Song for Xenia

A heartfelt song I created for Xenia to celebrate our beautiful friendship.

The Road Gets Brighter With You

Verse 1

Tuesday nights in Jilly’s lounge

Quiet seekers gathered round

Listening for a deeper truth

That’s the night I first met you

You spoke your heart so honestly

No disguise, just authenticity

And something in that gentle room

A rare friendship began to bloom

Chorus 1

Life gets brighter walking with you

Through harbour winds and morning blue

From Jilly’s circle to cafés nearby

You make the ordinary shine

Some friends appear then drift from view

But some feel timeless, deep and true

Through every step my heart still knew

Life’s a richer road with you

Verse 2

Bowral roads and country skies

Driving out to visit Jilly

Lunch at The Mill, laughter rising

Those long trips felt easy

Friday mornings, Balls Head views

Harbour light and quiet blues

Meditation, dreams we share

Designing lives with care

Chorus 2

The road grows deeper walking with you

From Bowral hills to harbour views

Friday mornings by the sea

Talking about the lives we’ll lead

The courage in the truth you show

The open heart that lets love flow

Through every mile my spirit knew

Life feels wider next to you

Verse 3

You sing when courage calls your name

Your voice rising clear and brave

You share your art with open heart

Showing others it’s okay

You help the lost stand up again

Seeing light in broken souls

Though the world may overlook

The quiet strength you hold

Chorus 3

The world feels kinder walking with you

Through parkland paths and harbour views

Through lockdown days we found a way

Meeting in the park each day

Through laughter, wisdom, food and song

A friendship steady, deep and strong

Through every season I still see

The gift you’ve been to me

Verse 4

With Chris and Jane and Shushann too

And Krissula beside us

Our little circle gathering

Where laughter lives and guides us

Stories shared across the table

Life unfolding as we go

Friendships woven strong and kind

The kind few people know

Chorus 4

And the circle grows brighter with you

Through meals and music shared in view

Through honest words and laughter too

You make this wandering life feel true

Some friends pass quickly out of view

But some help shape the life we choose

And every mile my heart still knew

Life’s a better road with you

Bridge

You’ve taught me truth is worth the cost

To live with nothing left concealed

To meet the world with honesty

And let the heart be fully revealed

And when my anxious storms appear

You meet them calm and crystal clear

A friend who helps me find again

The beauty living here

Final Chorus

Life feels sacred walking with you

From Mackie’s quiet trust of you

To harbour winds and wandering paths

And tables full of joyful laughs

Through every valley, every view

I know how rare a soul like you

And every mile my heart still says

Life is a better road with you.

Song for Dennis, a friend of Chris

Chris and I created a song for his one-legged, indomitable friend, Dennis who is about to turn 80. I love it. It captures his wonderful and cheeky spirit. He is a real inspiration. I had the pleasure of meeting him and hearing his life story as part of my research. Not that he suspects it had anything to do with creating a song for him!

Dennis Won’t Slow Down

Verse 1

Out where the wheat trains rolled through town

Kids on horses kicking dust around

Young Dennis pumping down the line

Railway jigger and a grin that shined

Born with polio, skinny little frame

But quitting life was never in the game

If the road got rough he'd laugh out loud

“Mate, I’ll figure something out.”

Chorus

Dennis won’t slow down

Not for fate, not for time

Wild white hair in the wind

And a stubborn kind of mind

From the bush to Sydney town

Hear that scooter’s roaring sound

Call him crazy, call him brilliant

Dennis won’t slow down

Verse 2

Seventeen riding northern land

Fixing fences with a wire in hand

Two horses, one dog, miles of sky

Dingos howling as the days rolled by

Truck came once a week with bread

Water drums and a place for bed

Forty degrees and the desert sun

That’s where the story begun

Chorus

Dennis won’t slow down

Not for fate, not for time

Wild white hair in the wind

And a stubborn kind of mind

From the outback dust

To the city underground

Nothing in this world

Can slow Dennis down

Verse 3

Then came tanks in Vietnam rain

Steel and thunder through the jungle plain

Six big machines under his command

Young sergeant with a steady hand

Three long tours and he made it home

To a country that left him alone

Dennis just shrugged with a crooked grin

“Right… what’s next then?”

