“I wish I’d been less serious in throwing those balls for hundreds of hours with the kids, but my goodness that regret is dwarfed by the unbelievable gratitude of having had the chance to do so.” ANTONIO DI DIO continues his Short History of Kindness series. 

YES, well, it sounded like “Doreen” and, while not CJ Dennis, I am a sentimental fella. Italians weep at almost anything, especially from the ATO. 

And so it was, She of the Order of Infinite Patience and I were gardening together. She hollers instructions while I do stupid, and on this occasion she was manning the fandoogles while I was in the pool, cleaning muck off the green bits. 

Not so much a pool these days as a water feature with textural notes of the “Amityville Horror” meets “Swamp Thing”. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to other people, what with their organised schedules and Useful Men in the family. But I was giving it a crack, and the alligators and eels were scared of my yellow speedoed butt wiggling below the surface, like a giant blancmange that was keeping time with my top half, humming Chisel tunes and taking instructions from madam. 

After the axing of the offending vegetation, the newly homeless reptiles slunk off elsewhere, and I reintroduced the pool to chlorine, slightly less negatively charged than Doreen and Maureen, but higher up on the periodic table and a ripper on algae. 

You know the Proust effect – the smell of something can trigger a memory that brings a powerful emotion – in his case it was the smell of a pastry dipped in tea that reminded him of happy childhood. In my case, chlorine is a reminder of two things – laps up and down in a country town pool with scary, hatted ladies on a microphone announcing that some other kids were behaving very well and had an attention span; and our backyard with the kids still little, throwing endless slips catches.

Those catches peaked when I was about 18 and my friend Marco Polo would come up from Sydney and we would spend hour upon hour in the water at Nambucca, tearing tennis balls into the surf trying to get it to land in a fashion that the other bloke got smacked in the head with an oncoming wave as he took the perfect John Dyson. Such fun, and like licking an ice cream or watching the Duke whack a bad guy, wonderful just being what it is.

Chlorine’s smell reminded me of past pool catches, when I had the luck and privilege to have lovely healthy kids, a sunny day, a house, a few hours off, no bombs or climate catastrophe, and still I got irritated because one of them wasn’t taking it seriously. 

I figure you’ll never be in the best cricket team if you don’t practice these catches seriously. I look back and think, “what a blessed idiot”. Those afternoons kicking a footy, tossing catches, skimming stones, hitting tennis shots, throwdowns in the nets – my goodness, they were wonderful because they happened at all.

Meikle’s Kindness Central stats show 400 plus Aussies go to each of the recent Olympics. About 450 Australian men IN TOTAL have played Test cricket since 1877. These are Very. Small. Numbers. It’s unlikely that two hours a week behind the school nets will get Cheryl into the Matildas. 

I have such a long list of advices to give my younger self that the weight of that emotional baggage will not let me get a ticket on the Bezos/Musk Time Machine. 

One will be – enjoy every minute with them, dummy – in five minutes they will grow up – and by the way, they will grow up so wonderful that they will remember all the dumb things you did with joy, not horror that you thought you were God’s gift to coaching the Narrabundah under 12s. 

The other, and far more important, is that kindness to yourself and others is the bedrock of your future self’s gratitude. 

Tomorrow morning I will wake up and thank myself for today‘s disciplined effort not to have that 14th taco. 

Today I wish I’d been less serious in throwing those balls for hundreds of hours with the kids, but my goodness that regret is dwarfed by the unbelievable gratitude of having had the chance to do so. 

These holidays, be gentle with loved ones and yourself – spend time with people and talk and play and argue and swim and eat with them, not with the challenge of trying to improve them in any way, but enjoy the huge gift of just being together. 

I miss them that are no longer with us, one important one our family lost last year, but thanks so much to a generous Universe that we had her, and them, at all.