Soup

One day this week I helped out in a soup kitchen. 

The kind folk here at the Methodist Church in Knysna dispense containers of soup to over a hundred hungry people, every Tuesday and Thursday. And there are a few other soup kitchens too, in other parts of town.

I was quite sick that day, and as a result experienced it all through a feverish haze.

Still, I have dispensed soup before, and when L picked me up, and took me home, to fall headlong into my sick bed, the memories tumbled around my head before I slept.

Times spent in such different realities to my own linger on in my mind, anyway, like some dream or hallucination.

Memories of spaces and shadows falling into grotesque shapes, under bridges, under foggy, dim, street lights, late at night, came back to me in my delirius sleep. 

I remembered other times spent with people who live on the street, who gather in dark corners, mostly out of sight, with some security only lent by a concrete wall or a reinforced pillar, holding up a highway, way up above.

Those in need of soup, to be sipped, slowly, into a body not much used to food, can be found in these sorts of places. 

We joined them, a twenty something me and a couple of others, under the P E freeways, a long time ago.

Port Elizabeth had a docklands like no other South African city. It was bounded by a row of strip joints and sleazy nightclubs in old warehouses, which let out into the underbelly of the freeway network. 

It was a labyrinth of concrete pylons, holding up highways going no where - a world of cold cement and tar-kept back from the sea, by chicken wire fences, and a row of faceless buildings,with the waves  so near you could smell them crashing in the cold air curling round.

I remember fire lit faces with toothless smiles.

The people gathered under the bridges, warming themselves around those fires, mostly smelt incredibly bad. I, then not much accustomed to them, recoiled a little. But, I had a friend who brought her small, three year old daughter with her, and she let those dimly lit women dandle her, which they loved to do, and stroke her little smooth head, and she was not a bit afraid. 

And so, I let my hand be held, by one lady, who, still somewhat drunk, wanted to sing me a song, in exchange for my offered, polystyrene cup of soup. 

Everything changed for me after that.

Similar hands took soup from me again on Tuesday. Hands with long nails, ingrained with grime. Thin wrists emerging from stiff cuffs, ringed round with dirt. Grey hair tangled into dreadlocks, hanging down alongside thin, crusty and lined faces. 

They sat on the wall in the sun, and waited for their number or their name to be called, graciously accepting soup and samp, from my hand to theirs. I had had no part in the expense or preparation of the soup, and wondered at myself,  in between helping to wash containers, dry up, dispense, receive, smile, chat briefly, lapsing into my words used for those unknown to me, 'love', 'sweetheart', ' my dear'...

That turn of phrase, resident now in my speech, found its way there during my time in England. It has settled into my vocabulary, comfortably, cheek by jowl with 'skat', 'liefie' and other all encompassing terms that cover a wide variety of folk, and roll, effortlessly off my tongue.

I used those comfort words first, when working with the Homeless in Guildford, Surrey.

There, in that lap of luxurious Southern England, I spent some time, distributing soup and sandwiches. The Homeless there, when unable to make use of the various shelters, also gather in similar dark corners. 

We found them, in the icy winter, by breaking through the barracades of back, boarded up windows in a multitude of 'squats' - a dark warren of connected terraced houses, abandoned and derelict.

Finding our way in,  in the freezing dark, was the stuff of clothes, jeans and arms, being hooked on nails and shattered pieces of wood. It was clambering up, over, through, crumbling, tumbling, falling down stairs stuff, and missing a pothole and losing your foothold in the ripped up floorboards, and following a thin beam from a headtorch lamplight stuff  - at least that is how I remember it.

The people we found were wrapped round in a blanket and still and stiff with cold and alcohol and drugs. I am not sure how welcome our sudden, bursting upon them  presence was, really. 

But stumble over them we did.

And they mostly sat up and took the Sainsbury sandwiches from us -  yesterdays fare-  but quite exotic with  tasty chicken tikka, or prawn cocktail fillings, inbetween two soya seed, sourdough or rye layers of slightly curling bread.

