Traces of Our Lives

Traces of Our Lives ©

By Michael Casey

It’s a miserable day here in Birmingham, drizzly and cold, I snuck out to Aldi to get some stuff ready for when the girls come home from school, Totoro our cat is gorging herself having been out in the cold marking her territory. So I was wondering what to talk about today. As I looked about the room I saw the last traces of Christmas, today is 6^th Jan 2017, the feast Epiphany. So I had a think before diving out into the cold on my daily trip to Aldi. Now I’m back and I have a mug of tea in front of me and Heather Small of M People is singing, the album is 20 years old now. So I’m ready to talk to you.

Heather is a trace of my life as is my album collection, nowadays people have Spotify, there are less physical things as everything is in cyber space. I’m sure somebody will invent a way of putting mother-in-laws into cyber space, as well as nasty little brothers. So what traces are there of our lives?

There are the dirty trainers scattered around the house, Camembert the family hound suffers the most as a dog’s nose is 1,000,000 times better than a human nose. We suffer too, so the patio door is opened and the trainers are flung to the bottom of the garden. Camembert thinks this is a new game so retrieves them, seventeen times until Camembert gets bored, but the trainers still smell worse than 7 year old camembert, the cheese I mean.

Girls are just as bad with tights littering bedrooms, with smelly washing accumulating, until Camembert drags it to the laundry room. School bags tossed into a corner behind a sofa and next to poor dad’s bookcase, these too are traces of our lives. Mugs and plates litter the coffee table as laughing girls retire to their eyrie, Totoro the cat volunteers to wash the dishes, leaping up to get any scraps before dad can tidy up. Totoro looks at dad thinking he’s a fool, she has already licked the plates clean.

Objects remind us of our past selves of our past lives, behind me is the painted watercolour copy of a Burne-Jones angel, it’s in the photo of me at work, that’s if you call writing stories, talking to you, as work.  The picture was a leaving present after my two decades at the same company. It wasn’t that they wanted me to sleep with the angels. If you ever get to Birmingham you can see the Burne-Jones windows in Saint Phillips Anglican cathedral, and the art gallery has some of his stuff too. So this one painting represents a large chunk of my working life, it also represents the start of another part of my life, the Shanghai adventure. 

There is a huge pot of shamrock in the corner under the other bookcase, this reminds me of my mum and my old aunty Mary from Ballyheigh in Kerry. Aunty Mary used to send us shamrock and harp badges each Saint Patrick’s day, so when I glance over there I think of her, she was such fun. Did you bring me the ham, no,  you didn’t ask me to bring any ham, but you should have known I wanted ham to give to the visitors from England, so you forgot to remember that I’d forget. Henry her husband was a great man too, so if I’ve forgotten to remember exactly that specific conversation, I hope they’ll remember that I the writer forgot to remember the words. But I will never forget their love.

I have another painting of the wall, it’s a picture a girl in red walking her dog in the woods. Our local library had an exhibition a few years ago and I got it as a Birthday present from my sister. So the painting represents sisterly love, she never reads my stuff so I can use that word. The painting also represents the Future for I want to see my daughter grow up and walk our dog in the woods just up the road from the house. Then I’d take a photo and have it underneath the painting. The painter M. Melia sadly died of cancer around the time I bought the painting, so he and his art live on in my home.

Many things are traces of our lives, the scratches on the back door made by the dog or cat. My ballet shoes which we hang on the Christmas  every year,  you cannot imagine me, a 245pound or 110kilo ballet dancer, I was just seeing just how good your imagination is. Though when I visited Shanghai for the first time what was on the bedroom wall, only a picture of a ballerina, my future wife. 

And there’s more, I really was vetted by a ballerina from the Birmingham Royal Ballet. So fact and fiction merge to form the traces of our lives.  The best trace to leave from our lives is laughter, so if when people think of you or speak of you they smile as soon as your name is spoken, then you have lived a good life, laughter cannot be seen but it is like starlight, it brings hope into the world, as does the Epiphany.