Free Love at the Speed of Email by Lisa McKay Page B

in a bookstore. Or set it in an airport.
    I hadn’t written a single word.

 
 
    Canberra,
Australia

 
 
    Perhaps one of the reasons I got so stuck in Hawaii when
asked to write about home is that my images of what home should be are so firmly anchored in place. But how can you have a
firm sense of a place as home when you’ve moved a dozen times and your longest
stint in any single city was from age one to seven? I can barely even remember
that house in Canberra.
    There was a giant dog that lived next door, some sort of
Great Dane mix. It was as big as a small horse, and I was both fascinated and
terrified by its majestic, seemingly placid presence.
    A bird flew into the kitchen window one day with a
tremendous bang and broke its neck. We buried the limp still-warm body in the
garden in a shoe box and marked the grave with a cross made out of popsicle sticks.
    I shared a bedroom with my little sister. There was a foam
couch between our beds that we used as a bridge for silent post-bedtime
acrobatics. Michelle fell one night and took a chunk out of her eyebrow on the
metal frame of her bed. Blood fountained . Mum and Dad
were not impressed. That was the end of our late-night acrobatics.
    I find it a little disturbing that the only clear memories I
have of my first real home in Canberra were apparently imprinted there by fear,
death, or injury. The details of happiness, it seems, take longer to settle in.

 
 
    Los
Angeles, USA

 
 
    I asked my sister and brother about this shortly after I
moved to Los Angeles. Through part happy accident and part good
trans-continental schedule coordination, they both managed to visit L.A. on the
same weekend. New to L.A. myself at that stage, I cast around for something
cool for the three of us to do and settled on the Huntington Gardens.
    That Saturday we took a picnic blanket and wandered around
those green and manicured acres – through the rose garden, past the prickly and
bulbous cacti, and down a long shady pathway that wound through a stand of
bamboo. At the very bottom of the park, past a pond jammed with lilies, we
found what we were looking for: the Australian section.
    We spread our picnic blanket on the grass under the gum
trees and lay down. Pale bark hung off the trunks in papery sheets, and, above,
dry gunmetal leaves rustled in the breeze. I took a deep breath, searching for
the eucalyptus signature, menthol.
    I can’t remember which of the three of us suggested calling
Mum and Dad, but it was probably Michelle. Michelle tends to be the one who
remembers things like the fact that it would warm the cockles of our parents’
peripatetic little hearts to know that we were all together in the Australian
section of the Hungtington Gardens.
    “We can’t call the parentals ,”
Matt said. “We only have a mobile phone.”
    “We can,” Michelle and I said at the same time and then
looked at each other and laughed.
    “I’ve got Mum and Dad’s calling-card number memorized,” I
said proudly, since memorizing any string of digits is a noteworthy achievement
for me.
    “Me, too,” Michelle said.
    Matt did not give us the applause I thought was warranted.
    “Are you two still using Mum and Dad’s calling card?” he asked.
    “What?” I said. “Mum and Dad don’t care, as long as we also
use it to call them.”
    Matt looked at me in silence, with eyes narrowed and just
the merest contemplative curl to his lips. Matt is very good at communicating
in silence. This particular silence said something like “Don’t you think, my
dear sister, that perhaps it’s time you got your own international calling
card?”
    I answered him out loud.
    “Aren’t Mum and Dad still paying for your car registration
and insurance?”
    Matt’s wide grin appeared with all the sweet suddenness of
the sun coming out from behind clouds.
    “That’s my tax for staying in Australia,” he said. “With you two both gone, they’re pretty happy to have one of us still