductive sweets. As appropriate as this progress was in the overall, what became most evident, was how it was so equably pitched to the very-well-to-do demographic, as well as to the many strapped well-to-do, still in their well-worn labels; re-heeled leather; decade-old, or older, marques parked out front, only sometimes gleaming, and often having forgone the convenience of underground parking - subterranean squeamishness, perhaps, or complexity phobia, or straight up anxiety, which most definitely was in healthy supply in both those strata, all, appealingly stylish in that pretty, quiet, leafy, suburb. The platinum-level, and the mere gold-class level were amply catered for. They shopped for groceries in stores that were almost side by side and most definitely in their own delineated price-point pools. One with its many authentic delicatessen lines, and freshly hand-prepared gourmet-gastro options for immediate consumption, the other, with observably doppelgänger brands and tonal lookalikes ready for the thaw and re-heat. The latter attended by the desires and questions and occasional upturned nose: I hope the taste satisfies; will it go the distance to please? Of course, this is all first-world shame; the sturm und drang, and fear baked-in to the daily distraction diet on screens and devices, streams into even the finest ‘burbs.
One afternoon there, I was about to make a purchase from the grocery with everything. It was nearing school pick-up. The area was busy. Ahead, on the upward sloping footpath, I noticed a handsome couple of advanced years tussle with their groaning shopping trolley. I entered the grocery, emerged a few minutes later intending next to select a Maltese charcoal chicken up the street, and continued in the direction of the two elder folk. Only by the woman’s straining efforts to hold the trolley back from rolling away, had the two managed half the task of transferring the groceries to their car. The woman’s perspiring husband was short of breath, struggling. I offered to assist, suggesting they hold the trolley steady and I swing the remaining bags into the boot of the vehicle. The lady and man, eyes glistening—looking about at the many still obliviously passing them by—radiated a shocked thankfulness. I was touched.
Earlier, near the beginning of this page, mention was made of a shopping list. My original intention was to make something of the fact I’ve made a switch from one product to another. IMHO, that decision is validated on the four following counts: nutrition, sustainability, taste, and value. But, a reflection right off the top of this piece caused a diversion and brought up another picture, other priorities. Some would definitely agree that appetite has gone begging all over, lately. So I’ll spare you my preachy Jamie Oliver in favour of putting something else as succinctly as possible.
The ‘preachments’ out of the US for as long as I can remember, have had at their top, an implied inviolable rectitude for preserving, protecting and defending its most prized possession: The Constitution.
Has the star-studded stripy idyll always been a cheap veneer?
Has the US always just served up soufflé?
The clock is running down to prevent the complete destruction of a country based in law.
TA