I might, at some stage, post bits of this new writing which I find hard to describe, for I have no real idea where it is leading me. I have so enjoyed writing this Rocky and Gawenda thing. So has Rocky I think. And there’s the book of course, Rocky and Gawenda: the story of a man and his mutt which is in all good bookshops. It is a lovely looking book. The photographs are gorgeous and the writing, well I hope the writing touches some people. It touched me, especially the chapters written by my children Chasky and Evie.

That’s it then. Rocky sends his love. So do I.

Another sunrise beckons.

Postscript: My son’s band Husky is recording a new album and a single from it, Dark Sea, will be formally released on Saturday 28 November at  8.00pm  at The Astor Theatre on Chapel Street in Prahran. It should be a great gig. Dark Sea has been played on Triple J and received rave reviews.

Tickets are cheaper on presale – Astor box office – 9510 1414.

In the shallows,  there were three young men holding what looked like a large white sheet or towel which they wrapped around the shoulders of two other young men, one at a time, and submerged them for several seconds in the still bay water. On the shore, the singing and swaying became more pronounced, the bright blue and red and green robed women flowing and joyous, as each of the young men emerged from the water. They looked triumphant and modest at the same time, these young men, stripped to the waist in the sunshine and the gentle, windless water. Behind the adults, the children ran backwards and forwards across the sand chasing each other and Rocky of course joined them and the children welcomed him with squeals of delight.

I am not a Christian and I know little about baptism except that it is a metaphor for being born. Again.   I wondered what it meant to them, beyond its religious significance, to be re-born on the beach in St Kilda, in Melbourne. I wondered about their journey, these people from Africa, singing and dancing, the children exuberant and fun-filled and I saw the space, the physical space for them here on St Kilda beach , and I thought this space, in the scheme of things, is God’s own space, even if there is no god. I feared, as I stood there on this lovely spring morning, that once again we will soon be in the grip of  Stranger madness and that Kevin Rudd will soon once again call people smugglers the most evil people in the world and that soon children running backwards and forwards on the beach with Rocky in pursuit and adults swaying and singing and young men being baptised on a sun-warmed morning will be proof that our space, the space we think we own and can do with what we wish—`We will decide who comes here,’ as John Howard once said- is being taken from us.

These fears were fleeting, for the morning was gorgeous and the re-birthing was joyful and the beach–the sand and the rocky outcrops and the shoreline dotted with dead jellyfish and the hovering and frantic seagulls– seemed to me to be a gift rather than a birthright. But fleeting though they were these fears, they darkened the morning which had started out sombre anyway. Part of the night had been spent in contemplation of journeys ended. This contemplation had taken me into the backyard. The night was cool and still and Rocky joined me there,  impatient to get going, to the beach, though his face was sleep-filled, his beard crushed against his face.

Jacob Diner died in a Melbourne nursing home a week ago. I didn’t know he had died until after his funeral. Jews bury the dead as quickly as possible, even Jews like Jacob Diner,  a secular Jew who for most of his life, never entered a synagogue and never joined in prayers to a God he knew did not exist and who really, though he never said as much to me, held all religion in contempt. He was over 90 when he died and his life spanned much of the 20th century and he was  both wounded and inspired by that century’s great  and bloody madnesses.

A half a century ago, Jacob Diner, having been dismissed from his post as a  senior official in Poland’s economic planning ministry during one of the periodic purges of the Polish Communist Party and Government of  Jewish  traitors who had, in one way or another, betrayed the Polish working classes and the revolution, arrived in Melbourne with his wife and children. He was still a  Marxist and a believer in the salvation in Communism when he arrived–how then, I wonder, was he accepted as a refugee at the height of  the Menzies era?- because, I imagine, despite the fact that he had been cast out by his Polish Party comrades, and accused of abominable political crimes,  still fresh in his mind and in his heart was the horror that had been brought upon him and his family and his country by Nazism and Fascism.

I first met him not long after he had arrived in Melbourne. He was a short bald man with an owl-like face who wore a light brown gabardine overcoat–did all Communist Party apparachicks of that era wear brown gabardine overcoats? — which he took off  at the start of his teaching duties, in the attic  room of the large and rambling Ewardian house in Elsternwick which was the home of the Sholem Aleichem Yiddish Sunday School.

Lerer Diner we called him–literally translated it means Teacher Diner– we children of an earlier influx of refugees–earlier by no more than a decade or so– who considered Lerer Diner’s children, who spoke English with a thick and funny Polish accent,  to be rather backward in all sorts of ways– they spoke English with a thick and funny Polish accent, they could not play cricket and they followed no football team and could hardly kick a football.  There were quite a number of reffo kids like this at Sholem Aleichem Sunday School, children, like Lerer Diner’s children,  children of  Communist true believers who had been cast out of the Party and from their government posts in that late 50s early 60s wave of Polish Communist Party Anti–Semitism, though in most cases, these Jews, like Jacob Diner–and unlike Bundists like my father who were commited socialists but also committed to the concept of Jewish peoplehood and Jewish culture, especially Yiddish culture– had cast off everything that would have marked their Jewishness–religion, ethnic solidarity, cultural ties, the lot.

Jacob Diner was a softly spoken  rather downcast looking man who at first, taught at the Sholem Aleichem Sunday School because, I assume, he needed the money. He taught Jewish history and Yiddish literature and a subject called simply Ethics which now, a half century or so later, I cannot for the life of me recall what  it was about, though given this was a secular school,  I think it had something to do with Jewish secular values whatever that may have meant at the time.

Softly spoken, serious, sad-eyed, his bald dome an alarming shade of red, scarred by his experience of Nazism and then the fierce and brutal  rejection by his beloved Communist Party and his country,  I grew over time to love Lerer Diner and over time, to my great surprise, I came to look forward to his Sunday morning classes in Ethics, Jewish History and Yiddsh literature.

I loved his gentleness I suppose and I loved his passion for books and ideas and history and meaning, but mostly, I think I loved that he loved me, in the way that all great teachers love their pupils–for their youth and their eagerness and their potential. My father was wary of Lerer Diner, for my father was an anti-Communist by then, a socialist and a Bundist and a secularist, yes, but a man who despised Communism, and he worried that my enthusiasm for what he saw as  Lerer Diner’s Marxist interpretation of Jewish history and in particular, his Marxist  view of Yiddish literature would lead me to bad places.

I do not know whether Lerer Diner took me to bad places, but I doubt it. I think that over time, he grew disillusioned with Marxism and certainly with Communism. I know that he joined the Bund and the Labor Party. I know that he loved Yiddish literature and that he taught me to love books and writing. I know that he taught history by telling stories, great twisting and turning narratives that ended up in the most thrilling places. He loved me, Lerer Diner did. I wrote Yiddish poetry for him about the books he read to us and when he liked one of my poems, his eyes would fill with tears and his red bald dome would glisten and it was as if I had somehow saved him from despair. Here, in translation, is a fragment of a poem I wrote about a book by Sholem Ash which was about the Cossack pogroms in the Ukraine in the 17th century:

I arise from my grave

And hear the  murderous Cossack riders

Move across the once green now blood red fields

Through shtetls and towns they ride, the murderers

And a song is hammered out by the  galloping horses

A song of death for my brothers and sisters.

Lerer Diner had tears in his eyes when he read the poem (it’s not bad in Yiddish) and he whispered to me that if I wanted it, I could one day be a real poet and writer.

We stayed in touch more or less after I finished Sunday School. I saw him at Bund meetings and later, we lived close to each other, he alone in a small flat, his wife having suffered a catastrophic illness which meant she had to be moved to a nursing home,  and me, with my wife and children in a nearby street. He never visited us. I think that once or twice, my children and I went to see him. From time to time, he would write me notes about an article I had written. The notes more or less suggested that there was still hope for me, that one day, I could still be a great writer.

