The HEA Cafe

I went away for the weekend to Mudgee which is a wine growing region in the Central West of New South Wales. There was a big rock concert on called A Day on the Green with some of the classic Australian rock acts of the past thirty years, like Jimmy Barnes from Cold Chisel, the Black Sorrows, Richard Clapton and the gorgeous Deborah Conway from Do- Rei-Mi. It was hot, flies were everywhere and when the sun went down, it got cold.

The only place that could accommodate several thousand people was a big field at one of the wineries. My friends and I took a picnic, some chairs and bought some wine. It was very pleasant and civilized as rock concerts for baby boomers generally are. I had a great time.

There was a family in front of where my friends and I were sitting and I spent a lot of time watching them. Couldn’t avoid it really. They were only a couple of feet away. He was a bit taller than middle height, solid, maybe of Mediterranean background with a strong hook nose which gave his face terrific character. Dark eyes. Good looking in that vaguely brooding, tough way. Dressed in cut-offs and a T-shirt but looked as though he should be in Armani.

She was a classic ice blonde. Hair in a ponytail, stylish jeans, diamond ear studs. Four kids with them, three boys, one maybe four or five the others a couple of years older. Eldest child a surly girl of about fourteen. Looked like Ice Blonde’s parents were with them too.

Tough Guy and Ice Blonde barely talked to each other. They had blank faces and empty eyes when they did communicate. Their kids were lively and Tough Guy engaged with them when needed. But she said hardly anything. I kept thinking her parents, the grandparents of the kids, kept shooting her looks filled with anxiety.

Why am I telling you all this? It falls in the category of ideas for stories. I had several scenarios worked out by the end of the night. One was the clichéd one – they are a Mafia family and she’s going slowly round the twist with nothing in her life but shopping and childcare even though she wants more; one was a bit more snazzy – he was an undercover agent trying to protect her from a mad ex husband (although that’s been done a lot too); and the last one was that she was a girl friend of convenience he’d picked up for some as yet unknown reason – something to do with the kids.

But the real story I think, was this. Their marriage was stale and about to collapse. Everyone knew it, even the kids, and everyone ignored it. So what then? Does he have an epiphany in the middle of the field and realize he has to save his marriage or see his life go down the toilet? Does she have an epiphany and realize she has to leave or go crazy? Does he go back to his city life then on Monday morning, take out his Armani suit and find himself weeping uncontrollably? Does she walk in on him weeping and silently wrap her arms around him? Do they spend the next few hours on the floor in their walk in closet telling each other all about their fears and failed dreams? Or do they make wild, bone shattering love that doesn’t help and makes her more resolved to leave?

I don’t know. But I’ll file this away and one day come back to that family in the field and ask them what happened.

What do you do with all those fragments of stories and lines of thought that can leap into your mind in a nano second, just after you see a quick sideways glance or a head turned away too quickly?