Viva Brighton Issue #41 July 2016

COLUMN
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Amy Holtz
The truth is, I’m a Minnesotan
The girl is walking, quickly,
ahead of a middle-aged
man and woman that’re
fanning themselves with a
leaflet. Wherever she goes,
they follow like ducklings,
weaving in and out of the
careworn clothes and French
Bulldogs on Sydney Street.
The woman’s nostrils flare. It
seems she’s caught wind of a
particularly ripe pair of dungarees. She touches
the man’s arm and for a moment, they’re the
picture of unity in their mutual bewilderment –
before scurrying after the girl, whose pace has
quickened.
Suddenly, the girl at the front turns, her septum
piercing swaying with the motion. They’ve fallen
behind as they stepped off the pavement and
into the path of an irate cyclist on a fixie, who’s
dinging his bell as furiously as it’s possible to
ding a bell.
She sighs. Waits. Mumbles something into the
ground. She puts on that look of pained exasperation,
once worn by the parents of a lagging,
sobbing child. Now she wears it, with unpractised
frustration.
There is something so delightful about graduation
season. And something so intimate about
inviting your parents, or whoever you love, who
knew you back when, into your ‘now’ world.
Especially when your world is Brighton.
They’re everywhere, these lumpy groups – clogging
up the arteries of The Lanes, squinting at
the menu at Pinocchio, wandering into the path
of speeding taxis, lamenting
‘Brighton prices’. Their
offspring are all Brighton –
practiced dodgers of tourists,
except, now, they’re shepherding
the tourists. Most
stand a little ways off, arms
crossed - or feeling the walls
for a trap door to swallow
them and take them back to
the White Rabbit, away from
these uncouth louts in their polo shirts and spectacles.
Instead they’re stuck watching their dad
fog up the window of Choccywoccydoodah, then
wipe it off with the sleeve of the beige jacket he’s
had since 1983 thinking, ‘Something’s not right
here – how are we possibly related?’
The word ‘graduation’ derives from the Latin
‘gradus’, which means degree – but I like that
it also means ‘step’. Steps are underestimated
after your first ones; but you have to step away
from your families and homes, get tattoos, make
friends, spend three years trying to shake everything
your parents taught you. There’s vexation,
but there’s also pride in towing them along, and
through, the new life you’ve made for yourself.
Pride and worldliness that lasts forever – or at
least until you move back in with them.
For now, it’s bittersweet to watch this step
forward; the couple trails the girl they’ve already
lost – the girl wary of looking behind in case she
glimpses her future – a future desperately trying
to catch up with her.
But hey, at least when it does catch up, it’ll probably
buy her dinner.
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