And so it was that we set out on that sunny spring day, Rocky and I, for the beach,  Rocky concerned, I thought, at my quiet and sombre demeanor, anxious for it to pass so that I could join him in his love of the morning. I was in the time of Lerer Diner’s death, when we came to witness the baptisms on St Kilda beach. It was the baptisms and the singing and swaying and children playing and Rocky chasing the children up and down the sand that I thought led me to think of people smugglers and  asylum seekers and the ownership of this space, this beach.

But perhaps  it was Lerer Diner’s death, the death of  a man who was exiled from his homeland and rejected by his comrades, this man who was my greatest and most loved teacher, that made me fearful, for just a little while, as I watched the re-births in the shallows of the still bay waters, that those who come seeking to share with us what only God–if he exists– can give, will be seen, again, by many of us, as Strangers.

Postscript: Rocky and Gawenda The story of a man and his mutt is in the bookshops. I think it’s a lovely book. The photographs are wonderful. Even if I do say so myself.

Instead of the beach, we walked to the St Kilda Botanical Gadens. Rocky was jumpy, alert and alarmed by every piece of paper that flew past us in the wind and by the blue plastic flapping sheets that covered the still to be completed renovations of the narrow fronted Edwardian houses on the still -deserted and water-covered streets of our neighborhood. So much renovation. So much change. The old St Kilda and certainly old Elwood, the adjacent suburb, is fast disappearing. A week ago, a rather modest townhouse in our street sold for well over a million dollars.

 The shops along St Kilda Road were all still closed except for a small coffee shop, sad looking, with a solitary young man sitting on a stool by the window. In the window was a large poster urging the Saints on to victory in the Grand Final. The poster was in the red black and white colours of the St Kilda Football Club. Most of the dozen or so shops and restaurants had these posters in their windows and the rain sprayed against the glass and to me, looked like tears. We turned off the main road as soon as we could, for these posters did not fill us with joy. I am of course an Essendon supporter and the Bombers were thrashed in the first week of the finals–as expected I must say– but St Kilda is my home and somewhere in my heart, I discovered on Saturday, there was a place for the Saints.

So we left the rain- sprayed windows and the desolate posters behind and headed for the gardens. It seemd that only Rocky and I had been determined this early morning on the Day of Atonement, the wind biting, dark grey clouds massed in the sky, the rain relentless–relentless rain thank God!–to walk these streets, past the Elwood Synagogue, at dawn, the Synagogue locked behind the high fence, empty now, but not for long, for on this Yom Kippur –like all those past–the pews would soon be full to overflowing for the morning service, the first session, for Yiskor when members of the congregation will acknowledge and pray for –and give thanks to– their dead parents.

I stopped outside the synagogue. Rocky sat quietly looking up at me, as if to suggest that a liver treat might be an appropriate reward for his willingness to indulge my madness, this standing there in the rain and wind outside the synagogue, and so I offered Rocky two liver treats and he devoured them and then he sat quietly, up against my legs, sheltered there as far as possible from the wind and the rain. My sister Rita was married here– her first of three marriages — here in the Elwood Synagogue, 21 years old she was and wild at heart and beautiful– she looked, I thought, like Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Taylor, yes, both of them–and though our mother had by then been dead for six years, I think now, looking back, that Rita was still in mourning and that she remained in mourning for the rest of her life.

After my mother died, on the first Yom Kippur after her death, my two eldest sisters asked that I accompany them to the Synagogue for Yiskor. Though I agreed to do so , I was reluctant, for I had hoped that my mother’s death would liberate me from synagogue attendance –as it had liberated my father from all his religious duties which he had fulfilled only because my mother had insisted he do so– but that morning, when for the first time, I sat inside the synagogue for the Yiskor service while the boys and girls who still had both their parents played outside, I felt then, as I said Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for my mother, that I was no-longer one of those chidren and that I had been let in to a secret about life that those children, playing outside, could never know.

I cannot now recall how many times after that time I went to synagogue on Yom Kippur nor can I now say just what it was, that secret about life that came to me during the Yiskor service, but on this Yom Kippur morning, standing outside the Elwood Synagogue, I quietly recite the first few lines of Kaddish, with Rocky pressed up against my legs, with the wind dying down now a little but still strong and the rain swirling about us.

In the gardens, we walk down the wet, puddled, pebbled path towards the rose garden and Rocky is alive to the potential of every tree and to the rain- covered deep green and closely mowed lawns, pulling me here and there, from tree to tree and over every patch of lawn, head down, nose alive to every sign of life, past and present and then there it is, the sunken rose garden, the rose bushes cut back but now in spring, with new growth starting and buds on every bush and in one section, there’s a patch of rose bushes with flowering yellow roses, Day of Atonement roses, I think to myself and we stay in the gardens, Rocky and I, for what must have been a long time, for as we start to leave, I see that outside the Elwood Synagogue, there are people gathering, adults and children.

I wondered what it was, that secret I learnt that Yom Kippur morning almost 50 years ago and I repeated again those first few lines of the Kaddish–for that’s all I could remember of it- and this time, I did think of my mother and my father  and my eldest sistere Hinda and of Rita, beautiful and in mourning on her wedding day and for a moment, I thought I could remember the secret, but then it slipped away.

We avoided walking past the synagogue on the way home and St Kilda Road as well, with those shops and restaurants that had in their windows those  St Kilda posters. The rain had stopped and the wind had died down and the black clouds had been blown away and the sky was late morning dull blue. Rocky wanted to walk on, down to the beach to search, I suppose, for a tennis ball, but I thought the time for the beach had passed and that tomorrow we could set out early and see the sunrise  on the beach and perhaps tomorrow, some of the birds, the swans and the pelicans in particular that had been there every morning during winter and had gone at the start of spring,  might be back.

Shortly after we arrived home, my son called and  said that on this  Day of Atonement, he wished to ask for my forgiveness for whatever bad things he had done me. He was serious I think. As he spoke, I thought how thankful I was that the secret about life, the one that came to me on a Yom Kippur morning long ago, that secret I could not now remember, not in words anyway, was a secret my son and my daughter, when they were children– and even now for that matter– could not know.

 Postscript: The launch of  our book, Rocky and Gawenda the story of a man and his mutt,  will be held this Saturday at 10.15am   for 1o.30am at Veg Out the St Kilda communal vegetable gardens in Peanut Reserve near Luna Park. Tim Costello will launch the book. There will be liver treats for the dogs who attend–on a leash please– and other refreshments for their human companions.

Rocky and Gawenda the story of a man and his mutt will be in bookshops from Saturday.

 Tim Costello, a former Mayor of St Kilda and now CEO of World Vision and of course one of our great social justice advocates, will launch the book. 

Rocky will be there so please bring your dog(s) if you have one. But please keep them on a leash. There will be liver treats for the dogs and refreshments for the humans. The St Kilda farmers market is on as well, so what a morning is in store for you if you turn up! And both Rocky and I will be more than pleased to sign copies of the book.

There will be another post this week, a longer one, because  Rocky and I are still discussing the merits of getting him a companion and frankly, we are also talking about whether Rocky and Gawenda can continue, given that the writing has taken a surprising turn(see last post).

Yom Kippur starts this evening(Sunday), the most solemn of Jewish religious days, the Day of Atonement. While I have abandoned the faith more or less, Yom Kippur remains a day of reflection for me. And memories. I shall write about this–and more–in my next post.

And I will post details of further events–in Sydney and Melbourne– to mark the launch of our book.

But remember, Rocky and Gawenda: the story of a man and his mutt will be launched next Saturday October 3 at 10.15 for 10.30 at Veg Out, Peanut Reserve, near Luna Park, by Tim Costello. Please come if you feel like it.

