Ian Hayman

The following is my attempt at transcribing a marvelous talk to our Red Carpet Tour group by Ian Hayman. Please don’t hold anyone accountable for anything written here (except me)! This is Crystal Trulove’s perception of the day, and I can only vouch for myself, NO ONE else in the following words. Warning: there are a couple of curse words.

This is from a poor recording on my phone, while standing at the back of a crowd. Every time I moved, my clothes rubbed the microphone, drowning out words. I had a cough that day, and every five minutes my coughing drowned out the words. Ian kept telling jokes and talking while people laughed, and my phone only picked up the laughter. You want more excuses? Ian talked a million words a minute, and has a New Zealand accent I’m not familiar with. The following 5,660 words were spoken in 31 minutes (3 words a second) on the side of a lake, with chirping birds, the wind blowing, clapping, and side conversations. I guessed at words that I couldn’t decipher, left out the words I couldn’t hear, put in question marks for single words I simply wasn’t sure about.

Why would I put it all here anyway? Because the man is a born entertainer. I’m sure he could charm the pants off of anyone. Good luck, and have fun reading.

Picture an animated performer, gesturing, shouting, doing all his own sound effects. Ian Hayman of Tasman Downs:

…recording missed the beginning….

There was a border guard before she got here. So Walter put a manager on it from 1915 to 1919 and they brought Grandfather in the Summer. My grandfather was told to look after it and ? until they could sell it. Mainly because of the rabbits. Six rabbits eat as much as one sheep. Two rabbits in two years produce two million. Two rabbits can start breeding in 4-5 weeks after being born. When six rabbits eat as much as one sheep and you have hundreds of them all over your paddocks… This paddock here was actually fenced up, see that Burnt Creek fence, right round about 25 acres. They put a crop on that, and that was literally rabbit zone. The rabbits knew after about 3 or 4 weeks that there was lots of yummy crop. So rabbits would all pour into the paddock. Then they would shut up the gates and get 25 or 30 men – this was back before health and safety – and lots of dogs. Dad was about 8 or 9, he had his little shanghai, all the adults had shotguns, and then they piled into the paddocks and just had mass slaughter. You had to be quite careful you know you could drive all the rabbits to the end of the paddock and they would actually start getting over the fence – they would pile up in corners and smother and get out. So you would go off with a group of a thousand rabbits and you would shoot that lot in a corner and they would go off and do theirs. Anyway… pretty mayhem. They tried to do this with good shots and then the skins got used; they skinned all the rabbits. Enough about rabbits and their bad habits.

He found a way here and he couldn’t really make a lot of money off the place, mainly because we’re too far from the markets. Everything’s a long way away from here. This is all windblown loam soil so it’s not very good farming land. It’s got no nutrients in it, there’s no selenium, no sulpher, so you’ve got to get a lot of supplements in. You stop enjoying the farm. So his wife Lynn started Tasman Downs School, ran it from 1923-1945, put through 75 pupils. My dad was taught there. When he left that school, he went to Timaru Boys’ High. When he was at Boys’ High, his father, um, had, you don’t hear it so much this word used now, because of now of course if someone has a fit and falls over because of a stroke…because we know now that was what was wrong with him, he had strokes and all that. Back then if someone had a bit of a wobble and fell over and survived, people would say, ‘Oh, John’s had a bit of a turn.’ No one really knew what had happened but they said it was a bit of a turn.

Well my Granddad Jack, he’d had a bit of a turn. So my dad left school when he was 15. The turn he had had was not in this paddock but in the next paddock, where those cattle are, he was working with some cattle when he got a rope wrapped around his knee and he got dragged for five hours up and down around the paddock, through swamps and bushes, by his leg. He probably had a mild heart attack, I don’t know. Jack was pretty floppy for about 3 months. So dad left school and came back to help him out because he’d had a bit of a turn. He had a bit of a turn in the cattle business.

