Naomi Bulger: messages in bottles

Not all wines have Magic. Most are just ordinary, alcoholic beverages, their only magic being perhaps a sublime nose, or spice on the tongue, or their capacity to transform the personalities of the drinkers, whether for better or for worse.

Which wines hold real Magic? There is no great formula to answer this question. Only an eye trained to spot the signs, or a nose that knows, so to speak. The more Magic wine you drink, the better you will learn to recognise a true drop when you see (and taste) it, and the more powerful your own Magic will become.

Certainly, our modern world and perhaps our modern winemaking techniques have not been good to Magic. The older the wine, and the older the vine, the more likely you are to find Magic. Of course, age is by no means a guarantee. There are plenty of vinegar wines and rotten vines to whom age has not been kind. Likewise, I have found Magic in as young a wine as a 2010 Pinot Grigio from South Australia. That was a pleasant surprise, I can tell you.

This is no exact science. When you do uncover the Magic, and drink the potion, there’s no telling what it might do to you. A common theory is that Magic wine will give you longevity, an ability to last and improve with age just like the best wines. This has led some to believe that the ultimate wine – if it were ever uncovered – could bestow eternal life. I have drunk two bottles and one glass of Magic wine in my life, and my head is liberally speckled with coarse, grey hairs among the black ones. Draw your own conclusions.

The first Magic wine I imbued was the aforementioned 2010 South Australian Pinot Grigio. An entire bottle, consumed over two nights. 

The Magic: first, music. As I sipped I caught snatches of Italian maestro Constanzo Spadaro, his notes building and swelling to the rhythm of tarantella danced by scores of feet, the swish and swirling of coloured skirts… 

Next, smell. Salt water. Flowers, fragrant in the summer heat, tumbling through trellises above stone walls. And glorious, abundant, heady Neapolitan food: tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes, powerful cheeses, and the many fruits of the Tyrrhenian Sea, anchovies being uppermost and dominant in my nostrils. 

I breathed slowly, eyes closed, drinking in the tiny Isle of Capri where, as sure as I am writing this now, the wine had taken me. Everywhere around me the music still swirled, feet danced, Island filled my senses, and the Magic fizzled and snapped like a fist-full of New Year sparklers all lit at once. 

When I opened my eyes and sipped again, I was on a narrow pathway between two stone walls, overhung on one side with boganvillea and, on the other, with three dogs that had thrust their heads between the railings of an ornate and rusting, iron fence, and were yapping at me for all they were worth. Probably, they were not used to witnessing Australians materialise out of nowhere on the pathway in front of their house. 

Out of my sight, further up the pathway somewhere at the top of the hill beyond the white and yellow villas and churches and ruins, I could still hear music: Constanzo Spadaro’s troupe, dancing. 

So this wine’s Magic was teleportation. Specifically, teleportation to Capri, Italy, late in the August of 1939. Even after the bottle of Pinot Grigio was finished, I had enough Magic to transport back to Capri and that late, hot, summer of 1939, at will, for a good three months before it had all faded out of my bloodstream. I took as much advantage as I could, revisiting whenever I had a day off to explore the pathways, taste the tomatoes, and drink in the music. 

Of course it’s not easy to explain the sensation of being teleported across oceans and backward through time, and I’m aware I’m not doing a very precise job of it. The actual journey was almost always as I have described it: snatches of Spadaro’s tarantella, then salt water on the breeze, ripe tomatoes, always accompanied by the fiery sizzle of Magic, and before I knew it I was there. 

But once physically on Capri, my experience of the Magic gets harder to quantify. All my senses were alive. I could hear, smell, touch, taste and see, and I did as much of each as I possibly could. But others could not know me. I wasn’t a ghost. I couldn’t walk through walls (a painful discovery, made on my second visit) and, if I knocked into someone, they would just as surely stumble and spill their wine as you’d expect. If I walked uphill on a narrow pathway and a crowd came downhill toward me, they’d make way just as though I was any other stranger met on a path. 

