Heritage Day – Reprise

The thing about memory, or one of the things about memory, is how selective and unreliable it is. And so my Dearly Beloved, on reading my Last Post on the topic of Heritage Day, has seen fit to correct my meanderings.

The carousels of abandoned slides, she says, were found not by Eve but by Herself; not on the back stoep, but in the yard.

Detail, perhaps; but as I subscribe (by and large) to the truth, a detail I feel obligated to correct.

It’s worth it, if only to keep the peace 🙂

Heritage Day

By the end of the day, after the sorting and the winnowing and the careful packing, I had put together a large carton full of slides, and a smaller box of photographs – black and white prints made in the converted bedroom I had turned into a darkroom in the early days in Umtata, thirty years ago; family photos, pictures from my travels. In the carton of slides were two carousels, rescued from the back stoep where Eve had found them, exposed to the rain and the sun, after Eileen left, and countless boxes of slides alongside stacks I had carefully gathered together from where I had found them, loose and scattered, and fastened with rubber bands. It will take a couple of days, if not more, to go through this trove; who knows what lost family treasures may come to light? There is no time now, but once we have moved, I shall find some time – my heart is already full, at the thought of what I might find, and the memories and imaginings that this journey through the photographs will provoke.

Amongst the photos, as we were packing up house on Friday, I came across a miniature album entitled ‘Holiday Memories’ – nothing more than a small cardboard folder from Cameraland, the shop where my father would spend many happy hours discussing lenses and filters, cameras and film, with a few plastic sleeves for pictures. Inside were just three photos: the first, of me and my sisters Laura and Dianne, in our early teens I think, on the rocks at Glen Beach, with a grey and creamy sea behind us; the second, a photo of my mother on Clifton beach. She is lying on her tummy in a bikini, and the two girls are sitting back-to-back on her bottom. To the right and left are pairs of sunglasses, one of which I imagine must have belonged to my father, who no doubt was behind the camera. And the third picture is from much later – my mom is cutting what looks like a wedding cake, perhaps it was an anniversary celebration; my dad is pouring champagne, and Laura, Dianne and I are laughing and smiling, caught up in the moment.

There were letters, too – old letters from the days when people still wrote to each other, and the coming of the postman was a moment of anticipation and sometimes of grief or celebration; old poetry magazines; a bag full of stamps and first-day covers; scrapbooks, including the scrapbook I had made on the moon landing, and another, covering the drama and intensity of the clashes with police, on the University of Cape Town campus, and downtown at St George’s Cathedral, that to this day are integral to my memories of being a student. Copies of my children’s birth certificates; school and music reports; the programme from Kathy’s graduation ceremony at Wits University. The results from the psychometric tests my parents made me do, in high school; my graduation photo, at UCT.

As I have said before, this is our last weekend at Emmarentia. We are moving forward with our lives, Rob and I – we are both amazed, at how much has changed, how much we have accomplished, since we moved here at the beginning of the year; since we got back here, from Canada, only a month ago. And as we move, it seems, we draw behind us like the tide, the objects, the fragments, that are the remaindered artifacts of our lives.

Friday, let me add, was Heritage Day.

Raspberry soup

Tags

fine dining, moving house, wedding

This next weekend will be our last in the Emmarentia house. For Rob, this spells relief and release. For me, it is both of these things, and more. I said to Rob last night that I will want some time simply to sit and reflect, before we hand over the keys and take our last look around; I need to smoke a cigar, pace about the garden, squint up towards the sun through the sparse and spindly arms of the pine tree and the blackened branches of the ailing willow; sip a malt whiskey, make my final peace with this patch of earth, this fractured yet still meaningful home.

We have had our celebratory bottle of sparkling wine, in front of an open fire on Saturday evening on the sun deck over the pool, to mark the transfer of the property, and of funds into my account. We have had our dinner with the kids, in which our goodbyes were hardly spoken and barely noted, at least not openly, though who knows what each of us was thinking. But this weekend, I have told Rob, should be our own moment, to mark the time and mentally transcribe the transition. So down to the fishy market we will go next Saturday morning, to buy the biggest most succulent prawns we can find, and I will take a bottle of good wine out of my small but precious store, and we will kick it all for touch, in style.

In style, I say – but for style, I doubt we will easily match our lunch on Sunday, out in the Magaliesberg, at Roots restaurant in The Cradle of Humankind. We went there to check out the lay of the land, for our wedding dinner, and to see if it would be possible to hold the ceremony itself on the premises; we came away overwhelmed, delighted, fulfilled, and deeply emotional. It is everything we want, it is, quite simply and superbly, us. And it is, we have decided, where we will be married.

Our North American relatives will be blown away by this, something new and fabulous, Out of Africa. My children, my mom and sisters, will love it. Mike will be rewarded, at least a little bit, for his bottomless generosity, towards me over many years and now towards the two of us. And for Rob and me, two fifty-something kids, two practical dreamers, it will be perfection.

Six courses, each with a dedicated wine: raspberry soup, a duo of pork, a something of chicken, a display of something tantalising and exquisite on the next plate, a something more to follow – bliss, peace, and purest pleasure.

No matter, then, that we nearly didn’t make it. The power went out, on Sunday morning, and for twenty interesting minutes, there were Rob and I, dressed up and all set to go, frantically trying to figure out how to get the electric gate open. Finally, the power came on, and out we scooted.

There was to be no holding us back, it seems. And now we have not merely a wedding, we have a dinner, to look forward to.

