30.  <title>Terrell Neuage Memoir: 1997 - Family Life, Baseball Triumphs, Court Battles, Early Internet, and South Australian Adventures</title>

1997

Leigh and I lived together again, 17 Lynn Place, Hackham, South Australia 5163 with the same phone number for four years: 08 8326 5519.  This would be my longest house since leaving Clifton Park in 1965 and it is now April 2015. I did recently live in the same building in Dalian, China for three years so that would be my second longest address in the past fifty years.

As always, January began with the hopes of another year of baseball success for Leigh and he was lined up for success from the beginning of the year to the end.

Leigh ’s baseball  –

• January 4 - 15. Under 14 Australian National Championships. Played for South Australia finishing fifth in a field of eight teams. Leigh received player of the match for each of the three games he pitched in.
• March 13 Westfield School Sports Awards – at Westfield Marion – Leigh received sports person of the month award
• 18th selected to the 1997 Australian AA 15 Training Squad 
• 27-31 SASI (South Australia Sports Institute) tournament in Melbourne - seven games against the Victorian baseball Institute
• May first. I applied for sole decision-making. The Family Court at the time granted me the sole-decision-maker for one-year to be renewed the following year. (I could be tacky and say I was a sole-soul-decision-maker which in essence I was – but I won’t), and as I had sole-custody, though joint-guardianship, of Leigh for fifteen years I took her to court seeking sole-decision making ability to allow him to play wherever the ‘universe’ would lead.
• July 1st offered scholarship for SASI for the 1997 season Leigh was 13 at the time and the youngest to be offered a baseball scholarship
• September 18 invited to an Atlanta Braves tryout session at SASI – Phil Dale – Atlanta Braves Australasian Scouting Supervisor
• 28 – October 5 Australian AA 15 Training Squad Brisbane - Brisbane accommodation: Sleeman Sports Complex Chandler Queensland. Cost of trip $550
• Made the U -15 National Team - Brisbane October 1997
•  

First emails and first web sites

Dear Kevin,
Thank you for your response.  Yes, I did receive the initial letter you sent.  Sorry.  I was of the impression that you had sent out something else and that is why I was being a pest...thinking “all the other kids got one but I didn’t”.  Probably just a phase I was going through.  I am rarely home during the day to speak on the telephone.

I suppose what I am saying is I am easy to be in touch with except at home.  I do not have the wonders of technology at home (like a computer) so I spend unnatural lengths of time at Flinders University and the local library.  I usually leave when my son goes to school in the AM and return in the evening.   The difficulty, or probably ‘a’ difficulty, is that the local library has IBM computers and Flinders has those fruity ones.  At present I have about 350 pages of text (100,000+words) of this thing I am writing on IBM discs so I have to do my editing and writing at the library, and at times I can’t get booked in because it is also connected with TAFE and they have students using them.  But I won’t complain, it just appears that way.

In the random sections of brain space that constitute my life I have searched for meaning of this particular letter. In other words I have no idea who Kevin is or why I would write this plea to notice me. Maybe this is how we all are – we just put our shit out there and hope to find someone to respond. With the Internet this is so easy to do. I have found myself unemployed, here in New York City, age 59, PhD in hand and nothing to do – except edit my story – and in my wasteful moments I put my resume out and apply for jobs and what I get back is some bots to inform me either that the job is taken, my resume will be looked at, or for a small fee I could buy or do or something about something. Life is so random that I can no longer find a random space for my randomness.

On with the story...

What I believe I am doing with this course is writing a section of a longer piece which I have a future variation, discussed below, and planned for. As you suggested me to do in your recent letter I am sending a few utterances over 2000 words as a beginning to the prose project.  Some of it was written a few years ago when I wrote the general body of this textual thing; TryThis - ‘Try raising two kids with hands tied behind your back’. However, I have added and chopped and changed and will end up with a totally new work, but it will be incorporated within the whole at some point in time and space.

In this beginning piece, I change styles from the previous body of work which has poems, pictures, roofing... whatever is added in between chunks of text. Though I do toss in a letter, what I am doing is switching.  Switching from different time periods; for example, years ago when my kids were young, to snatches of my youth and some just plain meaningless mental ramblings, switching to different perceptions.  I want to reflect on the unstableness of not only my own world but the world about us.

Having created hundreds of internet sites over the past year (at last count I had 150 sites linked) made up of things I have written and having a minor thesis on how the World Wide Web is changing literature http://www.Geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/5289/THESIS.html; I find that not only my writing now has a tendency to go back and forward but what I wrote decades ago is like that.  Eventually I would like to put; TryThis - ‘Try raising two kids with hands tied behind your back’ onto a CD ROM and all these sections would have hypertext links and the reader would be able to create their own paths.  I find randomization like a keyword to life, or at least to my life. There are some quite fascinating novels in this format now.  If you have the time or inclinations to pursue this the best starting point is the company who publishes these new texts: Eastgate... http://www.eastgate.com

Well, this is a starting point. 