Meanwhile, Rocky and Gawenda the book will be launched by Tim Costello on Saturday October 3 at Veg Out at the Peanut Reserve in St Kilda at 10.15 am. Humans and their dogs–on leashes please– most welcome. There are other events coming up for the book and I will post details in the next week or so.

Chaskiel Gawenda was disdainful of small dogs, though he himself was a small man, wiry and thin-legged, round bellied too, but somehow sturdy looking, with tightly curled greying black hair that stood up a good three or four inches from his scalp, his hairline set back as if to emphasise the curve of his large forehead, large foreheads and hair standing up being fashionable and desirable at the time. At the time, in 1946, certainly amongst the Jews in the displaced persons camp -where I was born in February 1947– Albert Einstein was considered to be the world’s smartest Jew.

The DP camp was in Veksheit which the Austrians called Bindermichel, a suburb of Linz. Not far away, perhaps a half a kilometre away, was the double storey red brick house with a flat slate roof and small wooden windows painted dark brown, in which Adolf Hitler had grown up. It seems likely, though not certain, for no record exists of it at the Linz Hospital where I was born, that Hitler too was born there a few years earlier. I have often wondered whether the fact that Hitler and I were born in the same city and perhaps even in the same hospital, not all that much time apart, had any meaning or whether it was just coincidence. It is not hard to consider it meaningful: the largest Displaced Persons camp in Austria for the Jews of Poland and Russia who had survived Hitler’s plans for them, was located in the city of his birth, indeed a stone’s throw from where he grew up. Which made Hitler and me Landsman — there is no direct translation of this Yiddish word which describes people born in the same city, but resonates with spiritual and volk connections. Come to think of it, perhaps we weren’t Landsman.

In April 1946. my entry into the life of Chaskiel Gawenda was still 10 months away. I am not sure when I first became aware of Chaskiel Gawenda, my father, but I do know that by the time I was conscious of him, he was well into late middle-age and therefore not the man he had been. It is that man in whom I am currently interested. Back then, he had three daughters. Rita, the youngest, was born in Siberia in December 1940, more than a year after Chaskiel and his wife Chaja and daughters Hinda and Cesia left Lodz not long after the arrival of the German Army. Rita was a miracle baby, they said. I am not sure just what sort of miracle she was, but I always assumed it was because she was so beautiful–everyone said so– and not necessarily because she was born in the back of a horse- drawn cart in the middle of a Siberian winter. Chaja was 40 when Rita was born, a wholly unexpected miracle and one that Chaskiel had not welcomed.

Chaskiel and Chaja had been married for 16 years when they fled Lodz with Hinda and Cesia. It was an unlikely marriage, though this judgement is made from the perspective of someone who was exposed to Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca at a very early age. Hinda and Cesia, by then both in their late 20s and Hollywood- ruined as far as love was concerned, took me along to the local picture theatre on Chapel Street on Saturday night when their husbands and my father were at Festival Hall for the boxing.

Chaskiel was 22 and Chaja 21 when they were married in the small grey-stone synagogue on Stanislav Street, a narrow cobbled street lined with two and three storey brown rendered apartment buildings, each with a wooden gated entrance which led to a communal courtyard criss-crossed with string on which the women hung the family washing every Thursday afternoon so that it could dry well before the Sabbath. On December 16, 1923, when Chaskiel and Chaja were married, around 5000 Jews lived in these apartment buildings, about a third of the population of Loyvich, or Lowich as the non-Jewish residents of this small town 50 kilometres east of Lodz, called it.

At 22, Chaskiel was handsome and vain, olive skinned, with dark deep set eyes and thick curly black hair that he liked to brush up and back from his broad forehead. Already then, he had his clothes tailored. He liked wide pleated woollen pants, sports jackets that were gathered at the waist, shirts of the best thick-woven cotton that he bought on his regular trips to Lodz and black and dark brown loafers. Chaskiel, at 22, was a master weaver, having completed his apprenticeship in Lodz where he had lived with an uncle from the time his parents died, months apart, from tuberculosis, when he was five years old.

Lodz was Poland’s great textile industry centre–with Loyvich as one of Lodz’s satelite towns where the weavers, mostly Jews who worked out of their apartment buildings, the master weavers, like Chaskiel Gawenda in particular, employing at least one apprentice and a qualified trademan or two, produced the finest carpet in all of Eastern Europe. By his wedding day on December 14, 1923, Chaskiel Gawenda had leased his own apartment on one of the wider, more salubrious streets of the Jewish area of Loyvich.

In one of the three rooms of the apartment, Chaskiel set up three carpet weaving machines which he had leased from the German supplier in Lodz. Most of the large weaving factories in Lodz were owned and run by Germans. The Germans had set up their factories in Lodz in the 1880s and had brought with them Jewish master weavers from Germany who in turn, apprenticed the Polish Jewish boys coming out of the cheders of Lodz- as Chaskiel did– at 13, Torah-filled and Talmud savvy, and ready to learn a trade which in Lodz almost invariably meant in textiles.

In Loyvich, at the age of 22, Chaskiel had rejected the Torah ways of his childhood. The uncle who raised him in Lodz was a pious man and when Chaskiel refused to cover his head except at the Friday night Shabbes meal, his uncle suggested that it would be best if Chaskiel found somewhere else to live. Thus it was that Chaskiel moved from Lodz to Loyvich and by the time he was 22, was full of utopian socialist bravado, handsome and successful in business, for not many young men his age had three weaving machines and employed two weavers and an apprentice, Chaja’s younger brother Shia who Chaskiel considered rather too much of a dreamer to ever become a master weaver.

On Saturdays, before he was married, Chaskiel went to the local Jewsh cinema where he particularly liked the cowboy films, especially the early talkies which were dubbed into Yiddish, the dubbing done by some of the best actors and actresses of the Lodz and Warsaw Yiddish theatres. More often than not, he went to the movies with Zissman Mazrokevich and Zissman’s younger brother Moishe, whose parents had taken Chaskiel in when he had arrived in Loyvich, aged 15, after his uncle had ordered him to leave his house.

The Mazrokevich family had been friends with Chaskiel’s parents, not close friends but friends enough to take Chaskiel in. Zissman Mazkrokevich was Chaskiel’s age, Moishe three years younger, a tall and athletic boy, with long blond hair and an Aryan looking face that Hitler and Goebbels would have envied, wild at heart and street smart and tough, wilder at heart and tougher than Zissman who was wild enough and tough enough himself. Both brothers looked up to Chaskiel, though they thought him rather too bookish and too much of a dandy for their liking. The Mazrokevich’s had a dog, a German Shepherd called Woolf that had about him something of Zissman’s and Moishe’s fearlessness.

Only semi-secular, Torah questioning Jews owned dogs. Chaskiel and Woolf were inseparable and it was from this time that Chaskiel came to disdain small dogs. The German textile magnates had brought with them German Shepherds in the main. They were used as guard dogs at the textile mills in Lodz and it was said later, amongst inmates of the Lodz Ghetto, that the German Shepherds used by the SS soldiers to help with rounding up the Jews bound for the Chelmno death camp, that these were not the German Shepherds the Jews of Lodz had known and in some cases, loved, dogs that had been Lodz born and bred and raised.

The Mazrokevich family lived in the same apartment building as Motl Laznowski, his wife Hinda, and their three sons and three daughters. Chaja Laznowski was the youngest of the daughters and when Chaskiel first got to know her, when he was 15 and newly arrived from Lodz, and she 14, Chaja was a slight fair-haired girl with blue eyes, a long thin but not unattractive face and though modest in her demeanor and devoted to her family as were most Jewish girls her age, devoted to the point where they hardly had a life outside their apartment and the communal courtyard, their lives full of washing clothes and cooking and preparing for the Sabbath and for the religious festivals around which their lives revolved, Chaja’s steely resolve, reflected in her eyes–resolve to do what Chaskiel sometimes wondered–eventually gave Chaja a certain allure in Chaskiel’s mind.

