Twelve more hours to San Francisco then a few more to Chicago and on to Albany, New York with the due to arrival time of 11.59 pm Tuesday – close to 24 hours hence. I have just had a couple of those small airplane bottles of Baileys and the nut packs. After dinner and another drink or two and a sleeping pill I should awake as we slide into California for better or worse. Narda is reading her book and does not seem to be affected by her two small airplane bottles of Baileys – maybe she is reading slow… I seem to be slowed down a tad bit though I plan to be slowed down heaps more shortly.

 

We stayed at the Novotel – Ibis complex of hotels in Homebush across from the Sydney Olympic Stadium last night. I did not think I would want to stay at the very place where Leigh died two years ago but when we went there on the 16th of August to do a memorial I knew I needed to stay there before we left. I have not found a focus point on this planet to be with Leigh. Because he is not buried; his ashes were divided between the girl friend, the ‘mother’ and me, he is in many places and at the same in none at all.

 

Graduation yesterday was a relief – something about fourteen years of worry now over. I worried when I started university in 1991 and never stopped until after I had my PhD diploma in hand. My education has always been a difficult and worrisome journey. I seemed to have come unstuck with the learning process back at Shenendehowa High School in 1965; grade ten or eleven (I had failed so many subjects that I was taking ninth grade French for the third year – and managed to get a lower grade in the third year than in the first; tenth grade math for the second year – I got 35 for the final year’s grade after two years of algebra; and a splattering of tenth and eleventh year subjects with band being the only thing. I passed. I got 90% in that course. I played second trombone in the high school band, playing in the occasional concerts as well as stomping through various city streets. I could never master marching and playing at the same time. I had to either be in step and not play or play and not be in step: I could not do both at the same time. Somewhere in eleventh grade, spring of 1965, the whole school thing ended rather disastrously. I was on the track team and at our final meeting – for the local district championship – I had already won two events – whilst running the 440 yard race and being in the lead – a strange, though probably normal thing for a person who did not put on their jock thingy – happened to me right before going around that last bend of the race; and with the grandstand full of high school students yelling – we needed to win this final event to win the day’s meet – I could not continue the race. I tried to make the pesky thing – that had already emerged below my shorts - to stand up but it would not. I ran to the school bus and cried. I was so persecuted at school the next couple of days that I left home for good. I went to Florida then to New Orleans where I would spend a lot of time between 1966 and 1974. I have been saying for years that it was my favourite city and several times over the past couple of years Narda and I looked at visiting there but now it is no longer there. Or at least it is not there in the way I remember it – and even though it will be rebuilt it will be a different version and never quite the same. I think it will become a Disney World New Orleans, being an imitation of its self. Perhaps it will be just the Las Vegas version that will remain – down on the Bayou in the Arizona Desert.

 

Yesterday I graduated with about thirty other PhD types – apparently it is the largest number of us in the history of the University of South Australia. Most everyone was either from Hong Kong or Singapore. A lot of graduating Asians were not the only differences. All the men, and us men were by far the majority, wore white shirts and tie; I wore my new multicolor jumper that Narda bought for me for my birthday. I had scoffed once-brown shoes – that had traveled the world with me over the past few months and before that had taken me through muck and mire for the past year. Everyone else, even the two or three females, had shiny black shoes. We PhD types sat on the stage looking out at the audience. Narda and her family waved to me and I waved back – though I am not sure whether that was a permitted doctorial gesture. There were the usual boring speeches about progressing upward and forward and we can change the world, then it was time for us to parade, one at a time up to get our parchment. I was already out of place, not being Asian, not having a white shirt and tie, not having black shoes. I was in the wrong division – the wrong school. My school, the School of Communication, graduated on Tuesday afternoon – right about now, as I fly over the Pacific, typing this on my laptop, I should be with my school – graduating. I had told them I had to leave a day before the my school’s graduation because I had to be back at work at Albany Academy for Girls – well actually, I was suppose to be back to work a week ago; my supervisor at SUNY is teaching my first two weeks of classes and at Albany Academy for Girls we do not start school until the day I get back but Narda and I miss all the meetings we were suppose to be at – something about me graduating and not being in the country gave me an excuse to prolong our ten-week holiday another couple of weeks. I graduated with the School of Business. Everyone else had trendy degree titles to do with business in Asia like stuff about water quality in Hong Kong and crap like that: “Terrell Neuage, thesis entitled “Conversational Analysis of Charoom Talk’” – blimey it was embarrassing. But now I am Dr. Neuage – though if someone had a broken foot the best I could do would be to direct them to a chatroom that dealt with people with broken feet. I surely do not feel smarter – actually because I am fifty-eight I suppose I am a bit thicker of wit than I was when I started, a mere fourteen years ago when I was a youthful 44.

 

I worried right up to the last moment – I worried that something would go wrong and someone would tell me that there was a mistake and my thesis never did past the mustard and after all who the hell was I to think I could actually get a PhD? I even had one of ‘those dreams’ just the night before. I had to take a written examination and I missed one answer and I was told that I really did very well on the test but unfortunately I could not graduate because I was not smart enough to get all the right answers.