Hopefully I haven’t fallen off track with what I am doing for this course

1997 was another court year. I never knew why I was in court so much. That two adults cannot make the simplest decision without legal intervention is wacky. From my side it was such a game; if the children had not got hurt it would have been a grand sport. For decades we were locked in battle. I knew how to draw her into battle, and I could predict her movements. She had a few different lawyers but got rid of them after one or two times in court. On the other hand, I stayed with my dude, Graeme. Graeme I reckon thought I was as unstable and off the planet as one could be. I spent many hours in his office trying to explain the life of a Lesia and me. Humans always think their life is unique. I was human therefore I was unique in my mind – that part of me that I finally let slip away some years ago. (No longer am I unique because now I realize I am identical to everyone else – of course I am unique in the realization of my “identical to everyone else’s sameness”). Nonetheless I submitted many petitions to the court in hopes of either wearing down my opponent or arriving at the happy sequence of events that would permit me to abscond with my children to the States.
As I was on the single parent pension my court stuff was paid by the lovely folks of South Australia through their taxes. I only wanted to leave the country and if I was going to be kept as a prisoner then it was only proper that I should be compensated. It came out of someone’s taxes. If I could have found gainful employment – well actually I was a fulltime student single-handed, handling, the raising of two boys – but I did try to make money with my picture-poems and many other harebrained schemes so that my taxes could contribute to the coffers of the South Australian Family Services so other single-parents in similar situation could go to court. They should have boxes on our tax return forms where we could tick where our money was to go as my ticked boxes below show where I favour my taxes to go:

• single parents

Lawyers

• housing
• food
• pets
• toys
• trips overseas

wars

• drugs
• roads
• old people
• whores
• disbanding religion and turning all property owned by any religious group over to victims of religious groups (children molested by priests and ministers – though I doubt there would be enough money from selling all religious property to deal with that, people who had been stolen from in the belief that their money was going to help some crazed religious leader or cause and so on and so forth).

The list could have thousands of categories, and everyone would feel like they were making contributions to what they wanted then we would have a people-orientated society.

One of the ‘tricks’ my lawyer mate played on Lesia was to send her court hearings the night before they were held. He would only do these sorts of maneuvers when we knew she did not have legal representation. It was because of one of these surprise moves that Lesia came up with her most crazy reactions. I will get back to this when we look at January 1999.

I would sit at my dining room table writing my pages of script to hand in to the court. I read these now and wonder how I did not get put into a psychiatric hospital but then again Lesia’s was just as crazy. Our favorite themes questioned the other person’s sanity and parenting ability.  At the end of the day; to use one of those not to be used literary phrases, I had two specifics in my life with the South Australian Family Court system: I wanted to get the most I could for my children – this is any normal parent’s desire, I had the need to get even with her. Reading what I wrote to the courts in those days shows some form of insanity for sure. I read what I wrote then and wonder what the hell I was doing – saying stuff like this to Lesia that of course she would submit to the courts. Lesia once submitted a twenty-two-page affidavit to the court outlining her opinion of me. By the end of it we had something like sixty court events together. Why we were not banned from the Adelaide Family Court I have no idea. We were a waste of time and money just because we would not give either one iota of assistance. I am described as a ‘psychologically disturbed stalker – carried out by means of the mail and the Internet,

I know the second reason is not something I should say in this story. For my audience of one, Sacha, whom I am left to write this to I should be offering mature fatherly advice. However, in my close to sixty years, one thing I have worked out is that having an enemy is great. One is better than an army of enemies. An enemy is one’s dumping ground and once we have established enemies then we are free to love. When anything goes wrong in our life, if we have a bluey day, if we lose everything, we became unloved, old, crazy, poor, overweight, lost… have an enemy to dump on. An ex is great therapy, and it is too bad I am talking about your mother but separate that fact for the moment. Because of years of feeling abused psychologically I was finally able to overcome everything by attacking when life got horrible – which we know it has. I should send a greeting card ‘thanks for being my enemy’ – perhaps Hallmark makes such a card. Of course, I could just make it in Macromedia Flash and email it but it would never be opened and loved. Hallmark cards are so much more personal. It really is the way to go.

