8 – next > enter Leigh

1983

In the early part of 1983, we bought a small four room house and built a tofu factory on to the back of it. The tofu factory was basically a shed; it was forty feet long and fifteen feet wide. We had a large cool room and some more tofu making equipment. We had a one-hundred-gallon cooker, a press to separate the soymilk out of the soaked and cooked beans that were constructed from a train brake and large stainless-steel tubes to put the tofu in. We had a proper bean grinder that was loaned to us from Jurgen Klein who used our okara and some tofu for body creams he was just beginning to make. Years later he would become one of the top cosmic cream companies and Jurlique would have stores from Australia through Europe and Asia to New York City (The brand is sold in over 5,000 stores worldwide). 

For a while it looked as if I would be having production in the same factory as Jurlique but as dreams and circumstances change those dreams never happened and Jurgen has moved onto great success94F and me, I am writing this. It is these paths we embark on and some continue, and some do not. Now when I see a Jurlique store I take a deep breath and wonder how I got so far from my dream and how other people’s dreams are so wonderfully real. Are we assigned paths, or do we create them and fall off of them and continue lost for a while or for a long time? If I had been able to put together a successful tofu business would I now have products worldwide or would I at least have been able to have a good stay in Australia? 

For my tofu boxes I used plastic hospital baby basinets that I bought at auction and drilled full of holes to let the whey separate from the curds out of. So my tofu factory looked somewhat like a nursery with a dozen baby holders without the babies lined up with the steam of hot tofu coming out of the sides and tops.
We bought a house on Richards Street in Hindmarsh for about $40,000 in 1982 and decided to build a factory. We were selling more tofu each week and more secondary products.

Building the tofu factory was a difficult process as all processes I have ever been involved with have been difficult. The house was small with the front rooms becoming the offices for what I had hoped would one day be a great enterprise. The back two rooms we combined to make an area, which we rented out, to a couple; Robin and Robyn who were making health foods. The stone of the house was Mount Gambier Blue Stone. I spent many days cleaning the blue stone and many days inside the cottage restoring a fireplace and removing paint from the woodwork for our offices. There were a lot of dilemmas with the building of the factory. Some really nutcase of a builder gave us a lot of grief. I would come across the nutcase builder archetype decades later when wife number next and I set about to renovate our first Victorian house then as luck would have it we bought another, much larger and older Victorian house and got even crazier builders. 

I was very excited about my new prospects in life. I had been bouncing around the planet without much of a direction and suddenly I was a homeowner or at least one-half of a factory owner. Having never owned much more than a couple of junk cars and some crap furniture so far in my first thirty-five years of life I was really moving up in the world. The tofu business was also increasing and we had at least thirty customers with more products entering the market. It was extremely hard work and I would work through the weekend with only a handful of hours of sleep, but I liked what I was doing. We were into our second year of tofu making and selling.

By July we were giving birth to more than a tofu dynasty. Tuesday night, Lesia, Sacha and I went off to Ashford Community Hospital at 55 Anzac Highway and once again I was part of the birthing process. We had questioned whether Sacha should be there when the baby was born as he was only two and half years old and whether this would be a traumatic event or just plain too weird affecting him adversely for the next few decades but when the time came, we were all there. I was the first to hold the new baby and I cut the cord. I was going to be the one to literally set him free of his mother. I walked to a corner of the room and said, “I am your father and I will always be there for you” and then passed him to Lesia.

What I did see, and which has never gone far from my thinking was that Leigh had a very short lifeline. I had studied palmistry for a few decades until I got to a point in my thinking that I no longer wanted to believe that lines in our hand could tell what our life was to be. I asked people about this for years then finally stopped thinking about it for quite some time.

I do not recall when we decided to call him Leigh but we did agree on that. I think Lesia was afraid I would come up with some strange hippy name but I was fine with Leigh. I wanted my adopted father to be a part of Leigh’s name and added Kenneth so he would be Leigh Kenneth Neuage. Lesia wanted the name Sebastian to be part of his name and by the end of the naming process Leigh was Leigh Sebastian Kenneth Neuage and somehow any acronyms or significance of initials became a mess. I never found out where the name Sebastian came from; whether it was a past lover or what she had said, she just liked the name. Sebastian means revered, Leigh means Field Meadow, Kenneth means Handsome. All in all Leigh Sebastian Kenneth means ‘revered handsome field meadow’ how stupid. I wonder if anyone looks up what his or her name means before using it. Leigh was born at 3.08 AM on a Wednesday. He, like me had Moon in Taurus and I thought that would be good for us all living together.  We all had Moon in earth signs. Sacha and Lesia have Moon in Capricorn and Leigh and I have Moon in Taurus. Leigh had Saturn in 27 degrees Libra the same degree as my ascendant.  Someday he would affect me the way others saw me and being the planet Saturn I did not think the affect would be a happy one. I decided I would not use astrology to raise my children and until they were teenagers I did not look at their charts again. I wanted to engage with who these two children, new arrivals to this planet, were and not who they were according to astrological interpretations that may or may not be accurate.

