In the old days it wouldn’t have been like this. Back then all I had to do was book a ticket to Europe and turn up at the airport. I used to book with a travel agent, too, usually the English company ‘Trailfinders’, sitting down with someone trained to the job who would help me find the best deal and be extremely pleasant and upbeat about it. Nowadays, by contrast, I not only booked my flights online, using some anonymous entity which, for all I knew, might not even exist and could easily vanish with my hard-earned money. There were also all these tricky arrangements to make, including, the trickiest of all, working out what to do with my mother.
As some readers will know, Mum suffers from Alzheimer’s and I’m her carer. She’s the main reason I left Greece a couple of years back. It’s because of her I live in a place I don’t particularly like and in a manner which is uncomfortably foreign to me. I don’t regret what I’ve done; when something like this happens, none of the options are good, and I simply chose to do what felt right and natural under the circumstances. Yet even allowing for that, since returning to Oz I can’t deny that I’ve struggled at times, lacking motivation and direction, and finding it difficult to locate the bright side of the road; at the same time I’ve dreamed constantly of escape, preferably as far away as possible and to a place that I know and love. After all this time, almost twenty months, I believed that a month or so’s leave to enable me to return to Greece was not too much to ask for. Fortunately my sister Karen, who lives and works in Sydney and handles the technical side of things, happily agreed. She promised to do everything she could to expedite my journey.
Mum is eligible for respite care, nine weeks of it each year, so theoretically putting her into a home wouldn’t be difficult. The problem my sister and I faced, rather, was finding a place that Mum would find comfortable and in which we might feel reasonably confident that she’d be happy. Mum’s mind is rarely, if ever, where it should be these days, but she remains a relatively vital and active eighty-three year old who dreads, above all else, routine and boredom. Neither Karen nor I would feel comfortable leaving her in a place where we thought she might end up sitting staring at a wall all day. Maybe these days, in any case, those places no longer exist. Even so, we wanted the best and most stimulating alternative that we could find and had agreed beforehand that, if Mum didn’t like a place, we wouldn’t force her to stay there. This agreement put my prospective trip on shaky ground. Would I or wouldn’t I make it to Greece? It was a difficult situation and yet, under the circumstances, there wasn’t much choice. The way things stood these days, my wagon was hitched firmly to Mum’s.
To get the ball rolling, Karen sought out a couple of rest homes in Sydney. The plan was that I would take Mum to Sydney in August and together the three of us would go and check them out. Karen organised appointments with the people who ran these places, two on the same day, one for the morning, the other for the afternoon. The trip would culminate in my sister taking Mum on a four-day cruise, leaving from Brisbane, devoted to food and wine. While they were away, I would stay in Karen’s house and look after her cat. And hopefully during that time I would be able to book a flight to Greece.
In the event our plans went astray when Mum contracted pneumonia and had to be hospitalised for a week. My spirits sank. Time was passing with characteristic alacrity and, as one day of hospital routine followed another, my chances of getting away seemed to diminish accordingly. Yet, as so often happens, the situation wasn’t as bleak as it had seemed at first. Once out of hospital, Mum recovered her strength, if not her equilibrium, with inordinate speed. When Karen was subsequently able to reschedule the appointments at the two rest homes, it simply became a matter of moving our Sydney trip back by two weeks. Mum would miss her cruise, which was unfortunate, but by way of compensation Karen would fly her to Noosa Heads, an upmarket resort town north of the border, where it was hoped the warmer temperatures would complete her recovery. Suddenly, everything was moving again in a favourable direction and I thanked my stars. For some reason, it felt like I’d had a reprieve.
I must admit that I harboured some reservations about leaving Mum in care. Something about it didn’t seem right. I guess that, deep down, I was just afraid that she wouldn’t be happy. Our first glimpse at the Kamilaroi rest home was, therefore, less than encouraging. In the sunlit and otherwise pleasant-looking foyer sat a pair of elderly women in walkers, their chins on their chests, fast asleep. I looked at Karen and shrugged my shoulders. We had actually pinned our hopes on Lucinda Cottage, the next establishment we were due to visit; Kamilaroi had been chosen as a wild card, the control in the experiment even, and because it was close to where Karen lived. Mum, however, didn’t seem to notice the sleepers, or if she did, was unperturbed by the sight, and remained happily upbeat as the young Irish manager gave us a tour of the place. We viewed the rooms, and caught a game of bingo in progress, while in one of the back rooms some impromptu dancing was underway. Everything looked clean and neat and well looked after. The staff that we met seemed open and friendly.
A lunch break followed and then in the afternoon we drove out to leafy Wahroonga and visited the second home that Karen had lined up. It was called Lucinda Cottage and it occupied a lovely, hundred-year-old bungalow that featured vast rooms with polished wooden floors, individual fireplaces and high, elegantly moulded ceilings. Equipped with a tennis court and swimming pool, and set among a lush and well, but not overly cared-for garden, Lucinda only took five guests at a time and looked more like a holiday retreat than a rest home. We were treated by the director to afternoon tea in the parlour, adjacent to the billiards room. Conversation came easily and Mum distinguished herself by clearing the biscuit plate and telling the director that she’d had coffee with George Clooney only the previous week. She was impressed, if not awed, by the surroundings, and was astonished to learn that she was booked in to stay. ‘Oh, but do you think they’ll have me?’ she asked, looking around at the shelves of books, the paintings on the walls, and the Chinese vase on the mantelpiece.
The fact that Mum liked both options was more than either Karen and I had expected. For me, in particular, it was good news, meaning that instead of four weeks in Greece, I would now have six. Once, of course, I would have scoffed at such a restriction on my time; my previous journeys had been nothing if not lengthy. But now circumstances had changed, and my options for travel were limited. I won’t pretend that I was comfortable with how things were; I wasn’t and knew I never would be, but for the time being at least, the gates to my prison were open. Freedom yawned ahead of me and I spent some delightful hours that night, a glass of wine in hand, plotting elaborate journeys on a map in my head.
When the Wine is Bitter 