Diary – Love at Cumbersome Corner – The Children – Pt 5

By Bruce Williams

There’s not a single decent children’s park in Cumbersome. Not one.

There’s just not enough room, with all those grownups and all of them in love. Street after street and block after block, all in love, in their rows of Victorian terraces and California bungalows ‘ cheek by jowl by jowl by jowl by cheek by jowl. There’s no end to them.

There’s no school in Cumbersome, no playground. The most child-friendly café on Cumbersome Road, has a sign in the window that reads: ‘We have children of our own’.

Across the road at 9 PM, in front of the Indian Diner that is right by the Apollo theatre, Nandita, aged six, rides her Razor two shops down, then back, then two shops up, then back, over the newly-paved terrazzo footpath. Soon her mother calls her inside for samosa and homework beneath the plasma TV playing cricket beamed in live from wherever it is that cricket is live. And soon she puts down her pencils and takes up her Razor, and returns the the newly-paved footpath of Cumbersome Road.

Frank and Michelle lived two streets from each other from age six all the way through high school, then university for her, and one-job-after-another for him. Since their off-white wedding, they’ve been sharing a flat in the street that still separates their family homes, as they save for a place to make absolutely their own.

Theirs was my one and only neighbourhood wedding. Betty and I were invited because we had seen each other at the IGA and the post office over and over for the past five years. First they had seen Betty carrying each of our daughters in her belly, then me carrying them on my shoulders.

When Frank and Michelle had played on their kikuyu footpaths, all those years ago in Cumbersome, there were no dogs-on-leash council ordinances, no clean up after your pooch bi-laws. So they learned to tread carefully.

This paid off in spades at their wedding, where they danced a proper waltz, and then a stirring tango: a neat routine that would have required practice and patience, and love, to master. Michelle was golden. Frank was upright. That wedding was the Cumbersome culmination of all their parents’ hopes and dreams.

Four good parents had raised two good children, grown children, who knew the meaning of love. In their lives together, Michelle’s and Frank’s parents might have let love down, they might have let each other down. But they had not let their children down.

And I can attest to how beautifully golden Michelle and upright Frank danced together on that night beneath the low ceiling of the twin reception room in Concord, west of the footpaths of Cumbersome. Where Nandita now rides her Razor two shops down from the Indian Diner, and Frank and Michelle raise their arms, hands clasped, to let her pass beneath.

That’s the difference between six and twenty-six ‘ in Cumbersome.