Post-Its for my children: The kite

Tags

children, Divorce, kites, marriage

Your mother made me a kite. It was big, impractical, it didn’t fly very well. But it was beautiful – long tail, paper stretched like parchment over a simple frame…she brought it out to Gordon’s Bay, in her little white Datsun … I was leaving for Umtata, a 12 hour drive ahead of me, and we met on the beach, beside the harbour: warm sand, blue sky, and the ocean opening out before us. Our lives lay before us. We were not yet married, not even betrothed: but this was a gesture of love; a sign; a kite, tossed up into the wind.

I drove to Umtata, alone, with Eileen’s kite in the back of the car.

Thirty years later, I wish I could talk to your mother, about that kite.

Being Dad

Tags

American Beauty, American Graffiti, American pie, children, dad, fatherhood, memory, movies, parenthood

There is something about being Dad at my age that I find rather attractive and, well, nice.

No, it is not about getting up at 3 in the morning to change nappies, or wiping clean pooey little bottoms – those days, mercifully, have long since receded into distant memory, though I am happy, if any of my children are contemplating having children, to point out the downside. Nor is it about fetching home drunken teenagers in the wee hours, or separating squabbling siblings, or wondering if your kids are off somewhere snogging with boyfriends or girlfriends.

I guess it is something to do with feeling useful; by serving as a repository of some sort of institutional and familial memory, being the archivist of one’s own errors and failings, so that one can draw on memory and anecdote for the purposes of advice and guidance – simply being turned to, with a problem or a question. For example, we’re doing prawns tonight – dad, how do you make that stock of yours, from the heads and shells? Dad, there are chicken leftovers in the fridge, that have been there for two days – do you think its still safe to eat?

Sometimes its about work, or study, or those pesky things called human relationships; sometimes its just about one of those things that are at the tip of your tongue, that you just can’t remember. Jonathan, for instance, sms’d me from London last night: ‘dad, what was the name of that sixties movie we used to have where they drove around a lot? It had all the good music in it.’

Damn! It was not ‘American Beauty’ (a great movie); not ‘American Pie’ (a cheesy one) – but it was something with ‘American’ in the title, of that I was sure. And so, after mulling it over for a while in a leisurely bath, I went online, and googled, ‘movies with ‘American’ in the title. And there it was: ‘American Graffiti’ – a fabulous movie!

These kids humour me, I know, with their questions and queries. But it doesn’t matter. I like it. And thank you, Jonnie, for reminding me of ‘American Graffiti’ – one of the perks of old age, when the memory starts to go, is being reminded of things by your children. And here it is, the trailer, courtesy of YouTube.

This quiet life

In the next two months, I need to:

• get an electrical clearance certificate for the Emmarentia property
• find a new home for Rob and me to rent; somewhere convenient, with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and an office
• book a removal company
• pack up the Emmarentia house (second move this year!)
• move into a new home, or place my goods in storage
• in readiness for my visit to Canada and the US in August to meet Rob’s family, and the few days that Rob and I will spend in London with Jonathan and Hayley, stand in line for a US visa, a UK visa (we didn’t use to need these, but since our South African passports have become such fraudulent currency, the UK has clamped down) and a Schengen visa, for the stopover in Paris
• lead and manage a task team on policy, legislation and governance in the Further Education and Training (FET) colleges sector
• write a critical analysis of Further Education and Training policy, legislation and implementation from the 1998 White Paper (in which I had something of a hand) to the present
• interview key FET informants
• Develop a proposal for a new business initiative in FET and skills
• Help to plan and sell the Learning Partnership for School Improvement that I have been instrumental in shaping
• Do the preparatory work for a report on the state of schooling in South Africa, and the role of business, for the first Learning Partnership Forum
• advise on the development of proposals for a provincial education and skills development forum
• find new work to supplement my income from July, when the level of effort on my contract with my former employer steps down from full-time to part-time
• start looking out for someone able and willing to marry Rob and me on 21 December
• oh, and there must be other stuff, but it’s Friday afternoon, and I can’t be bothered right now….

All I can think is this: it’s a good job I lead a quiet life – I don’t think I could handle a busy one!

Postscript: paperwork

Tags

consulting, paperwork

Three weeks into this new life as a consultant, I have my first independent contract, and with an organisation in the Western Cape. Thanks to the loyal and caring colleagues who have supported me – I may have made the sale, but Judith made the introductions.

All I am waiting for now, is the paperwork 🙂

Paperwork

Tags

administration and bureaucracy, carbon footprint, paperwork, toilet paper, waste

There was a cartoon in the office of the Dean of Research at the University of the Western Cape, back in the days when I worked in the Education Policy Unit, that was both out of place and apposite. It showed a human behind on a toilet bowl, and a tide of toilet paper flowing across the floor. The caption read, ‘the job’s not done till the paperwork’s done.’