They, the forced to rise for us, recipients of our worthy gifts, were grateful for the most part. Mad for the rest. 

One man, I remember, jumped at us, and swiped at us with a plank of skirting board, like a raging demon in the dark. We beat a hasty retreat and I panicked that I would not find my way out, but I did, and tumbled out, back into the dark, tangle weed garden. Quite safe.

I will, I think, be back at the soup kitchen, this Tuesday. 

Being older, and more cynical about myself, I do wander why I do it. 

Without thinking too long and deep,  my more philosophical side might present an argument about balance or justice or just doing good.

But probably its just because I like it. 

Just because I like to do it. 

Feed people.

And I like them, those of  the stripped away gaze, and the open eyes, of the stale sweat smell, and the stench of alcohol and dirt. I like the held out hand, the bad toothed smile.

Maybe it is a kind of love. 

I surely hope so. Then it is something more than like, and sense or understanding is not necessary. 

No answer. No solution to be found.

Just a cup, from hand to hand.

Ballet

The Ballet came to Knysna.

An old friend bought me and my daughter each a ticket. Turned out she bought a load of tickets and on the day we all followed her, splendid as she is with grey plait and jaunty hat, to take our front row seats, amongst the other ballet dames, with grey coiffed hair and legs crossed neatly at the ankles, in the Knysna NG Kerk Hall.

Ballet is not new to me, although seeing it so close up is not something my daughter takes for granted.
My sister did ballet for years. We started out together as little girls, me dropping out early and moving sideways to the more heavy handed (or footed) tap. Even the satisfying clickity clacks bored me pretty quickly and I moved out yet again. I found my niche in drama as siblings tend to unconsciously give space to each other , leaving my sister to the delights, and there are many, of ballet.

The most impressive things about ballet, to me as a child, were the concerts. Concerts and costumes. I remember my mother hunting down seamstresses and fumbling, panic stricken, with paper templates and dress patterns. A sewer and a maker of anything creative my mother was not. She was a secretary and an earthbound gardener. She still is.

Ballet teachers are a different breed. My memories of them are of tiny flexible feet, fluttery fingers,  and feathery beehive hairdos. They are eternally cast, for me, against a backdrop of church halls and rows of little girls with buns, clattering around and thumping jumping, spinning and falling.

The soundtrack is one of piano playing, by a retired ballet dancer, looking up and over all from behind her spectacles, while the teacher loudly shouts out single words - in French - plié, pirouette - and first position, second position, third...
It was all fascinating for a very young me, sitting on the church chairs at the back with my mother and other mothers, fretful over the next concert and the whispered expense of it all, the bother...
But it always came together in the end. Temple Bell costumes, Thailand style, scratchy I thought, and stiff, with a large headdress which my sister wore without a murmur of complaint. She only vomited a lot, as I recall. Excitement did that to her, always. And so, she glided out from the wings, in tutus, Polish Mazerka peasant dresses or as a Temple Bell pretty pale beneath all that make up on a totally empty stomach, with my mother praying silently that she would not faint.

As it turns out Ballerinas and empty stomachs seem to go together.
You have to be light.
There's a lot of leaping and jumping and catching that goes on. I saw that close up in Knysna the other day. The dancers were right on top of us all. I loved being so close up. Its so much nicer than looking down or up to a performance on a stage. I did that often in the P E Opera House, growing up, where we regularly went to see Capab Productions and Phyllis Spira. Once two men stood up in long black coats and threw single stemmed roses at her feet. I was awestruck by that, feeling, for a moment quite transported to London or Paris, forgetting the limited charms of the Opera House, with its tiny stage and musty dimly lit foyer.

My sister danced on that Opera House stage later, many times, when she got older. I did moon over the star dressing room, the tutus all squashed together on a rail, the strange turned out feet and the delicate but hollow thunk thunk ballerinas make rushing about in points.
I tried to be very small backstage, so as to be smiled upon by a totally transformed face, now sporting eyelashes as long as a birds feather.

