Mrs. Lian was a staple in my life that is becoming a vague staple stain on my vintage t-shirt. She was first my nursery school principal and then my chaffeur and my Creative Writing teacher. Her first name was Valerie and she drove a beat-up station wagon that was a golden chariot of Grecian myth in my perception as a 3 year old ingenue.
We called her Mrs. Lian even though she lived alone.
She was quite religious, or quite paternal-maternal, or a little of both. I was too young to distinguish between these. Almost every day after school, she would stop by the church cemetery and leave a couple of posies at her mum and dad’s graves, and then say a little thing to a person-shaped rock I soon understood to be Jesus-shaped from her instruction.
The virtue of being young is that no one gets pissed off when you are insensitive; I would ask intrusive questions about the fading monochrome snapshots on the tombstones. She would answer quite amicably – “Oh, my dad was a fisherman! Yes, he did have a lot of fun with a lot of fish,” and so forth.
The highlight of every Saturday afternoon was the stop-over at her house to eat Julie brand peanut butter sandwich cookies and stare in an impressed manner at her immense grandfather’s clock. I remember a few rousing choruses of “My Grandfather’s Clock” in front of it, which I incidentally have always thought quite a depressing song. He died and so did the clock!
I wrote a story about being “the seagull that ate the most rubbish in the world” when I was 7 and she liked it very much.