Juvenile toilet humour, I agree, and in the better world we all believe in, performance not paperwork would be the thing that counts. But performance, as we also know, is precisely what generates the paperwork.

Or, a lack of performance. In two instances, today, one to do with a supposed tax-free allowance on leaving my employment, the other to do with actually drawing down the money from the further bond on the Emmarentia house, which has already been approved and registered, paperwork, far from wiping the slate clean, in a manner of speaking, has gummed up the works.

The tax free allowance turns out not to be tax free. The money I have borrowed, to pay out my ex-wife, turns out not to have been borrowed, until I make a further application to access it – and the final key, to unlock these funds, turns out to be – wait for it – a piece of paper. In this case, because the property is registered in the name of a close corporation, of which I am now the sole member, the paper in question is a resolution of the said close corporation, with a register of members present, to the effect that application should be made to draw down the money already borrowed.

And so, accordingly, today I met with myself, and agreed with myself on the necessary resolution, and signed and forwarded to the appropriate bank officials, the required paperwork.

Dear Kafka, how many forests, how large a carbon footprint, and how much time and treasure, to wipe a few arses!

Obituaries and announcements: Frederick van Zyl Slabbert

Tags

Cradle of Humankind, Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, Mail & Guardian, Mark Gevisser, Roots Restaurant, summer solstice, Thabo Mbeki, wedding

Frederick van Zyl Slabbert died last week. He was one of the good South Africans.

Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki’s biographer, wrote in the Mail and Guardian on Friday of his first encounter, aged 12, with the young, virile, handsome Slabbert: ‘…like almost everyone else who would meet ‘Van’ during his extraordinary life, I was immediately smitten. I had never met anyone like him: he seemed both glamorous and earthy, both intense and irreverent, both easily approachable and fiercely intellectual….I remember thinking, on the drive home, that I would go to the trenches for him…and that I wanted to be like him when I grew up: passionate, principled, engaged.’

The one and only time I ever voted, under the apartheid regime, was for Van Zyl Slabbert and his Progs. I voted in his constituency, Rondebosch, and Van Zyl won.

Van Zyl’s history, in a way, is a ‘white’ history – not because the man could not transcend his race, or his Afrikaner background: he did so with integrity and passion. And not because – or not only because – there would always be those who would typecast him, whose interests were served by playing the race card. No, at a deeper level, Van Zyl’s story is the story of a good man marginalised, an intellect and passion for this country set deliberately to one side by those in power. And his race, I think, in our re-racialised democracy, made it easier to do him in.

Gevisser again: ‘I have written elsewhere that Slabbert was ‘seduced’ by a highly instrumentalist Mbeki as part of the latter’s strategy to shatter the monolith of white South African support for apartheid. Slabbert himself believed this to be true….Slabbert remained outside until his death, and many – including the man himself – believe he was denied an active role in post-apartheid politics because he refused to be a yes-man to Mbeki, from whom he became estranged.’

It was Van Zyl’s tragedy, but it was also the tragedy of the country: not just for the man, but for many more like him who have found their passionate belief in and loyalty to our young democracy cynically abused, because, in the end, they just can’t brown-nose like they are supposed to. ‘He loathed the “patronage, favouritism, cunning and manipulation” of the new order as much as he did that of the old and although he was an ambitious man who wanted to play his part, he wore his alienation from the new power elite as a badge of pride.’

‘Get out of the way,’ a white leftie friend said to me he was warned recently, ‘of the black bourgeoisie stampeding to the trough, setting up their family dynasties. Stand, and you will simply be run over.’

‘In the end,’ Gevisser writes, despite his years in Parliament, Frederick van Zyl Slabbert was ‘simply not a politician.’ Maybe. But there is more to life than politics and politicians, and Van knew it.

To my mind, Thabo Mbeki will always be an exile. History, in a sense, chose him; but he chose his path, too, and forged his own identity. Van Zyl Slabbert always was, and always will be, a citizen.

Meanwhile, of course, ordinary lives go on, as they must and should. Rob and I have now settled on a date: 21 December, the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere, and winter in the north, is the date we will be married. We have chosen one of the top ten restaurants in South Africa, Roots, in the Cradle of Humankind, for a celebratory dinner with family and friends. And, as we look ahead to a life together, one of the questions I guess will be, not ‘where do we want to live’ but, ‘where do we belong?’

