A Backblocks Epicurean

I stepped out of my front gate this morning and found a twenty-dollar note lying on the footpath.

“Happy Father’s Day!” I told myself and pocketed the note.

I thought I heard my mobile phone ring and patted my pockets to find it, but the ringing stopped. I heard my neighbour answer, “Hello,” and then say, “Thanks, love, I’ll look forward to it.”

My mobile had the same ring tone as his phone. It had fooled me before.

I walked past their house. The front door was open to the warm spring air and I could see him standing in the hallway holding the telephone to his ear. His wife stood behind him, her arms around him. He held the phone so she could hear it too. They had a teenage daughter who had recently moved to Newcastle to go to university; they told me she called them at least once each day. She wouldn’t forget Father’s Day.

Our end of the street was solid with parked cars. It was Sunday morning and an Anglican church was on the corner block beside my house. The twenty dollars had probably fallen from the pocket of some worshipper. In summer, when the church windows are open, I can hear the drone of the organ and the congregation singing of their unfashionable certainties. They seem a harmless lot, and it’s only once a week for an hour or two that their cars crowd my street.

They have their routines, and I have mine. On Sunday mornings I like to have a coffee at the Epicurean Cafe while I read the weekend newspapers. So I walked to the cafe, stopping at the newsagent’s on the way to buy the papers and a scratch lotto.

Fortunately, my favourite table in the sun in the cafe’s courtyard was vacant. The waitress took my order and I settled down to read the paper. Of course, it wasn’t good news. There was uncertainty about interest rates and inflation; petrol prices were set to rise again; home-grown terrorist cells were thought to be multiplying; diabetes, asthma and heart disease were killing more and more of us; the manufacturing sector was in decline; species loss was greater than previously realised; coral bleaching was destroying the Great Barrier Reef. And that was just in Australia. Internationally, wars in West Papua, Afghanistan, Darfur and Sudan continue their cruel patterns; the Middle East was a mess (again); it was predicted that climate change would propel the spread of malaria; the sale of useless, counterfeit medicines was threatening to undermine gains in public health in developing nations; bird flu was set to cause renewed havoc in Asia; and Chechnyan terrorists had used a surface-to-air missile to shoot down an Aeroflot jet, killing the 123 passengers and crew, including twenty-eight French children who were on a school excursion to Russia.

With my coffee, I was given a complimentary macadamia nut cookie. The waitress explained: every man who comes into the cafe gets one for Father’s Day. The cookie was delicious, so I asked for another. The waitress told me that was free also.

“And you’re a regular,” she winked at me. I enjoy that small affirmation of worth and welcome. I scratched my lotto ticket and discovered I’d won ten dollars. Sometimes uncertainty works in our favour.

At the bottom of the cafe’s new spring/summer menu was a short note on Epicurus. I hadn’t noticed it before. It said:

Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher. He taught that seeking small and therefore achievable joys—such as friendship and a measure of independence (via food from one’s own garden)—was the most sensible response to life’s uncertainty and our own mortality. He knew that we can’t find true knowledge, but we can try to cultivate imperturbability. We want our cafe to be a peaceful place where you can enjoy the simple pleasures of food, coffee and conversation with friends.

I was pleased with myself. Quite independently, I had reached the same conclusion as an esteemed philosopher. As a young man I had things that I never doubted: that my marriage would last, and that my children would always care for me, were the most prominent of my naive certainties, and the closest to my heart. But after a divorce—as a result of my wife’s infidelities—and as the absence again this year of any Father’s Day messages from my children demonstrated, these certainties had certainly lapsed.

In recent years I had cultivated, quite consciously, the enjoyment of small but achievable pleasures to alleviate life’s disappointments: the companionship of a few good friends; developing my cooking skills so I could enjoy delicious food; expanding my knowledge of classical music, and planting an attractive but low-maintenance garden. I grew sunflowers to attract rosellas, cockies and galahs, and I was rewarded with their colourful, squawking presence. Then there were the gifts of chance: in spring a cheerful bird woke me most mornings with its carolling; nearly every day a pair of grass parrots, a male and a female, walked around my backyard eating seeds hidden in the lawn. And each day I’d look for something good to happen and inevitably it would: a friend would telephone; a scratch-lotto win would give me a small thrill and a token amount of money; a waitress would give me a free treat to enjoy with my coffee. These were small joys especially treasured because large joys—lifelong love, sure knowledge, and a sense of life after death—were seemingly beyond reach.

I finished my coffee and cookie, tucked my paper under my arm, and paid the waitress. She is a slim girl with a lovely smile. I don’t remember teaching her, but maybe she went to boarding school, or to the Catholic high school. When she gave me my change she, smiling brightly, looked straight at me and I noticed how her hazel eyes were flecked with blue. She would be around my daughter’s age—twenty—and younger than my son—twenty-four. My son and daughter, although both living independently at the time, resented that I’d sold the family house to resurrect my life after the divorce; my punishment, it seemed, was to be treated as if I didn’t exist.

I put my change in the waitress’s tip jar.

“Thank you!” she smiled. “Seeya next Sunday.”

I wondered if I appeared a predictable, somewhat sad middle-aged man. I was only forty-eight, yet I probably seemed quite old to her.

I used my share of the equity in our large Sydney home to purchase a two-bedroom house in a small country town. The house was laughably cheap so I had money left over to invest. And I get regular work as a casual teacher at the local high school: it pays my bills. I’m not interested in full-time teaching any more: there is too much meaningless paperwork and too many kids with “issues”. During school holidays, I visit friends on the coast. We compare receding hairlines, health issues, our financial woes, our anxieties and depressions. We also wallow in the surf, watch movies, eat prawns and drink too much wine and beer.

I checked my mobile: I hadn’t missed any calls and there were no messages; it was foolish to hope there might’ve been.

At home after the coffee, I inspected my back garden. The freesias were in bloom and my bed of irises looked like a detail from a van Gogh painting. In my vegetable garden, the carrots could be thinned and snow peas could be gathered for dinner.

As I lingered to pull out a few weeds, I heard a motif—just a few bars—on an organ. Church had finished—the cars were gone from the street when I returned from the cafe—but someone was still there and had played a familiar phrase. I hummed it and memory completed the rest of the melody. It was a chorale by Bach. I had the piece in my CD collection. I went inside, put the CD in my player and selected the track. It was Sheep May Safely Graze.

I turned the volume up because the piece started so quietly, the gentle pulsing rhythm conveying confidence. I sat in a chair beside the player and tapped the air with my fingers to keep the introduction’s steady, dignified time. I closed my eyes to concentrate on the flute and oboe’s ethereal harmonies. Then the choir began. The air in the room was suddenly dense with powerful voices. Even though it was in German—which I barely understood—no translation was required to know that Bach was celebrating his hope. Credible then but incredible now, the Baroque certainties were still piercingly eloquent. The music was better than I was: its joys were large, their security assured. It wasn’t the sound of humanity settling for the bare minimum from life. When it finished, I played the piece once more.

Afterwards, I went outside to pick the snow peas and as I picked them, I thought, Epicurus, I love you because I agree with you, but I hate you because small joys are meagre comfort. And there are times when they’re no comfort at all.