Bruised Football Bob

I read this week a proposal that aged drivers be restricted to within a ten kilometers circumference of home. I’m not sure what they hope to achieve by this. I’ve often heard it said that the most likely place to have an accident is within a few streets of home though I know of no serious research. Perhaps the aim of keeping you local is to increase the likelihood of there being someone there who recognizes you and can direct in the event that you forget your way home. Don’t know how they’ll deal with those who forget the ten kilometer rule and stray though, or what penalties may incur. It could be an opportunity for one of those new inventors to come up with a device that incapacitates the car at a set distance from base Luke.

I know all this ageism is boring you, lets face it no one over twenty five wants to contemplate the consequences of ageing, but it seems to be something I have to get off my chest so if you’ll just bare with me a little longer. I know that senility is sometimes referred to as second childhood but I never imagined that it would be preceded by second teenage hood with pimples no less. Blotchy skin, liver spots, shiny red bulbous noses with dirty open pores, all of this I expected but pimples, the scourge of adolescence, never. Oh the embarrassment especially to one who has never quite lost his narcissistic tendencies. It’s almost enough to revive belief in long forgotten, Job style, sin and penance, or karma at the very least.

Well that feels much better. I shouldn’t have to bother you with this stuff ever again though peripherally I’m reminded that this time last year when I was unemployed and Alice was beginning to carve her initials into the publishing tree we thought that I should research the possibility of writing for a senior’s publication. As part of this research, well the only part really, I had a conversation with my local News Agent who informed me that there were no publications targeting seniors and that all previous attempts at such publications had failed owing to the target audience’s reluctance to identify with this demographic There you go, It’s really only children who want to be older, everyone else just wants to stay and the older they get the harder they try.

As I write to you this morning from this sport centric nation the skies in defiance of their forecast seem to reflect the gloom of having lost face in three major sporting events overnight. Why should I, who don’t give a rats about ball sports, have to put up with this on the first day of my weekend? Am I being punished for having spent only two days at work this week? An astute reader has tweaked a discrepancy in my publishing habits already so I guess I should come clean. I have a bruised foot ball, mmm that sound wrong, the ball of my right foot feels bruised, that’s better. For some time I have noticed this and more recently I began to notice other phenomena such as tingles and numbness in that leg and oddness in the hip joint. Last Tuesday I decided to share this with my Which Doctor come Chiropractor who incidentally practices his voodoo in Mona Vale. He discovered some very unhappy muscular contusion in the hip / lumbar region, applied treatment and dispatched me with instructions about hot and cold compresses. He requested that I make an appointment for a repeat performance on Thursday and told me not to sit. Not sit, what stand walk? No preferably lie, of course stand walk and sit but avoid sitting as much as possible and lie as much as possible. Now I like what this guy’s saying and it takes little time to conclude that all this lying will be done much better at home than at work. On top of that this prescription has cost me $60.00 none of which I can claim from Medibank and this represents more than a third of what I will earn at work before tax and it’s not tax deductible. If this alone had not convinced me that this was the time to indulge that employee perk called sick leave then the logistics of an appointment at Mona Vale on a day when work was at Mascot would have been the clincher. So I took two days of sick leave when a bruised foot ball was about all the sick I felt and with time weighing heavily on my hands belabored you with additional blogging.

Sonego was a big lad, recently arrived from somewhere in Italy with pretty poor English. Maybe he was a year or two older than the rest of us and placed in our class as a compromise in order to catch up, that would help to explain his size. To be honest I’m sure it was mostly his size that influenced my decision to befriend him. He caught his bus from the same bus stop / tree adjacent Marist Brothers Lismore as I did and at this unmanaged portal where the opportunity for trouble and strife were always present I found it comforting to stand in this gentle giants shadow. You young’uns would find it very hard to understand how strict was this school, indeed they were nothing if not strict. If you missed a day you’d better come equipped with a note in explanation, or face consequences along the lines of the - shoot first ask questions later - kind.

So it was that one day after a period of absence Sonego arrived with a note written by himself most likely, as the only member of his family who had even the flimsiest grip on English, explaining that he had been unable to attend owing to a sore toe. That bastard teacher outraged at the seemingly petty nature of this excuse, on one hand and its denial of his opportunity to thrash this giant, on the other chose to belittle this lad in the worst possible way by there and then reading to the class the continents of this poorly written note placing bold emphasis on the words “sore toe” maybe more than once. Well what a joke, the class was in uproar and worst still poor Sonego could not understand why making it funnier still. I don’t have enough fingers to count all the charges for which this teacher would be sacked today but I do know that Sonego was known ever after in his school life as Soretoe Sonego. Had he been an American Indian or even an Australian Aborigine with their philosophical backgrounds he may have worn this well and who knows, maybe even proudly. Sonego though came from proud Italian lineage, his ancestors had contributed enormously to the cultural and scientific nature of this world long before anyone even knew of this woebegone continent, he did not wear it well.

So far I have not become known at Bunnings as Bruised Foot Ball Bob. If I do I hope I have the maturity and more importantly the connectedness that poor Sonego lacked to understand and cope with a brave face.

Here’s a shot of my class Marist Brothers Lismore circa 1960
It’s funny I always remember it as having been crowded.
Top row dead center and highest is Soretoe.
Back row second from right is definitely Mick Davis who had no challenger for position of top enforcer / bully certainly a tough.
On his right is Warren (fat) Cerrone, obvious to me now of Italian origin but never obvious to me then.
Two more along in this row is Brett Lee who was hanging out with Dr. Who about then.
Swots / shorts (some still even wearing them) are in the front row. Can’t remember names but I’m fairly sure skinny legs third from the left was Muldoon who had a Monsignor in the family or a bishop, something like that.
Fourth from the right was the dux who had obviously been rewarded with a watch for putting up with last year’s blazer. Can’t remember his name.
Somewhere in there is a handsome lad who had he only seen it sooner could have flapped his ears and flown away.



Bruised