Westmoreland St

It was the summer of 2008 – the Year of the Potato.

To celebrate, Bry and I were roasting ourselves in spud-like fashion in the sweat-foundry (what’s a foundry?) that was his car. We were young and nearing the end of our first degrees[*], full of convictions and the comforting knowledge that no one expects a student to follow through on his convictions. Only a few hundred metres away, in the dingy study-mines hidden away beneath our uni’s Hogwartsian facade, class was happening; rows of bright-eyed students still somehow fresh-faced and eager after three years or more of grinding away under the yoke of 80% minimum tute attendance. The smart ones – those who would go on to Masters and PhDs, not because they wanted to defer real life for a few more years, but because they actually wanted to do the work – would be asking complex questions to show that they’d understood/done the readings (usually met with a blank stare from the lecturer, who, with twenty years’ teaching experience, hadn’t expected anyone to do the readings and hadn’t bothered to do them herself). The dumb ones – those who make you question the validity of every good mark you get by somehow managing to pass themselves – would be asking if Jane Austen wrote Elizabeth Bennet with Keira Knightley in mind (in an Egyptian Archaeology class). The mature-age ones would be sitting in the back, chatting obnoxiously to one another, talking about life experiences, cracking baby boomer jokes that you could track by the cringes that spread like ripples through surrounding students – and then having the temerity to be really interested in the subject and put enough effort (i.e. any) in to make the rest of us look slack.

That’s would have been happening inside the classroom, but we didn’t care about any of that. Outside, in the baking car in the tree-lined street, we were experiencing other kinds of happenings. Sunlight. Music. Friendship in all its forms: palness, croniage, chummitude. The blissful harmony of two people happy to be perfectly still, knowing that talk will ruin the unspoken conversation. The radio (I want to keep this unbiased, so I won’t mention the station, but its name has 3 Js and it’s Triple J) was serenading us with the soothing discordant caterwaul of some Middle Eastern music, best transcribed as: WWAAAwwawwaWWAAAWWwwawawawEEEEEOOOWWWWWAwwwawaaa. WA! Our legs were hanging out the open windows, sweetly blistering in the hellish sun. Whenever we shifted in our chairs we left furrows of ass sweat behind – the moist g-strings of summer.

A brief lull followed the Middle Eastern yodel – WAAAWweeWAA! This time a bri – WOOllleeOOO! That’s not even how it soun – BLORG!

…

A brief lull followed the Middle Eastern yodelling. A hesitant breeze licked our rancid toes. The world was drifting into a doze, a daze, a sweltering haze. The sunburnt silence held until, subtly, seamlessly, it was gently invaded by the friendliest, cheeriest whistling y’ever did hear, cutting through the humidity easy as a pickle through mustard. It was as though the summer, pregnant with its own possibilities, had given birth to a child of pure song, and that song’s newborn cries went a little (aka exactly) like this:

Ever since that day, ‘5 Years Time’ has been, for me, the very essence of summer. It’s instant teleportation to slow, lazy days back on Westmoreland St. Any time I hear it it’s like a strain of freedom, of open spaces, of unscheduled, boundless time, rustling greenery, steam-wavy streets, easy friendship, and staying wild.

I was going to do a music review, but I think I’ll save it for next time.

May you always find love in the bodies of the elephants, too.

..

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[*] Arts. While the rest of our friends were wiling away the precious years learning about things that society not only understood but also valued – and would also earn them serious NASDAQs (what? I really should have taken economics) – like toxic torts and the synthesis of Keynesian and neoclassical economic theories (actual things), we had taken the scenic, and also circular, route of the eternal student: a magical path of leprechauns and rainbows where there is no such thing as mornings and you only have to walk it three hours a day for three days a week.