As Ignorant as Swans

Here I am on Mount Vic Lookout in May, 1998. I went to Japan the next day. The Mount Vic Lookout used to be a Maori graveyeard, but the council bulldozed it and put a viewing platform there.

In 1998 I was under the impression that I knew things. There were rising threats against this self-confidence. Now in 2008 I have an almost entirely new set of things I believe I know.

This was a very hard day. It sort of felt like I was dying. My mother talked about Marshall quite a bit. We had recently come back from a trip to Dunedin. A town full of ghosts.

The Town Hall where the Joe Brown Dances used to happen every Saturday night. Imagine all that nervousness and brylcream, polished shoes and homemade frocks.

Mainly I went to see Gran. The first night my mother and I were at her house she wasn't really herself. She complained a lot about her health. She didn't really talk to me. I went to bed feeling a bit down.

In the morning she was different. She was like the Gran I loved. We sat at the breakfast table and ate. Mostly we went through the morning ritual in companionable silence. Perhaps National Radio was on, perhaps it wasn't. It was good to say goodbye in that way.

There they are. I suppose it's 1914 or there abouts. My grandfather is sitting next to his father. He might be about 26; unmarried, tall and strong. He worked up in the back country with his Dad building fences. Lying on bracken in a tent with a lamp he might have written letters to a girl he had seen around. The night sky must have seemed enormous and full of stars.

His brothers are standing. One of them is going to war. What did he believe before he went?

It was a sunny day my last day before going to Japan. I didn't sleep that night. I was beginning to find out that fancy ideas about who you are and school book theories are built on sand.