Recent events have thrown up some – thankfully – kind reflections on ageing and renewal.
When Dad was alive, and after Mum had gone, I sat with him at the kitchen table in our home on Coleman Crescent. It was the very scene, the very place, of a single family’s birth, youth, middle age, old age, and eventual quiet departure. Life at the kitchen table was captured on camera through all the ages, from tiny glossy black and white photographs of our infancy, to the orange hued instamatic of our youth, to the digital imagery nearing our departure. These thoroughly ordinary moments were to become extraordinary, frozen in time on square bits of paper that would become our only record of a life well lived for all.
But that kitchen table, that was the place. It’s where, in 1968, I gazed out the front window while the Meckering earthquake was in full swing and saw the distantly purple hills in the south-east dancing up and down. I hid underneath it. Once bustling with seven or more people, it came down to me and Dad on this one morning, looking out the window at young Mums in active wear pushing their kids along with a Labrador at their heel. Young Dads would follow, one gently guiding his toddler on his tiny bike with trainer wheels. A BMW X5 wagon would slow and pull into a neighbouring driveway, probably that of the one-time Preedy’s home. Then a KIA Carnival would arrive and do the same thing someplace nearby.
It hit me. These people were the new versions of us. Mum and Dad blazed the trail in Melville, at first not even realising a street would be carved into the earth directly opposite our home. It took just another two generations to look askance at these crumbling 1950’s homes, realise they could build something better and, piece by piece, rebuild the street into their own image.
My observation broke our gentle 5 minute silence. Dad quietly nodded.
And so it continues. 50 Coleman Crescent, high on the hill and with a story to store, but never tell, about a single family, has been demolished. I knew it would be. It was obvious its new owners were just biding their time. I went there, trod the earth, mapped out where all the rooms were, and even scoured the earth looking for a memento, but found none. I was secretly hoping to find the remnants of a long-lost Matchbox car in the churned earth around the perimeter.
I’ve parked my Peugeots on the driveway 40 years apart, but this week really was for the last time. I’m excited for the new owners. Whatever is built here to replace our home will be magnificent.
