10. Leigh’s first ride was in a Rolls

Christmas  1984 Clifton Park , New York  with father and brother children in Australia

 I closed the tofu factory and went to see my parents and brother in New York. I spent Christmas 1984 in Clifton Park and it was the last year I would have Christmas with my brother, mother, and father. However, I could not enjoy my old family together because my real family or at least my children were not with me. I visited Randy in Hawaii and he suggested I bring the kids back to the States with me but of course, I could not because Lesia would have me stopped at the border from taking the kids to the States. I visited Beverly in Maryland – she was married and had a one-year-old daughter. She said she had never stopped loving me but if love overcomes everything why did that particular love not keep us together? I never heard from her again after that visit; since writing this, I did have a few emails in 2010 and that has been it for the past fifteen years. How would life have been different if Beverly had become pregnant from me years earlier? Why did that not happen I am not sure. We had talked about having a baby seven years earlier and I thought it would be a good idea. We had enough sex to populate Eastern China but she did not fall pregnant and I think my thinking when I met Lesia was that as no one had ever become pregnant from me in the past that I was sterile and therefore there was no worry about her getting pregnant. It seems my thinking was faulty – then again if, indeed, there is a pattern to life and we have certain experiences for a reason then that would be why Lesia “fell” pregnant and no one else did.

An email I received from Beverly in 2010:
From: …
Date: 12 November 2010 18:25
Subject: oh my
To: Terrell Neuage <tneuage@gmail.com>
You know, it is probably better if we don't communicate anymore.
I just don't understand why I was so driven to look you up and call you after 30 years!!!  And to have found that Story blows my mind.
When I read about Leigh in your Story, I just longed to nurture you because I knew how you ticked and how deeply you felt about ALL things all those years ago.

We did communicate up until 2025 when she wrote that my Leigh (dead for 22-years) appeared before her to have her tell me that i need to turn to god. I blocked her then and there/

1985

• January 1 London’s lost love’s splendor
• January 2 Germany
• 4th Rome
• 7th Athens
• 11th Bangkok
• March 11th signed for Toyota truck
• September 13th LL in court said kids could go to US
• September $7638.90 tofu sales
• October $6537 tofu sales
• October 23 sent in US passports
• 27th first order to Sydney
• November 4th first order to Melbourne
• November 11th with overdraft $8659 owed - ow 5659 = 3000 in shit
• December 13 to Clifton Park with children

After my time in New York and Baltimore, I went to London on my return to Australia. I stayed with a sister of one of my tofu customers. It was one of those many things that have happened in my life, which gives me the constant impression that things happen for a purpose. Very few people came to my tofu factory but instead ordered what they wanted through a health food shop. I only remember one person who ever stopped in to get something and she wanted fresh soymilk. She came in on a Saturday before I was leaving. She wanted to start collecting soymilk each week but I told her I was going away and my tofu business was going to be run by my Vietnamese workers and Robyn, who I shared my factory with was going to deliver my products along with his health food crap. My soymilk customer said she would resume collecting milk when I returned. When I said I was going to the States then London, Rome, Athens and Bangkok she said she had a sister in London and that she would contact her about me staying with her. My customer stopped later in the day and said it would be fine to stay with her sister and I was given her phone number. It was my first time in England or for that matter my first time in any other country besides the States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. I telephoned the sister when I got to Heathrow and got directions for which stop to get off in London once I was on the subway.

The sister lived in a government type of housing project, a large apartment block. She had two young children, and I was given the couch in the living room. The sister’s neighbour came to visit, and we all seemed to be enjoying the day before New Year’s. All I remember, now so many years later, was that we all went out dancing to celebrate New Year’s and I ended up having sex with her neighbour on the living room couch. The sister was upset about the neighbour and me becoming entangled though I do not know why. The neighbour and her children, who were in the seven- to ten-year-old range showed me around London for New Year’s Day and we had a very romantic day. We all acted like we were a family and probably the children thought that I would be a good “new father”. However, I was on my way the next day and the neighbour and her children came with me to see me off at the airport. We corresponded for a few months after I got back to Australia and she proclaimed something akin to love for me but as time went on so did whatever it was we thought we were doing together. The neighbour talked about coming to Australia and I think that is when the correspondence – at least from my end, stopped. I moved and left no forwarding address.