Oh, the magic of it all!
The magic of the dance does linger. I dreamt of the Knysna visitors that night.
I remembered
the hooks and eyes holding the extraordinary tutus of lace feathers sequins satins brocade and gossamer floating tightly together
the delightful lycra bottoms of the men
quivering fingers and gently perspiring foreheads
glossy lipstick smiles exactly tilted necks arms elbows knees ankles toes
lifts and legs and tight holds releases spins stops..

There is always an element of imperfection to any live performance, a crackle on the soundtrack, a piece of loose cellotape, a slipped strap, a feather fluttering down, a wiff of cigarette smoke from a fleeting flying figure...
the illusion slips
I enjoy the little girls, who run onto the sheets of floor covering laid down specially for the dancers, once they have skipped finally behind the velvet curtain. At their age no imperfections can be seen.

And me, I was transported.
Probably by their awesome commitment almost more than anything else. Their work. Their striving and attaining perfection in their craft. Their ability to transport me, in lifts and tilts, and to be so balanced...

I remembered other church halls.
Thanks Fi.

Pizza

Last night we ordered takeaway pizza.
We wanted to treat our children, and so, while they tucked in I watched them, and realized that pizza has always been part of their lives, something they know.

Not so for me.
Archie comics arrived at my childhood house in mysterious ways. I don't remember ever buying any. Comics were frowned upon in my house, where good literature was always highly praised and encouraged. But it was in the pages detailing the antics of Veronica, Betty and Jughead that I first encountered these strange, platelike, floppy, edible things called pizza, which I pronounced piz - za, without the obligatory, inserted T.
 They were a mystery in the then South Africa, alongside 'Sea Monkeys' and that empowering ingredient that transformed the guy on the back page advert, who never had sand kicked in his face again.
 If you know what I mean, then you know.

That was then.
 And me, growing up in a suburban house, set like an island in a sea of mown grass in P E, glimpsed the bigger world as best I could.

There was one big exception to the comic rule in our house.

Every Friday the British mail arrived, and we would stop, on our way home from school to fetch our magazines from CNA ( as long as there had not been a workers strike in Britain). We bought chocolates too, and home at last, shed our uniforms for an afternoon, bare legs hanging over the side of the sofa, of reading.
Chocolate melting on my tongue on a carefree afternoon still fills me with guilt free pleasure. No homework, no sport, just the antics of 'Patty's World' in 'Pink' magazine, and posters of David Bowie and David Cassidy and the Bay City Rollers to drool over in 'Jackie' with my sister.
My mother paged backwards and forward through her 'Womens Weekly', which educated me  all about the Royal Family, and 'Mills and Boon' romance. We always had 'Look and Learn' thrown in for good measure, no doubt to assuage my mothers guilt of all the frivolity
.
Everything was always depicting the wrong season, winter in summer, summer in winter, and the special enclosed gifts never arrived. I don't think I ever heard a song or saw a moving image of any of the pop stars on the posters, which my sister and I stuck up on our bedroom walls.

When I first arrived in London later, fully grown , and surfaced from the tube somewhere near Trafalgar Square it was all so familiar. The train out from London through the suburbs, clattering between the backyards of the terraced houses was as known and loved as chocolate on my tongue.
 It took years before the reality of its strangeness overtook me, my deep Africanness surfacing and totally swamping every other thing.

Then, memories of lying ill as a child and listening, against my mothers wishes, but she was at work, and it was just me and my nanny Sarah then, at home, to Springbok radio all morning, would come back to me.
I balanced the leather encased transistor radio on my stomach and it was so close to my face that I was reflected as in a mirror in the silver metal lines across the speaker. I stared into my own eyes staring back at me and listened to 'Under the Jacaranda Tree' and other stories so gripping to me then, that I would often have to fake an extra day of illness so as not to miss the next installment.