Or perhaps a better way of putting it is that they made way for me as though I was a plinth or a fountain or even a pothole in their path. Nobody acknowledged me, spoke to me, looked me in the eye. I was not invisible, but I was unseen. Only the animals seemed to recognise me, dogs invariably barking, and stray cats purring against my ankles. Cats admire Magic.

Slowly, over time, my Magic waned, and it grew increasingly difficult to find my way back to Capri. Of course, I had purchased several cases of the Pinot Grigio, but to my dismay I could not find more Magic in any of the other bottles. Eventually, only two of my senses, hearing and smell, remained magically connected to Capri, August 1939. To this day, if I listen carefully, I can still hear Spadaro’s joyful folk music ringing, and if I choose to I can smell anchovies and ripe tomatoes anywhere I go. And there is always the memory of a jagged harbour hugging an aquamarine and salty sea. But that is all I have left of that particular wine’s Magic. 

This was how it worked. Magic is not a reliable science. 

We had Em up this weekend, something that never fails to make us happy. We miss our beautiful girl so much, and the house seems just that much quieter (not in a good way) after she leaves. 

Also, my hair has never had so much attention! I am the world's oldest living doll. 

To ease my lonely heart now that she has gone, I am munching on my candy necklace, a present from Em today after I told her I had loved these things when I was little. She has a big heart. 

I hid a giant, sprinkles-covered, chocolate "E" in her bag that she will discover when she gets home. 

What would you do if you found a mystery in your mailbox? 

Where would the mystery take you? Just how powerful is the power of storytelling? Is your world real? Or do you only see the shadows of real, reflected on the walls of a cave? What are the rules to a game of marbles? 

Find answers (in just two minutes) here: 

Not the answers you were looking for? All will be revealed here. Promise!

There's a soundtrack to this blog post, a track called 'Pietman' by Nadia Ackerman, from her album The Circus is Back in Town. I suggest you hit "play" now, and I'll explain as I go along. 

(Sounds like a Little Long Playing Record, doesn't it. Turn the page when Tinkerbell rings her little bell. Boy am I showing my age. But I digress. Click "play" when you're ready and we'll continue.) 

'Pietman' is a true migrant's story, and a beautiful tribute to Nadia's father, the Pietman of the song (Pietman is Afrikaans for Peter). He left South Africa as a young man and travelled to Australia, where he worked three jobs until he had saved enough to bring over his wife and three small children. 

Nadia lost her dad far too early, a tragedy she carries with her every day, and the first time I heard 'Pietman' (live, at a venue in New York's East Village), it caught in my throat. I felt the loss, the sadness, the pride in her father and the joy of simple memories. I hope you do, too. 

It's 19 years since Nadia's dad passed and, in memory of him, she is offering 'Pietman' as a free download throughout June 2011. I highly recommend you take her up on this. 

All this put me in mind of my own dad Paul (hence the title of this blog), and how much he means to me. It doesn't matter how old I get, my dad is always there for me with love, humour, and wise counsel (as is my mother, for that matter, but that's for another blog post. This one is about dads). 

So today, randomly and by no means exclusively, I want to list some of the things I love about my dad: 

• I love that he and my husband text each other every other night and play silly mind games with each other, like they are BFFs
• I love that he cares for me like I'm still his little girl, while respecting my independence and intelligence
• I love that he and I fixed up a bike together for my little brother's birthday when I was about nine, and that I got to say "I made the bike" even though I did precisely nothing, except get in the way
• I love that my father would always pretend not to love the pets in our family but, when he thought we weren't looking, he would give them cuddles and treats 
• I love that for the first 12 years of my life, I thought there was a song called "Oh-ho me o-ho" because it echoed through the house every morning as my father sang in the shower (this was actually his personal interpretation of "O sole mio")
• I love that, despite zilch in previous experience as a builder - my father was a social worker - he built a dream house in the country for us to live in 
• I love that I can go to him for advice, whether it's personal, business or anything else, and he's always smart and always loving 
• I love that he makes nearly every family get-together involve a belly-laugh 
• I love how wonderful he is to my mother, that the two of them set a ridiculously high standard for marital bliss, and the absolutely brilliant childhood that gave me 
• I love that when I do stupid, crazy, impulsive things, he says "I trust you"
• I love that he pretends to like my book Airmail and tells me he is proud of me, even though I know it is the polar opposite of his cup of tea
• I love that French is the language he grew up with, but he speaks it with such a broad Aussie accent that he failed it at school and most of the relatives can't understand more than one in three words he says 
• I love that he models the following of crazy dreams: from family, to life without electricity, to worm farming, to photography and publishing 
• I love that he has to wear the right outfit for every activity. My dad has a fruit-tree pruning outfit, a block splitting outfit, a stamp collecting outfit and many, many more 
• I love that he has obsessions, not hobbies (my mother's phrasing), because I am the same
• I love that when my horse Starbrow died... Starbrow, who had been in my family for more than 20 years and, if I sat in the paddock and crossed my legs, would go to sleep with his head in my lap... I love that when my old horse died, my father's sobs were as ragged as mine