But it never crossed his mind, even when it crossed his mind that Chaja might be his wife–by then Zissman had married Chaja’s older sister Fayge– to take Chaja with him to the cinema on Saturday night, nor did it cross his mind to take her to the meetings of the Loyvich chapter of the Weaver’s Union or to the Lodz Yiddish Theatre performances where he went once a month, dressed in his finest tailored trousers and waisted sports coat. He went alone to the theatre and to union meetings. Neither Zissman nor Moishe was interested in these things, though one of Caja’s brothers sometimes came with him to the theatre.  Leibl was a flamboyant young man and his fl;amboyance sometimes annoyed Chaskiel, but in the main, they liked each other. Later, Leibl became an actor. He escaped Lodz after the Germans came, but was killed, along with his wife and two children, in Minsk after he refused to leave, despite Chaja’s pleas, because he said, he was tired of running and he had finally found a Yiddish theatre group that appreciated his talent.

On their wedding day on December 14, 1923, Zissman was Chaskiel’s best man. Chaskiel’s sister Cesia, his only sibling, who lived with her husband in Warsaw, was matron of honor. There were 100 people in the Shul that Sunday afternoon, a bitterly cold and windy day, threatening snow, but instead, the afternoon was punctuated by freezing rain showers. Rabbi Boruch Weizman, who often ate his shabbes meal at the Laznowski home, for he was a bachelor, conducted the wedding ceremony. Chaskiel wore a black hand tailored suit, a white wing collared shirt and patent leather shoes. Chaja’s dress, Chaskiel had insisted–and he had agreed to pay for it– had to be specially made and in the style that he had seen Molly Picon wear in a movie. Molly Picon was a the Yiddish actress who had made it, small-time, in Hollywood.

Zissman was there with Fayge. Moishe came too, dressed in a black shirt and black trousers, his shirt unbuttoned at the top, his black overcoat glistening with raindrops, the black cap he wore everywhere covering his longish blond hair, though not entirely, for he wore his cap slightly to the left side of his head. The whole Mazrokevich family was there and so too of course were the Laznowskis and their sons and daughters, even Makhcha, the oldest of the daughters, who Chaskiel could not abide because he found her stupid and demanding and unlikely ever to marry and he feared that Chaja would be burdened with looking after Makhcha long after her parents were dead, which meant that Makhcha would be his burden too.

As it turned out, he was right. What he couldn’t know was that Makhcha, after my mother died, would one day be his lover and that she would make my life miserable and that the hatred between us would be mutual, as powerful, if not more so, than the hatred between Makhcha and Chaskiel on that December day in 1923. I was 14 when I discovered that Makhcha and Chaskiel were lovers. I despised him that night and for many nights afterwards. After days of stony silence between us, I told him I intended to move out of home as soon as I could.

“You’re a fool,” he said. “But if that’s what you want to do, do it. Hinda will take you in.”

“Makhcha?” I cried. “Makhcha?”

“What do you know!” he answered. “Go, go live with Hinda.”

Chaskiel and Chaja’s wedding night was spent in the apartment, in the room beside the room in which the three weaving machines were housed. The workers had been given the day off and Chaja’s brother Shia too had not worked that morning. He slept in the machine room usually, though on this night, he went home to the Laznowskis. The rain was still falling intermittently and the wind had strengthened and though there was a fireplace in the room, there had been no time to light a fire. It was cold, as cold as a room could be without a fire on a December day in Loyvich.

It was a much milder day, on April 14 1946, when Chaskiel Gawenda and Chaja, together with their daughters Hinda and Cesia and Rita arrived at the displacd person’s camp in Veksheit,the suburb of Linz, where Adolf Hitler might have been born and where I was to be born in Feburay 1947. They were greeted by Zissman and Fayge who by then, as well as their two daughters, had a son who was six years old, Rita’s age. The two families had not seen each other for six years.

They had left Lodz together for Russia in October 1939. They had left Loyvich together, both families, in 1931, for Lodz, where Chaskiel set up a four machine weaving operation in an apartment in Lodz’s textile centre. By the time the Germans arrived in 1939, Chaskiel Gawenda, while still a utopian socialist, was a successful carpet manufacturer. Hinda and Cesia went to private Yiddish folk schools. The family lived in a spacious apartment on one of the better streets in the Jewish district of the city. They even had a maid, a Polish girl whose family took over the apartment when Chaskiel and Chaja and Hinda and Cesia left Lodz and headed for Russia.

They had gone from Lodz together in a horse drawn cart that Zissman had stolen from the blacksmith’s workshop near their apartment building. It was Zissman who forced them to pack a few belongings and get into the cart. It was Zissman who had taken Chaskiel by the scruff of the neck and had threatened to kill him on the spot if he didn’t gather his family together and get in the cart, They were all leaving. All except for Moishe who had been killed by a German soldier on the day the German army units arrived in Lodz. Moishe had got drunk and had run through the streets of the Jewish district shouting “Down with Hitler!” He had confronted a group of German soldiers, drunk and brave and fearless, and had told them he was more of an Aryan than they were and he had taken off his black cap and shown them his blond hair and he had spat at their feet and as a consequence, had been shot dead. Woolf was with him and the soldiers had taken the dog with them and had left Moishe in the street where he had fallen.

The two families travelled across Poland in the horse drawn cart, but were separated in Bialystock where thousands of Jews were clamoring to pay smugglers to get them across the border into the Soviet union. So chaotic were things in Bialystock that it was not possible for the two families to stay together. When a smuggler offered to take Avreml and his wife Fayge and their two daughters across the border into Russia, but would not wait, not even for an hour, Zissman decided they had to go, then and there. Fayge was hysterical, crying and wailing for her sister but to no avail.

The DP camp in Veksheit was run by the American military and at the beginning, when it was first set up in December 1945, most of the refugees were concentration camp survivors, but by the time Chaskiel and his family arrived, an increasing number of Jews who had fled to Russia from Poland at the start of the war made up the 4000 inhabitants of the camp.

Zissman had arrived in January 1946, with Fayge and their children. He immediately joined a group of young men who hunted down Nazis in Linz. They also hunted down collaborators–concentration camp kapos, Jewish ghetto police– in the DP camp.In some instances, the collaborators were executed by Avreml and his group without a hearing, though the majority were not killed, but rather sentenced, after informal `trials’, to being banished from all involvement with communal life. In Linz proper, however, Avreml killed people, mostly young men who, under duress, admitted they had served in German SS units.

Chaskiel Gawenda knew nothing of this when he arrived in Veksheit in April 1946 with Chaja and Hinda and Cesia and Rita. By then Chaja knew that her brothers, Leibl and Shia and their wives and children were dead. She was worried about Makhcha, who had escaped to Russia with her husband–she had married after all! –and she was sick, Chaja was, sick and weary and old and frightened and in that displaced persons’ camp in Veksheit, not more than a half a kilometre from where Hitler spent his childhood, there in the barracks where hundreds of people, men, women and children, slept on iron cots, there in the middle of the night, some time not long after they had arrived, though it might seem inconceivable, I was conceived.

Chaskiel Gawenda did not join Zissman’s group of avengers. His only sister and his five year old niece–at least she had been five when he last saw her in June 1939, when his sister and her husband and Chavele had come to Lodz for a visit–had been killed, as far as he could discover when he returned to Lodz in August 1945, at Chelmno some time after the Nazis started their round-ups from the Lodz Ghetto in the winter of 1941. But Chaskiel Gawenda was in many ways, still full of life. He might have been by then in late middle-age, but he was considered to be still handsome and there was an energy about him, a sort of life force that Chaja, for all her stubborn resolve, had lost–or perhaps had never had.