So Dad missed out on doing his matriculation. Matriculation is what you needed to like mass or cert or whatever you need for university entrance. Then in 1937 Dad was headed to Timaru on a 1918 Harley Davidson there was a billboard on the side of the road. BIG bright coloured billboard of a young strapping lad and he had a blonde girl with arms out like this around that blonde girl he had a fag out his mouth, av goggles on his head, and there was a spitfire plane standing beside him all lovely and yellow with gleaming and shining windows. For a young fella to see a picture like this…and written right through the photo was ‘Join the RAF travel the world for free and have the time of your life.’ Dad thought, ‘That’s me!’ He was sick of rabbits and their bad habits and being on the farm. His dad had got better by then. So he went back to the boarding school and did his matriculation. He was about 16, 17 then. He told his father and mother that he was going to go to war. They didn’t want him to go to war ‘cause they had lost a daughter that was 3 and a half, because of a bitch aunt that was actually up from London. Not that she knew she was a bitch, but she was a qualified nurse. She said to them not to worry about Patricia because it was just wind, and that’s why the wee girl was crying. But it was actually a burst appendix. So she died. And then Dad’s other sister, she also died later on when she was about 20. She was going to take over the school, but she got pneumonia and died.

So then Dad decided that he was going to go off to war. So he went out to Christchurch, and then woodland?, and then ? and Wellington, and then a boat trip to Sakatoon, Canada, where they were put through, for a year or so, vigorous pilot training. He had a good heart, and his eyesight was good, and they threw you in mock planes down into the water to experience a plane crash into the sea, then you had to find your latch and get out. They gave you the turbulence and g-forces that a spitfire could give you when you were dropping from 12,000 feet to 1,000 feet and pulling out and your blood all just went to your feet and would drain but as long as you had your probable position you would pull back out and your blood would come back up and you would carry on. So once you got through all that and you were fit enough, you got to be a spitfire pilot.

Meanwhile back in Britain, the bloody Germans had been over and accidentally bombed – we got Germans here? (there was Peter) Ah cool, cool. Good machinery. I watched American shows saying ‘Far superior tanks’ – wrong! In fact the Germans used to call the American tanks – the Sherman tanks – a Ronson. A German cigarette lighter is called a Ronson – yes? The German tanks were so superior that when the American tanks would burst into flames, they would go ‘Another Ronson down.” Anyway, the Germans had been over bombed England, and had gone a bit off course and had bombed civilians. Winston Churchill was irate, so he put a feller in charge, Bomber Harris, or Arthur Harris. They nicknamed him Bomber Harris. His thing was that they were gonna bomb the shit out of Germany, but right at the scene it was gonna be an absolutely bloody scene, the war was gonna be over by 1946, but we were too strong.

So um, all the spitfire pilots, there were 23 others in dad’s group and they were the glamor boys they had a lot of fun in a spitfire; it was like being in a rollercoaster all day. He got shot at, but he got paid a wee bit o money. I actually watched the History Channel, when the Americans when were fighting the Japanese and they got a $1.66 a day to land on the beach and get shot at. Going back to Winston, Winston was out doing a talk at his lectern once and talking out to the crowd and a lady came out of the crowd and yelling up at him and she said, “If I was your wife, I would poison your coffee!” Winston looked down at her, puffing on a cigar, and he said, “If you were my wife, my dear, I would most likely drink it.”

So dad got put on a Wellington Bomber, a Wellington Bomber was a bit bigger than a DC3, it carried two and a half tons of bombs. It was leaving – it had a few gadgets on it, it was a big trip to get to Germany from England, so they had gadgets on it like cuz the motors would run out of oil, so the rear gunner would come forward and got on a pump and turn a tap on to the starboard motor and pump two gallons of oil into the engine and then pump two gallons of oil ? so they could get back home. …the fuel they were using would …sealed up the holes so it wouldn’t fill up with fuel and it had two Rolls Royce super charged 1800 horsepower in each engine. Pretty state of the art for the day. In fact there was that song, ‘Coming home on one wing and a prayer,’ and that was an old Wellington coming home, they were all shot up but they could normally get you home.

