On hearing Yo-Yo Ma with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I was reminded of Melbourne’s strong sense of civic ownership of our resident symphony orchestra. And not a day went by when I wasn’t caught eavesdropping. As I walked on Massachusetts Avenue I overheard snippets about cells that refused to mutate or the latest lecture by Noam Chomsky, and I wanted to know more and join in – just like a young sister tugging at her older sibling.
This was the moment I slowly began to adopt your ways, to talk your talk. I would soon talk about Comm Ave instead of Commonwealth Avenue. I would take the book, the newspaper or the Kindle and, like it seemed every other Bostonian, while away the hours. And like every other Bostonian, I would soon be jogging along the Charles River. Yes, we were becoming sisters. But in that longer passing, when our acquaintance developed beyond the seeing and the doing, I also learnt your hidden narratives, those traits I could only discover by being with you. I would learn the parts of you that were not very much like myself.
You were more reserved than I. You carried yourself with a certain stillness that I could not emulate. Where I was prone to the extrovert, you were insular – you seemed to carry your life like a book whose story unfolds in a measured, discreet manner, whereas the book of my daily life seemed to be more like a tell-all. I was more the larrikin, and while I was more prone to exaggeration, yours was a tempered language.
You turned off your lights earlier of an evening, but there was always the mystery of what would be continued in a doorway, a theatre or in a brownstone apartment. It might have been a single antique light or perhaps what was left on a step outside the home that seemed to suggest that it would take time to unwrap you.
As time drew to departure, I reminded myself of the uncanny ease when we met. There was no strangeness in our meeting. There was no map – I remembered a kind of embrace as if we already shared a secret that only sisters tell each other.
Xenia Hanusiak is the recipient of the 2011 Hugh Rogers Melbourne-Boston Fellowship, which aims to enhance Melbourne and Boston’s reputations as centres of knowledge excellence and to strengthen international relationships in medicine, the arts and education.
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