There was something about him, small in stature though he was, that made him feel large and powerful. Even in the camp in Veksheit, Chaskiel Gawenda, when he earnt some money selling groceries and confectionery he bought from the American KP store and which he sold at a stall he ran at the camp, sought out a tailor in Linz to make him a pair of pleated trousers and a waisted sports coat. And he remained, even in Veksheit, a man who loved large dogs.

Rocky had approached the young woman with his usual exuberance, whole-heartedly open hearted, preparing himself as he came close to signal his willingness, no, eagerness, to lie on his back at her feet, his tail sweeping backwards and forwards in anticipation, his face on her feet, looking up, open mouthed, his white chest heaving with excitement. But as he approached, just a few feet away from her, she turned away and suddenly, my heart was filled with pity for Rocky and I was angry too, not white- hot angry of course, but angry nevertheless and then I saw it, the object of her desire, a few metres away, black and small, curly haired, baby soft it looked, its face puppy- open, open and stunned and somehow also curious, its trembling blob-like body up against the legs of the man who was looking down at this beautiful thing and I thought he was beaming and embarrassed at the same time.

I called Rocky to me and he came , puzzled still, but prepared to be put on the leash for the reward of a liver treat. By then, the young woman had swept the puppy up in her arms and she craddled it and she let it examine her ears and her nose and she let it burrow into her chest. The man looked on, gentle-faced and not without some pride, as if he was somehow responsible for the gorgeousness of this thing that the woman found so entrancing. I was determined to quickly take Rocky away from this moment of his rejection–and mine , for my empathy for Rocky’s predicament was total and painful–when the man called out to me, my name, and then he called out to Rocky too and there was nothing to do but go over, both of us, for we knew this man and  I knew the puppy too, having seen and held it, the puppy passed around like a baby at the birthday party, from one set of out-stretched arms to another, the man rather indifferent to it I had thought, affecting distance, as if this puppy  had not been his idea and that  he had allowed it into his life with reluctance.

 We greeted each other warmly, the man and I.  He tried to greet Rocky too with some enthusiasm but he could not hide his concern that Rocky be kept away from the young woman, in case she decided to put the puppy down, though it seemed to me, given the fervour with which she was holding it still in her arms, that the likelihood of her suddenly growing weary of this embrace was remote. The man informed me that he had fallen under the spell of the puppy and that as a result, he had come to read Rocky and Gawenda with a deeper understanding of Rocky’s place in my life. Did he understand then, I wondered,  did he feel my anger and pity at Rocky’s rejection by the young woman who had fallen under the spell of his dog?

He did not and neither really did I, for as we walked on as soon as was politely possible, Rocky pleased to be off the leash and having leapt off the boardwalk to dash towards the water’s edge after consuming his second liver treat, the one he demands as a reward for being unleashed, Rocky life-filled and warmed by the mellow sun in the pale blue cloudless sky, my anger and pity did not vanish with Rocky’s joy, but lingered and as is the way with these things, memories came and there was one memory in particular, of a day–was it a day like this, a spring day that had banished winter?– almost a half a century ago that try as I might, given that today, this morning was so life enhancing and Essendon was in the finals, still alive in spring, alive against all my expectations and my lack of hope, I could not easily dismiss.

My eldest sister that day asked me whether I wished to come and live with her, with her and my brother-in-law who was like a father to me, and with her son, my nephew who was my brother and with her younger son who his brother and I had not exactly welcomed into our lives when he arrived unannounced and unexpected. My mother had been dead for several years. Not long after she died, my father sold the shop and we left Fitzroy, my father, my aunt and I  and we moved back to the house in Caulfield where my sister still lived with her family, the house we had left when my mother had finally convinced my father that a mixed business in Fitzroy might put us on the road to riches.

In those years we lived together again in Caulfield, after my mother died, my father lived his life as if his life in Fitzroy had never happened. He went back to work in the carpet factory in Preston but now he travelled there, across the city, a journey of perhaps an hour in traffic, in a green Fiat 500, which I assume meant it was a car powered by a half a litre engine, which he bought after he got his driver’s licence. Well, bought his driver’s licence, for in those days, Jewish men of my father’s age, by then well into his 50s, were taught to drive by an instructor who guaranteed them a licence no matter their driving skills and road knowledge, a promise I believe he invariably kept. My father’s driving was something to behold, confident, unafraid, open to safety hints from no-one, me in particular, and always, no matter how short the journey, always on the edge of catastrophe. There were no catastrophies, though on average once a week, my father was involved in a traffic incident, half the time with parked cars.

He drove his car to all sorts of meetings and lectures mostly ones that were in Yiddish, often lectures delivered by some ancient looking Yiddish literary critic who had been brought out from Israel or America  and on Sunday mornings, he sat in a little shed in the playground of the Sholem Aleichem Sunday school where he dispensed exercise books, pencils and dog-eared Yiddish readers to kids who, like me, wished to be anywhere on Sunday morning but with my father, my father dressed in his Sunday suit, cheerful and full of jokes, as if there was nowhere in the world better to be than at Sholem Aleichem Sunday School where Yiddish, despite the odds, still lived!

He never spoke to me about my mother. He never gave any indication that he missed her. He fulfilled her wish that I have a Bar Mitzvah, a proper one, in shul and not one of those secular travesties of a Bar Mitvah that the Bund, the Jewish socialist party to which my father belonged, organised for members of SKIF, its youth movement. But he freed me from the after school Torah lessons my mother had inflicted upon me in Fitzroy– I rode my bike three nights a week to the synagogue in East Melbourne for these lessons- but at the the Passover seder after my mother died, my father severely abridged the Hagoda, the story of Moses freeing the Jews from slavery in Egypt, and in subsequent years, abridged it even further.

I do not know whether my sister spoke to him about me when she decided to move out with her family, but surely she did. How did he respond, I  wonder?  But I remember how my sister looked when she asked me whether I wanted to come and live with her and her family. She looked as if the question came from somewhere inside her where frailty and betrayal reside, not monstrous or heartless betrayal, but those betrayals that time and the end of things make inevitable. The time had come for my sister to live differently, the life I later realised, that she thought she had won when we had moved to Fitzroy, but that she had given up when our mother died, that giving up a terrible consequence of my mother’s dying, one I had never considered before my sister asked me that question, of whether I wanted to go with her and her family to their new home and even then, when she asked me the question, all I knew was that she was in pain and that in the face of her pain, there was only one answer to her question.

She loved me, my sister and I loved her. In the years after she moved out of that house in Caulfield, when I lived there with my father and my aunt, my sister remained more like a mother to me than a sister, worrying about me and feeding me and including me in family outings, but she knew and I knew that it was true, that line from the Yiddish lullaby that broke my heart and hers, nor a mame zi is eyne, mer nit eyne oyf der velt (Only a mother, only a mother, there is only one mother in this world). She loved me my sister, as much, perhaps more, than any sister could love a brother but we never spoke of our love for each other and we never spoke of that day of self-pity and anger.

I do not mean to suggest that this memory, this day almost 50 years ago was life-changing,  for I do not believe in life-changing days but rather that time changes everything. Even on this spring morning, this memory was only fleeting and by the time we arrived home, Rocky and I, my pity for him and my anger at his treatment by the young woman beside St Kilda pier had more or less gone.

 I did wonder, however, whether getting another dog, a puppy, a companion for Rocky who is more and more distraught each morning when he thinks that he will be left alone, was  such a good idea. What if Rocky considers it a betrayal, an abandonment, evidence that he is unloved, that rather than ameliorating his despair at being left alone, another dog will amplify it in new and entirely unpredictable ways. The thought that these may be the consequences is unbearable.  The thought that I could inadvertently betray Rocky is unthinkable, though I have come to believe that most human betrayals are inadvertent.