This was 1943, and they flying into a place called Fargier (?), and they were a few hours into the trip when the clouds broke open a bit and they thought, ‘oh, it’s gonna be a nice day,’ and then it clouded over, and then they opened up a bit more, and then a massive grey went past on the starboard side. And then he looked up and there was a whole heap of this grey coming up from the side, and that was Mt. Etna in Sicily, at about 10,000 feet. So he gave it full throttle, up the plane went, and then went out to the side, they were full of bully beef, blankets and biscuits, a couple of ton of all that on. Then the struts broke on the plane because they got off on quite an angle trying to pull it up, and then stalled, an aviation term, just the motors wouldn’t let it go any higher. Then out it went to the side and everyone goes, ‘hooray!’ on the radios and everyone thought it was all good and then WHOOO! both motors flew to bits. There was an outcrop of rock that took the propellers off the plane and then it bounced, skidded down the mountain a bit, and then up into the air and back down again, and then broke in half a bit and went two feet into the snow and then carried on, still intact and then stopped. And when Dad came ‘round – he was knocked out for a bit – the whole nose of the plane had gone. The front gunner, who would normally be out in front of him, had gone out beside him, all this av gas was pouring down the aisle of the plane. The pilot sat a bit to the left and there was an aisle down the plane that went to the back, up and down, and all this av gas was pouring down there.

The front gunner was lying in amongst all this fuel, and Dad used to describe it a bit like when you had a boiled egg for breakfast and you know when you have a boiled egg you crack the shell and then you took the shell back to eat the egg. His head had done that. Dad said his head had just flopped back like on a hinge, his brain was out there, and there was blood pouring down the aisle. So that didn’t look good. The whole nose of the plane had gone, the throttle was gone. Dad thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of this.’ He didn’t know if it had actually happened or if it was a dream. He went to get his av gear off, he couldn’t see out his eyes, he didn’t know his nose had been pushed across that left eye, and he had 32 stitches worth cut right from there to there you could see his top row of teeth, and his finger was chopped off here. It was hanging down and the blood was going “pfffff pfffff pffff!” Couldn’t see very well cuz when he was trying to get his av gear off, and oxygen gear, the blood was squirting into his other eye.

Anyway he went to jump out of the plane, he was sitting about six feet up in his seat, the whole nose had gone as I said. So he jumped down in the snow and his foot came around and he saw size 9 ½ on the bottom of his shoe. It came around and hit him in the knee. His tibia and fibula went out. So he dragged himself up to a rock about 20 yards from the plane. Tried to light a smoke, tried to get his matches out, shaking, probably in shock, because he had had this experience. Couldn’t get his matches out of the box, couldn’t hold the cigarette. Yelled out, someone else yelled out. There there was this gurgling that went on for about 2 ½ hours. That was a guy sort of had the equivalent of long term Covid, he was {gasp gulp gasp}. He was trapped under the wing. The wheel of the plane had squashed his chest. He survived about three hours and died.

So two died, four survived. Dad and the navigator were alive, and the two fellas who got ripped out of the plane when it was coming down the mountain. They came down. They put a tourno around his leg and gave him lots of bully beef and blankets and biscuits. It snowed that first night, the plane slowly disappeared in about 3 or 4 feet of snow and the snow was up over Dad’s head. What he did enjoy with the snow was just the lovely taste cuz he was so fucking thirsty, cuz he’d lost so much blood. He ate copious amounts of snow. Of course if you’re in a situation like this you don’t eat the snow; you put the snow in a plastic bag and then you drink the snow when it thaws, because your body needs energy to thaw it. But of course back then he didn’t have a plastic bag, so he just ate copious amounts of snow.

Two nights, Italian mafia came up to look at the plane. They had heard that the plane had crashed. They were in radio contact and had heard the plane had crashed. Radio contact in a bad way. They would scan channels and find out where their actions were. We’ve got Italians? (there was Matteo and Fabian) Italians, they’re lovers not fighters. Dad had a soft spot for Italians, and he always bought Italian tractors after the war. You’ve got SAME and Fiat. You know I’ve still got an Italian tractor, a Landini, good hill tractor. Good on ya, cool! Now I’m going to tell another part of the story, to do with Italians. So. The mafia came up to look at the plane, and they ended up putting Dad on – an RAF plane captain, this fella Salvador Libretti, held onto the corner of the blanket and dragged him down the mountain. Bumping down, the navigator had a broken back, he was also on another blanket, he was also bumping down. Dad said it was amazing how much the human body could handle cuz he’d be, ‘Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhhh!’ and then just fade out and faint for about a quarter of an hour. Then, ‘Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!” Anyway, he survived that day. Yeah now if they even suspect it’s your back they won’t even touch you, they put you on a stretcher and go on a rig down the mountain. This guy was on a blanket!

