LAUGHTER IN LALOR

“We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.” – Jimmy Carter

Another wonderful Saturday! I started the day off by having my hair cut. Fortunately my barber opens at about 8:00 am, so I was able to not waste much the day on such a chore. We then went shopping and visited the public library. Today we were at the Lalor Shopping Centre, which is in an outer working class suburb of Melbourne. I love this shopping centre as it is still a vibrant, vital and zesty strip shopping centre with many old-fashioned shops, cafés, quite a cosmopolitan air.

An Italian cake shop is right next to a Lebanese bakery. A Greek delicatessen opposite a Spanish take-away shop, next to a Turkish restaurant. A Vietnamese two-dollar shop, a Chinese department store, an Australian supermarket, Serbian greengrocers, Polish cafés, Korean newsagents, old English butchers, multinational clothes and shoe shops, everything one may need! And people, always masses of polyglot, multicoloured and endlessly varied people! The public library there is well-stocked, not only with English books, but with a variety of other items - books, CDs and videos in languages to reflect the multicultural population of the suburb. It is always such a lucky dip in that treasure trove and I come back with all sorts of CDs of various nationalities.

In one of the pedestrian byways, on most Saturdays, a couple of elderly Italian buskers play an accordion and sing old Italian songs contributing to the festive atmosphere. Today a Chinese woman was dancing along while a few pensioners of varying nationalities were sitting on the benches and were clapping their hands in time. The greengrocers were shouting out their specials, while the butchers further down the street had a barbeque set up and were grilling a variety of their sausages for people to sample.  Further along some groups of friends were telling jokes and laughing. The world might have gone crazy, terrorists may have decided to blow everyone up, war might be raging far away, but in Lalor today everyone was having a lovely time!

Here is a song, “Marina” by Rocco Granata from 1959, and one that was on the Lalor Buskers’ repertoire today:



Later in the afternoon, we watched a movie and then in the evening a wonderful dinner with all the trimmings and some divine dessert…