Even these thoughts were fleeting, for the morning was spring-filled in every way. During the night, my thoughts had been mostly about the Essendon players and I could picture them, each of them, those who I thought would be playing Friday night, in spring, in the first game of the finals. When we came home, Rocky and I, I sat upstairs in the study at the computer, and Rocky jumped up into my lap and as I clicked on to the Essendon Football club site, eager for news and the latest developments with the team, prepared to read even the most obvious drivel about this player or that, for this week I am  gripped by football fever, Rocky looked out of the window, his lovely furry sturdy body stiff and alert, his eyes fixed on the footpath below us. And every time someone walked past, Rocky growled, a quiet, sustained  excited growl. A growl of love, I thought. For me.

Spring is coming. The dark mornings of winter are almost over and I sense in Rocky, despite the cold this morning, a spring awakening, his search for a ball along the shoreline more urgent and exuberant than in the darkness of those winter mornings when we were often alone on the beach but for the birds- the black swans and the pelicans and on some mornings, the white cockatoos that sat in defiance, arrogant- looking, alert but not alarmed, on the grass that sloped down to the small white forlorn- looking lighthouse.

The birds have gone. There are no swans sitting along the shoreline or gliding through the becalmed bay water this morning with spring approaching. The weather worn wooden posts on which the pelicans had sat in a sort of prehistoric-looking reverie, are bird free. Even the seagulls, in winter mad with loud and frantic activity, are there in much smaller numbers, subdued, as if tranquilised by the early sunrise.

We will now see out the winter, Rocky and I, without my having succumbed to the temptation to buy him a coat, though in the middle of winter, that temptation was almost irresistible when I saw at the South Melbourne Market a knitted red and black coat which quite frankly, had my wife not been there to control me, I would have bought for Rocky and dressed him in and walked with him wearing it and I would have worn my Essendon Football Club t-shirt and cap despite a threat from a friend that he would cross the road away from Rocky and me if he came upon us, were I to do this.

At the time, in the middle of winter, had I bought that coat for Rocky and dressed him in it for our morning together, it would have been, as far as the performance of  the Bombers was concerned, an act of defiance, for despite showing early promise that suggested the lack of hope with which I approached the football season was premature, they have succumbed to the low expectations of both the wider football public and their followers. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote that all hope had gone, that grim reality had set in, that my fantasies had turned to dust. For the fifth year in a row, the Bombers would not play finals and September– spring– would be a time not of renewal but a time for lamentations.

In the depths of no-hope, I thought the black and red coat at South Melbourne Market, the coat for Rocky, black with red stripes, would offer me the chance of consolation. I thought of my mother, a half century ago or more, having finished work at the sock factory in Preston, unable to speak more than a word or two of English, taking the tram to the Victoria Market and walking along the stalls, most of them run by Jewish refugees like her, the sound of Yiddish rolling down the market’s aisles, conversation and greetings and curses and pleas to buy, mostly material as I recall, stall after stall of cloth, the `marketnicks’ as they were known, measuring and cutting and fingering the cloth, pleading with every passer-by to come over, come over and feel and smell and see the quality.

 My mother, already sickly, heart-sick, able to walk only short distances without putting a pill under her tongue to ease the pain in her heart, her long grey hair pinned in a bun–I never saw my mother with her hair down and  I never saw her comb it–only in her mid-40s, but old, ancient in my eyes, older than anyone I knew, too old to be my mother, walking down the aisles and looking for football jumpers for me and for my nephew, my eldest sister’s son.

That Friday night, my mother brought home two Essendon Football Club jumpers. I do not actually remember that night, but I imagine that it went much like other Friday nights in that house in Caulfield. I assume that Mr Lowenstein, the shoychet–the ritual slaughterer–who lived up the road and who later taught me the Torah reading for my Bar Mitzvah, had been to slaughter one of the chickens that were kept in a wire enclosure in the backyard. I assume that my eldest sister had plucked the feathers of the bird and had prepared the vegetables–carrots and parsnips and celery–that would go into the large pot with the chicken and a slab of beef top-rib to make the Sabbath yoich–chicken soup. I assume the gefilte fish was simmering on the stove and the rhubarb compote, which my brother- in- law loved, had been cooked and placed in the ice-box to cool.

My brother- in- law, having returned from his assembly line job at GMH, would be out in the shed in the backyard where he kept his pigeons, soothing them and locking them in, for when a chicken was slaughtered, the hawks would smell blood and come after the pigeons and I remember times when a hawk would swoop from the sky– my brother- in- law having failed to lock up all his birds– and take off with a pigeon, the other pigeons frantic with fear, mad with it, squawking and screaming, in the locked up shed. At these times, my brother-in-law was always silent, his grief inwardly held. His grief was always inwardly held. He would talk about his time in the concentration camps and about the fact that all his family, his mother and brothers and sisters had all been killed, only rarely and then in the most matter of fact way. He loved his pigeons and his canaries which he kept in large cages in the pigeon shed and he loved my mother and father and me in the most open and demonstrable way.

Every Friday afternoon, my nephew and I would wait for my mother at the tramstop, wait for her to cross the road to us, laden with market bags, old sacks I think, and we would take them from her, my nephew little more than a toddler and my mother would hug and kiss him and me too I suppose, though that part I do not remember very well. I remember–though I wonder whether this is mainly in retrospect– how tired she was and how sad she looked sometimes getting off the tram, sad and silent, as if  she felt nothing but weariness.

It is strange perhaps, that I do not recall that Friday night when my mother brought home the Essendon Football Club jumpers. Nor will I ever know now whether the  story as to why she chose those jumpers is true, for it is a story I heard only from my sisters, long ago and which, when I think about it now, sounds too neat an illustration of some of the characteristics of  yiddish mamas. According to this story, my mother that Friday at the Victoria Market, examined every football jumper on offer. She quickly rejected those that had even a bit of white in them, which meant that we, my nephew and I, were destined never be supporters of Collingwood, South Melbourne, Geelong or St Kilda.  In the end, she left with the choice, on practical grounds- for in those days, we did not have a washing machine and at  least one night a week, my eldest sister and mother would spend the evening in the laundry scrubbing clothes on a washboard–  between the Essendon jumper, which was black wth a red stripe, and the Richmond jumper which was black with a yellow stripe. My sisters were convinced that my mother chose the Essendon jumpers because she saw in the Richmond jumpers the yellow patches with the Star of David on them that the Jews had been forced to wear in the ghettoes during the war.

I do not remember that Sabbath night, nor the first time we wore those jumpers, though I remember that they were made of wool and, as it turned out, I was allergic to wool so I hardly ever wore the jumper. There are photographs of my nephew and me in those Essendon jumpers and he looks full of joy, my nephew, and I look like I can’t wait for the photographer–in those days, a professional photographer was needed to take good family photographs– to let us go so that I could take the jumper off before the itching drove me to self-harm.

For the last half century, my nephew and I have been going to the football together. We never did wear our Essendon jumpers to games, not from the time we started, each Saturday aftenoon, me seven or eight years old, him five or six, taking those two trams to Essendon, a journey of more than an hour, coming home in the darkness, to see the Bombers play. Perhaps he didn’t wear his jumper as a mark of respect for his allergy-ridden uncle.

I did not succumb to tempation and  buy Rocky that gorgeous little black and red coat, but I did succumb to hopelessness as far as the Bombers were concerned. It was the only rational response to a month of  disappointing performances, so disappointing that I came home from games empty and devastated, as if life had lost all meaning and that all that stretched before me was weeks of football agony. I was without hope but this did not mean that I was without pain.

