mountains and mountains

Everything in moderation, including god and taxes. This mantra, imparted upon her by working class parents, formed the crux of my mother’s outlook on the world. While she was growing up this saying was constantly repeated in situations as varied as dinner table chat to family holidays. It is the kind of humble protestant sentiment common to people of my grandparents’ generation. It is coloured by a tinge of great depression hangover and a slathering of wry Australian humour. Both of my grandparents existed with the living memory of the depression; the susso, the bread and dripping for dinner. Of that unwavering sense that everything you have could at any minute conceivably disintegrate. Like currency. My mother told me many stories about the hardship suffered by her parents as she was growing up. The way my grandmother would rub the hardback covers of red books against her cheeks every morning because she could not afford to buy rouge. The way my grandfather would save the chicken that he won in a meat raffle all year for Christmas dinner.

It is clear how these small privations influenced the way my mother brought me up, despite social mobility having firmly rooted her in the burgeoning strata of the middle class. When I was a little kid my mother often threatened me with the 'rule of diminishing returns’. This rule states that the more you indulge in something, the less satisfying it becomes. My mother would quote this rule at me in supermarkets when I would plead with her to buy me lollies. She would use it a rationale to counter the desire for immediate gratification that all young children posses. And she often used it on herself as a method of self-control. When dieting she would think of the ‘rule of diminishing returns’ to justify why she did not want that second piece of chocolate cake.

I’d never tried it before. It’s sort of like heroin, he said. The way nothing can rival that first time. The original utter fulfilment can never be reached again. The flies kept distracting his hand from the steering wheel as he swatted away like an orchestra conductor. But there are a lot of things in life that are like that. We were back on the road, with nothing but mountains around us. I wanted to keep driving forever. At least until the gullies and canyons swallowed us up into their rocky bellies. At least until we crashed head first into some tender cliff that would absorb us like a portal to another universe. I looked out of the back window. Before us, behind us, only mountains.

And mountains and mountains.