From London, I went to Germany to look at some equipment for my tofu factory. Following Germany I went to Athens for a week then to Rome for a week. After Rome I stopped at Bangkok. I think got a bit attached to a girl I met there who was from France. I know we wrote to one another for quite a while after I returned to Adelaide but as all things do at some point in time we never got any further than letters. But in general for a world trip I had a lovely time and I found my way back to Adelaide around the beginning of February. I had been away from my children for five or six weeks and that would be the last time I would be away from them for any length of time for the next fifteen years. I spent a delayed Christmas with Sacha and Leigh at the tofu factory. I had brought back a suitcase of presents for them and we had a good time and they had their third Christmas in a row. Lesia’s parents are Orthodox and have their Christmas a week later than the regular run-of-the-mill-pope-following-Christians and now with me there was a third Christmas. I had thought of beginning a new holiday maybe calling it Terrellism or Neuageism and we would celebrate for a week following the Orthodox shindig so there would be several weeks of giving and receiving but it never eventuated.

 Back with the tofu industry I was ever more in debt – having used up a ten-thousand-dollar overdraft for my bit of a holiday. If I look back over my life it is a wonder how I ever get to from day to week; I am always in debt, but somehow, decade after decade, I fly around the planet and basically keep going.

Lesia and I were back in court soon after my return and the children were living with me again in the tofu factory and Lesia got the court to tell me that if the children were going to live with me I would have to get a proper house.

Through one of those passing next moves in life our future direction lay in our waste products. I will never understand why sometimes a direction opens and someone will show up to lead the way and at other times we just flounder from experience to experience not having a clue about what is happening. Most likely there is really no difference. It is just our interpretation of directions.

Directional Interpretation. Perhaps I will write a book on it. In essence it is all random. Nothing happens for any significant purpose. However, because we have developed the awful needs of consciousness, or invented consciousness as some would say – perhaps three-thousand years ago as one school of thought would have it – we create the ‘needs-of-purpose’ (another terrellism). Simply put; the ‘needs-of-purpose’ is a self-contained and self-invented hierarchical system where we believe that something bigger than us, perhaps a creator, actually gives a shit about our miserable lives and instead of random events – there are reasons for why things happen. The reason is because the Creator cares and wants us to learn, observe, masturbate – whatever. At the end of the day it is all a big wank no matter how one looks at it. But due to Directional Interpretation we think there are reasons for why things happen. The real reason we think this is because we believe we are important enough to be given direction.
One of the things that the by-product of tofu, okara, is good for is stock feed. One of our customers discovered that we had so much high protein roughage going to waste that she should relieve us of it. Leonia would stop in each week and pick up my twenty-five-gallon tubs of okara. I would use some of the soybean pulp in cooking my burgers but there was always a lot left over and I had no place to take it. It would rot after a few days if left out so I would have to find ingenious ways to dispose of it. Lesia and I had put it in our garden or her parent’s gardens as it made excellent composite. A few times, bucket loads were contributed to local shopping centre bins and at other times we would lovingly place the okara on a nature strip in hopes that the ground would absorb it and it would not rot and smell for blocks away or at least we hoped we would not get caught disposing of it.

I was happy to see the okara go to a useful cause, I was glad to see it go so I would no longer have to dispose of it. Leonia lived in Mount Compass, a country town fifty kilometers from Adelaide. I had never gone in the direction of Mount Compass, Port Elliot, Middleton, Goolwa, Myponga or further south to the Encounter Bay Town of Victor Harbor, all places that would play a pivotal role in our lives over the next fifteen years. One day whilst Leonia was collecting the okara I told her I was on my own with the kids and needed to find a home. She suggested I investigate living in Mount Compass that it would be a beautiful place to raise children and I probably would be able to build a factory out there. There was also the matter of the Family Court telling me to get a home if I wanted the children to continue living with me.
I was feeling very positive after returning from the States and felt that I could do anything. Being positive has its good points but it also has its pitfalls. Too often in life I have thrown myself into a situation full of hope and feeling very positive and brimming with new age idealism that I can do it all only to realize once too fully committed to abandon ship that I do not have a clue what I am doing or how to get out of the situation that I am in so I just plough forward.

