Sue Wootton
I’ve always loved the word ‘bubble’. It says what it is: a puff of air in a tense bracket of plosives finished with a liquid gloss. Bubble bubble bubble bubble bubble. Say it five times fast and hear the pot boil – a sound so ancient that it was probably heard by your grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, when she was a little girl. If anyone had asked her about her bubble, she might have assumed the soup had stopped simmering because the fire had gone out. In 2020, though, bubbles have taken on a whole new meaning, and a new social greeting has entered the language: “How’s your bubble?”
How many times a day did we use to say ‘bubble’? Not often, unless we happened to teach swimming. Suddenly it’s the word of the day, the word of the week – heck, ‘bubble’ is probably word of the year already. But it’s not ‘bubble’ as I used to know ‘bubble’. It’s got me thinking about why I love the word ‘bubble’ … I mean, why I love the old word ‘bubble’.
Today was our deadline. It was still dark when we hugged on the driveway. Your embrace felt solid, warm, stable. Within it I felt frail. We don’t know who is more at risk. You, with your chronic night cough. The insufficient protective gear. The leaky protocols. Me, with a relapsing and remitting immunological disease and on the wrong side of fifty. Children are supposed to be okay, but what about our middle daughter, the one with severe allergies, who is taken down for weeks, even by a common cold?
There seem to be more dogs getting walked these days – or are we just doing it all at the same time? Dog walking, I would argue, is important for both physical and mental health. We have been committed dog walkers from graduate school days when we dog-sat a Newfoundland and a Labrador. Our first dog, Taffy, a Welsh terrier, was a present to my Dad on his seventieth birthday in the hope that he would take more walks to help his heart condition. When my Dad’s heart gave out two years later, we took over the naughty and ill-trained dog from my unable-to-cope mother. Taffy returned to my mother five years later – a bit calmer – when we went overseas on study leave. When we came back, we saw how that naughty dog had enhanced my mother’s life. Those walks around her neighbourhood kept her fit and brought her new friends. At home he was great company. There was no way Taffy was coming back to us.
At a time when we are all isolated in our homes, teddy-bear-in- the-window hunts might keep exercising children amused in the street. Dunedin people are getting into the spirit. Our household currently lacks a teddy bear but we’ve put our wooden duck in the window as a tiny effort to relieve tedium. All round us people are engaging in acts of kindness: a wave from the window, a phone call or email to a distant friend, and then the essential workers – particularly those in the health system, providing treatment and care for on-going needs. In the face of relentless bad news, these acts keep us grounded and sane. And some people are truly inventive.