I fell under the spell of serials in England much later, when the dreary dark afternoons kept me housebound with my baby and I had only the telly for company. The Australian soaps in the afternoon filled the screen with sun and sea and funny accents.
 But my downfall really, were the British series, when, on my little snowflaky screen I followed the antics of all the 'East Enders', and, with chocolate in hand, and baby sleeping, it was the British mail all over again.

My love of magazines was born then I suppose.
The black and white 'penny horribles' Sarah read in her room, and the Afrikaans radio dramas in the afternoon she listened to whilst ironing, were out of bounds for me. Mom came home then, and I picked up my real book, probably a classic, maybe Wuthering Heights - again.
I loved them passionately too, its true.

But, what sweet memories.
 Archie comics, being read with my damp swimming pool hair dripping and making the print run, whilst lying on a towel in the sun.
Those British mags being poured over too, by other far away girls, who were, I thought, like me,  but were really oh so different. They had 'fellas' and 'discos' and called their sisters 'our Kate' and wore their hair loose to school, and their ties pulled down.
And food like pizza was being eaten, and people all went to the 'pub' .

None were like me, lying in a sick bed, with no TV yet , but only a transistor radio for company, and a nanny called Sarah, who came in from hanging out the washing, to pull my bed straight, and plait my hair back very, very tightly.

And if I was very good, she would  make me french toast with  Worcester Sauce, and bring it to me , on a tray.

Fevers

Its been the time of  fevers in our house for the last couple of weeks. No doubt its linked to the time of year, a new school, new viruses.

I took my thirteen year old daughter into my bed the other night, like my mother did before me. L had to sleep on the sofa, or her bed. He opted for the sofa, her bed being one large knot of blankets and sheets. We extricated her from the tangle like from the tendrils of some tropical plant. Her fever was so high she was hot to the touch. I watched over her all night, whilst she tossed and turned and muttered strange delirious strings of poetic words.

I was a very feverish child myself. I think I ran a fever with every virus I had. I also had illnesses like tick bite fever, hepatitis and my sister the deadly encephalitis. My mother tended us both faithfully, folding cloths soaked in vinegar and laying them across our brows.

 Some illnesses I came home for, having left some lover who proved unable to tend to me. My mother changed my soaked sheets and pajamas as faithfully as if I was still a young child.
 I sailed the seas of my fevers like a drunken sailor, muttering muddled thoughts through parched and thirsty lips. Indeed, the days after a fever feel like those of a man who still has his sea legs on dry land, with a rolling gait and a far away horizon in his sights.

Rudolph Steiner has a thing or two to say about fevers I believe.
 I spent some time at a Waldorf School, my son in the Nursery and me in an office. The fantasy world of washed through purple and lilacs and pinks coloured both our worlds willingly. No nightmares there I found, only a dreaminess, and a welcome escape from the harsh reality of the divorce we were enduring at the time.

I think my son had some fevers then, And I, comforted by some dear women, almost 'brides of Steiner' I fondly remember, rode those fevers with him. The Waldorf world has no fear of fevers. They are seen as necessary times of travel, of journeys almost, to the other side. Times when 'we can truly be ourselves.'
And, when they, the fevers pass, we awake afresh to a new, bright day, alive with possibilities.
 I do remember that feeling.

In those Waldorf days I was wracked with pain mostly, emotional, spiritual and physical. My body was bent double often then, with the passing of  agonizing gall stones, so 'galled' was I with an individual, I suppose. Our bodies do, it seems patently clear, mirror our minds and our emotions.

So, very healthy now, my thoughts have turned to illness.
 I watch my husbands eyes grow bleary and red rimmed, watery, his pupils like two swimming fish in bowls, when he is sick and tired. Those fish flash their tails at me, like warning flags of approaching  illness. Stress does it too.
 He hardly remembers having a fever - only I do, nursing him once through the high temperatures of pneumonia, when he made the transition from bachelorhood to me and mine. That was a long bridge to cross.

