Winter Castles

I can't make up my mind whether I like Winter, or not.
I think it depends on the duration. And the depth of cold.
England was too much of both. So was the Langkloof - and with no central heating!
Still, there is much to enjoy in a month or two of mild chill.
Stripy socks. Hats. Fires. Mohair blankets. Bredies and Pies and Soups. Boots. Books in bed.

And a winter beach.
Last weekend I bullied my two children into leaving the comfort of their books and face book and all screens in general to venture out with me and L into the icy outdoors.
The drive out was a miserable one, but I remained unfazed by our two gloomy backseat passengers.
The final idea had been L's, when he said something like -if we were tourists what would we do?.
And so we headed off to Noetzie.

We had both been there years and years before.
I did not remember the turn off being through an informal settlement. No doubt it had not been. These places almost suddenly appear. The road sides were lined by structures that had truly embraced the term 'lean to'. Lean too far and they would topple their bright turquoise, purple, red selves right into our path. They cheerfully teetered into the banks of nasturtium leaves, whilst the children outside their toppling houses waved. We waved back and proceeded on.

Down the gravel road we drove, leaving all behind us until it was all trees only on either side. And then we entered the Pezula Estate zone, of mansions perched in fynbos behind electric fencing, with soulless sheets of glass eyes staring with a lonely gaze down towards the sea.
We passed on, and our passengers cheered up, and we remembered other trips down gravel roads, dragging tents and gear to isolated spaces, and it felt a little like that again.

The parking lot was not quite deserted. L and I both know crime stories that have  happened at Noetzie, but we both said nothing. Deserted places in South Africa always cause us to hitch our senses up a notch, pull out our  antennae, as it were,  and become a lert, in the African sense.
We met two fishermen on the steep path down. They were tired and armed with long rods and knapsacks. We greeted them, and they us.
I relaxed a little on the descent of bricked path. That had not been there before, and was built no doubt, by Pezula who have privatized a section.
A castle.

By way of explanation we told our two children (bright eyes now, with the assault of sea air and pungent fynbos, and the shiver of steep cliff to our left) that the castles built at Noetzie beach were a kind of folly. I forget the story, or history of it all, but the fact is - someone one or some people built six stone castles down there on the sand sometime last century - simply, I suppose, because they could.

By the time we made the final descent of 132 steps to the sand the children were ahead of us, and we were warm. L and I followed the bend of river around the corner and peered up at the castles and peered down to the sea, and ended up perched on an abandoned lifesavers chair - to keep watch. The children, meanwhile, with sticks in hand, followed steep tantalizing pathways up between stone walls and hanging vines, to wave to us, after a while, from blind, glassless windows in the very top, decaying castle.

They came back eventually, to say that apart from some graffiti about heroin the castle was absolutely clean and tidy, as far as abandoned buildings go. Only a rich kid shooting up then, took shelter once, it would appear. No shack dweller, wandering down the dirt track, past the shut away Pezula houses, came upon, and decided, on a cold day, to set up home in a castle by the sea. No dirty rascal making a bid for being King of the Castle.
It would be too lonely down there. There is a  desolate lack of company - only a colony of seagulls gathered together on the icy sand, and two back birds with spread and drying wings on the foamy waters edge. No Ubuntu. No community in Castle land.

Even I was glad of two smart figures with large cameras glimpsed behind the buttresses of Pezulas private luxury castle. And there were one or two other tourist strays coming down with clicking cameras.
The ascent was harder work and my heart beat alarmingly. No fear now though, the spirit of adventure had caught up with us by then

We were a cheery lot on our return, and threw all final caution to the wind  at the Knysna Heads, where we drank wine and ate pizza on the way home.

Tourists we remained, until the end.

Crime and Punishment

Some people tell naughty children that the police will come and get them, if they are not good. No one ever told me that. But I heard it.  I still do.

Good cop, bad cop has become an accepted turn of phrase.
It is a reality of life anyway, on which it just, well, depends, I suppose.

