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the promise of the approaching spring. I finished the song, exhaled
a mighty breath, and rushed to put my jacket on. I was going to visit
my grandfather to show him what I had created.
It always struck me how everything seemed larger in scale in the
city. As I stopped my black Jeep at the corner of Collins Street and
William Street, I glanced up at the mighty skyscrapers with
tenderness in my heart. The city has always made me feel as if
anything was possible, and I admired their colossal figures around
me as the generations before me had surely done, with hopeful eyes.
Everyone in the city had something to do, somewhere to go,
someone to be. Women and men in suits bustled about purposefully
and you could hear the bells of trams, the zooming of cars and faint
conversations, lost in all the noise. The green light appeared in
front of me and I pushed my accelerator pedal down.
Another red light stopped me at the Warrigal Road exit off the
Monash freeway. This time there were no skyscrapers, just a wide
road, and some houses and trees. I had arrived in suburbia, the
place that many migrant workers had return to after a long day’s
work, to rest and to reap the rewards of their hard work. I glanced
around at the figures beside me in their cars. To my left, an elderly
man sat in the driver’s seat wearing a grey cloth cap with a younger
female passenger. I imagined the conversations they could be
having. I imagined their names and that they were father and
daughter. I imagined the girl’s doubt in her father’s ability to drive
her safely. I imagined that when she would try to instruct him, he
would quickly remind her that he had been driving longer than she
had been breathing. The light turned green again and I drove on,
barely ten minutes away from showing my grandfather my
composition. He would be pleased with me. Surely.
As I drove into his driveway, a wave of hesitation swept through
my mind. Is my song sad enough? Does it truly capture the struggle
that my grandfather endured? One last play of the song erased any
doubt and I stepped out into the cold air towards his front door.
Nono built this house himself. Well, that’s what dad always told
me. It was a weathered yet sturdy house of timber and red brick,
encircled by a white picket fence. I knocked on the front door and
was soon welcomed by the same thing, a weathered yet sturdy old
man, with a smile of white and gold. “Donatello! Come stai?” My
friends called me Don but my grandfather insisted on referring to
Minor Major
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