SOMETIMES life really gets you down. It seems to have been a month of exclusively wet Mondays, with hardly a glimmer of mirth to brighten the gloom.
So when a 21st birthday party invitation rolled around I took a while to make up my mind to go. But it sounded as if it might be quite bright, really.
It was island style, and the dress for guests was either a tiare or a lei … those bands of flowers around the head or draped around the neck.
What actually decided me was that I had bought a tiare at one of Suva’s super open air markets and to this point had nowhere to wear it.
They are usually made of fresh flowers and are incredibly beautiful, not to mention environmentally appropriate, but are a one wear only item.
Mine was one of those made for keeping and was all plastic flowers, also very beautiful even if scoffed at by the purists.
Those purists usually have someone at home to make them fresh. It’s all I can do to produce a wilted frangipani salusalu for kindergarten concerts.
Anyway, I picked a matching muumuu and decided to party.
What had slipped my mind until I was getting dressed up was that when I bought the tiare, I had worn it home on my hat, as a hat band.
So when I put it on my little wee head to go out, it slipped over my ears and came to rest on my nose. Not a good look.
I’m telling you, I tried everything to make that headband small enough. But no matter what, from a sort of net across the middle to a scarf tied around the cranium, that thing would not stop lurching from one ear to the other, across my eyes or down the back of my neck.
The suggestion that I should just give in and wear the hat with the tiare as the band I rejected outright.
It isn’t a nice island woman’s hat, all white and woven. It is a serious working hat. In fact it is what we call a drover’s dog’s hat made of leather, engineered to withstand the rigours of the Australian outback.
I love that hat, even in tropical Fiji I wear that hat, even though some careless person spilled paint on part of the brim and sometimes it grows a bit of green mould.
But it is not a hat to wear to a party, especially if I would be the only person wearing one. Then the pre-schooler came up with her solution — and her tiare, made for a mini-head. It wasn’t quite as flash as mine, but it did clasp my noble brow with suitable firmness.
It has floppy blue flowers that seemed to be in a stage of moulting, but it was given a “pass” approval rating by the household. All I had to do was now change my muumuu to a bluish shade kaftan and I was ready to roll.
Turned out to be a good decision. Nothing like a dose of youth to ginger up life, even though many people in my age bracket view them with a not entirely unfounded suspicion bordering on despair.
When I look around the chaos left by the four-year-old Tufaan Taylor, the Hurricane of Flagstaff, and her two-year-old brother whose personality is based on BamBam, the brutal Flinstone baby, I am tempted to give up on the human race.
No matter how tunefully I sing the kindy picking-up song as I set a good example by crawling under the couch to get the blue ball and the yellow digger and crouch under the table to reach the teeny tiny plastic blocks and Supergirl’s plastic boots, they rarely help.
The most they do is kick the odd fluffy wombat or wooden train track towards me.
But I live in hope, bolstered by a number of youthful acquaintances who seem like the right material to whom to turn over our world. Like those at the birthday party.
Those I know best are intelligent and hardworking, deeply loyal to their large families, kind to the elderly, pleasant to chat with and dance like a dream.
Some of them also sing and play musical instruments and well as write terribly clever papers about things.
I wish they would hurry up and enter politics, at which point the same old same old should stand aside. Next election, perhaps?
* The writer is a regular contributor to this column. Views expressed are hers and not of this newspaper.