The court had given me one week in which to find a home. Leonia had collected the okara on Thursday and the week was nearly up. I looked in the want ads and there under rental was a three-bedroom house in Mount Compass. The next day I drove out with the children and that was it we rented it that day. I worked all week making tofu and the following Monday, in total obedience to the court order we moved into our new home. We bought a sofa and a couple of beds and a few dishes and suddenly I had a home and a family of my design – sort of.

I immediately embarked on a tofu expansion that knew no limits or for that matter common sense or practicality. Within the first few months of 1985 I had tofu in four states, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia as well as two territories; Northern Territory and Capital Territory. I had thoughts of not only covering all of Australia but I was sure I would find a way to get my products into the States. After a series of failures that unfortunately at the end of the day was the equation of my life I was finally doing the dance of success and my journey Down under was starting to have cosmic significance. I had always thought being a single parent was the way to do it. Back when I was living with Lynn in Maryland I even entertained the idea of adoption. I thought I could do it on my own and now after seeing the difficulty with trying to raise kids with Lesia I saw that it was best doing it all on my own. I could be a parenting dictator, of course in the nicest way.

I would not have to make compromises or bow to another person’s vision or ways or demands. I was on a roll and even though going to court and being put down and at the moment being fully in the poor-box category and not having any friends or family I still believed I would do it all right and come out well. I had a friend once tell me that she had never seen anyone who could so totally come unstuck in life and still come up smelling like roses like I did and here I was in the middle of my rose orchard. That was Kathy who said that. She was lover number one of four on the weekend that Lesia arrived on my doorstep and the result of that weekend was my being in Adelaide making tofu. Of course, making tofu was just a step along the way. My real goal back then was the same as it was in the 1960s and that was to do gallery shows and sell my picture-poems and write some novels. Now it looked as if anything was possible. I had a way to make money, I was my own boss, I had two really great kids, and the world was my oyster. Gosh darn how could it ever get any better?  I had it all figured out. Everything was going my way. My life still had the appearance of a fully laden truck without breaks going down a mountain road, but I did not worry. Why would I? It was obvious that I was headed for a soft landing in life.

I found two letters in my father’s belongings last year (2003) from 1985. These letters are the only real indication of how I felt that I have. 
Of course, it is how I felt when I wrote them and of course what I would write my parents would be different than what I would write to a friend (I have left the misspelt and missing words and poor grammar as I wrote it. At this point in life at the youthful/joyful/ignorant age of 38 I officially had a G.E.D. diploma – ‘a high school equivalency diploma for my educational resume in life. Though I am not much better at ‘it’ now with my B.A., Honours, Masters and Ph.D.):

Dear Dad
The children are fine
My business, as always is close to being successful it always close, sure wish it would go ahead and be a success.
I may be moving home and business to the country. As Im trying to buy an ice company mainly as it has pure water from an underground stream --- Adelaide had been rated as having one of the worst waters in the world.
Am still hoping to come to New York for Christmas with the children the Australian dollar is still only worth about 60 cents (it was worth 85 cents when I was there and 2 years ago it was worth about $1.10). boy you Americans are making us all poor over here. Anyway, I think of you always but I keep waiting to send you good news that everyone is now eating tofu  but it all moves forward so slowly.  (6-6-85)

Our dog was Licky. She was with us for a few years. We also had a series of
cats including Peanutbutter & Jelly, but they disappeared we think maybe a snake or some animal got them.
Sacha helped with housework.

11 - 1985 seemed for the most part like a good year

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.