I'm brimming over with patriotic pride this week, following reviews of Airmail appearing in two wonderful Aussie publications. 

The first is a review in my absolute favourite street press, Spitpress magazine. They say Airmail is "a philosophical cupcake; perfect to enjoy in one go with a cup of tea on a rainy afternoon," and that it "will leave its footprints in your mind for days." Poetry! 

If you live in Sydney, you can pick up a copy of Spitpress all over town, and I highly recommend you do. Issue 8 (called 'Wired') is out now, and Airmail's starring role is on page 9. For everyone else, despair not. You can read Spitpress online here. 

In addition to Airmail, you'll find Cleptoclectics, Frankie magazine editor Jo Walker, Brendan Maclean, Jack Carty’s tour diary from up north, Tunes for Change, Crash Test Drama, The Smallest Gig, Dry July, Photographer Xiaohan Shen, and artist Jilly Cooper AKA Lisa Bowen.

But wait, there's more!

While I was still swinging high on Spitpress' kind words (and before I'd even had time to indulge my sudden desire for cupcakes), fellow Sydneysider Jayne Fordham of 'The Australian Bookshelf' posted her own review of Airmail online.

Jayne's review focused on the characters in Airmail, and I really enjoyed what she had to say. In Jayne's take on Airmail, Anouk is "neurotic and entertaining." GL Solomon’s "rigid life becomes malleable."

Jayne concludes, "The author has created very likeable characters who grow and learn despite the length and will leave you quite satisfied. If you would like a quick quirky read, then Airmail by Australian author Naomi Bulger, is an entertaining read."

You can read the full review here, and if you live in Australia, don't forget to enter her competition to win one of two copies of Airmail. 

This is a game we used to play when I was little.* 

One person would sit on a kitchen chair, in the middle of the room. Four of us would surround her, two at her shoulders and two at her knees, and using only our index fingers (in the poor kid's armpits and under her knees), we'd try to lift her. 

Generally the response was "Ow! My armpits!" and a couple of raised knees, but a leaden derriere resolutely on the chair. 

Then we would begin the magic ritual. 

It wasn't complicated. We'd place our hands on the seated girl's head, one hand on top of the other like we were making a pact. 

We'd close our eyes, and focus on the magic. 

After a while, we'd quickly remove our hands and try lifting her again, still using only our index fingers.

This ritual made our seated girl completely weightless. Inevitably, she would soar into the air, often losing contact with us altogether in her flight (although this generally created mild panic at the "catch her before she crashes down onto a wooden chair" phase of the game).

I loved this game. We played it at every slumber party. It was equally as fun being one of the 'lifters' as it was being momentarily weightless, sailing into the family-room air. 

Where does the magic come from? 

I looked this game up on Wikipedia, and folks had put in their five cents worth with three different theories: 

1. It's easy to lift heavy weight when it is evenly distributed. The reason things got so much easier the second time around was because we were more focused, and more 'in sync' with each other
   
2. The magic ritual we performed was used to trick our minds into believing the person was weightless. The body still reacts to the command from the brain, but the brain perceives things differently
   
3. This is a self fulfilling prophecy. The first time, we know the girl will be too heavy to lift with a fingertip, so we subconsciously don't try very hard. The second time, we believe the ritual has given us power, so we exert enough effort to lift her
   

At the time, us kids postulated that the downward motion (of placing our hands on the girl's head) was reversed when we then lifted her, like two magnets pushing away from each other. But we didn't postulate all that hard. We preferred to believe in magic.  