But hope of course, hope is not rational and considering oneself without it is not necessarily the end of the story. There was nothing rational about what happened a little less than a week ago. Essendon beat St Kilda and so unexpected was this, so improbable, given that the Saints had won 19 games in a row and were undefeated and seemingly invincible this season, that I had decided not to go to the game. How the Bombers won remains a mystery. That I wasn’t there to see it is deeply regrettable. Perhaps that’s why the next morning I fed Rocky so many liver treats on our walk that he eventually looked up at me, puzzled, head cocked to the side, ears pricked, as if to ask whether I had lost my mind.

This morning, when the sunrise came as we headed home, the Bombers having lost a game–okay, having been thrashed actually– the day before which, had they won, would have secured them a place in the finals, hope has not entirely evaporated, for were they to win next week, the last game of the season before the finals, they could still play in spring, in September. This was foremost in my thoughts as I watched Rocky race backwards and forwards along the shoreline looking for that elusive tennis ball, but there too, were those memories of my mother and of long ago Sabbaths and of Mr Lowenstein, the chicken slaughterer and of my brother -in- law who loved his pigeons and who I loved as if he were my father and of  those football jumpers my mother bought us. I thought about how the choice she made of jumpers, based on both practical considerations and her history– the fact that yellow had been the color used to mark out the Jews of the ghettoes of Poland– changed my life.

I also thought that perhaps this story of the way my mother chose those football jumpers was entirely apocryphal. Perhaps all that had happened was that along those aisles at the Victoria market, there was a salesman of great skill and empathy–perhaps he was an Essendon supporter!– who convinced my mother that the Bombers were the team her son and her nephew should follow, that for young boys who will inevitably one day play football, there is no better color combination for a football jumper than black and red.

My friend, I have concluded, though smart and still full of dreams and hopes and as mad– by which I mean youthful–as ever he was,  has nevetheless nothing much to say about Rocky except to say that Rocky has become my best friend. Try as I might to explain to him that Rocky is a dog and therefore not a competitor in the best friend stakes–and anyway, have we not moved on from the need for such childhood affirmations?– he remains entirely unconvinced by my assurances.  I  believe this is due to the fact that my friend has never had a dog.

In contrast, another friend responded to my ruminations about friendship and Rocky’s place in my heart in that recent post of mine, this way: “Your last blog on friendship ….. made me think. It made me think about the true basis of your relationship with Rocky, and of humans’ relationships with dogs. Of course he is a lovely dog and so he deserves plenty of credit but there’s a bigger question, isn’t there? Why do we love dogs so much? I think part of the answer is in the line I once sent you: “I want to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.”  The unquestioning loyalty and admiration and unqualified friendship of dogs is so profoundly reassuring to humans, anxious insecure beings that we are.

“But maybe it’s more than that. I think that your love for Rocky is not only, perhaps not even mostly, about Rocky. It is about love for the idea of love, or more precisely, love for the knowledge that we are able to love. Being with a dog makes us feel good about ourselves. And, on top of that, their silence — or lack of speech — creates such a deep bond. I remember walking our dog when I was a kid. I would be lost in my thoughts, raking through my anxieties, the flow of the human world, fear, desire, shame — then after a while I would notice that my dog was with me still, by my side, looking out with me at the physical world, both in step with me but respecting me, waiting to know what I would do next — what I thought of this world we were entering together. And sometimes it felt very deep. ”

 This brings me to a decision we have made: out of love for Rocky and concern at his despair every time we leave him alone. We have decided to get him a dog companion. Being an only dog, we have concluded, might have been acceptable had I remained committed to my fantasy of a new life after I left The Age and journalism and meetings and frantic busy-ness, a new life full of time, I suppose, and yes, self-indulgence. Things turned out differently and while my old life is over, gone and finished and unlamented, I have been forced to conclude, given the fact that I am the head of a centre for journalism at the University of Melbourne and that I attend meetings and plan research projects and events and that I am excited by the potential of this centre to make a real contribution to journalism, that this idea I had of myself as a rather inward looking, self-absorbed and private person–a writer in other words –who for 30 years or more was diverted from his real calling by the seductive power of being a public figure, even a minor one, that I have possibly been deluding myself.

The consequence of this delusion for Rocky has been that I have not honored my implied promise to be around most of the time, which means that he is often left alone. The evidence suggests–his increasing down-heartedness long before I leave the house, his baleful little bark as I put on my going to work outfit, his earlier and earlier retirement to his bed in the morning–suggests that he is unlikely to come to terms with my broken promise of a life spent mostly together, any time soon. If ever. Rather than change my life, I have decided to change Rocky’s life by offering him a companion. I will do so with some trepidation, for I wonder whether this an ethically and morally sound step to take, given that I cannot at this moment, imagine there being room in my heart for loving another dog the way I love Rocky. Not just that. Even if such room exists, how will Rocky take to having another dog in his–and my–life? What guarantee is there that a dog companion will sooth and comfort him when I am about to leave home? What if his pining is for me and me alone? Finally, finally, there is this question: What will happen to Rocky and Gawenda?

There are no answers to these questions for there are no guarantees in life and in love. Nor are there guarantees  in the life and eventual death of Rocky and Gawenda. And so with hope in my heart and with trepidation, with only faith to see me through it, I shall, as soon as possible, bring another dog into our life. So much of what we decide, I realise, is based on faith and hope.

In my last post, I revealed that Rocky and Gawenda was to be published as a book in October by Melbourne University Publishing as Rocky and Gawenda: The story of a man and his mutt. I posted a small image of the book’s cover and said that I loved it very much. Turns out that those who know about these things thought  that my excitement at Rocky and Gawenda being published in book form had slightly unhinged me, so that I did not understand that the cover I posted was never going to be the `real’ cover. The real cover, which I am posting above, I think is even more gorgeous than the `unreal’ one.I think the photograph of Rocky captures the pensive and thoughtful side of his nature.

The book is to be published under MUP’s new imprint, Victory Books, which Louise Adler, the boss of MUP has described as “proudly commercial”. I see that along with my book, Mick Gatto’s life story will also be a Victory Book published in October with the title I, Mick Gatto, which I suppose is meant to be suggestive of swearing an oath–or affirmation to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in court proceedings. Gatto and Gawenda, eh. I wonder whether Gatto, often described by journalists as a `Melbourne identity’ –and everyone knows what that means– has a dog companion that has offered Mick the gift of knowing that he is, in my friend’s phrase, able to love? I must read his book to find out.

 Postscript: Another litte plug for my son’s band Husky which is doing three nights at the  cabaret venue, the Butterfly Club in South Melbourne  from tonight, Thursday August 13. Then  Friday the 14th and Saturday the 15th. It is a small club and the band will be mostly acoustic. The show starts at 7.00pm. Friday and Saturday is nearly booked out. Tonight’s a good night to come along.

Bookings at: www.thebutterflyclub.com

It is Grand Final day and Rocky and Gawenda’s main character, that is Rocky, has been chosen by the Essendon players, each of them having become devoted fans of Rocky–if not of me– to be their mascot on this great day. The Bombers have made the GF and everywhere, there are black and red flags and banners, one of which has printed on it in large letters `Do It For Rocky’. Even in dreams, there is disappointment at work, for the fact is that I desperately want them to do it for me. But Rocky is known and loved across the breadth of the land so it is appropriate, in order for it to work in terms of inspiration, that the banner refers to Rocky. Lying there with the dream still upon me, I think that it is plausible, especially the adulation of Rocky. What is not plausible, what even for a dream is a fantasy, is that the Bombers have made the Grand Final for the Bombers, despite early promise, won’t make the finals let alone the GF. Hope is gone. Dreams have been dashed. All is now stark and painful reality as far as the Bombers are concerned.

Not so for Rocky and Gawenda, for the essence of this dream is not the fantasy about the Bombers, but rather the adulation of Rocky, no-longer the province alone of those who have followed his life story here on this blog, but those who read Rocky and Gawenda the book which has taken the publishing world by storm, a book so resoundingly successful that the publisher has begged and pleaded with me to  give her 60,000 words by the end of the month in order to quickly publish Rocky and Gawenda 11.