The police  have been there, in my life, always. In fact, they are one of my earliest memories. I remember waking in the middle of the night to the sound of them hammering on the door of the servants quarters in the yard. The door of the woman who worked for my parents. Real fear gripped me as I heard their loud voices demanding that she open the door.
 I loved her. I was little, and she was like a mother to me.
 I heard my father open the bathroom window and talk to them, and then shut the window and tell my mother softly that they were checking passes. My mothers ghostly form drifted into the room I shared with my sister, and touched us both and whispered  to us to go back to sleep.

I remember the police vans  of the time, with the brown fingers of the men in the back wound around and gripping the wire mesh. I was not sure that I could trust them for myself, but I was told I could.

At university and in the communal houses of my early adulthood I knew the sound of the security police kicking open a door and bursting in. In their uniform of tight jeans, running shoes, leather jackets and moustaches, in the Eastern Cape, I knew some of them by name.  Their faces had shouted into mine a couple of times.
I would be lying to say I was not afraid , but being young then, and white, I had felt invincible.

Not so, anymore.
L has been hijacked too many times. Once with a gun to his head, and the trigger pulled, but the stolen, mismatched bullets stuck in the chamber. That drove him to a solitary life on the Crocodile river, with an old land rover and a long drive back to Jozi.
Another was with AK47's in a barrackaded schoolyard .
There was another one, but the details get confused after a while. That drove him back to the Fairest Cape.
The point is, we have not, not been touched by crime

So, last week I did not march into the police station because we  do not understand the issues around crime. I served on the Community Police Forum in the Langkloof precisely because I try - to understand the issues, that is.
I marched into the police station because, a short while earlier my son - my seventeen year old, tall and lanky son, with a new cell phone, a bank card, a snazzy purple asthma pump and no doubt a wad of crumpled tissues(rhinitus) , in his pocket  - had come riding home on his very good bicycle, with his beanie on his head - visibly shaken.

The two policemen who stopped him now know the exact contents of his pockets - because they made him empty them. They know how good his bike is because they checked it over. They know the colour, curl, length and height of his hair because they pulled his beanie off and checked it out as well...

I have been told that they -  asked where he had been, whether he had been using, what he was doing there (on the streets of Sedgefield), whose bank card he had  ,how his asthma pump worked (he had to demonstrate),whose bike it was -  because they can and will stop, search, and make a young man spread his arms on the bonnet of their vehicle and pat him down, wherever and whenever they like.

I took the complaint as far as my son would let me, which wasn't very far.
He is not very happy.
To him the police are far from being friends.
I understand the feeling.
I thought those days were over.

Every Mother has her Day

This morning I woke up thinking I had heard my Mothers voice.

I experienced a moment of confusion, like when a dream crosses over into reality and voices escape from inside to outside, for a moment.

She is not here, where I am, but is alive, and living in a city far away.

This morning her voice brought me intense comfort. Like when I was a little girl, and I would awake to her, and reach out my arms , with eyes still shut.

Every week I phone her, and even though our roles are beginning to reverse, the roles of carer and being cared for, she can still be, for me, a warm voice of comfort.

A lot of our lives have been lived over the phone. That way our voices could be any age, and I forget that my face is becoming more and more her face and I am aging. And I forget that she is getting old.

There were many years when we lived on separate continents. Years when most of what we said was conveyed in letters ( mine since returned to me, a big bundle tied with string – I can't recall where they are even now.)

Phone calls were for Christmas and birthdays. There were a few years of New Years Eve calls, when I was still young and it was a tipsy delight to phone all and sundry at two in the morning for a slurred 'Auld Land Syne'.

Our lives intersected at times back here at home and we connected, mostly in quaint towns but also busy cities. I was always a faithful visitor – dutiful, perhaps making up for the grey hairs she claims I gave her, which I have now.

I gave her plenty of scares I guess, by disappearing on yachts for weeks on end and doing other dares that she probably guessed at, but didn't know.

So, when Mothers Day comes round, like it did a while ago, I phone, of cause, and I do miss her.

She and I have had our lonely spells, hers by staying, and me by going, but we are grateful for the phone. Its not that we have always been the best of friends, but her imprint is so strong on me that , wiping away the mist on the mirror, I cannot avoid her.

I can only hope that my voice will be a soothing balm (it must be the right time of day, you understand...not too late, when the weariness of the day has taken its toll.), for my daughter in her life. It does not stand to reason of any sort, because, there has been hurt, and fear, and doubt, along the way.