From my many years of studying astrology I can see at times how it makes sense and lines up with an event, but I have never been able to foresee anything in order to prevent it from happening based on astrology. However, I do see the differences in personalities based on using all the planets but at the end of the day how anyone uses any pattern is unpredictable and totally contingent on many other factors besides knowing the positions of one’s planets. Two people with identical charts but living in different cultures would be influenced differently based on family, social values, and even the times they lived in.

There are so many bits and pieces of being who we are now, we are us it is totally impossible to know with accuracy what the unknowable future will be. The most we can say is that based on all our knowledge: astrological, educational, psychological, past experiences, intuition and given the country and time we live in and what is going on around us that we cannot control weather, wars, other people’s actions is that it looks as if we may have a good week next week or we will have a challenging week or problematic or emotional or a week that appears to be so unpredictable that all we can do is to love the moment we are in and say isn’t this moment amazing?

Do all living things go through this? Fish? Some lonely shark cruising the ocean blue – are there depressed sharks? Mountain goats, dogs, cats, kangaroos, birds… Do they wonder what will happen when they die? Do they stress because of reasons that we humans could not come close to imagining? Trees, flowers, amoeba. Perhaps amoeba are stressed out because it is such a long haul to evolve to a decision-making process. Do what we get as world leaders present the ultimate evolutionary pinnacle? What a horrific thought.

I am constantly amazed and often I stop and look at where I am and almost gasp for air when I add up the situations that made this moment the way it is. Of course we can all do this. “This led to this which led to that and that is why we are where we are at for this moment”. But the next stupid statement would be. ‘” If we had done something else and we were now at that other place we would not even be aware of the possibilities of being at this place in this particular moment and we would be communicating about that other place instead”.

Astrology cannot offer a complete explanation for how we got to this moment there is nothing that can. However, what does stand out in my mind is that there must be more than this current consciousness because too much happens as patterns unseen until after they are either in motion or they are complete to believe it is all mere chance. Of course, we could create explanations for the way each thing is and believe there is a pattern or there is more because to believe that life is just a random series of events and at the end we die and go into non-existence is too much for the human mind to cope with. We make up religions and beliefs and hope they are real. I see patterns in everything because I want them to exist. I want all that I go through to be for some reason. The only reason to learn lessons is to be able to use them in some future world.

We spent the rest of the night together in the same room at the hospital and the next day Sacha and I went home to prepare for our expanded family. Sacha seemed quite aware of what was going on. Soon after Leigh was born Sacha pushed the cart with Leigh in it to a room to have him weighed and every step of the way Sacha and Leigh were together. For all of Lesia’s and my differences and our constant fighting over everything and anything I thought we were going to be OK. Maybe we could change - do the turning over a new leaf thing.

I thought Leigh should come home in style. Sacha had come home from Kahuku Hospital in our dented and old car but maybe that was the way to do it in Hawaii. I thought maybe we would do it differently this time and I hired a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur and went to collect Lesia. We shared an expensive bottle of champagne and as the drive was only fifteen minutes away and I had paid for an hour, we drove through the Adelaide parklands. We got home in fairly good shape and five minutes after being in the house I got a telephone call saying there was a truckload of soybeans that needed to be unloaded. I was feeling a bit pissed (drunk) and drove over to the tofu factory and there was a large tractor-trailer truck with my ten tons of soybeans I had ordered but had forgotten when they were to arrive. This was our largest order to date. When we started our tofu business we were buying beans at a Greek small goods warehouse in lots of ten kilos. One kilo would make about one and half kilos of tofu or three blocks so ten kilos served us well for the first few weeks of production when we were selling 24 blocks of tofu a week. When our sales rocketed up to fifty blocks a week and we were selling a dozen cheesecakes and a dozen burgers we were purchasing 20 kilos a week. Then we made the big purchase. We bought a fifty-kilo bag of soybeans. We were so excited that we were able to go through a fifty-kilo bag of soybeans that we even took a photograph of that first bag.  Lucky you I no longer have that photo so will not waste this space with it.

By the time we went to the States to look at tofu factories more than a year after beginning our little cottage industry we were buying two bags of beans a week for our production of 150 - 200 blocks of tofu a week and our one to two hundred burgers plus baked tofu and cheesecakes we were making each week. But now in July 1983 two years after starting our business and with sales of three hundred plus blocks of tofu a week and a profit of a few hundred dollars for my four days a week work and a new factory we were ready to make the move into larger production. We ordered ten tones of organically grown soybeans from Queensland. There are twenty fifty-kilo bags per metric ton and we had 200 bags on a truck in front of the tofu factory with one ton per palette and the driver told me he did not have a forklift to remove the ten palettes off of the truck. He said he made his deliveries across Australia and every other establishment had a forklift, furthermore, when he left Queensland there was no room on his truck for a forklift.