What really got her mad was sending any money my way. She saw me as a ward of the state – one of those people who could not and would not make a living141F . My tofu business was quite successful until the bankruptcy thing happened in late 1988 and I was basically unemployed from then until I did some teaching at the University of South Australia in 1999. There were a few weekends that my picture-poems sold enough to pay for the petrol to drive to the park. I did not really have the time to work with schooling and parenting and writing stories (that unfortunately did not get picked up by any publishers or television or movie folks) and kept my relationship with Kris together.
My life with Kris seemed OK. We would spend one day midweek together and weekends. I would borrow her car to take Leigh to his baseball on Sundays and that seemed like a good arrangement. She expressed frustration that I did not have much time to share with her, but the children and academic life was too much. She started some university degree – it was something to do with women – issues – gender studies or some such nonsense. The more she got into it the more difficult she became to be with. I am just a regular bloke but that does not sit well with some females. I think she was jealous of the amount of time I spent on Leigh’s career. There was little I could do about it as tending to a sports star is so full on. Every cent we could muster went to Leigh. Sacha went for years without any extras. Of course, this was back when parenting was easier than it is today.

This is an insane time to raise children. The main culprits are cellphones (mobile phones in Australia) and the Internet. Sacha and Leigh were at the very beginning of this craziness. We got our first computer in 1990-1991 and with Leigh making a database for his hundreds of baseball cards and Sacha playing a few games and me writing stories to the children when they went to Adelaide for the weekend we had a lot of time to do other stuff. I spend about forty hours a week on computers now and have done so since the late 1990s.  It is really all a waste of time. We did not have mobile phones until the children were well into adolescence. Sacha got his first cell phone in about 1999, and Leigh got his first in 2000. I took over Leigh’s phone in 2001 when he went to Florida to play baseball with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Of course, there is the convenience of cell phones – I can text message Sacha in Melbourne from Brooklyn and wherever I am in the world my number is the same. It has been about two years since we had a landline-based phone and it is a good thing. My phone is a complete computer with Internet, Microsoft Office and video and cameras and things I will never use all fitting into my pocket. A few years from now it will be an antique and I will wonder how I made it through the day with such a cumbersome product (4.29 x 2.28 x 0.93 inches and 5.64 ounces – lightweight today and a brick tomorrow).

I could not afford cell phones and cell phone plans for my sons. We did not get the Internet on at home until 1999. We spent the last decade possible (1990) before every child had to have their own cell phone and their own laptop and Internet connection. Computers are dumbing down society to a point where we will have future children who are all overweight and who have few social skills. We also are developing a society that is getting more in debt with every technology coming out.

For a large amount of time Sacha talked about hiking. We thought we would go for a few days’ walk in the Adelaide Hills and stay at shelters that were put in place by the Parks Department. We decided to go hiking for a day in the ten kilometre long Onkaparinga Gorge with Kris' son, David. The Gorge has cliffs that Sacha had been abseiling off a year earlier and he had been hiking before in the area. The Onkaparinga is South Australia's longest river after the Murray and it was not far from Main South Road near our home in Hackham. David was sixteen and Sacha had just turned seventeen and I was feeling most of if not much more of my age of fifty. Kris dropped us off at daybreak along the river in Old Port Noarlunga and we followed the path that wound along the river. We were inland a short way from where the Onkaparinga enters the Gulf of St Vincent at Port Noarlunga. We had brought food and a camera and water and thought we would be at the end of our walk by late afternoon. We were only going as far as Clarendon and we hoped we would be able to climb out of the gorge at that point. I was quite tired within the first hour. Sacha walked fast and kept getting ahead of us and I would call out for him to wait for us and then we would catch up and he would be off again. The name Onkaparinga came from its original Aboriginal name “Nankiparinga”, meaning women's river

and surely, they were a hardier bunch then we, or at least I was.

  
The terrain was much more rugged than I had anticipated; I had imagined a smooth level path that would follow the river to where Kris would collect us within a few hours. Whether we got off of the path because we could not see it, or because it just vanished, I am not sure but at some point we were climbing over rocks and at some point the river was a long way below and there were cliffs on either side with no walking area along the water. We were going along the cliff when I began to slip and I grabbed onto a small tree that was more the size of a branch than a proper tree and the tree want-to-be was starting to be pulled out by the roots from my weight when David who fortunately was right ahead of me at the time was able to grab a hold of my hand and pull me up to the top of the cliff and onto level land. I am sure I would have either have been killed or I would have been seriously injured if the tree had come unstuck from the ground and toppled down the cliff with me. We did not have a cell phone with us and it was a longs way to any town and there were no homes anywhere nearby. Sacha was so far ahead that he would not have been able to rescue me. My little brush with disaster was soon over and I walked along the top of the cliff for a few hours until there was a path that led back down to the river and Sacha, David and I had lunch. In fact maybe it was not me that the cosmos was saving from tumbling to my end that morning but the little tree that was trying to get a start toward maturity alongside the cliff. It was the tree that was keeping me from falling but it was gradually coming out by the roots – as I tried to pull myself up the rocks and tried to get a foot onto some rocks that I could have climbed to the top along. The tree was barely staying in place. Another few moments and the two of us would have become a miserable mess at the bottom.