A voice can be like a refrain, or a familiar song, that takes you back in time, to moments well lived, and loved.

I live in Sedgefield, and my mother in Cape Town – and I miss taking her out to a special lunch on a special day. I would like to think that these days it is more me giving and her receiving. But, no, it is probably not yet quite that.

Some say that you only truly grow up when your parents are no more.

I am still a very needy me , sometimes, and I do not yet feel fully grown.

All this, settles down on me right now, as we plan my daughters first trip to England.

She goes without me. Already we have our skype conversations planned. She is the wrong age to confess to much anxiety or to express that she will miss me too very very much, as I would want her to.

I realize that I am the one staying, for the first time now, while she will go.

Many a call was made home by me, from chilly England, to my mother, sitting sunny by the pool, with a smokey braai in the background, that I could almost taste with the memory of it.

With skype I'll get to see my daughter, and hear her, and that will be for better or for worse.

I'm not ready for any role swopping – but it seems it happens, ready or not.  

A right Royal affair

Of cause I watched the wedding.

There were many complaints from those who claim to be  anti- Royal, and some whinging on about money being wasted and how inappropriate it all is in this day and age...

I remember similar comments about the World Cup and the money being spent by our poor nation to host such an event. I explained in an e-mail to a friend in Britain that a party is important sometimes. A moment in  time in which to forget the tough times, the violence, the disillusionment, the discord - and join together and at least believe, for a month or more that we all love each other and are united as South Africans.
It was a great moment.
It seems the same may be true of Britain, and I for one sat in my African living room and  thoroughly enjoyed it all.

 

Life is too serious at the best of times, and lately I really believe in the Power of the Party.
And I try to still believe in weddings. I've had two, and the only Royal thing about both was probably the jelly and the icing.

The first one was the most in contrast to the Royal one witnessed in London the other day - and with all its political correctness and lack of spending it still didn't last.
So, theres no guarantee..

I bought the dress for that cross racial/ cultural wedding in a pre-democracy South Africa in a Surf shop the day before the wedding. It was plain white viscose and I wore purple shoes. My parents bought me flowers and the groom was jazzy in dreads and an Indian waistcoat!
The black community I worked in was bused in and my dress was later stained by the blue dye in the icing of the slab cakes we cut into hundreds of squares for the children whom I carried around the reception. Only immediate family from my side were present, due to my choice of groom, and all in all it was rather a gloomy affair.
 There was no dancing, just eat and drink, and our Azapo and other friends, who thought they were 'communists' would not enter the church, but languished outside until it was all over. I do remember a young 'comrade' wrote us rather a nice poem which he recited mid floor whilst the cake and cokes were consumed.
We were idealists, thats for sure, and probably more than a  little self-righteous.

That marriage, like many similar ones of the time in South Africa, ended in tears and confusion and disillusionment. So, I don't hold 'doing what appears to be the right thing' in such high regard any more. Its alright, you understand, but me and my second husband swung round more to the 'Carpe Diem ' maxim, I suppose.

That second marriage was just about 100% a gift from friends. We fell into it after two years of living together, probably more so that my children could legitimately say Daddy, and some misled idea of religion. It was a day of fun in the sun played to a Van Morrison soundtrack with friends outside under the Oaks. We ate Nandos from a trailer and tent and there were no speeches, no table settings, and was similar to the first in that I carried around children again (this time my own) and very little money was spent.
Still, the dream of marriage is one that brings a tear to even a jaundiced eye.

Maybe Wills and Kate want to have kids, and being Royal they need to be on the right side of the blanket. Or maybe it was more. Married they certainly, in a sense, already were.

It was also a gift I suppose, to them, by tax payers money, and then in turn another gift to all of us, the satellite viewers. Deep in our psyche is the desire of the mystical union, expressed in different ways, in different cultures.

In the end money has nothing to do with it.
 Its all a dream. A hope. A fantasy.
 Long may it last.

The Luck of the Draw

Its a long time since I have done a dot to dot puzzle. I was always rather fond of them and used them to teach my children how to count. They are such a good marriage of right and left brain, aren't they? A combination of numbers and art as the picture magically appears.

