Trendy But Casual

Kashin

Kashin

Sad news from home today: Kashin the elephant died at Auckland Zoo yesterday. I know it’s ridiculous that I’m moved to public lament when this blog fails to commemorate the deaths of Bergman, Pinter, Antonioni et al, but I guess I’m sentimental. (And not alone.)

Kashin was one of only three elephants in New Zealand. There’s another Indian elephant, called Burma, at Auckland Zoo, and an African elephant down in Nelson, in a circus. My sister remembers Jamuna, who used to give rides at the zoo: Jamuna arrived in 1923 and died in 1965. My sister probably also remembers the chimpanzees who held tea parties: this was stopped before I was born. All I remember is the Punch and Judy shows, which involved no inconvenience to animals, apart from persistent cruelty to the puppet crocodile.

The funds for Kashin were raised by the ASB, which in those days stood for the Auckland Savings Bank. It now calls itself the ASB Bank, which seems ridiculous to me, but presumably makes sense to its new Australian owners. Kashin arrived at Auckland Zoo when she was four and I was seven, in December, 1972. A public competition came up with the elephant’s name, though it has a Hindi meaning as well, allegedly unrelated to money. My brother and I were very excited about the arrival of a baby elephant, though he would no doubt deny this now. (He has a very non-elephant-like memory.) Like almost every other child of our generation, we got plastic Kashin-the-elephant piggy banks from the ASB. We had several of them, as I recall. I’m sure that one, at least, is stashed away in my storage unit in Albany, along with all the other jumble of my childhood.

When we were children, the best thing to see in the Auckland Museum was the gigantic stuffed form of Rajah, a male elephant who lived at the zoo in the 30s until he became too violent and unruly and had to be put to death. (It was seen as the humane thing at the time, apparently, because the alternative was spending his life chained up.)  Australians are also implicated here: before he arrived in Auckland, Rajah was being terrorized by the public in Hobart, and this is now blamed for his anger-management issues. I think he’s still on display at the Museum, though the latest generation of curators despise him, no doubt, as a relic from a less enlightened age, and see the exhibit as capitulation to trashy public taste.

Today the Auckland zoo is all environments rather than enclosures; the old elephant house is rented out for parties and wedding receptions. It backs onto Old Mill Road, just where the road takes a steep climb. When we were children, we used to beg my father to drive this way at night – when we were going back and forth to my grandparents’ place in Ponsonby – so we could see the elephants. Just a glimpse of those massive dark backs, like upturned hulls, safe in their pens for the night.

The Auckland Zoo is closed today: they’re in mourning for Kashin. Here in New Orleans, it’s late afternoon, which means the McMain band is outside wailing and braying and trumpeting in the school yard, and our new next-door neighbor is practicing scales on her French horn. The sound of elephants, perhaps, but not quite the same thing.

 

Writing at Night

Mornings here at the Sargeson flat are the same every day – rain clattering onto the skylight, birds chattering, the hiss of buses along Princes Street. I turn on the heaters and the kettle and the computer. There are various high-maintenance procedures involving the loathed tooth splint, over which I will draw a pocked acrylic veil. Most of the time I'm not sure what day of the week it is.

And then the attempts at procrastination begin. At present this involves anything from "internet research" to calling to change seat assignments on upcoming flights to developing sudden interests in obscure Olympic sports. Though this one only works after lunch, when the TV coverage begins. (By the way, Bob Hillman, maybe I would stop criticizing the inclusion of beach volleyball if a) the competitors were not wearing swimsuits, though no swimming appears to be involved; and b) if songs by Gwen Stefani and Joan Jett were not blasted out at the venue during games in order to "get the crowd in the mood.")

Despite these efforts to muck about, I'm still managing to get a lot of work done. Right now I'm in the last month of reading for the anthology I'm editing, and making really good progress with my YA novel, which is due to Scholastic next week. Next week! On my birthday, actually. My editor at Scholastic does not realize that my birthday is traditionally devoted to lavish and expensive beautification rituals, followed by a slap-up dinner: this year we're going to August. I'll be back in New Orleans briefly, to watch five episodes of the new season of Project Runway, move offices (to the good side of the building, overlooking oak trees and lawns rather than the service road and air conditioning unit), interfere with various start-of-semester events, give Dinaw Mengestu, our visiting writer, my combo literary/disaster tour of the city, and coax T. Middy off the precipice.

Here I feel I’m reverting to my student self. The one that lived in the little room above the kitchen at Eden’s Cottage, York, early in 1986. Snow outside around the apple tree, dormer windows cracked open to let in fresh air because I wasn’t used to central heating yet. My contributions to furnishings: a small, dark bedside table I bought at a school fair, and stacks of library books on the floor. The red boom box I bought when I first arrived in York, softly playing – Red Rose Radio, a Pennines station, I think. I’d work into the quiet of the night, long after everyone else in the house was asleep. 

There wasn’t much traffic along Heslington Lane at night after the pubs were shut; campus and its creatures lay on the other side of the road, the colleges all facing the lake. I only spent one term in that room: that summer, I moved downstairs into the big room with the old black range and timbered ceilings and the latch door, and lived there for the next two years. The downstairs room was a great party room, and my friend Julia and I stuffed it full of rubbish, including two creaky red arm chairs bought at another school fair; we had to carry them along Heslington Lane, stopping numerous times on the narrow pavement to sit down in them and catch our breath, like spectators waiting for a parade.

But it was that first winter – when I escaped my dreary breeze-block room at Goodricke College and moved into Eden’s Cottage – that I started to feel at home in York, and in England, and started to get some serious work done at last.

Now I'm writing something quite different from an essay on Edith Wharton, say, but I still enjoy the quiet of night work. With all the rain, noise in the park has been more sporadic the last week or so. The time markers I can see from my window here in Auckland – sun and shadows, birds, council workers forking up rubbish, language students taking their breaks, teachers arriving and leaving for the day, buses dropping off Japanese school girls and their giant suitcases, cars parking and leaving – disappear. There's just me and the rain and the whirr of the heater. I didn't know that I still liked to work this way. I didn't realize, I guess, that nothing really changes.