Chorus

Dennis won’t slow down

Not for fate, not for time

Wild white hair in the wind

And a stubborn kind of mind

From the Mekong mud

To the harbour shining brown

Nothing in this world

Can slow Dennis down

Verse 4

Printing presses night and day

Worked his way up the hard-earned way

Ran the whole show, retired at fifty

But sitting still just didn’t fit him

Philippines sun, he met sweet Joy

Little Louise became his pride and joy

Life kept rolling loud and proud

Just the way Dennis likes it now

Bridge

Christmas Eve in a hospital gown

Doctor says “Dennis, you stay lying down.”

He says “Mate… I just need a smoke.”

Scooter roaring down the corridor floor

Nearly knocks a nurse through the lift door

Across the highway in a dressing gown

Bought his smokes and sat right down

Two quick puffs and a rebel grin

Chris just shaking his head at him

Final Chorus

Dennis won’t slow down

Not for fate, not for time

One tough life behind him

And a spark still in his eyes

Hear that scooter flying

All across the town

Call him legend, call him Dennis

But he won’t slow down

An essay about Dennis based on my interview with him

There are people who drift through life quietly, leaving behind a faint ripple. And then there are people like Dennis, who barrel through it like a souped-up scooter at sixty kilometres an hour, wild white hair in the wind, leaving everyone else laughing, shaking their heads, and wondering how on earth one human being can pack so much life into such a small frame.

Dennis is nearly eighty. And if you ask him to slow down, he’ll probably laugh at you.

He was born with polio, which left him with a weakened leg from childhood. For most people that would have been a life-defining limitation. For Dennis it was more like an inconvenient detail — something to work around while getting on with the real business of living. From the very beginning he seemed to have an instinctive understanding that obstacles are simply puzzles waiting to be solved.

His childhood belonged to a world that feels almost mythical now: rural Australia, railway lines cutting through wheat country, horses tied to fences outside tiny country schools. Kids rode in from farms in every direction. If there were sixty students in the school, there were probably sixty horses outside. And Dennis, with his irrepressible grin, was often in the middle of the action. Sometimes he rode horses. Sometimes he powered down the railway line on a hand-pumped jigger, friends clinging on for the ride as if they were on the world’s most improbable rollercoaster.

Adventure came early.

At seventeen or eighteen, while many teenagers today are worrying about exams or what to watch on Netflix, Dennis was sent to the Northern Territory to work as a boundary rider on a cattle station that stretched across an almost unimaginable 2.5 million acres. His job was to patrol and repair the fences that held that vast land together.

He did it largely alone.

Two horses. One dog. Endless sky.

Every fifteen kilometres there was a rough shelter — four posts, a sheet of corrugated iron, a drum of water. Once a week a truck would arrive with supplies: bread, tins of food, sometimes a packet of tobacco, sometimes a couple of beer bottles dangling in the water tank to keep them cool. If supplies ran out, you shot a kangaroo or a cow and made do.

Days could hit forty-five degrees. Nights could drop close to freezing. Storms rolled across the desert with little warning. But Dennis, a bush kid at heart, simply figured it out.

That phrase — figured it out — might be the secret of his life.

Then came Vietnam.

Dennis served three tours there as a tank commander, responsible for six tanks rumbling through jungle and delta country in the middle of a war that was as chaotic as it was brutal. Inside a tank, he once said, the sound of bullets hitting the armour was like standing under a metal bucket while people hurled rocks at it. The noise was constant. The tension never switched off.

Yet he survived.