Anyway, they survived that, they got back to the campsite where there was a 12-year-old kid.  They stayed the night there. Then they got on donkeys. Dad said that was the worst bit of the trip, hanging on ‘round a donkeys neck and hanging on to its tail. And going down these steep bits. The donkey’s leg was hitting his legs. Anyway, while I remember. This Italian kid was 12 then. They raised this lake in 1976 – this is a long way of telling the story – but they raised this lake in 1976 for hydroelectricity for New Zealand there was Rob Muldoon Think Big project. Before they raised it in 1976, the top of the lake was 2 kilometers that way. So there was no water out there. So our farm was out there. We had 1,000 acres out there. So they raised the lake; we lost half the farm. We got put from 2,000 acres to 1,100. Compensation wasn’t that good. Back at the farm, that was all good country out there it was lovely deep soil. Anyway, they raised the lake fourteen k’s longer. Because things were tight then, and we had lost the land, Mom and Dad went into homestays. They did farmstays and people came in, and they had a bit of a extra income. This started in 1981, and went right on through to 2005. Some Italians were staying, and Dad used to tell the war story of course. They were very interested in the war story and they were from Catania. They asked Dad whether it would be alright if they put an ad in their local magazine, it was in 1998, and put the story in, of what had happened. And they did. Within six days, that 12-year-old kid – he was 66 – got in touch with this family. They talked about the story and then the 66-year-old and the family they rang Dad and they were quite good at English. They had the conversation with the 12 year old kid that was 66.

He remembers that day. It was a very cloudy day, and the drone of the plane, and that ‘wooooooo’ and then it just stopped. The mafia fellas, he said, they were on their radios station, and said that the Remington had gone down somewhere around Sicily, maybe near Mount Etna, and then they were on their journey. The 12-year-old kid was made to stay at the site and cook up some meals and keep the fire going for when they came down. So that’s the end of my story.

Dad used to tell me about the Germans, they were in Italy at that stage, they were bombing Italy  a ball bearing factory, bridges, and trains and stuff. The mafia got him down, and the RAF came driving up looking for the plane, they came across Dad, and the donkey, and the 12-year-old kid. The three mafia fellas split. Dad never quite knew why. Oh, so I didn’t tell you this. They were gonna shoot Dad when they found him, the first mafia fella came up with a gun to his head. Dad pulled out his goolie chit – your goolies they’re your nuts – they used to call it your goolie chit because it was the last thing you hand over to someone and it was written in five languages. If you hand over the pilot back there was £70,000 in rewards. Having a language barrier, Dad showed him this, then they put the gun down, didn’t they. So they didn’t get their reward; they ran away. But Dad was a bit sad because in the Catania paper three weeks later that Salvador Libretti, who they’d been trying to find for about a year, was finally found and they shot him for other wrongful doings, but he had saved Dad’s life.

So he got to the hospital Christmas Eve 1943 listening to Sicilian Nuns singing Christmas carols as he went up into the stairs of the hospital. He said it was like going up to heaven. He got his finger on, his jaw sewed up, he never had a scar there cuz they did it so beautifully under his cheek. Quite a lot of glass was in his head, and a wee bit of glass came out.

But he got to live, and then he ended up in England. They couldn’t get the swelling out of his leg, they wanted to amputate it. It was getting near the end of the war at this stage. A lady came in with a tube, a glass tube – you know a vottle(?) – and she said ‘Do you know what this is?’ and Dad said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘This is penicillin and you are going to get half of it.’ Penicillin was actually invented in 1928 and Dad doesn’t know why he didn’t get it earlier, but he does think, looking back on it, that the Americans and the Japanese were still flat out in the war, it had been going on six years and there was getting to be a shortage of supplies, a lot of it would have been going over to the Americans. So he got this penicillin anyway, the swelling went down in the leg, they hung a weight over his bed, they stripped the bones back out over a couple of months, took the tibia out of his path. Took fibula out of his good leg and screwed it down the side of his tibia and he got to keep the leg. And he got to come back to the farm, and his parents were very happy. He had a bit of a limp, one leg was always that much shorter than the other, which was good on hills, you could walk around the side.

And then he had a few other – he had a car crash. He got someone pregnant while he was in the hospital, maybe I don’t know. A red-head girl called Tonie came and followed him out and she lived on the farm and they were married for 19 years and had four children, all in their 60s and 70s now. And she left with one of the shearers that had been shearing the sheep. Then he met my mother. She was 28 he was 45. She liked this old fellow with a bit of a limp, and he quite liked this young darkie girl so they got married. When my mother was 7 months pregnant they had a car crash out on this road. Dad lost a kneecap in that same leg, the handbrake knocked the kneecap out. And he had a big dent in his hand there for the rest of his life where his teeth, he had knocked two teeth out in the steering wheel. That was with the old lap douts. Had a big dent here in his hand. Had no kneecap, broke some ribs.