Most of the time, I hasten to add, I dream smaller dreams and when I am fully awake, I think my motives for agreeing to have Rocky and Gawenda published in book form have rather less to do with the attractiveness of  the sort of celebrity that comes with producing a big best-seller, a big seller that would have producers fighting over the film rights with Rocky signed to play himself and me played by the Israeli actor Topol –with his best Australian accent on show– and more with the seductions of a book which, unlike a blog, even if  a few copies are sold–God forbid– will survive me, even if only on the bookshelves of my children.

I have come to consider this publication of Rocky and Gawenda in book form as a sort of revival of an old tradition in which writers– Dickens and Dostoyevsky and all the great Yiddish writers– were first published in serial form in newspapers.  I am not old enough to have read Dickens this way, but I remember when I was a child that my father read the stories and novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer–the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature– in the American Yiddish language paper, Der Forvertz–The Foward– copies of which he received by airmail every week.  As an aside, I must say that my father was not much enamoured of Singer who he considered to be a popular rather than a literary writer, which makes me wonder what he would think of this blog and especially of the book were it to sell a few copies. Still, my father continued to read Singer in serial form.

This blog became a way to tell a story in serial form, Rocky’s story and mine, and it has developed a life of its own and it goes to places that surprise me and that a few readers of this blog have told me surprised them as well. I am set loose in cyberspace, free, unconcerned with those things that concerned me and constrained me and defined me in my life as a journalist and reporter.

So Rocky and Gawenda, still in the grip of winter and its  rewards but with Spring coming and with the sunrise earlier each day so that by the time we head home, the sun has edged over the horizon and the clouds are pink tinged again and on clear mornings, the kiosk at the end of St Kilda Pier is again aglow, Rocky and Gawenda the  serial  is, I hope, far from finished.

Rocky and Gawenda: The Story of a Man and His Mutt is finished and will be published by Melbourne University Publishing in October. I love the cover so I have posted it above.  As for what’s between the covers, I am told by my publisher that it adds up to a sort of memoir.  My view is that if this works as a book, it’s because Rocky is so damn regular and predictable when it comes to getting me up and out and on the beach in plenty of time to see the sunrise.

Now given that my son’s two blogs were considered by many among the best posts on Rocky and Gawenda so far, I feel obliged and more than that, eager to offer him a little plug for his band Husky which is doing three nights at the  cabaret venue, the Butterfly Club in South Melbourne  next week, Thursday August 13, Friday the 14th and Saturday the 15th. It is a small club and the band will be mostly acoustic. The show starts at 7.00pm.

Bookings at: www.thebutterflyclub.com

The ability to convey tone in an email may sound improbable,  but we have been friends so long that our emails are as if we are speaking to each other. It has been that way between us, this jocularity and sarcasm, when we express affection for each other, since we were boys. Indeed, come to think about it, not much has changed since we were boys in the shape and even the particulars of our friendship. We have absorbed our histories. We know each other’s disappointments. And our fulfilments.We have changed of course and yet we are those boys and what brought us together a half century ago, holds us together even now. We are on the same road to wherever it is we are going, though we may be travelling there at different speeds. There are times when this is not a happy thought. I think almost as often of the mortality of my friends as my own.

This is the context in which I received the email from my friend, funny and self-deprecating and sarcastic and memory-filled, accusing me of being more enamoured of Rocky than of him. He reminded me of the things we shared when we were boys–cadet camp at Puckapunyal where we slept in the rain under leaking ponchos for we were the Assault Pioneers whose job it was to set up camp and dig the trenches into which we would climb and wait for the enemy to arrive, smoking cigarettes at lunch-time at school down by the Yarra River, the girls we pursued, pursuits in which he almost always was triumphant–or so he says. He asked whether Rocky, about whom I have been writing at what he said was exhaustive length, is capable of delivering me such shared experiences and memories?  He ended with this question:`Will he pick up your shit the way I have?’

I thought about this question as Rocky and I prepared for our morning together on the beach and I thought this was not a rhetorical question. Nor was my friend’s suggestion that Rocky had supplanted him as my best friend entirely free of jealousy and perhaps even pain and regret, for my friend and I, truth be told, are busy, he in particular, for he is devoted to his work, full of energy and optimism and mad creativity, a world leader in his field but as eager as ever to make new discoveries. We are busy and we see each other irregularly.

Rocky on the other hand, is not busy. Rocky and I are companions whose relationship is made up of daily routines, unchanging routines and habits. I spend more time with Rocky than with my friends or even my children, but more than that, day in and day out, our day, mine as much as Rocky’s, is structured and determined by our togetherness. Rocky wakes me in the morning and goes to bed at night in the same bedroom I do. Our morning routine is unchanging and our hour or two at the beach, mostly before dawn in winter may be full of new discoveries and thoughts and memories, but it is nevetheless routine. When I leave him in the morning, he looks devastated, abandoned, even if my wife is at home with him and when I come home, he greets me with great exuberance which I take to be joy-filled.  I am joy-filled as well I must say.

All of this is true. No friend, no wife or child could offer such companionship, but to say that Rocky is my best friend would be absurd and yet my friend was not entirely joking when he said Rocky had supplanted him and my friend is no soft-minded sentimentalist. Friendship is mysterious. It has none of the certainties of family–blood and genes and continuity and a belief  in life after death. In some ways, friendship is like marriage, kept alive, as the writer Brian Doyle argued recently, by the knowledge that it can end at any time. There are friends with whom I am no longer friends. Mostly those vanished friendships were not ended because of any dramatic rupture, though that too has happened, but more often because, through time, we lost whatever it was that connected us. These friendships ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

Friendship, I think, is a creation of modernity. It  transcends tribal and religious and ethnic ties. It is a secular relationship, a tie of love and like all forms of love that are untethered to blood or faith or tribe, is open to the possibility of impermanence. It is doubtful, given what we have overcome, absences and resentments and each other’s short-comings and the business of our lives, that my old friend and I will drift apart, doubtful, but not impossible. Friendship is fragile. What resentments, I wondered, lay behind my friend’s question about whether Rocky would ever pick up my shit the way my friend suggested he had done for half a century?

Those friendships that  ended with drama and abruptness when each of us had been convinced that the other had been the instigator, the betrayer, what was left when these friendships ended? Even those friendships that had finished with a whimper, long ago, so that when we meet, those former friends and I, there is a sort of awkwardness between us and sometimes, a feigned sadness, must have ended with disappointments and resentments and even something approaching betrayal.

None of this can be repaired or taken back. But as I woke this morning to Rocky’s inevitable and wholly predictable urgency, his sniffing at my face, his quiet and yet urgent whimper, Rocky almost certain, but not wholly so, that within minutes I would start our morning ritual and that soon we would be heading for the beach together, towards that place beside the grassy park where he would be unleashed and free to dash across the sand to the water’s edge,  I thought that this bond between us, because there was no danger of it ever being broken–either abruptly or by just fading away– was not one that my oldest friend needed to fear. There was no chance that one day, Rocky, rather than my friend, would be the one to pick up my –metaphorical– shit. Metaphorical for the time being at least, for who knows where the road we are both travelling on will lead us?

I have resolved this morning, in light of my friend’s email, to ask him whether I have failed in some way to pick up his shit and if I have, whether he can suggest the way in which this failure of mine can be rectified. I am pretty sure that this will surprise him and that he will suggest, in quite robust terms, that this thing between Rocky and me has driven me half-mad. He will say that he was joking of course and he will pretend surprise that I would ask him such a question. I think he will nevertheless be pleased. How could he not be pleased at such an expression of fidelity?