YOU never know who you’ll meet on a train.
As I embark the quiet carriage from Redfern to Wollongong at 11pm, I am suddenly drawn to an elderly couple with two large suitcases taking up extra seats.
The white-haired lady smiles warmly, squeezes her husband’s hand and falls asleep on his shoulder.
Soon after I nod off, and when I wake they are both fast asleep with their mouths gaping open.
I feel an urge to take a photo. Instead I close my eyes.
When I get off the train, the lady and I exchange smiles again, and that’s that.
A week later I catch the 4:36am train from Wollongong to Redfern, and who should I see on the platform but the same couple saying goodbye to a person I assume is their 30-something year old son.
I wave. They wave back.
We’ve never spoken a word, but we are friends already.
The chatter is instantaneous as we board the quiet carriage.
Ten minutes into the conversation we elect to change to a talking carriage.
It’s not even 5am and we can’t shut up.
Cav and Val O’Mealley fell in love on a blind date – Cav was a trainee teacher and Val a trainee nurse in Armadale, a suburb in Perth.
Now 54 years married, their connection is a joy to behold.
When Cav speaks, Val listens and squeezes his hand. Cav does the same.
If soul mates exist, these two are just that.
The couple used to live local and ran The Open Hearth Hotel, “a real workingmen’s bar” in Warrawong, a suburb of Wollongong in the Illawarra.
Come the 90s they knew it was time to move.
They shifted to Evans Head, over 700km north of Sydney, in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW.
“It’s the most beautiful place in the world,” says Val.
They come to Wollongong a couple of times a year to see one of their five children, Michael, and his two sons of five and three.
They catch the train all the way here. A long ride, even for these fit-looking 77-year-olds.
Cav and Val are lapidarists.
A lapidary or lapidarist is an artist who makes decorative items from stones, minerals, and gems using the techniques of cutting, grinding and polishing.
They sell their creations in Gemtree, north of Alice Springs, and at a store in Sapphire in Central Queensland.
For two to three months of the year they go bush, digging up garnets in Fullatin River, a mountain dotted with red gem stones. They then go 130km south to Agate Creek to fossick for the “prettiest quartz in the world”.
“When the rains come down, they wash them all out. It’s absolutely beautiful out there,” says Cav.
A community of like-minded Aussies do this annually.
Each group of fossickers will camp up in a specific place that is close to water and safe for camp fires, about half a kilometre apart from one another.
From the Earth’s stones Cav and Val make dinky gem trees from labradorite amethysts and decorate emu eggs, which they sell at the Sapphire Markets purely for the love of it.
Val digs them up and Cav carves them into shape.
Val says their kids insist they should have a website to sell their creations, but they can’t keep up with the demand as is.
“Basically we love fossicking,” says Val.
“But when you find something you have to do something with it, so Cav facets and I make things, and then you have to get rid of them otherwise they start to accumulate.”
For the 80-minute train ride, the conversation never stops with these two gems.
We share stories about our families, work, theories on water divining, the healing nature of stones and crystals, post-traumatic stress disorder, sleep disorders, plant medicine, yoga, and mortality.
We go deep quickly.
“I see many people my age spending most of their free time at the RSL (Returned Servicemen’s League) drinking and playing the pokies,” says Val.
“We don’t have time for that.”
As the years roll by the couple are in no hurry to slow down, always seeking sweetness and adventure.
They have just organised their first overseas trip – “New Zealand doesn’t count, it’s part of Australia,” they joke.
Almost 80 years old and they’re off to Europe and England.
Cav and Val say the hardest thing about getting older is deleting friends’ names from their phone book.
Val squeezes Cav’s hand extra-long to accentuate the point.
The heart melts.
The paradoxical unity of falling madly in love with your favourite person in the world, and knowing you will lose them one day to death or separation balances the sweetness and bitterness of such a union.
Val and Cav are a reminder that as far as we know “there is no always forever… just this”.
So live, love, follow your joy, be adventurous and kind with every fibre of your beautiful and divine human-being.
Yoga teacher, skydiver, martial artist and journalist. Yoga keeps her centred and reinforces her core belief that the greatest gift to each of us is ourselves. When Dawn isn’t teaching yoga, she works as a skydive camerawoman, grapples with her mates at Gracie Barra Shellharbour, and does media and promotions for stuff she loves.
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