Art and Maths are the opposite ends of the scale and passion of my sons schooling - one being hated and one being loved. It was in the pursuit of the one that I took him and a fellow art student to visit a local artist the other day.
Here in the Garden Route are many dabblers in Art and a few famous names also, hidden as they mostly are amongst the mountains and dunes.

Beatrix Bosch lives on the ridge of the dunes of Wilderness and has had an open house for the month of April - an exhibition contained within her house - and so we popped in. We were on our way to George for Art classes and she was alone when we visited, and we spent longer than we intended and were late (although, of cause we did not miss anything really). We stayed longer because we were invited upstairs to her workroom - which we could not resist and lingered longer there, fingering her piles of skins and admiring her newest work in process.

I glimpsed her bedroom to one side and heard the radio for a moment before she clicked it off. I had willingly toured all the huge art works downstairs, and talked about them, felt them, smelt them - praised them.

But, I have to confess my eyes kept wandering to the huge panoramic views of the crashing sea and beach stretching the entire length of the house, visible through the wall of windows. I noted that her bed was placed so that she could see it - the crashing sea.
 I enjoyed the twinkle in her aging eye. The sadness too, was there, because of longing and missing and getting old and things ending, I think. I imagined the legendary parties  (she said with up to two hundred guests) that used to fill the place in the seventies...
I saw one photo of her in the sixties, so pretty and vital. I remember her comment of how her and her late beloved husband used to run down the wooden walkway to the beach, with bicycles, and haul up amazing and twisted lumps of drift wood, which he made up into sculptures..

It was she who interested me , almost more than her creations of leather (purple, red, orange, turquoise, black) and wool, hanging heavy on every wall. I thought of her strength in bone and muscle and mind as she created, letting the leather speak to her,  against that backdrop of sea and sand.

So I left late, but still sad not to stay longer. She seemed lonely, and would not deny it, because she is quite recently widowed and alone. After all, there is surely no way to separate the Creator from her Creation. The Artist from her Art.

In preparation for teaching Art I am lately swept away into the world of Artists. Enthralled by the stories of Gauguin, Modigliani, Kandinsky, Rousseau, Picasso and the rest. I think of Paris and poverty, of mistresses and madness, paint and passion, light and laughter.
The Creator and Creation, all jumbled up and impossible to separate.
Dots and numbers, dots and numbers..

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about the act of creation and how it starts with one dot.
 One number, or a lot of dots and how they are joined and become the numbers, the sequence, the picture...
And I think about Beatrix - on her duney hilltop, within her walls of bright and brilliant leather - looking out at the sea with her artists eye.

You are sixteen, going on seventeen...

My son just turned seventeen.
As always, for me, a birthday brings with it a bittersweetness, especially when it is one of your children, getting older, moving on.
And now, its strangely winter, a sad and sudden end to summer, and I close my eyes and think of England...

My bonny bairn was born in the borders between England and Scotland. The Scottish nurses hailed him as the future President of South Africa, seeing as he was born on the cusp of our new democracy. They tucked him into the car, sheilding him from the icy North Sea wind. A lazy wind they called it, "Why go round ya, when it can go right through ya.."

That was all after the panicked removal of me and my belly on a dark night, in an ambulance, through the border hills to a 'proper' hospital where he would be born by emergency c-section. We were accompanied by our Scottish nurse in the back of the swaying ambulance who got herself high on the 'gas and air' which she repeatedly offered to me and then enjoyed herself.

 For most of the journey her face was covered by the large black rubber mask - I was attended by her halo of golden curls and her beautific (read stoned) smiling presence. She later visited me in the maternity ward and presented me with a knitted pink jumper for the babe - an honour she foisted on all the babies she accompanied in the ambulance.

With hindsight I think that what I was going through was pretty much like what was happening in the run up to the vote. A mad rush to rescue a life on the brink of tragedy, with a crazy angelic being in control, with a home knitted jumper as a reward at the end for the creature that had been born - a being that she was a little confused about - what was it?

Ten days later we travelled to Glasgow to vote for our exciting new country. I was nursing a baby and a hacked and black laced up wound and the air was icy and grey. The voting hall had an air of a party where hardly any guests had turned up, but those who had made it were determined to have fun nevertheless. A couple of women yululated and some elderly folk punched the air with their fists and muttered 'Amandla' I think.

