No Regrets

"In the middle, in the middle, in the middle of a dream
I lost my shirt, I pawned my rings
I've done all the dumb things..."
Paul Kelly

By Anna Warwick

I have done some dumb things in my life. I try not to foster regret, since there's no way to change the past.

Even if I could travel through time, I don't think I would want to. Maybe if I were the only time traveller things could work out - I'd tweak a few things here and there without altering the course of History.

Maybe I would go back to my Grandma's bedside as she lay dying on the closing night of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games... only because I stroked her hair and whispered that I wouldn't leave her. But I did leave her. And the next morning at 6am Mum got the call. I loved my Grandmother, Jean. She was kind of a rock for me.

I was explaining this to my friend Natasha today as we walked around the cliffs from Bondi to Bronte. The days are dazzlingly bright and warm in the middle right now, despite it being winter, and the water is crystal clear and icy blue to the sandy bottom. I was telling Tash that I think every child needs a refuge of some kind where they can take a break from the business of growing up. I was suggesting that she could be a rock, and that her home could be a peaceful refuge for the niece she adores and worries about.

I told Tash that no matter what was going on in my troubled teenage life, I could visit Grandma Jean after school and we would just sit together eating mini mars bars and watching her old TV. We'd have a Meals on Wheels frozen dinner or something she'd overcooked, and watch more TV.

Grandma didn't have the patience of a saint in those days but nor did she grill me, nag me, question me or scold me, confide in me, test me or correct me. I didn't ask her anything much either - not in those days. She went to sleep in one of the two single beds in her own bedroom, where she snored the night away. I used to go into her bathroom and put on her ancient Oil of Olay and Four Seven Eleven eau de Cologne.

Then I'd go to bed in the spare bedroom I'd slept in, from time to time, since I was a child. There was an enormous bucket of one and two cent pieces in there from Grandma's endless bridge triumphs (this bucket had once held mythical status among all eight of her grandchildren), and there were Grandpa’s paintings of masted ships caught in violent storms on the walls. So many Aussies of that generation seemed to have those scary paintings – in homage to the precarious migrations of ancestors, perhaps? On my own walls - my adult walls - are paintings of white yachts on a peaceful blue Sydney Harbour. I find it hard to imagine not being able to fly across the world in planes...

One afternoon Grandma took from her cupboard a cardboard box full of jewellery - some costume beads, some valuable pieces from her trips to Japan and Europe, or from Grandpa. She gave me a huge blue square cut topaz ring set in lary yellow gold. I loved it despite the unfashionable knuckle-duster proportions, and the fact that it didn't fit.

But a year or so after she died, when I was broke and desperate and about to hop on a plane to China, I took the ring to a jewellers to be "valued". I left it there. When I came back to Australia the jewellery store was gone - buried, I presumed, under the huge new Westfield. I was angry - why hadn't they called? But it was my fault, of course.

I regretted it. The fact I had even considered something so terrible as pawning that ring, has gnawed at the back of my mind ever since. I "talked" to Grandma about it. I even cried over it.

Which seems rather silly now, because I never even tried to track it down - I had simply given it up for lost, certain that the jeweller would have sold it for bottom dollar before they closed. But when I walked past the information desk at Westfield today, a little voice told me to ask about that disappearing jeweller.

So I waited quietly for the Portuguese girl behind the desk to get off the phone to her boyfriend, and asked her whether there was any way of finding out where the store had gone. She made a call... the jewellers had moved just downstairs. I rushed down the escalator and nervously squinted around at all the shop signs as I was only wearing one contact lens.

I turned the corner - dodging another Portuguese/Columbian/Brazilian/Spanish girl who was offering me a squirt of sea salt hand moisturiser. There it was, a tiny store with a black marble front and white lit windows displaying sparkling goodies, none of which were shaped like my ring. I went in and approached the middle aged woman with a brown bob, "Excuse me. This may sound ridiculous..." I told her my story, "it's probably worth nothing... it's just a piece of costume jewellery, but..."

Finding no sign of my name on the computer, the woman opened the cupboard and took out one of two huge cardboard boxes. Inside were dozens of sealed envelopes. "It might be in here. We put everything older than five years into the archives" she explained. I began to hope.
Sure enough, a handwritten ledger revealed my name and old home phone number. I started to snivel. The woman looked at me in surprise as a tear popped out. "It's my grandmother's ring..." I explained, I thought I'd never see it again."
"We never throw anything away."
"Oh, you're an angel!"
I watched her leafing through the envelopes... no, no, no... maybe it was gone after all. "Gosh, so many people left their stuff behind..."
"Yes, mostly watches. They forget. Ah!"

She pulled out a fat envelope and ripped it open. The ridiculously bright blue ring fell out, good as new.
"It was worth $600 and that was seven years ago..." the lady shrugged as she read the back of the envelope.
"I don't care how much it's worth, I will never let it go again. You are a darling!" I kissed her and hugged her and left the shop beaming from ear to ear, blinking back more tears.

This time I accepted the moisturiser from the sea salt lady. I glided up the escalator and then slapped my ring-adorned, moisturised hand down upon the information desk, startling the Portuguese girl so her brown eyes opened very wide.
"Look!" I said, "I left this ring at that jeweller's seven years ago... and they still had it!"
"Really?" the girl smile politely, "that's lucky."
"Yes, they are such nice people! Thankyou so much for helping me find them."

No - I don't want to go back in time. I can live with my past - even the mis-spent naughty, naughty naughties - because, even if I did return to good old 2009 to carry on my merry way, monkeys off back, chips off shoulders and friends and loved ones none the wiser - there's no guarantee I would return to this very moment, exactly the way it is... Sitting here in this room in Mum's old panda dressing gown with these huge paintings of Sydney Harbour on the walls and a topaz ring worth a good few hundred bucks sliding around on my pointer finger.

I may have left my Grandma but, as it turns out, she never left me.