Time and distance

Tags

distance, memory, Relationships, teachers, teaching, time

Distance is a many-splendoured, many-flowered thing. We think interchangeably of time and distance: the Magaliesberg is an hour away from where I sit, here on my verandah in Emmarentia, on a chilly but bright autumn morning, catching up on my blog. We appraise and value our relationships in terms of distance: though Rob is in Canada and I am in South Africa, she and I are close; certain acquaintances who live not far from here are distant; my ex-wife is not merely distant, she has fallen, alas, through her own volition, through a black hole into another galaxy. Already, just three weeks into my new life as a consultant, my former life and career as a director in an organisation seems almost remote. Memory ranges over the distant past. Life itself is a journey.

So here’s a question: how far is it, would you think, from the Transkei to Johannesburg? I can tell you precisely. It is half a lifetime.

On Monday, at a colleges conference in Durban, I was poignantly reminded of this fact – and being reminded, was made aware too of how much the past is part of us. We carry it in our hearts – or, less sentimentally, as my daughter Kathy would remind me, we store it in different parts of our marvellous if imperfect human brains – and find, when we retrieve the file, that the past is, after all, just another form of the present, and every distance is near.

On Monday I experienced one of those moments that every old teacher has experienced: a former pupil materialises out of nowhere, and tells you how you have influenced or shaped or changed their lives. In this case, the former pupil was from my old school, Ngangelizwe Senior Secondary, in Umtata, and he had been – a point he emphasised, as a badge of honour – a member of the cohort of students that had started at the school in the first year of my principalship, almost all of whom, he said proudly, had matriculated three years later. He said – and I have to admit, I have no recollection of this – that I had made a speech on their matriculation, telling them what a ‘special’ group they were, as my first group of students, and added, that this speech had made a tremendous impression on him, and he had always remembered it. But the thing he said that moved me most – that made me think, is this not the very purpose of my life? – was this: we didn’t understand this at the time, he said, but you were already living then, in the world we live in now.

What he meant was, he saw me, a young, white, inexperienced and often brash young principal, as someone who believed in a different future – for him, for his fellows, for myself and for our country. Even now, as I write this, I find the tears welling up – is this not what it is all about? Could I ask for a finer tribute? And I thought, too – is this not what all good, concerned and dedicated teachers are about – working today, in today’s world, to shape the young lives and personalities in whose hands the world of tomorrow will rest?

Teachers have always understood ‘sustainability.’ His name – Lynette, you may remember him – is Lulamile Giqwa, and he is the deputy principal of a Further Education and Training college.

And so the week has gone. The past two weeks, in fact, have flown: working long hours, including the weekend, travelling to Durban and then, the latter part of this week, to Cape Town; back to back meetings; documents to revise and distribute; phone calls to make and emails to send. The notion of a quiet life, reading the paper at leisure over breakfast on the patio, has vanished like morning mist. But it has been good – a productive and creative time, a good time for networking, and a promising time for lining up new and interesting work.

And, in between all this, Rob and I have stolen brief skype calls, talked about our wedding plans, and shared the mounting impatience we feel to get on with our lives. Distance has its charms, and it is amusing to play a few riffs on the concept: but there comes a point when distance sucks. Down with distance, I say: I’m all for getting close.

Home Truths

Tags

home renovation, love, marriage, sweat equity, weddings

My first blogs, you may recall, were dominated by this house: the Stone Age garden, with its petrified cacti and fallen lumber; the gutters hanging down like the beaks of hungry pterodactyls; the electricity fusing and sparking in the middle of the night so that it seemed as if, startled awake in our darkened cave, we were about to discover fire; the pool transformed into a primeval swamp from which, at any moment, some huge, scaly creature might rise to the surface and climb out onto the land….well, as I remember writing, in the end the house was tamed, refreshed, brightened, its spirits cleansed with holy smoke, its ghosts placated, and all by Rob, whose curses and blessings and sheer hard work made this place habitable again. And this week – exactly a month, Rob reminded me, after we decided to get married – I found a buyer who could see the potential, who was willing to take the house on as a renovation project, and I sold the place.

Without Rob’s effort and care, this would not have happened – or, if I had found someone willing to tackle the task, it would have been at a fire-sale price. If there is a price to be put, in this instance, on love, it is 50% more than a house sold without sweat equity.

Just writing this, and thinking about our marriage – not just the wedding we are planning, but the shared life we are building – I am reminded that grown-up love is about all of this: working together for our shared good; caring for and sacrificing for one another; sharing in the rewards.

There are other aspects, too, to a good marriage – but these, let it be said, are strictly between man and wife.