No doubt my daughter has made it over some high suspended crossing with this latest illness of hers. It is a time of change for her in body, mind, place and face. I remember her as a baby, emerging from fevers to reach another milestone. She took a sudden step, uttered a clear loud word, slept through or tossed a bottle aside for a sippy cup.
And never looked back.

In my nursing days I held many a hand whilst feverish eyes flickered and bodies shook and sweated and fought that within which needed to be dealt with. I felt I might have steadied them as they made some crossing.
.
I left some folk after a fever. Some left me before.
All I know is something changes with a fever.
Something new begins.

Broken

I read an explanation of the word SHALOM once. It was, 'nothing broken, nothing missing.'
I always remember that, when interpreting it the more common way, Peace.

I watched 'Eat, Pray , Love,' again the other day. There is a scene with the Elizabeth character, in Italy. She is with her somewhat frightening, brusque and honest new Italian landlady. The lady is outspoken, and decidedly disapproving of Elizabeth when she says softly that , No, she has no husband, that she is, in fact,  divorced. After a few more broken English questions to her about her divorce, Elizabeth quietly admits, 'We broke it..'

We broke it.
Any divorced person knows that there are few things in life as broken as a divorce. Shattered, messy, scattered,destroyed..done.

I love it when scenes in films get played backwards. When, for example, a child dives back up, from the deep water, up, up, through the air, back up to the diving board.

Or, when the many shattered shards of a piece of precious porcelain gather themselves together from their watery puddle on the floor, and gather that puddle back into their belly, and then, reformed now, as a pretty painted jug, they travel upward through the air, to be clenched again (obviously not well enough, not tightly enough) into some delicate ladies hand.

I wish some things had never been broken.
At nearly fifty I wonder if it could have been possible to keep more things whole, in one piece.
I watched something on YOU tube that explained (quantum physics, I believe) that there is a theory that everything started out the size of one (maybe green) pea.

There was a Princess once who knew the power of one tiny pea.

I rather like the thought of a play backwards of the moment of creation, of all of us and the cities and the seas and the planets all zooming inward and squeezing down to fit in, cosily all inside each other....

To me God IS the Big Bang.
Or maybe He is the Pea.

He is a lot of other things too.

But the most comforting thing to me right now, as I survey, from a great height, another broken scattering on the floor of my life is...
That He is surely SHALOM, or one small pea, containing all the pieces.
Healed and whole.

Commitment

 I have been away from home for a long time. Five weeks. To me, that is a long time. Long enough that when I opened the door of my home and walked inside, and sniffed the air, it smelled different, not like me/us any more.

The cups and plates and cushions and other things were in different places and spaces and it felt like someone elses' house. It took me a while to settle back in.

Still, I was happy to be home. Very happy. My dogs were happy, one thinner, one fatter. They were both strangely subdued. And so was I.
It took me a few days to make one decision. And this was it.
Time to commit.

Commitment and I have a long history.
The thing is - I seem to do it. But actually I don't.

One of the first things we did when back in the Garden Route was to take a young nineteen year old Dutch boy bungy jumping.
He wanted to do it. He booked a jump as early in the morning as he could. He hesitated only because he did not understand the instructions to jump. They were in Afrikaans. And there was music playing. Loudly. Even we could hear it, from the viewing station across the gorge. He was on the curve of the arch beneath the bridge. The highest bungy jump in the world.
I suppose they play the music to help the jumper. Similar music is played in clubs in Amsterdam. Here it beat out along the fynbos covered ravine running beneath the bridge and out towards the river sky sea.

When he jumped I screamed. He, was silent. He said he was aware of the air rushing passed his ears. Silent.
That's commitment.
You make a decision and you do it.
No turning back.

I have moved over fifty two times since I was eighteen. I think that might be a world record.
My children have moved about fifteen times. They are grumpy about it - but I am not very sympathetic, really. I tend to hold the view that not moving and staying in one place is only the accepted thing because most Western people do it.

