Cy, the king of 'castle

It’s not often that you meet a person who can see right through you, see the daft wee child crouching within.

I was half-managing a warehouse in Moorabin — an industrial suburb of Melbourne — when Cy joined on as an extra pair of hands. We latched onto each other immediately, laughed and cried at the absurdity of the culture in that office where the founder role-played Steve Jobs¹, his business partner looked like 120 kilos of Geordie Shore wrapped in a pin-stripe suit, and our immediate boss was the Sri-Lankan version of David Brent. In the chaos of all that, Cy would pull me off the warehouse floor, drop a cup of tea in my hands, and laugh at me for spending even a moment of the day taking myself or any of that mayhem seriously.

I won’t recount the whole of that time, but months later, not long before I left Australia, Cy took me out for breakfast. Good food, good patter, but what I remember most vividly is Cy poking his head into the kitchen of that busy cafe just as we were leaving and bellowing a thanks to remember to the cooks in the back. All of ’em were smiling ear to ear after. That memory stuck with me — that and the time he went cartwheeling (truly) through the Monday morning meeting. To exist alongside Cy was to exist in a sort of perpetual awe at the volume of joy that a single human being could add to the world.

That uneasy sense that I’d had since about age ten, that my life was being suffocated by my shyness — and I’d be far better off without it — found it’s first talisman in Cy, and I’ve been drawing on it (avash) ever since. As Cy put it recently, a decades friendship emerged in weeks back then, and for all that we’re both hopeless correspondents, when we do manage to get to the phone at the same time, there’s no one with whom I can more reliably let go of the silly guff in my head that, left unchecked, would have me and the world at odds.