We were clipping a rams feet when he was 68 or 69 when a ram charged and snapped the knuckle on his knee so he was in plaster with a broken leg. Then he fell off the roof when he was 72 and broke his pelvis. And he had his leg amputated when he was 74, and he lived to be 88. But also nice things had happened, he was really tough, and he was the only person on the farm. He always did – like when he had his broken legs he made things on the three wheeler motorbike to carry his leg in a hook so he could still check his stuff. He put screws in the end of his crutches – cuz I was at boarding school – so they wouldn’t slip in the snow for feeding out the hay. He had a grave dagger on his plaster and still got the jobs done. He was a good old type guy. And then someone said, ‘Oh Bruce with all that you’ve been through, what about your mental health?’ And he said, ‘I don’t got fuckin time to get mental health.’ He just went from that to that to that. He had to keep going. There wasn’t time to think about being floppy or not.

He got to be old, and then he died in May 2008. Yeah I think we’ve got too much time now, with people putting tails on, it’s just– people went away before the war, just to live, now we’ve just gone way off the bloody radar. Anyway, we can’t help it.

In 2011 Peter Jackson came, to do The Hobbit. He found a spot over there where he put Laketown. That was in June, July and then he said in November – I’m lyin a wee bit saying ‘he said,’ because he didn’t actually say that – his PA, his assistants, they flew in to find the place they told me you’ll get ten grand at the start, then they’ll pay you 3,000 each day on filming days, 1500 dollars a day each day they’re here. They were here for about a month, they did six days filming, they took about 12 months to film. I made about 19,000 dollars out of that. The film went out about 680 million Am I right in saying that? So it ended up being done here on the farm.

When I was here, this is Robert here, I could tell you a story about Robert. When you’d go down and see the um, I’d come down here to see the filming, show my pass and then sometimes a head fellow, or Harry, he was a guy who was on, I don’t know, I think he was on meth or some kind of drugs, he was just so screwy, just so on — so sharp. Harry’s like ‘Hey Ian! Ian!’ and he always needed to clean his glasses, holding his glasses like. ‘We’re just gonna – another guy’s coming, another guy’s coming down from Auckland. Should be here tomorrow.’ When you’d meet these guys that come down, they might want to organize, I don’t know a whole lot of trucks coming in and stuff. They’d be talking to you, they’d be like, they’d have an earpiece on them and they’d go, ‘Hang on just a minute, Ian,’ and they’d walk around going, ‘Yep. Yep. Uh huh, yeah yeah yeah.’ And this went on a couple of times, they were wasting my time a bit.

So that was my farm hat then. Actually it just had a haircut. I used to have really long dreads in it, and it’s all gone. This. So I’d put that on, that was my farm hat. And then that cell phone cord. Cuz I was just trying to outdo them. And then you’d get days when you get a cell phone, I never used them, I just had that on my farm there. So you’d go down and meet these guys. You know when you meet another person, if you don’t know them you don’t say anything. Of course if there’s a mate you go, ‘What the fuck you got there there,’ but when you don’t know someone. Obviously his mind was thinking, ‘Well, this guy’ And then he’d start talking about something, that he thought was very important and I’d go, ‘Hang on for a second, mate.’ And I would walk away saying, ‘You’ve got a tractor start over here, hang on what was that? Alright, bye bye.’ So I’d do that, then I’d walk back and start talking again to the guy. They never said anything about it. I was walking through the trees over there, and Lando was walking towards me sort of was almost going to walk past me, and I thought nothing was gonna happen and then he goes, ‘Does that aerial line really work?’ ‘Yep, Yep, we’ve got quite bad coverage here on the farm, and to run the farm with all the things going on with the cattle, we’ve got to be in touch with outside world, so a friend hooked all this up.’ He goes, ‘Oh, alright.’

I was in the food marquee, and I overheard, they said, ‘crazy thing, I wonder if that really works,’ I heard them say this when I went past about three tables with my meal gun (?) I went round talking. ‘Oh my god, it must work.’

