Audacious to
think I taste that kind of sorrow. My missing
of you is simply
on our steps in Ghuznee Street: you in a shiny,
red coat, wanting to
know where to go to get a hook-and-eye
fixed on your dress, delighted to be
taken up Cuba to the
small shop that’s shut now, the one with
the blackboard and the mysterious
seamstress. I'd have done
it for you if I’d had needle
and thread, but instead I left you
by the blackboard – and we hugged
and your coat squeaked, your skin up close impossibly creamy.
I think too of
watching you talk that day, when you gave time
without weighing it, the tracings your fingers made, mouth
so mobile, your face a place people
lingered. The
way you said to a wedge of brownie on a plate:
‘Perfect!’ and regarded it with
such plain affection. Small ruins
for me. For the brother they
call Gramps, the weeping father,
the stoic mother, Grandma Jo, the rest –
Mac in his kilt,
girls in scarlet lippy and pineapple pants, boys
with three-day beards and
skinny ties – for them this missing
is a shattered city: lost spires, gutted high-rises,
lights stuck
on amber, paper caught in chicken-
wire, the howl as
wind claws the perimeter fence.
Mary McCallum
 |
| Hat and puppy. Photo credit: Rebekah Dorman |
Harriet Rowland would have been 21 today. The lively, gorgeous Wellington student passed away on 7 March this year.
We at MÄkaro Press published the blogs she wrote over the nearly three years she lived with cancer – it's called The Book of Hat and it's been a surprise hit: on bestseller lists, bought by students and grandparents, by bookclubs and classrooms, and runner-up in the Ashton Wylie award between Lloyd Geering and Joy Cowley.
We at MÄkaro Press published the blogs she wrote over the nearly three years she lived with cancer – it's called The Book of Hat and it's been a surprise hit: on bestseller lists, bought by students and grandparents, by bookclubs and classrooms, and runner-up in the Ashton Wylie award between Lloyd Geering and Joy Cowley.
So many people have responded to Harriet's vivid, upbeat and compassionate voice. It's been called 'the real The Fault in Our Stars' but it's more than that... there's something singularly Hattie about the book, that spills out in the reading, and doesn't leave you. Peter Jackson's called it, 'truthful, funny and wise'. All of that. Just – Hat.
And now it's going global! The Book of Hat is an ebook -- launched today, something we've achieved working with Rosa Mira Books in Dunedin. And we're also off today on our third roadshow around Wellington secondary schools distributing Hat's book – donations from generous reader Bridget Percy, who reckoned every school should have a copy.
All great ways to celebrate the wonderful woman Harriet Rowland was, on what would have been her 21st birthday. And goodness would she have partied!
