Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Once upon a time, Fred was an earth loving, dreadlocked hippie.
He wore jeans with tears and frays, jandals and T shirts worn back to front.
For breakfast he took eight weetbix, smothered them with condensed milk and spoonfuls of tinned Ardmona sliced peaches. The milk curdled with the peach syrup and this reaction he particularly liked.
Everyday, he’d sit on his piece of sawn off salmon gum, and clean his bowl while he thought tree wizard thoughts, ever hopeful that he’d have a gumnut moment. He was desperate for a project.
One day, three weetbix in, with the sea glinting diamond sparkles, he was doing his sitting thing at which he was very expert. Just sitting, looking up to the pale moon in the new day before it turned it’s man face away, letting random thoughts pass from his right brain to his left brain.
Because of that, he’d sit and sit some more, leaves sometimes swirling downwards. He liked how they twisted and turned in perfect synchronisation. He needed this project brainchill to hit him fast.
His store of tinned peaches was getting low, his jeans hanging together by threads, His jandals were rubber thin and he was becoming a bore to himself.
Being a hippie was tiring and he’d meditated out his heart and head.
His Krishna Das song list was overdone and he needed a big hit of doof doof music to bump up the beat of his roughly sketched lyrics to songlines he wrote down – when he could be bothered.
And because of that, he was woken from his interminable monotony of being by a piercing stab of pain on his left ankle. He was alarmed!
He looked around him, a big black ant wondered off into the sands of time. No worries, he’d live.
He looked at the trees in which he’d built his tree house and noticed the long flexing tree roots which were hanging in the air. He thought back to his Grade four and five years, when he kinda could focus on school and find excitement in the routine.
The days when he’d tumble on to the red gym mat in PE class with the student PE teacher who was really into kids doing their thing and who didn’t get hung up on the what if’s and the fear of breaking bones.
He’d flip somersaults and flip handstands one after the other and scurry up ropes and turn himself upside down when he was half way up to the ceiling.
The other kids loved it and would give him high fives and feed his daring to be different.
He was happy and having a blast. The student teacher left and PE became a boring set of catching and throwing the ball and running around the footy pitch. He lost interest in school then and took himself into his imagination.
He dreamed of rocket ships and astral travel. He wrote a few poems and songs he might sing when he was a rock n roll singer when he grew up. He was drifting further away from the mainstream.
Fred was a pretty practical hippie. He could tie knots, build tree huts and had a great way with people. He hadn’t met the mermaid to match his merman passions – yet.
Until finally, Fred saw those hanging tree roots, and suddenly the gumnut moment came to him.
He emptied the Weetbix box, tore it inside out and grabbed the pencil from the empty wooden wine box bookshelf.
He drew pictures of how he could make the tree roots into aerial trapezes and the amazing sculpted outfit he’d design to catch the punters’ attention as he flipped in the air and climbed the tree ropes.
He’d call his mate from school who he’d heard was making outlandish costumes for burlesque performers hitting the straps across the American theatre landscapes. In Melbourne, his mate was providing new scripts to Melbourne ladies in need of something shocking to talk about around the bridge tables.
He liked how he was thinking. Tree wizardry was taking on whole new meanings.
Enthused, and knowing neither fear, nor boundaries, he jumped up and down on the spot for three minutes, ran along the shoreline for ten minutes, threw himself on to the forest floor and managed ten push ups.
He was pumped. Yes, he had his project. He was gunna create his own hippie tree circus act. He had it mapped out.
And he’d write moonstruck songs, find a drummer who could keep a beat and still have the headspace to check out the girls in the audience. Cos that what drummers do. He’d find his mermaid.
He had it mapped out. Yes, he could do this. And from that gumnut moment, Fred started to live happily ever after.
Lindi Forde