Our Manchurian friend kept us laughing by peering hopefully out the doors in expectation of more exuberant voters, but to no avail - only a trail of bleak grey Glaswegians huddled or tottered by, ablivious. We were left to sit upstairs in our apartment , coaxing life into our sooty coal fire and had to be content to watch the scenes of sun beating down on those long snaking columns of queues in our home country
.
 I nursed my baby and sipped soup and sobbed with the missing of it. The loneliness of it - us mothers know the new baby tears and fears. And I had it for both those new babies then, mine and the other mine (that longed for country of jubilation and joy) .
I have never stopped regretting not being here, and being there...

Still its now seventeen years of democracy and boyhood. Seventeen seems to be nearly manhood, but the British have the  best word - a lad.
 Lads can be loutish, funny, irresponsible, adorable, sexy, hunky, sweet, violent ,maddening, charismatic,scary  unforgettable,loud, thoughtful and relentlessly cheerful.
A lot like our democracy.

Timing is everything

Timing is everything.

I sms'ed that to a friend the other day, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

I remember a film I saw once, with Gwyneth Paltrow, called Sliding Doors. Basically, as I recall, it was about the difference a second or two can make. You get into a lift, or you don't because the doors slide shut. You meet the man of your dreams in that lift – or you miss him....and life is different evermore.

The other morning I wandered down to the Lagoon, like I often do. I had something on my mind, and needed to think it through. So I sat on a bench covered in mosaic (a Sedgefield thing) to do just that – a sort of think/pray/meditate thing.

What I heard was a distinct voice telling me to Pay Attention.

Check the details.

Stay in the moment.

So, I noticed people out on the muddy flats, pumping for prawns, and others joining them, and others leaving.

Two women, with rugsacks and prawn pumps were passing behind me. I turned to them and asked them what they were doing. They told me, stopping their long gumbooted strides, to smile, to unpack their rugsacks to show me their handlines, to explain how they pumped for bait, then moved over the lagoon to a fishing spot where, they assured me they would, some time that day, catch a fish.

For the pot, for supper, for the family, or the neighbour.

They greeted me and moved on, and I watched them till they entered the lagoon and waded out, maybe feeling my eyes on them.

The timing of fish and hook and bait.

Timing of seasons and currents and desultary conversation.

Sliding doors.

Chance encounters.

I went home grateful of meeting them, and their generosity for allowing me to glimpse for a second the pace of a lifestyle, probably generations old, and that it is still continuing.

There was nothing special about them or me that day – but the timing was never the less perfect. I think of them often at that time of the morning, and it is a comfort to know that they continue, most days, with their rhythm of life and me with mine.

And I remember, more and more these days, to pay attention.

Check the details.

Stay in the moment.

Timing is everything

Once outside Prince Albert, on the pass, we came upon a man, stumbling towards us, his face a mask of blood. We stopped. He staggered. Before us on the pass road was a car. There were three bodies. One flung against the cliff, where a smear of red paint showed me the car had ripped through. One was in the road. One was near the edge, where the road gave way to a deep and unforgiving ravine. The car was twisted and still.

I got out. L tried his cellphone. The children peered anxiously at me from the back window. I moved from one body to the next. Some were still, some moaning. Another three people were still in the car. The wandering, blood smeared man approached me again. He reeked of alcohol. The man on the cliff side also did – his trousers were down, and I noticed his Daffy Duck boxers. Another car stopped, another one drove on, shouting that there was no signal there, in that sweeping corner of huge mountain, grey road and green ravine. He would drive on to make the distress call.

I got back in, and we drove on.

There was a man with latex gloves, and a medical kit – and another now stopped, who were moving amongst the injured, tending, touching – in a way that I could not.

Sliding Doors.

A moment before we would have been facing that red out of control metal

coming careering towards us, from side to side, ripping along the cliffside and across, to be propelled back off barriers and rocks, to eventually be still.

How many avoided accidents have there been?

Timing is everything.

Be in the moment.

Pay attention.

So we are faithfully moving forward on this journey, trusting that no opportunities are being missed.

That danger, has been avoided.

That secret other life that could have been, but isn't.