Miss OddShoes
March 9th 2009 19:14
You might know of ... the Original Sin ...
So my Grade 1 teacher, Miss Oddlum, who was nicknamed Miss OddShoes by Weddy, was a very caring, tender and gentile female, who was eminently fitted out with grace by God to be a teacher of children. And so I fell in love with her maternal instincts. Without knowing it. I thought I was falling in love with her physical appearance. Later on in life I was to fall into the same trap time and time again. It’s just ignorance of the uninformed or ill-formed conscience. It’s why people believe advertising, I guess. They don’t know any better.
Peter Schaffer, in that most memorable and weighty stage play Equus, tapped into the damage that television does on an infantile mind. He also wrote the stage play Amadeus, which was translated admirably into a motion picture. I would highly recommend that everyone read Equus & Amadeus.
So, there I was. Six year old Kevin. Infatuated with 20 plus odd Miss Oddlum. She was everything my mother wasn’t. Caring, self-sacrificial, a worker, balanced, etc.
I wanted so much to give her a present. Without having to tell her how much I appreciated the fact that she accepted me as I was and didn’t judge me for being unkempt, scruffy, morbid, introspective and all those qualities I possessed way before I was supposed to get depressed about the reality of life. I wanted to say to her, ‘Thanks for taking some compassion upon me and treating me as though I was normal, when everyone knows I’m weird as.’ But I couldn’t do that at the time. So I thought I’d give her a present – a clichéd token of my appreciation for something I appreciated fully but couldn’t elucidate fully upon due to my puerile grasp of English at the time.
Even at a very young age, I was conscious of the existence of God and sin and hell and heaven and judgement, and all those religious things people want to brush under the carpet and pretend don’t exist, as though this world is all there is, and there is no afterlife. Money is their God. This life is their heaven. I think that’s why God put hell in the centre of the earth and made it molten in it’s heat intensity. It’s a just punishment for everyone who loves this world more than the next world. They get to spend their eternity in it.
I had a bit of normality as a kid. I got pocket money like other kids. I got lunch money. Money is funny stuff. In Australia, it’s metal and paper (or plastic nowadays). But back when I was a kid it was metal and paper. People place so much value in paper and metal when it’s turned into money, yet pay so little attention to the pebbles and rocks and trees.
So I used to think about what was the best way I could spend this sacrosanct money I was given. I came to the conclusion buying a gift/present for Miss Oddlum was the best thing I could do with it. There was a city about 40 miles away and once a week dad and mum would drive their to buy things that weren’t available in our little home country town. They were both so preoccupied with this shopping trip and their own lives and their own miseries and how they couldn’t resolve the fact that they didn’t love each other, I was free to wander around, as long as I was back at the car at the due departure time.
So wander I did. Like a biblical sheep wandering far from the flock waiting for the Good Shepherd Jesus to pick me up and carry me back home and tell stories about how one lost sheep is of more value than 99 safe sheep.
There was this glitzy, glamour gift shop in the city. In retrospect I realise it was a bogan trash shop, something like a forerunner to Cheap As Chips or The Reject Shop, but at the time, it was a paradise and glut of eye candy to a young boy. It wasn’t a hard decision. The gift shop was the place I would buy Miss Oddlum a gift.
So off I went. Up and down the aisles looking at all the glitzy trash, clutter, rubbish items that old women buy in their desperation and fit their houses out with. As though they are in the armed services and using their houses as a training ground or obstacle course. But there I was, thinking they were all wonderful, as though I was a six year old with dementia and Alzheimer’s, bereft of a walking stick, or granny trolley. A boy much more advanced in years interiorly than the exterior would suggest. A genius child. An unrecognised one at that. (Intone the trumpets and play the violin. Screech!). Then, there it was. A jack-in-the-box apple with a rice-paper expandable snake inside. How Original sinnish. Michael Hutchence should have bought it and whacked off into it, instead of topping himself in a Sydney hotel using the door knob as a mastubatory aid. But isn’t the world and media wonderful. Accidental death. Sicko death more like it. He had everything the world can offer a man. Fame and fortune. And still he felt as empty as a snake skin without the snake inside it. God will not be mocked. If you live a life of luxury, He will come along at a time you know not and just whip that life right out from under your feet. So watch and pray, because you know not the hour nor the time of your own death. Imagine dying during an important Blog Post. Then realising it wasn’t anywhere near as important as saving your soul.
Signed Kevin.
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