Rebecca Handler

Notes left on cars should fall into one of two categories: 1) I’m sorry I smashed your side mirror call me, or 2) 25% off Psychic Palm Reading. A hot pink handwritten post-it declaring “Terrible Parking” does not fall into either of these.

First, the facts. This was a grocery store parking lot, spots tightly crammed together, and I pulled in between two sedans, so it couldn’t have been that bad let’s be realistic.

Did the author of Post-It: A Memoir in Two Words try to pull in next to me but couldn’t? Did my slightly slanted parking job trigger her obsessive-compulsive disorder? Was she unhappy that the store ran out of muesli? Did she leave a note in the produce section because the carrots were not arranged in a perfect pyramid?

I bet she was talking on the phone at checkout.

My daughters had jumped in the back seat before seeing the note, so after I got in the car, I turned around to show them. “Guys, look what someone left me.”

“That’s mean,” said the younger one.

“Did you do a bad job parking?” asked the preteen.

“You tell me. Come look.” The three of us got out of the car and stood behind it, tilting our heads and staring at the back bumper as if it were contemporary art.

It was not my finest work but terrible? Please. I’ll tell you something terrible. There are these duck-like birds called coots that live at the lake near my house. When coot chicks beg their mother for food, the mother sometimes pecks or starves them to death. That’s terrible. I sometimes mention the fate of these birds to my children when they start asking me when dinner will be ready.

“I guess you’re a little over to one side,” said the younger one, peeling a cheese stick.

“Who would write a note like that?” said the preteen, having rejoined Team Mom.

We got back in the car, buckled in, and started to back up. “That’s her! That’s her!” said the younger one excitedly, pointing to a woman walking past holding a bouquet of sunflowers. I told her it’s impossible to tell and she said, “Well she looks grumpy. I bet she did it.”

“Should I roll down the window and yell, ‘Terrible Flowers!’ at her?” I asked my children, who were instantly horrified by the reminder that their mother is always mere seconds away from extreme embarrassment.

“Mom! Don’t!”

I asked them what sort of note would have been more helpful to leave on someone’s car window. I suggested something like, “Next time, please park more towards the center of your spot. It made it difficult to pull out. Thanks.”

“How about no note?” they said. No note would have been fine too.

There were many kinds of girls in middle school. There were the tough girls who had hickeys and lip liner and pierced their own ears, the “grown-up” ones who wore stockings and slingbacks, and the tomboys who played in band and wrote in permanent marker on their K-Swiss.

And then there were the girls I envied the most, the ones who seemed to be made of incense and linen. I’m sure, like most preteens, these festival girls, with their leather sandals and messy hair, meticulously cultivated their Virgin Suicides-meets-Woodstock look. But to me, they appeared absolutely effortless, like they were born wearing belly-dancing scarves around their waists. I imagine their homes were filled with beads hanging from the doorways, Indian silk throw pillows and the smell of chai.

I thought of these girls recently when I attended an event called Shamanic Cacao Ceremony & Sacred Ecstatic Dance.

As it turns out, Perth is not just home to Olympic athletes and sports therapy clinics. It also boasts an impressive number of white people with dreadlocks who dance like no one’s watching, except there is someone watching and her name is Rebecca.

My friend Druimé wrote on Facebook that she had an extra ticket to this event, and before you can say electronic didgeridoo, I was making plans for her to pick me up at 6:30 that night.

I spent the afternoon reviewing the event details and googling shamanic cacao ceremony. Cacao promotes focus and insight. Prior to ingesting cacao, five hours of fasting is recommended. I read the event description aloud to Dave and he asked, “Are you sure nothing else is added to the cacao?” I assured him no, we will not be deported because I overdosed on spiked Guatemalan cocoa beans and was found wearing silver ear cuffs, wandering the streets of North Perth.

Curiously, I was not leery of the Sacred Ecstatic Dance part of the invitation. Although I had never personally attended this sort of event, I understood the basics thanks to my friend Alex, an ecstatic dance enthusiast. I understood that there would be candles and a DJ, but, unlike a nightclub, it would be silent and alcohol-free.

On the way over, I asked Druimé if anyone would try to touch me. She giggled and promised I’d be left alone. She then added that if I felt that way, I should never attend a tantric cacao ceremony. I confessed to her that I just ate a ton of cheese and crackers, which doesn’t technically count as fasting. She said she just had some cake and I shouldn’t worry about it.

When we entered the North Perth Town Hall, we removed our shoes, dropped our bags in the corner, and squeezed ourselves into a large circle of twenty-somethings, all sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed. I’m old, I thought, as my knee joints cracked and I plopped on a pillow.

Khaleesi was walking around the circle beating a drum. Blond hair piled atop her head, she wore a long backless white dress and gold bracelets (post-event internet-stalking would reveal she speaks to trees and looks amazing in eyeliner). Her assistant, also gorgeous and also in white, handed out Dixie cups of room temperature hot chocolate.