The tree would have floated down the river and maybe some seeds on its branch would have been washed upon the shore and taken root and a new tree would have begun, and I would have died and maybe I too would have been reborn – but of course all that is quite stupid. Whatever happened that morning, both the tree and I were saved. I did not have any flashbacks of my life or any thought of harm. I just knew I did not want to end up at the bottom. Until August 16th, 2003, I had always been fearful of height. I had not looked down to the bottom of the cliff until I was safely on solid ground on top of the valley then I looked down and all my fears of heights swept over me and all I wanted to do was get to the end of the trail and see Kris. We could see Piggott Range Road across a paddock which would have taken us back eventually toward town but the boys wanted to follow the river. We had been told that we should contact Mt. Bold Reservoir to ensure water from the reservoir is not being released, which would make crossing the Onkaparinga River impossible but I never got around to do it until I thought of it when we were following close to the river and at times actually wading in it.

We had another unpleasant part of our journey that day. We were following a trail along the river when in front of us the trail vanished, and the cliffs went straight into the water. Sacha and David decided to climb up the side a bit but I had already discovered how unsure my feet were on the rocks so I thought I would just wade through the water. It was much colder and deeper than I had thought it would be and I almost drowned. I am a good enough swimmer to cross a short area of water but for some reason my body became numb and I barely got to the area on the other side of where the cliffs met the water and there was the path again. The river has cut down to glacial deposits that are aged at about 500 million years old and the whole area is far removed from the frantic world that we lived in.  I lay on some large boulders, and I could not move my legs – I thought either something had bit and paralyzed me or I had gone into some sort of shock. Sacha and David did not know what to do – they talked about going to the first house they could find and calling in a rescue helicopter but after half an hour I felt find and we went forward. I am sure I had become numb from the water. The rest of our trip was without adventure and as the sun began to set at about nine PM we found the way out of the valley and toward town where we found a telephone and had Kris come to collect us at The Old Clarendon Winery, an old pub built in the mid-1800s, five-hundred million years after the gorge I almost came to grief in was formed. David and Sacha talked about doing another hike soon but I made sure they understood I would never do that again.

Christmas  1997 Hackham , with my children and Kris

This would be my last Christmas with my children together. We forget in the moment that no other moment will ever be the same, but I always thought I would have many Christmases together with Sacha and Leigh.

We are participants in our life and not really planners no matter how many people try to say we are. Just when we set the stage an ill wind scatters leaving ever who is still conscious clutching choking snivelling at their memories in the middle of a barren stage constructed with nothing more than tattered memories and dreams of what could have been.

We had a good Christmas together. I have no recollection of what material possessions were involved but it was a good time. Sacha was 16, Leigh 13 and I had turned fifty four months earlier. Kris was there and so were her children – a shadow in the background of my memory with my children. Vacuum packed memories to keep forever. We spent part of the day at our home on Lynn Place in Hackham and part of the day in Kris’ house in Aberfoyle Park. Summer in Adelaide is quite hot. I shot baskets with Sacha, threw a baseball with Leigh, had a barbeque with Kris and our children combined.

Every year there is a Friendship Series with a team of All-Stars from the States. Leigh had been on teams playing against them for the past few years. Other player’s families billeted the players during the Christmas week they were in Adelaide, except for us. I think we were the only family that did not host any players. Most of the time our life was too budget; no car, little money, house in a shambles, strange teenage friends of Sacha’s hanging out piecing the back fence or getting stoned in the backyard – we were not a suitable family. Not good role models for the clean-cut-Yanks. I kept track of every pitch Leigh threw. From his first pitch in peewee at age ten through his seventeenth year – except for when he was out of Adelaide. We had a spreadsheet on our computer from the start when we had the Commodore 64, then when we bought a used computer for one-hundred dollars, on through to when we “borrowed” and brought home a series of computers from the University of South Australia. Our first ‘real’ computer was a multimedia Mac from uni. The university was replacing their one-year-old Macs with PCs in 1998 and I got a ‘used’ one for my office. Soon after I got that I was given a new PC and the Mac found its way to our house, and I was able to upgrade my spreadsheets to have all of Leigh’s pitching statistics from the years before.

The Friendship series was an exciting time for Leigh and me. Sacha never went out to the games as he had given up baseball years earlier. Leigh would be quite happy when he struck out the Yanks and almost started a brawl when he hit both of their black players in a row in the opening Under-16’s game that year. Leigh never purposely hit anyone – he just would try to move the batter back from the plate and sometimes he would miss. When anyone else would pitch I would not pay much attention being the Leigh groupie that I was. During the Friendship Series Leigh was chosen to play for Australia again. Sacha was attending Christies Beach High and I was halfway through my Masters degree.

December 1997
Leigh made the U-16’s South Australia State Squad - playing in Canberra January 1998