For Christmas, at Michael’s request, I made sausage Jambalaya. It’s not a dish I cook much anymore, given concerns about fat and sodium content. Last night, just as I was stirring it before serving, I realized I’d left out the Thyme. That was an accident, but I also deliberately cut the amount of salt in half. (Why even add salt when you’re cooking with ham and sausage?)
Michael didn’t seem to mind, and it turns out I actually like it better this way. It’s creamier and got a nice sweetness offsetting the heat.
Also, I made a chocolate apricot cake. And a pot of Smoking Bishop. Lovely celebration.
After Midnight Mass, there was the usual confusion of departure as carriages edged past each other, drivers holding up their whips in salute. Their carriage, unlike the others, turned down dark, silent Drum Street, and Amadeo rested his head against the backrest, looking towards the bay and at the stars.
They were passing the closed stalls of the market when Corl said, “Look sir,” and pointed towards the blackness of Sanctuary Bay. “The Little King is coming.”
Teach had mentioned this to him. Every Christmas, in the dark hours of the morning, the Out Easters brought the Holy Infant into Saint Nicholas.
Amadeo had thought Pinny still asleep, but she sat up in his lap. “Oh! Papa, can we see?”
“Cher, it is late, and your mother is tired. If we wait too long, Papa Noel will find your little sister sleeping alone and leave only one stocking behind.”
A distant “pop,” and what looked like a sputtering star rose and fell over the rooftops of the market. Someone was firing Roman Candles on the beach.
“But I am not tired, Husband” Hortense said. “And I am sure Papa Noel will understand.”
“Turn around,” Amadeo told Corl. “Let us off at the Long Steps.”
“Aye, sir. You won’t regret it.”
Usually, when Amadeo thought of the Long Steps that led down to Sanctuary Strand, he pictured the summer day they had landed. He saw Dr. Teach with his ledger in yellow sunlight and heat. The steps had led down to the blazing expanse of sand where people moved about and shouted at each other. Wheels had creaked and weary horses huffed as they climbed the hill road, their flanks smelling of wet horsehair and dust.
This was not the same world.
They paused, Amadeo, Hortense, and Pinny in between them, at the top of the stairway. Someone had set out torches every few yards alongside the stairs. The stone steps, harsh and gritty in daytime, looked golden, and led down to a pool of darkness as profound as the waters of the bay. Across that black a small cluster of lights flickered on the beach near the shore. The moon was in its last quarter, and the waves glowed in white curves as they crested.
Hortense bent. “Look,” she said to Pinny. “It is like the Arabian Nights.”
San Francisco has its wooden bay windowed and finialed apartment houses, Los Angeles has its tiny-eyed, tile roofed stucco bungalows, and Chicago has its red brick workman’s cottages. Sydney’s residential streets are lined with small terraced houses, square, two storied and compact, often built shoulder to shoulder. Each has a second floor balcony with intricately decorated wrought iron rails that, combined with slightly peeling pale stucco, untrimmed trees and vines and tiny but overgrown front gardens, give the neighborhoods an air of romantic mystery similar to the New Orleans French Quarter. Terraced houses are apparently so common they’re considered banal by Australians, but to my foreign eyes they were pretty and exotic.
Another feature of Sydney we noticed on that first day’s walk are the rocks. Not the neighborhood called The Rocks, but massive, enormous rocks that seem to manifest themselves suddenly in the landscape. The slope next to you, when looked at carefully, turns out to be not earth, but solid stone, ridged and reddish and plainly the source of the older buildings. We walked through one of these urban boulders. A pedestrian tunnel had been drilled through it, and we passed through a mossy, damp cave. Midway through was a barely legible plaque honoring a past Sydney mayor.
The Australian accent we most frequently heard sounded to me like a sans serifed English accent, terse, jaunty, typically ending in a slight rise as though it were a question (some American southern accents do the same thing.) Double tees are sometimes substituted with glottal stops. “Forgo ^ en.” A few Australians sounded American until they hit a flat drawn out “aaaay.” “I went down to the gardens t’ daaaay.”
We spotted no koalas, no kangaroos, and no thick-legged men in khaki shorts and corked hats. We met nobody named Bruce. Nobody said “crikey.”
We did see lots of sunburn, joggers, and tousled blonde hair, and heard a lot of “g’daays,” and “mates.” If we so much as paused to look at our map, somebody would stop to help us, including, that evening, a trio of young people who emerged from one of the terraced houses in Darlinghurst and stopped to help the four middle-aged, obviously lost Americans standing nearby on the pavement. They were plainly on their way to a party. One girl was dressed as little orphan Annie, the other as an American Indian. The broad-shouldered, shaven headed young man with them who wasn’t in costume whipped out his Iphone and located our recommended restaurant for us. It had been closed for the past two years, but he did try.
The Sydney residents we met had the easygoing good nature of people who love their city and enjoy sharing it.
I have been online long enough to remember terms like “flaming,” “cyberstalking,” and “douced,” pre-GIF ripostes like “ROFL,” and “Bingo!” and the ritual invocation of Godwin’s Law. I can even remember when “troll” referred, not simply to someone who disagreed with you, but to someone online pretending to be something they were not. Most frequently these classic “trolls” were male posters to USENET or Compuserve forums pretending to be women and revealing their sex with posts on women’s issues forums like “I’ve had my breasts grabbed in the bar where I work, and I don’t mind. Consider it a compliment, in fact.”
In 2023, this classic trollishness crops up frequently as non-readers of books pretending to be readers of books. A favorite canned internet response these days , is “educate yourself”, (which has replaced 2012-16’s “read some history,” invariably invoked by people who don’t.) Any request for book titles or authors in the aid of this self-education will usually get only a vague gesture and either “Google it” or “Google is free.”
When someone online responds to the question “what have you read recently on this subject” with “Oh, lots and LOTS!” with no titles or authors offered, you can generally bet the last book they cracked was assigned in school. The same goes for someone who replies to “what’s your favorite book” with “Oh, too many to say!” They don’t get that actual readers are eager to share the names of their favorite authors, cherished titles, to talk about them, quote them, etc.
Perhaps as the result of readers now storing their volumes out of sight on a device rather than bookshelves, people who don’t read books for pleasure no longer have any idea how many books people who enjoy reading actually read.
Intepreting “what’s your favorite book” as a request to list every book you’ve ever read and liked is a dead giveaway.
Pam Troy 