Women I Love (A Travel Yarn)
$30
IT began innocently enough with a mate’s observation that I seemed to have far more close women friends than males.
Though I hadn’t thought about it until then, the comment prompted me to sit down and make a list of those next to my heart. A few days later I’d come up with 40 names. Of these, 30 were female. Not only that, they represented more than a dozen countries on five continents. I thought, “hey, there’s a story here”.
I did a fun piece for this journal last year on 10 of my favourite women friends, their ages at the time ranging from 20 to 87. It might have ended there, but the editors put together such a delightful layout of my article that slowly, slowwwly, a book idea began forming inside my head.
Not only about these wonderful women, but, since I had first encountered them in my frequent roamings of the globe, I reckoned it might work to include a travel story – what we intrepid roadies call “yarns” – along with each woman profiled. The result is what I feel to be the best writing I’ve ever done: welcome to Women I Love (A Travel Yarn).
This is my fourth book in the past four years. One might think, at age 80, I should be slowing down, spending more time tending the garden or playing golf instead of straining my eyes, fingers and lower back sitting a million hours before my ancient laptop. The opposite is true, primarily because there exists a project, a mission actually, which has motivated these writings.
Twenty-seven years back I met a remarkable young woman. Her name was Amanda Lowry, and at 19, she blew into Whakatane and changed forever the cafe scene here.
Due to Amanda’s creative, yummy and healthful fare, the long-time Kiwi standard Bell tea, asparagus roll and stodgy, overly-sugared nana tucker were run out of town.
And it wasn’t only food she changed, but music and ambience as well. She made her cafe rock. And the citizenry responded in kind.
For a dozen years did Amanda’s Strand Cafe (now Javaman) pack them in. During this time I was a regular. Her place became my place seven mornings a week. And we became friends.
Following Amanda leaving the cafe biz, we remained in close touch, even after she and her new partner moved to Tauranga. She gave birth to a daughter, nine years back, and four years later her partner Gemma did the same. Both women were over the moon with joy.
Then, five days after her second daughter was born, the moon fell from the sky, crashed and burned. An accomplished surfer, Amanda dove off her board following an hour’s riding of the Mount Maunganui waves into what she reckoned to be a couple metres of water. She was wrong. It was mere inches atop an invisible sandbar. In an instant, Amanda life changed dramatically.
Now a tetraplegic, not only would she never walk again, but with just 14 percent bodily function, many of the normal activities of this all-go Kiwi female were relegated to history.
Whereupon Barry, whose creative efforts during the past decade had dwindled to nearly nil, stoked up the brain furnace.
Every dollar received from sales of the first three books have gone to help support Amanda, Gemma and the girls in their radically-changed circumstance. The same will be the play with Women I Love. But where before sales money went to help pay for construction of the new house essential to accommodate Amanda’s condition, the revenue from this book will go towards a totally different endeavour.
Since early childhood, Amanda has been a good swimmer. This is no longer the case.
Amanda is now an amazing swimmer, having taught herself to lie on her back and use her arms in synchronous motion to propel herself rearwards through water like a, well, a torpedo, comes to mind.
She has done competitive mile-long ocean swims against accomplished able-bodied swimmers and more than held her own. Now, she has taken this skill into the pool.
Through hard work and fierce determination, Amanda has qualified for the New Zealand Paralympics development squad, and if all goes to plan, come 2020 she will be in Tokyo competing to bring home a medal for New Zealand.
In addition to winning a medal in Tokyo, Amanda has another goal: she would love to have her two beautiful daughters there watching their mum compete. But she hasn’t the funds to take Lola, who will be 11, and Ziggy, who’ll be seven, to Japan with her. So how can this be accomplished?
The answer is through you, dear reader, when you purchase a copy (or more) of Women I Love (A Travel Yarn). Because every last dollar received from sales of the book will go towards shouting Amanda’s girls a trip to The Land of the Rising Sun two years from now.
And what does Barry get out of this? Well, since you ask, I am going to browbeat Amanda into letting me take her medal home and place it on my mantle for a single overnight. That will be worth every hour of slog spent on my antique Toshiba the past 12 months.
Oh, by the way: Amanda’s story is one of those in the book. Bet you never figured.
Price of Women I Love (A Travel Yarn) is $30, although you are welcome to pay more if you feel generous. Books may be purchased at Javaman Cafe, on The Strand.
By Barry Rosenberg
-Contributed