“Take the first sip of the sacred cacao.” Khaleesi led us through the ceremony, which involved drinking this bitter brown liquid that no amount of whipped cream and marshmallows would have rescued. “Imagine the crown of your head is covered with one thousand petals from a lotus flower.”

I wanted to shoot back the cacao as quickly as possible but followed the instructions to sip slowly, holding out hope that soon I would be super high.

No such luck. The only sacred cacao high I experienced was the high of dehydration, which I quickly cured by chugging my Chevron water bottle. This was around the time Khaleesi used the phrase “inter-dimensional midwife” and I unintentionally let out a little snort.

After chanting exactly 108 oms, we stood up and the DJ, also in white, started playing something I swear I heard in a Volkswagon commercial ten years ago.

Then came the good part. Man, I love dancing. I got to dance with the cool girls, the girls in halter tops and prairie skirts, and some beautiful delicate men too, the likes I haven’t seen since San Francisco. Swinging my arms around, I accidentally bumped into a skinny man with pigtails who looked like Alan Cumming in Anniversary Party. I mouthed “Sorry,” and he put his hands in prayer position and then darted across the room like Tinkerbell.

After some “find someone you connect with and bow to each other” business that I could have done without, the evening ended with chai. Of course it did. Because I am beautiful and effortless and drink chai.

In case you are wondering, if you deposit an Australian 10-cent coin into a San Francisco parking meter, you get one minute.

The 10-cent coin features the Queen on one side and on the other, a male lyrebird, tail feathers on display. Lyrebirds mimic other birds, and also things like crying babies and car alarms. What fun that must be.

Two weeks ago I learned that an old friend of mine, and by old I mean 98, had become ill. My husband told me to get on a plane, he’s got this, so I packed a carry-on and flew to San Francisco in a magical time-changing machine with cold dinner rolls and tiny bottles of wine. The next day, I was in Beate’s living room.

She opened her eyes and said, “What are you doing here?” I trimmed her nails and asked if she was thirsty.

Beate has wonderful care at home, and is surrounded by her plants and many knick-knacks, including an impressive assortment of schnauzer figurines and a solar-powered dancing sunflower still in its packaging. She sips tea from her glass mug, and has an occasional bite of soft-boiled egg. Most of the time she sleeps.

For as long as I can remember, Beate has owned a collection of wind-up toys that she keeps in a round Chinese hat with long fringe braids. There’s a frog with jazz hands that moves from side to side, a cowboy hat that darts around spastically, and a monkey that does somersaults. My brother and I spent a good chunk of our childhood on the floor with these toys, and my daughters know where to look for them when we drop by for tea.

I asked my brother if he’d mind if I took the wind-up toys back to Perth. “Just leave me the pear that sticks out its tongue,” he said. Fair enough.

So I took her toys and said goodbye. When I adjusted her hospital gown and told her I needed to go home, she squeezed my hand and said, “I am on the trip of all trips.” Then she requested a glass of water and shooed me away.

Beate is a Holocaust survivor. After 9-11, she didn’t like all the American flags popping up all over the place. “That’s how it starts,” she’d say, dishing up a rich chocolate cake from Schubert’s. I was hoping she’d live long enough to see Hillary beat Trump.

My family was waiting for me at the airport. Willa had new shoes and Simone won her hockey game. Soon after we got home and rolled around on the floor, I whispered to the girls, “I have something for you.” I zipped open my bag and handed them the Chinese hat filled with wind-up toys. “The monkey!” Willa exclaimed.

We lined up books on the carpet so the toys could dance. “Let’s pretend they’re at school,” Simone said. It’s hard to keep twenty wind-up toys all in motion. We laughed as the birds outside chirped and sang. I don’t think there are lyrebirds in Perth. But would I know if there were?

I once taught myself to like cottage cheese by eating one spoonful every morning for a month. In the beginning, I would gag. Between the chunky consistency of milk gone bad, the yellowish liquid layer on top, and a smell that manages to be both innocuous and rancid, there is not much to like about cottage cheese. But after a week or so, my taste buds relented. It’s not so bad. At the end of the month, I was dumping half a container into a cereal bowl and topping it off with a splash of canned peach juice. Mission accomplished. I am a person who enjoys a bowl of cottage cheese, I thought to myself, trotting off to middle school in my mint green Converse.

So help me God, I will become a person who enjoys camping.

There are many reasons to dislike camping but here I will present two of them: sleeping in a tent and serial killers.