When the war ended in chaos, Dennis was among those evacuated by helicopter and packed onto an aircraft carrier overflowing with thousands of soldiers and refugees. Helicopters were pushed off the deck to make room for more people. Planes were dumped into the sea. The only priority was getting everyone out alive.

Returning home, however, proved almost as hard as the war itself. Vietnam veterans were not welcomed back with celebration. Many were told not to even wear their uniforms when they landed in Australia. Recognition took years, and for some of Dennis’s fellow soldiers it came too late.

Dennis did what he has always done.

He got on with life.

He moved into the printing industry, starting at the ground floor and eventually rising to become the general manager of a large printing network with more than a hundred shops. He retired at fifty — which for most people might signal a long, slow drift into comfortable inactivity.

But Dennis is not “most people.”

Retirement lasted about as long as it takes a stubborn man to get bored.

He went to the Philippines to run a massive printing company. The job involved sorting out corruption, firing dozens of staff, receiving death threats, travelling with armed security, and surviving a heart attack along the way. Somewhere in the middle of all that he also met the woman who would become his wife, Joy, and together they raised their daughter Louise.

Eventually Dennis brought his family to Australia after a long and complicated visa process that required persistence, ingenuity, and probably a fair bit of the stubborn determination he has always had in abundance.

Then, nine years ago, life threw him another challenge.

Because of the long-term effects of polio, Dennis lost his leg.

Many people might have taken that as a signal to slow down.

Dennis took it as a signal to upgrade his scooter.

Today he zips around on a souped-up mobility scooter capable of reaching speeds that would make most mobility scooters blush. He repairs machines, restores mopeds, fixes cars, and generally behaves like a one-man mechanical workshop that refuses to accept the concept of retirement.

He also has a Jack Russell named Buddy — a tiny dog with the temperament of a heavily armed border guard. Buddy is fiercely protective of Dennis and treats strangers with the suspicion normally reserved for international spies.

And then there is the story that perfectly captures Dennis in a single moment.

When he lost his leg, he was recovering in hospital just before Christmas. The hospital, in its infinite wisdom, discharged him with almost no support equipment. But Dennis had a more immediate concern.

He wanted a cigarette.

So he summoned his friend Chris and instructed him to bring his mobility scooter to the hospital. Chris arrived, somewhat uncertain about how to drive the thing, but just in time to witness Dennis leap onto it like a cavalry officer mounting a horse.

The scooter roared down the corridor. A nurse narrowly avoided becoming roadkill. Dennis shot into the lift, out onto the street, and across the Pacific Highway — wearing nothing but a hospital dressing gown, which apparently left certain aspects of his anatomy enthusiastically exposed to the general public.

Minutes later he returned victorious, cigarettes in hand, calmly smoking his second one before Chris had even finished processing what had just happened.

If you want to understand Dennis, that story probably tells you everything.

He is stubborn. He is fearless. He is inventive. He is sometimes outrageous. But above all he is alive in a way that many people forget to be.

Dennis himself once explained his philosophy with the kind of blunt wisdom that only comes from long experience.

If the mind stops working, the body stops working too.

So he keeps both working.

And that, in the end, may be the real lesson of Dennis.

Life will knock you down. Sometimes it will take a leg. Sometimes it will throw war, illness, bureaucracy, or bad luck in your path.

Dennis looks at those things the way a mechanic looks at a broken engine.

Roll up the sleeves.

Figure it out.

And keep moving.

Preferably at sixty kilometres an hour.

Middle Head with Xenia

Xenia and I went for lunch at Middle Head cafe and then went for a little stroll for a view over Chowder Bay. The Butcher Bird came and visited us while we were having lunch. 

Sydney Botanical Gardens and surrounds

An enjoyable morning with my Photography Meetup exploring and photographing some familiar haunts.

Conservatorium of Music

Sydney Botanical Gardens

Table tennis with Chris and John in Kiribilli, followed by a walk home

John was in town. Always good to see him. He is 71 and backpacks around the world. A real inspiration.