… how I don’t want this to be a memory thing . rather a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing . to feel the Pemberton breeze blowing through the dusk bush, to taste that sumptuous brown trout you just caught . trout, tout, face-about, snout, roast pig . and how I shouldn’t say that in these vegan times, roast pig I mean . and how that trout thing was when my child was just born, that was back then, and how, today, I was at my childhood friend’s funeral and listened to his grown children’s eulogies . how he was only two years older than me and how his wife of forty two years died two years ago and their kid’s kids will not know grandparents . paring, faring, staring into the gathered crowd of mourners . talking about the things we first-gen Australian-Austrians did as kids and how that really was a remembering thing . and how we all seemed to have lost track of each other over the years . and how sad it is to think that was over how-many years ago I had last seen them only to watch now as they slide the coffin into that weird ante-room where they will ‘take care of you’, like in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One . but how not so novel it all is out here, outside the purifying fires of the crematorium . and us kids, the things we got up to and how, brown cow, dig that plough, it’s all water under the bridge now