The truth is I don't know how this trick works. And I don't overly care. I still prefer to believe in magic.

For a little while, I had power in my fingertips. For miniature moments, I could fly. That, my friends, is the magic of childhood. I'll keep it, thank you. 


*The name comes from another version of the game, in which the person in the middle would lie down rather than sit in a chair, and pretend to be dead. It was 18th Century planking.

Exeter, Rhode Island, USA: windswept and remote. As climate and vegetation go, this is about as far from Sookie Stackhouse's steamy Bon Temps, Louisiana, as it's possible for you to get.

But Exeter and Bon Temps have more than one thing in common. They are both beautiful and strange American wildernesses. In the backwaters of Exeter, you can still encounter deep forests, dirt roads, old folks playing checkers in the dust outside the corner store, and folklore that is thick with vampires, ghosts and witches. Just like Bon Temps, Exeter is a tiny rural community, where more than one family has lived for many a generation.

And the two towns have something else in common: they are both home to vampires. The key, however, is that neither Exeter nor its vampires are fictitious. To a point.

Meet Exeter local Mercy Brown. She is young, sweet, and pretty. Like many of her friends, she spends her afternoons carefully stitching together a blue, patchwork coverlet, and her evenings dreaming of being a good wife and mother. 

Spent, I should say. When she was 19, Mercy contracted tuberculosis, known as the consumption. She lost weight and suffered terribly from fever and fatigue. She began coughing up blood. Poor Mercy knew what to expect, her sister and mother had already died of the same disease. 

Tuberculosis ended Mercy's first life in the depth of winter, on 17 January, 1892. Her grieving father had her body placed in the crypt at the cemetery behind Chestnut Hill Baptist Church, to wait until the earth thawed before he could bury her body in the ground.

But according to the good people of Exeter, Mercy did not rest. Soon after her death, neighbours reported seeing her walking about town. 

Then Mercy's brother Edwin fell ill with the same disease. 

Many of the townsfolk began muttering. It was not tuberculosis but ‘vampirism’ that was killing the Brown family, they speculated. In 18th and 19th century Rhode Island, vampires preferred to kill in the family, sometimes taking the lives of one sibling after another until all were dead.

I visited Mercy on a sweltering August afternoon two years ago. Her sun-filled cemetery was bordered on both sides by centuries-old dry-stone walls, a feature of New England landscapes that dates back to the region’s pre Civil War plantations. 

At first look, her grave differed from those around it only by the heavy metal brace that secured her headstone to the ground – a necessary security to protect Mercy from her myriad ‘fans’ – and the flowers and gifts that, more than a hundred years after her final passing, were a touching sign that Mercy was still remembered. 

But it was only when I found the vine-covered stone crypt at the edge of the graveyard, and a small stone with a dark history nearby, that Mercy’s grisly story, made famous by a Providence Journal report in 1892, felt real.

Providence Journal, March 18, 1892. Front page: 

"During the few weeks past, Mr. Brown has been besieged on all sides by a number of people who expressed implicit faith in the old theory that by some unexplained and unreasonable way in some part of the deceased relative’s body live flesh and blood might be found, which is supposed to feed upon the living who are in feeble health.

"Mr. Brown, having no confidence in the old-time theory, and also getting no encouragement from the medical fraternity, did not yield to their importunities until yesterday afternoon, when an investigation was held under the direction of Harold Metcalf, M.D., of Wickford."

Mercy's neighbours, it transpired, believed she was a vampire, feeding upon her family members. With Dr Metcalf in attendance, they removed Mercy from the crypt and cut her open. 

To their horror it appeared that Mercy’s body had moved in her coffin. Moreover, her body was not as deteriorated as they expected, and she had unusual colour in her cheeks. Dr Metcalf examined Mercy’s heart and liver. Her heart, when cut open, still retained fresh, red blood. 