 

I struggled with insecurity for more than a decade doing this schooling stuff. Lesia had told me, and we had been divorce for seven years at the time, at the beginning of my studies, when I first told her that I was going for my BA in literature and journalism that I would never make it because I was not smart enough. We have been divorced for twenty-years and of course I now know everything she ever thought or said was horribly wrong. And of course that she is an ass. I am sure she was right that I was not smart but she had no idea how I peruse my goals. For fourteen years I have written essays, attended lectures and have worried about whether I would make the next assignment. When I finally did finish my BA, four years after starting, at the end of 1994, I convinced myself into believing I could do an Honour’s degree and somehow, even though I struggled and did not get really the highest grades, I barely passed actually, I was accepted. I was amazed when in early 1995 I received a letter saying I was accepted. My Honour’s topic was ‘Graffiti as Text’ to keep in touch with Sacha’s growing interests… at the end of 1995 I submitted it and foolhardily applied to do a Masters degree.  One marker of my thesis gave me a high mark and the other not so high and I graduated with a low – First – Class Honours which was the cut off point to get into a Masters. In 1995 Sacha, then age fourteen, and Leigh, age 11 and I took the bus to Geelong, Victoria and I graduated for my BA. I did not bother to go to my Honours graduation because we could not afford it. To continue my amazement I was accepted into the Masters program and my thesis was ‘the Internet and Literature’. I spent two years on that and in the meantime, along with being a single parent – loving education, I started a BA in Computing Science at Flinders University. I finished my Masters – could not afford to go to graduation – and to end this long paragraph I applied for and was accepted into the University of South Australia’s doctorial program, I spent seven years writing and worrying in two countries doing so many rewrites and changes that at times I totally forgot what I was researching and yesterday I received my diploma. Sacha was there and I had an empty seat for Leigh because I wanted him to know that I had finished and perhaps somewhere in the cosmos he is aware of it.

 

At Homebush I had my page of Leigh to put on the post at the bottom of the fifteenth floor balcony where he departed from. To my surprise there was still the last laminated page I had put up on August 16th. I had assumed someone would have taken it down but three weeks later it was still there. I put up the other one I had brought with me and lit a candle on the pavement. This was about eleven PM Monday and this morning the candle had gone out but most likely only recently because the wax was still hot. I feel good about having stayed where Leigh died because I have arrived at a mindset that I can cope with. Olympic Park is a huge area of stadiums and wide streets, fountains and sculptures that were built for the 2000 Olympics and this time of year it was almost empty of sports people and tourists.

 

I now see the whole park as a memorial to Leigh. It was his dream since the age of ten – to play for Australia and to be a professional baseball player. Leigh worked very hard to achieve his dreams and he played on eight Australian junior teams and made his depute in the seniors at the age of 17 when he played for Australia in the World Cup in Taiwan, the same year he signed with the Los Angles Dodgers. The last time I had seen him play in a major game was when he pitched for South Australia against Victoria at a stadium in Olympic Park across from the Novotel – where he last stayed – in one of those expensive studio rooms that has a spa and lounge and unfortunately had a balcony – on the fifteenth floor. I will someday inquire about putting a bench with a plaque on it ‘Leigh Neuage – Olympian – July 06, 1993 – August 6, 2003’.  We rented a car at the airport last night to go to Homebush Olympic Park to stay at the hotel where Leigh last stayed and before we drove back to the airport to get on the flight on which I am now writing this we drove around Olympic Park – or as I refer to it ‘Leigh Neuage Memorial Park’. Someday I will spread his ashes out on the grounds at the stadium where he had hoped to fulfill his dream of a successful baseball player – but then again he not only was but still is the greatest pitcher I have ever had the privilege to catch the ball from.

 

This is the last entry for this trip from me. Our next trip will be at Albany to Adelaide to Albany via Europe and India (http://www.bloglines.com/blog/trip06) Our return ticket to Adelaide for June 2006, has us going to Frankfurt, Athens, New Delhi, Singapore, Viet Nam and then Adelaide. We will leave Albany mid-June. I realize no one will ever read this but that is fine.

 

NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ Myanmar 2014

Blog updated 19 September 2014  K - 12 technology (updated 17 September 2014). Travel Site (2014) updated 17 September 2014. Videos/Blogs on Youtube, Twitter, Wordpress, Photo albums. Updated 15 Second Street, Round Lake, New York and photos from parent's 1943 wedding as well as Leigh's page. Farmville page updated Thursday, March 17, 2011 5:58 PM. neuage.org updated September 02 2014 10:31 PM     neuage.us updated 17 September 2014 7:21 PM.    Resume updated 17 September 2014        

Blog updated / Integrating Technology Blog 19 September 2014.  also:terrell.neuage.us and/or neuage.me

NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today working on picture poem links starting around "better" (19 September 2014). Picture poems are the digital format of work I did as a street artist in New Orleans in the 1970s, as well as New York City, Honolulu, San Francisco and Adelaide South Australia. .

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