Rockford Hotel. Adelaide. Australia. Yesterday I met a mathmatician through his Ethiopian wife Elsabet Tamrat who found me. She invited me to her home surrounded by pines in the forest inhabited by wild koala – “Wild Koala” sounds like an oxymoron – and kangaroo and a vista of Adelaide to die for from where I watched the sun fall.
Polish by birth with that gentle almost lisp of accent he showed me a mathmatics geneology website that traces back his mathmatical lineage. He clicked on his advisor and then on his advisors advisor and so on through hundreds of years right back to Isaac Newton. Try it. Put his name into the site Jerzy A Filar and click backwards. I couldn’t help thinking of the truest geneology written into earth formation and upon the rocks of this self same country.
Popped into the chemist earlier in the day. Mrs Casas with lidded eyes and a playful tone complimented me on my English accent “you remind me of our friend he has a same sense of humour as you”. It’s a family business. Clearly I was summoned to talk. Before I know it I am surrounded by her raven haired white coated daughters. We are all laughing. She the matriarch has set the fun tone. They now know why I am here, who I am, my shoe size. Everything but the reason I went in their in the first place.
They ask me to sign a pillar which has been signed by many famous Adelaide sports men and women. I sign it. I notice on the wall a picture of a man holding an Olympic torch. “My husband” Don Casas says “twice Olympic winner (Rome and Tokyo) of Greco-Roman Wrestling at the Olympics. They asked him to carry the torch when the olympics was here. But he is not well. See those two men at each side. They are helping him walk. He was such a fit and healthy man.” I buy my sleeping pills and leave. We are all everyone of everywhere seeking geneology and competition as passage to ourselves when nothing else matters but what we begin with, make and end with – family. I feel lucky at times to swim through the coral reef of human experiences.