Mercy was not the first vampire case in Rhode Island, a State which by then was rumoured to be the vampire capital of America, and the locals knew what to do. Let me prepare you, this is horrific. And true. 

They cut out Mercy's heart and burned it on a nearby rock, an action they believed would prevent her from walking again. 

As if that were not grisly enough, they saved the ashes of Mercy’s heart, mixed them with water, and gave them to her ailing brother Edwin to drink. Drinking the ashes of a vampire’s heart was supposed to cure their victims. Edwin died two months later.

My journey into Exeter and nearby Foster (home of another Rhode Island vampire) to visit Mercy was a surreal drive. 

The deeper I went into ‘Old Rhode Island’, the further I felt from reality. Here, a church sign boasted of the ghosts that haunted its nearby graveyard. There, a 10-metre high wooden chair was built and left in a field. And along the way, the road wound through vast tracts of forest, and lakes like glass that the tourist brochures were yet to discover.

I stumbled across the aptly named ‘Middle of Nowhere Diner’, a welcome haven in the wilderness, on the highway through Exeter. A row of stools nailed to the floor lined the counter, while wooden tables and chairs were crammed into the main restaurant and a kind of annex that was decorated with fruit wallpaper and looked, as someone said, “straight out of grandma’s kitchen.” 

Or a slightly more kitch version of Sam Merlotte's bar. I ordered fish ‘n chips and ate them on a seat out the back under the trees, and made friends with the 10 or so bikers who pulled up at the diner while I was there and asked if they could feed my dog.

I left Rhode Island after two weeks with more questions than I'd had at the start. I'd visited the resting places of several ‘girl-vampires’. Victims, I believe, of a society trying to confront the spread of a disease that was both selective and deadly.

Poor Mercy. 

But while I left with a sense of unease, there was also wonder. Rhode Island can be taken both ways, just like the chilling – or loving – inscription on the 1889 tombstone of yet another of its abused vampires, Nelly Vaughn of West Greenwich, who died at 19: 

“I am waiting and watching for you.”

Embarrassing admission: I am addicted to the Sookie Stackhouse novels. 

This did not start at Book 1, with which I was nonplussed. "Pshaw," said I, nose in the air, "this be too juvenile a style for moi." Instead, I stuck to the TV series, True Blood, that was inspired by the books. 

But everywhere I turned, online and offline, I was being told "Sookie will win you over, Sookie will win you over." I began to wonder if I may have been indulging in a teensy bit of literary snobbery (No! Could it be?), so when a friend offered to lend me the True Blood Omnibus (the first three books), I figured I'd have a go. 

Within three days, I'd read all three books. After another generous loan, the next two books were very quickly read. Not able to wait until I met up with my friend again (sorry, Ruby!) I made a trip to my local Borders bookstore, during the 50 percent off sale before it closed. 

I purchased Book ELEVEN at the airport on Monday morning and, thanks to some lengthy flight delays, finished it that same night. I now wish to urge Ms Charlaine Harris to hurry up and finish the next one. While I'm at it, I'd also like to take the opportunity to state that I am most definitely of the Team Eric persuasion, and hope she will bear this in mind as she writes. 

(Interesting fact gleaned in literature classes: when Charles Dickens wrote The Old Curiosity Shop in instalments, he was inundated with letters imploring him not to kill off Little Nell. It didn't work then, but this reader is hoping Ms Harris will be more open to a heartfelt plea.)

So I have my friend Ruby and the lovely ladies of the Book Lover's Hideaway group on Goodreads to thank for slapping me out of my snobbery, encouraging me to try a new genre, and unintentionally giving me permission to get lost in what amounts to pure entertainment. 

Most often, my reading choices are like fine dining. I want something clever, something unique, something that challenges me to think differently or face difficult issues, or transports me to a depth of emotion or experience that I could never have conjured in my own imagination. 

There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but my foray into Sookie's world has been like sinking my teeth into a spicy meatball pizza at Arturo's, and washing it down with a bottle of rough chianti, after a year-long diet of fois gras and alpine riesling. Lip-smackingly good! 

ps. I am so inspired by Sookie that I will shortly blog about my own experiences hunting down the REAL vampires of America. Stay tuned...