Tents are annoying and they smell bad. Putting up a tent is like trying to tie a Moby Wrap around your torso while standing on one foot under a waterfall. Tents come with long metal rods that you must shove through skinny plastic sleeves, and when you do this incorrectly, you must remove the long metal rods, throw them on the ground, and whimper as you strive to read the faded instructions in the quickly disappearing daylight. When you want to enter your tent, you have to first unzip the “door” and then step in awkwardly like a toddler learning to walk up stairs, only to find your clothes splayed out before you in various states of disgusting. You find one sock but not the other. You don’t change your underwear for three days. It’s all an embarrassing mess.

Dave strongly disagrees with me on this next point, but serial killers are rampant at campgrounds. I don’t need data to back me up because it’s common sense. If your hobby is, say, flying kites, you are going to spend time in large, open fields with few tall obstacles. If you are more into, say, chopping people up into little pieces, you will seek out a remote location where you will find your victim waiting for you in a poorly assembled tent with limited cell reception. Dave and I once camped in South Dakota and I saw several serial killers.

When our friends Rochelle and Geert learned we had not yet camped in Western Australia after living here over a year, they took it upon themselves to help. Rochelle is originally from Perth and moves through life with a sense of exasperated goodwill. It’s not that she assumes people are stupid, but she knows, with plenty of evidence, she was put on this planet to help people be less dumb. Her husband Geert is Dutch, which is pretty much all you need to know about him. I don’t fully understand what he does for a living, but it involves managing the operations of massive construction vessels. He moves seamlessly between taking an emergency call in the middle of the forest to helping four children navigate white water rapids on kayaks.

Rochelle chose the Collie River as our destination, which is about two hours south of Perth. We drove for miles on a bumpy red dirt road and claimed a campsite right next to the river, a location that felt very covered-wagon-gold-rush and also took care of the grime problem. Majestic jarrah trees surrounded our tents, and the river sounded like wind. At the adjacent campsite was a large family gathering, which made me feel better about my odds in the serial killer scenario.

The weekend had many wondrous moments, including a large black lizard spotting, the starriest of starry skies, and most notably, a kangaroo bouncing through our campsite. I loved watching my daughters dismiss scrapes, splinters and bug bites in favor of sprinting through the forest and jumping in the river with new friends. I am grateful to Rochelle and Geert for not once referring to me as a pussy. Likewise, I am in awe of my nature-loving-happy-camper husband who did not throw me in the river at midnight when, in a tent-induced panic attack, I tried to blame him for my inability to chill out. (“WHY DON’T YOU SAY WHAT I WANT YOU TO SAY?”)

Learning to like cottage cheese was much easier than this business of camping. But I am determined.

“And now let’s hear from Alastair, a Year Eight student. He enjoys math and rugby.”

Alastair walks up to the podium and thanks us all for coming. He is tall, blond and tan, wearing a white dress shirt, necktie, and shorts. “I love it here. I’ve learned loads from every subject. There’s heaps of sports and clubs.”

“Thank you Alastair. Next up is Anjali. Anjali wants to be a scientist. She lives in the country and travels more than an hour each way to school.”

“I used to think I had the IQ of a pear. It turns out, pears are quite smart,” Anjali giggles. As she returns to her seat, I notice her shiny black braid cascading all the way down her back. My mind wanders. Does Anjali need to wake up even earlier to do her hair, or does she braid it on the train?

The Year Eight String Quartet starts playing Vivaldi’s Spring. I decide that Anjali does not braid her hair on the train.

If we are still living in Perth next year, my daughter will start secondary school in Australia. Having ruled out girls-only and religious schools, we are left with few options. Today I am visiting the Perth Modern School (“Mod”), a magnet public school close to home.

Mod’s tagline is “Exceptional schooling. Exceptional students,” a sharp contrast to Australia’s tall poppy syndrome, the tendency to belittle others’ skills and accomplishments. The campus is large and grassy. The students wear blazers and lug heavy backpacks across a courtyard. The school is funded by the state. Teachers are paid well and there are ample resources and activities.

The principal approaches the podium and looks out at the crowd of apprehensive parents. She tells us not to worry about the three-hour exam our children will be taking next month. “It’s designed to be hard. Just make sure they have breakfast.” She exudes warmth and strength. I can equally imagine her teaching an art class for seniors or running a country.

As she’s talking about the school’s curriculum, photos are projected on a screen behind her. Kids in front of blooming cherry blossoms! Kids on a trip to NASA! Kids on stage in pirate shirts! Kids with seeing-eye dogs! Kids in the library!

I glance down at my information packet and see the phrase, “Delivering leading edge learning to gifted students.” I think about raising my hand and asking what leading edge learning means but decide I don’t care that much, and anyways, I would probably sound like a dick.

The quartet plays again. More Vivaldi. I check my calendar. Tomorrow I’m visiting a tiny private school that provides each student with a laptop and something called a “personalized learning plan.”

Everyone starts clapping. I skip the morning tea and walk to my car. I have an urge to pick up my daughter from school and take her to the beach. We could play in the waves and dig a hole. We could make a big mess.