City of cloud

Tags

creativity, gorillas, imagination, language, neanderthals, poetry, sex, sex toys

There is, it has emerged, a touch of Neanderthal in our gene pool; contrary to earlier belief, that homo sapiens had branched off quite separately from our gloomy cousins, it turns out our genetic inheritance is not as ‘pure’ as we might wish.

Makes a lot of sense, come to think of it. I dare not, for reasons which will be obvious to my readers, offer any contemporary or geographically proximate allusions; but let me suggest, by way of example, there was probably more than a little Neanderthal in Adolf Hitler; or Joseph Stalin, for that matter. BJ Vorster also, if you want something closer to home, but not too unnervingly contemporary.

And here is another cherished myth gone bust: the notion, not merely that we are the only tool-makers – a notion long displaced, it seems, by contrary evidence ranging from birds to apes – but that we are the only users of tools for our sexual pleasure. Desmond Morris, as I recall, in his eye-opening ‘The Naked Ape’ revealed to my generation that amongst our distinctively human features was the fact that we were the only of god’s creatures to have sex for pleasure, and not merely for procreation. At twenty, that seemed a fabulous proposition, and I made it my business to express my unique humanity whenever and wherever and as often as possible. Oh, for the days of free love!

Of course, I never got nearly as much free love as I liked to make out, but still, you could give me an A (or was that an E?) for effort.

Anyhow, it turns out that this myth, too, is no longer tenable: gorillas have developed a sex toy of their own – and it is…wait for it: a leaf. Yes, that’s right – a leaf. In case your imagination proceeds at this point to run riot, refer to the news link, and find out for yourself.

What then, I wonder, is left us poor humans?

Language, perhaps, and imagination. Poetry. To abuse a cliche, creativity. Last Thursday, as I flew in to Durban, I was entranced by the barrier of high cloud that loomed into view as we approached the sea, and I wrote this ‘note to self’ as a reminder: ‘there, before us, was a city of cloud, as we came in towards the coast and Durban’s new King Shaka airport.’

A simple enough image, I guess; but one which, perhaps, conjures in your mind something of the sense of majesty and wonder that I felt, early that Thursday morning, on my way to a day’s work in another town. The magic here, is not in my words, but in your ability to respond. Something happens in one person’s mind, and kindles in the mind of another, an image, a sensation.

And language, I dare say, is a tool of seduction that gorillas have yet to master; while imagination, I submit, sits ill with the heavy club and knuckle-dragging strength of our Neanderthal cousins.

Through the Looking Glass

Was it Norman Mailer who wrote ‘Advertisements for Myself?’ I don’t remember, I never read the book anyway, but the title lodged there somewhere in my brain amongst the files marked ‘curious and interesting.’ Perhaps the book wasn’t, books like people don’t always deliver what they promise, but like people we are often more interested in what appears to be than what is.

Anyway.

What surfaced ‘Advertisements for Myself’ from the archives of my mind was the sense of how hard it is to write about the things I am going to write about, momentarily, as the Americans strangely say, without ending up in self-advertisement. And this is not what I want to do.

No, what I want to do, is to reflect, to pause and wonder, about the course my life has taken – and about the moments that, as one skates around the riskier corners of one’s life, twenty years later, awake from where they have been sleeping, on a pile of blankets in a darkened alley, and hurl themselves forward with a humorous bellow – ‘it’s me again! surprise!’

So, I was going to write, for instance, how it suddenly occurred to me, as I settled down this evening with a glass of wine, the autumn cold beginning to settle as the light began to cool, that I have walked this way before. Back in 1992, at a difficult and fraught point in my career and in my private life, I left my job for a three-month research contract with the National Education Policy Investigation. I remember asking my ex-wife whether I should do it, could we afford the risk; it’s your decision, she said, meaning, I will have nothing to do with it. On your own head. And I did take the decision. A year or so later I had a Fellowship to the US, and then I was headhunted – you see what I mean? Advertisements for myself.

This is not where my heart wants to go, now, as I note, for the record, that today I signed my separation agreement, and a consultancy contract, with the organisation I have worked for and with and through for thirteen years. I wanted to reflect, instead, on the journey this has been, on the people and the places, the strain and the joy of it; and most of all, to remind myself, I’ve done this before, I can do it again.

This has been a week that I can only describe as a re-awakening. There is some of that excitement and anticipation in the air, that I felt when I was first recruited into the organisation; when I went to America; when I got married, thirty years ago. This is not about the self – at least, not about the self as spectacle or as a list of events and accomplishments. It is much deeper, much more personal – it is ethical, aesthetic, philosophical. It is about the eternal and unanswerable question: what does it mean, to live a life well?

Like Alice, today I stepped through the Looking Glass. So far, so good.