Day 36: Queensland and a Friend I’ve Never Met

December 20, 2010

Byron Bay lives in a world of its own. A crisscross of commercial streets makes up its centre. At the top of the cross is a park on the Pacific Ocean where barely clad young people turn bronze and flaunt their beautiful bodies. There’s nothing very practical about the shops, except the chemist and a post office tucked behind an organic health food café and store. All are there to serve the image this town thrives on – an alternative, left-wing, new age hot spot of the east coast. The gods and goddesses of youth reign here where sensuality spills onto the streets in colorful, slinky clothes, promises of virility through a panoply of bodywork, health elixirs and eastern exercise arts, and a decadent array of gourmet foods, which fly in the face of the slim-is-beautiful ethos of the place.

We order coffees at the Byronian Café and grab an outdoor table to read the local paper and people watch. There’s an intriguing display of attempts to conform to the Byron look walking up and down the streets – some extreme, like the lusty young lady in a bikini top and low-slung sarong with jewels pierced in any available body nook; others eccentric, like the scruffy unshaven poet with a mane of grey hair falling over his face as he scribbles words in a journal at the table next to us. The town is a magnet for artists, writers, musicians, social misfits and other defectors from mainstream society.

An hour later we’re crossing the Queensland border. The day is brilliantly sunny and pleasantly warm. The Gold Coast lives up to its promises with hi-rise apartments blocking views of the sea and a swash of entertainment options sure to appease cranky young ones and their frazzled parents – Movie World, Underwater World, Sea World, Dream World – even a Honeybee World! We skirt the edge of Brisbane heading inland towards Ipswich, on a mission to visit a friend I’ve never met.

Barbara and I got paired up for a writing assignment in early 2009. We had both enrolled in Swinburne University’s on-line post-graduate writing course. As mature-aged women with a fair amount of writing experience, it didn’t take long before we were applying our middle-aged cynicism to a brusque critique of the course. Unlike our younger comrades, we weren’t hoodwinked by the fact that the course coordinator, a woman roughly our age, was enjoying her tenure in the Faculty of Higher Education by exerting as little effort as possible in curriculum design. The unit material we were studying was fraught with proofreading errors and the content was not dissimilar to that which I taught in high school English classes. And she was an uninspiring and narcissistic writer. We both registered our protest by withdrawing – me with a $6000 debt and no degree.

But what clinched our on-line friendship was not the solidarity of bagging a badly constructed course but rather Scrabble. “Anyone up for a Scrabble game?” Barbara wrote in one of our early on-line Discussion Forums. “If so, meet me on Facebook.” I’m a sucker for word games and can spend hours playing Scrabble and Upwords with my mom when we visit. “What’s Facebook?” I wrote back.

This was early 2009. Little did I know the phenomenon of Facebook was breaking like a tsunami through a generation of Baby Boomers keen to tally up a lifetime of friends. Within two weeks I had over 50 friends and marveled at how my Gen X and Y friends managed to clock up hundreds, some nearly a thousand. How can a 20 year old do that?

Still, to this day I stand by my resolve that the only reason I joined Facebook was to play Scrabble – and Wordscraper, a modern version with more cut-throat scoring potential. While I have four or five Wordscraper games going at any given time (with American friends and family), it’s with Barbara that I’ve maintained a record number of consecutive Scrabble games, going on two years now. And we’ve never met.

I knew she lived in Queensland, in a funny named town somewhere near Brisbane. I never imagined myself anywhere near where she lived, but today we find ourselves on a Brisbane motorway following signs to Ispwich. Barbara has been following this blog and I’d been in touch with her several times while we were deciding whether or not to go north to get her opinion on traveling in Queensland this time of year. She welcomed us to stop by if we decided to head north.

On-line relationships are as common as brown bread these days. But I’d never experienced one before. It strikes me as odd how easily one can fall into a familiarity and ease with someone on the internet, merely through the vehicle of the written word. Maybe because we’re writers it comes easily for Barbara and me. Perhaps also as writers, we have a private persona preferably kept hidden behind the sheen of our well-tended words. I was keen to know whether she was who I had come to imagine her to be.

What goes through our heads when first we lay eyes on each other? “You look just like your pictures,” she says as she ushers us in through the kitchen door. She is more attractive than hers. There was a quirkiness in her I knew from her writing -- an offbeat sense of humor that made her stories a delightful read. Now, in person, I see that it is there also in her clothes, her furnishings and the purple streak on the right side of her silver hair – “my Christmas hair” she calls it.

I realize there is much I don’t know about her, other than that she’s a terrific writer and a great Scrabble player. We soon discover she has a daughter, Prue, who’s only just arrived from Adelaide today, on sabbatical from her job as a professor of American History at Flinders University. They have a lively wit that springs back and forth between them and is nice to see between a mother and daughter.

The four of us spend an hour on her front verandah drinking coffee and chatting. How odd it is to meet someone I’ve known, albeit in a very limited way, for nearly two years. It leaves me feeling mildly disoriented, struggling to marry the imagined with the real in my impressions of her.