I went off to look for a forklift and on the corner of South and Port roads; there was a company that hired forklifts. It was five PM on a Thursday afternoon in winter and it was already dark. When I arrived the gates were just being closed and I rushed in and explained that I had ten tons of soybeans sitting in front of my tofu factory and I know the man I spoke to thought I must have just escaped some place for those who do not have their thoughts gathered together in the right place in their mind (see? this sort of explanation is what we have come to - I teach courses at university and we teach all this inclusive language crap and it is just not politically correct to say loony bin so I have to come up with a more politically correct way of explaining what the person who I was dealing with was thinking even though we all know the bloke simply thought I was nuts).

Nevertheless I got myself on to a forklift and answering the inevitable question of whether I had ever driven a forklift before with my answer in the negative I was given a short lesson on which buttons to push and informed that I should be careful as this particular forklift had extra-long forks or whatever those long things in the front are called. I almost knocked over the fence trying to get out of the place and I saw the man behind me shaking his head as I rolled out onto Port Road. Port Road is a six-lane main street with three lanes per direction with a wide gardened island between. At rush hour the direction I was headed on was packed and there was me weaving and waving down the road. I had driven half a block before a policeman pulled me over and I almost crashed into cars parked along the side of the street before I could stop the thing.

There were no lights on the forklift, and I did not have a forklift license. In all my innocence I told the officer about the truck full of soybeans in front of my tofu factory (I should add that most people I came across had never heard of tofu) and how just an hour ago I was coming home in a Rolls Royce from the hospital with my wife and baby and sharing a bottle of champagne only to get a phone call saying I had ten-tons of soybeans needing to be unloaded and the truck driver did not have a forklift and that is why I was driving down a main city artery driving this vehicle, the likes of which I had never driven before. For some odd and unexplainable reason, the policeman believed me. He actually gave me an escort to my factory with lights flashing. I am sure he wanted to see if what I was saying was true and when he found that it was I was left alone, in the dark, with a grumpy truck driver and my ten tons of soybeans.

I made a gallant attempt to transfer a palette of soybeans from the truck to my factory, but I could not get the forklift to behave the way I wanted it. To add to my first ever attempt of manly forklifting work was the mud in the driveway. The past several rainy days had turned the yard into a bit of a swamp.  Out of pure frustration – I doubt that there was any Christian charity involved, the truckee took over and unloaded the 200 bags onto my front porch and I carried them one by one through the cottage through the factory and to a shed we had built in back. 

The rest of 1983 was spent making tofu, getting more customers, and my being unhappy living in North Adelaide with Lesia. Our relationship had deteriorated to the point where we basically ignored each other, and I do not think we shared a moment of affection again. I have no notes or diaries from those years and my memory is just that of working and playing with the children when Lesia was at work. I have a few letters that I have found in my father’s possessions, but they are just me telling my mother and father that everything was going well. If only I had the Internet, then and I had email I would have saved my correspondence online and I would know what I felt then. If the Internet had been working two-thousand years ago we wouldn’t have all the religious bullshit that we have today. For example, the Acts of the Apostles is the fifth book of the ‘New Testament’, written between 70 and 130 AD. That is a long time after the facts and a large range of years to spread gossip and innuendos about. A bit of blogging would surely change the way people believe today.

We, actually I can only speak for myself, put so much energy and importance into the moment like it is all there is well in fact it is all there is  but we put so much into some moment(s). Years later we do not remember anything about the moment of the past that at the time seemed and probably was so important (at that moment). Then again, some moments we remember over and over. My ninety-eight-year-old father remembers the day I was adopted and tells the story over and over of how “little Terry stood on the front seat of the car and he looked at me and I looked at him and then he fell into my arms”. I was three years old at the time -  fifty-four years ago, and he tells the tale like it was yesterday. He remembers me as a child and looks at me now as if I were still that person. I look at 1982 and 1983 and 1984 and try to remember events and so few stand out in my mind but like my father remembering me falling into his arms it is only a few events that we remember in life and everything else in between is merely fillers. It is the falling that stays so vivid in our mind and no matter what we do to block them it is those falling thoughts that never leave. “What I want to know oh supreme creator and angels of heaven; who was there in August 2003 to catch Leigh?”

Tofu Factory Hindmarsh in 2005  tofu factory with my first tofu delivery truck

Christmas  1983 Adelaide  with Sacha , Leigh  and wife # 1

Christmas 1983. There was Leigh and Sacha and Lesia and I together and though it would not be our last Christmas together in real terms it was. I remember nothing of it. I am sure we had a tree and presents because that is what we did each year and this would be Leigh’s first Christmas and even though he would never remember it we would find significance in the moment and remember it though I did not.

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.