So I tell my children that they could have been the children of:
- the touareg (my daughter retorts that at least the tent would have stayed the same - and all your friends travel with you.. and the desert is the same just about, wherever you go...)
- yachties (same argument more or less, the same boat, the same sea...)
- the maasai, who have no respect for borders, but only for lions, and own nothing but a stick and some pretty impressive beadwork ( the retort to this, from my son, is that the masai have sold their souls for wristwatches and photograph money and would probably live in a house in a security complex these days, if they could..)
- circus people (a friend pointed out that maybe, to them, we ARE circus people..now theres a thought - the juggling, tightrope walking, performing dogs, clowning....hhmmm)

But even circus people settle down eventually. Retire- to some caravan in a field where they let the grass grow up around its wheels. And yachties possibly throw the anchor one last time, or move into an upside down boat that they make into a home, maybe, complete with chimney. I'm not sure about the tuoareg, or the maasai, but their lifestyles are endangered and the lure of the west is getting to them too.
Which leaves us.

Moving is tiring, and the temptation to follow our noses over the next hill or beyond the next bend in the road is loosing its appeal.

Bungy jumping is expensive, but worth it I am told.
So here goes.
Lets stay!

New Books and Horses

I wrote a book a while ago. I haven't done anything with it since I wrote it. I wasn't sure why until I met with a writer/editor friend the other day.

I met her in a cosy restaurant on the edge of the horsey set. I like it because people(women mostly) trudge through with manure and mud still on their boots. They have riding hat hair, and horse neck grime under their finger nails, from holding the reins against sweaty damp horse necks.

I have always been a great horse lover. My parents let me learn to ride a horse, but not a bike. Our road was too busy, they said. I nearly broke my neck on a horse a couple of times.
Its a while since I rode a horse. I lived in Greyton for a time and rode with a group of women, all, like me then, in their early forties. They all fell off, one by one, until it was only me left. They broke arms, collarbones, and fractured a skull. I decided, if I was next, I might kill myself. I stopped. But I regret it. At the time I thought I still had children to raise. Indeed I did, but life is risky nevertheless, and so you may as well ride, ride - the world is wide.

I was always a bit of a daredevil on horseback. There is a famous story in my family of me taking off with the Xhosa groom over the Katberg mountains on one of our family holidays. I do remember him daring me to race - he was on a naughty pony, and me on a horse sick to death of carrying tourists, no  doubt. I think I lost control. I remember  dodging overhead branches, but clinging on while the groom beat me, anyway.

I can still feel the elation of galloping, standing up in the saddle, leaning forward, hearing the wind in the horses nostrils. Great. I would like to feel that again - but I think I have become a real scaredy cat, the thing I have always despised above all else.

So, I like driving the roads of the mink and manure set. I love pausing for riders and their large rumped, sashaying tailed mounts, trotting on the side of the road. I love the the tap tapping crop and clicking tongue riders, with matching blonde swaying ponytails and straight up down backs.
It's a treat to meet at the horsey deli, then, to discuss the publishing , or not, of my first book.

Officially, actually, its not my first. I wrote another one years ago, locked into a centrally heated flat in the dark of northern England one dismal bleak winter. But thats another story.
This second first one was a sort of rewrite of that other one, a sort of gathering together of pages of scribblings from piles of moleskins, printouts, tapestry,tie dyed,pretty printed covered books that I have lugged around with me, for years.
It feels like that, like a shedding of skins and skins. like a lizard

My friend was marvelously helpful, basically giving me permission to leave the manuscript in a drawer and move on, for now, to my second book, which is, well, champing at the bit, to be written.

Its like a wild horse, a new book.
Like a herd of wild horses.
Like a herd of wild horses all tossing their manes and neighing and stamping and pawing the air to be let free.

Its terrifying though.
They feel impossible to ride.
So, I suppose I'll just let them go and watch for a while.
New books and horses are like that. To me anyway.
Never totally under control.