When I was young my father used to tell stories. You know how when dogs are running around, one dog will sniff the other dog’s butt. Well this kid said, ‘Mr. Hayman, why is that dog sniffing the other dog’s bottom?’ Dad was always quick with an opening like that, and he said, ‘Well, it was because of the big party.’ ‘What big party, Mr. Hayman?’ He said ‘well, you’re wondering why dogs sniff their bottoms.

The dogs went to the party! They came from near and far. Some of them came by airplane, but they mostly came by car.

When arriving at the function, instructions they all took. Each unscrewed their asshole and hung it on a hook.

Then they proudly strutted in, each mother, son, and sire, And the whole affair was going well until some bastard shouted ‘FIRE!’

There was no time to ponder, there was no time to look. Each dog grabbed the nearest asshole off the nearest hook.

And that is why today you may see a dog may leave a tasty bone, Sniff another’s ass and hope he’ll find his own.

Yesterday there was this lady, with a nice BMW car and she was crying on the side of the road. I asked her what’s wrong and she said {sobbing} ‘I’ve run over something.’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘That.’ And I looked over and it was a hare, squashed on the side of the road. I said, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter, there’s lots of them.’ She said, ‘Oh I’ve never run over anything before. I feel terrible.’ And then a guy pulled up on a Harley Davidson motorbike, and he said, ‘What’s the problem?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s this lady. She’s run over a hare, and she’s very upset. That hare there.’ He had pretty cool black boots on that had a ? underneath the heel, and when he walked it went ‘weeoooweeoo.’ When a Harley Davidson’s idling, if you ever hear a Harley idling, this is one thing that Harley’s kept up, when they idle they go, ‘potatuh, potatuh, potatuh.’ So it’s sittin’ there, potatuh, potato-ing, and he’s got these cool boots on, and the hare is dead. He goes, ‘I might be able to help you.’ He goes back to his bike, undoes his satchel, pulls out an aerosol can, 330 ml I think, anyway, {speeesssshhhh speeeessshhh} sprays that side of the hare, kicks the hare over with his cool boot, sprays the other side of the hare. The lady goes, {sobbing}. Then the hare’s nose starts going {wiggles his nose}. I know! And it sort of sits up, and it’s like WTF? It’s a bit giddy, and its ribs are all squashed, and the leg was facing the other one, and the legs came round and the ribs filled out. It sat up, puffed its chest out, and its ears went up, with the black tips on, and then it started hopping! I was like, ‘Wow!’ It went hop hop hop, and then it started running, then going like this {he turns around and waves}, and then running, and then {waves}, and then running and {waves}. And it disappeared off, over the hill. I said, ‘What’s in that can?’ He said, ‘Have a look.’ And it said ‘Hair Revival with a Permanent Wave.’

Another one of Dad’s friends that came back from war, an American chap. He had been a bit hard on the girls in his life after the war. He had been shot up a bit and probably had a bit of mental things going on. He had gone through a couple of wives and was on his third one. He said to Dad, ‘Bruce this third girl I’m gonna marry proper like.’ Dad said, ‘How do you mean, proper like?’ And he goes, ‘Well, the other two girls, I’ve slept with them before the honeymoon, and I think that’s a bad omen. This girl, I’m gonna leave the sleeping till the honeymoon. This is gonna be the one.’ He was in his 70s. He came out a couple years after his honeymoon. He was here, having a few drinks, with his new wife. His new wife was over with Mom, and he was with Dad and I. Dad said, ‘How did your honeymoon go with your new wife?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Do you mind if I sing this to your father, young man?’

Now I can’t sing like he sang, one because he was American, and two he was actually a singer, so he sang quite well. But um, he said, ‘It goes a wee bit like this Bruce.’ He sang, ‘We got married last Friday. My girl was right there beside me.

My friends were all gone, we were alone, side by side.

We were happily wed when, she got ready for bed then, teeth and her hair, she placed on a chair, side by side.

One glass eye, so tiny. One hearing aid, so small. She took one leg off and placed on the chair by the wall.

I stood there, I was broken hearted. Most of my girl had just departed.

So I slept on the chair, there was more of her there, side by side.”

When we went up to him and asked for his photo, Ian said, “You look cool, with your toodly-doos on.” I replied, “Thank you, I’m an elf today.”