East London Blues

Rain washing down over the Buffalo River; sky, rain, runway a monochrome palette outside the Business Class lounge at the East London airport. I missed by three minutes the chance of catching the earlier flight home, and have a three hour wait, till eight, before I can fly off into the wall of sodden grey outside.  So I have plugged in the ‘phones, poured some Pinot Noir, and flipped up the lid of the Mac, to while away the time. Abdullah Ibrahim, the electrifying notes of ‘Mannenberg’,  are calling to my bones as I write, running the chords down each vertebra like a piano keyboard or the keys of a saxophone, the song of what it means to be a South African.

This morning, at the colleges workshop I had flown down to brief on national developments, I was introduced to the provincial Minister of Education, Mr Qwase. He stared hard at me, holding me firmly by the hand. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked. I explained. ‘But I taught in the Transkei,’ I added, ‘when I was a very young man.’ ‘St. John’s College,’ MEC Qwase said. ‘You taught me, in 1979.’

The transfer of my Emmarentia property has been registered. The money has been deposited. I am sitting in an airport lounge, waiting for a late flight home, listening to jazz and blues, jazzy blues, bluesy jazz. I am tired, I am lucky.

I am simply, wisely, innocently, happy. I have every reason to be.

Sundown at Emmarentia

The early spring is turning the leaves green almost as we watch, the days have grown warm and filled with light. Once the leaves have all come out, I tell myself, and the flowers are in bloom, I may get some relief from the pollens which seal up my eyes and nose, and breathe again.

Yet these are golden days, nonetheless, passing by all too quickly as we tap away at our computers in the office or sit through meetings, or hurry about our tasks and to-do lists. I try to take some time in the evenings, just to sit and watch the sun go down, over the western hills; on the weekends we sit outdoors with the papers, listening to the busy weavers who have constructed three nests over the pool, or the black-collared barbets calling from the cracked branches of the leaning willow. Sometimes we see an African Hoopoe treading the ground, his hammer-head probing for worms in the warm soil, a glow of russet body and black- and white-flecked wings against the greenery.

Late on Saturday afternoon the kids came round for drinks and dinner; Kathy and Gareth had not seen Rob since she left in February for Canada, and arrived bearing birthday gifts and welcome-home presents. We sat out on the porch, chatting and laughing, and I took a few photos of us all, myself included, seated on the low wall in front of the living room windows. There was wine, and a leg of lamb braised with aubergine and onion, peppers and potatoes, tomatoes and garlic and rosemary of course, and plenty of Maldon salt and ground black pepper; a cake that Rob had made for dessert. There was chocolate and coffee and port and whiskey, all in a cup of happiness and affection. And in the morning Rob and I headed out to the Magaliesberg, for beer and burgers at a bush pub, and a quick tour of the dam to look out for visiting birds: we saw a number of Arctic terns, crisp and sharp in their uniforms of white, black and red, and two forlorn flamingos. We stopped on the way back at a garden centre, to look for pots and plants for our new home, in Hyde Park, and were pleasantly tired by the time we got back home, just in time to watch, gin-and-tonic in hand, as  a pink sun flared into the dusk and sank behind the distant hills.

I looked out from the open deck, over the pool, over the darkening garden, and thought, I am going to miss this house.

Rob won’t, but I will.

A new lease

Life begins at 56 – at least, that is the somewhat accidental and arbitrary premise of this blog. Or, more truthfully (what is truth, anyway? You tell me!  – I know what lies are, I think, but truth, in this complicated and richly varied world of ours, in this strange country of the heart, is a far more ambiguous and unknowable thing) it is the convenient excuse for what I was going to write anyway, dressed up like any self-respecting person in clothes appropriate to the occasion.

Given this premise, however, you will not be surprised – indeed, you may expect – that I will return, from time to time, to the theme of a new lease. As, indeed, I do on this occasion. Except that on this occasion, it is what it is – the new lease I bring to your notice is not the renewal of the ancient life force, much less the discovery of the secret of eternal youth: it is a lease, folks, just a lease. A lease signed on a townhouse in Hyde Park (Johannesburg) – two stories, two-and-a-half bathrooms, three bedrooms, one of which will be our new office: we move, Rob and I, into the first home we have had that is ‘ours,’ rather than ‘hers’ or ‘mine’, on 1 October.

Now isn’t that a new lease, and one worth writing about?

Travels with my Suitcase

Tags

Air France, air travel, bureaucracy, customer service, lost luggage

The new A380

Come Fly with Me, the Frank Sinatra classic from the Capitol Records years, both the album and the song, seems to express so much of the era, and so much of the infatuation my father had with – well, with infatuation, with the romance of travel and the sangfroid of handsome charming men who alternately wooed or wept over beautiful and charming women, as at home on the front porch of Middle America as in the cafes and on the starlit embankments of gay Paree.

Gay is not quite the same thing, nowadays, I guess – nor, for that matter, is travel – air travel, anyway. In fact, flying these days is f*ing awful, especially when transgressing borders: the searches, the queues, the thinly disguised hostility of immigration officials. Mind you, I don’t complain, I’d rather the guy with the bomb in his Nikes was stopped before boarding, thank you. So up we all more or less put with the thankless tedium, the prodding and poking by relentless officialdom, the winged cattle trucks trundling down crowded runways, that international air travel has transmogrified into.

Keep it safe, I say – but I’ll be the first to volunteer, when finally the boys (and girls) in the white pants-suits figure out how to beam me up, Scotty.

Flying is hell, these days. But hell, like so much else, is raised to another power, a higher altitude, when travelling with the French. Ask my suitcase.

One of the many as-yet unreported tales of my recent travels abroad is the tale of my travels with my suitcase, or rather, my suitcase’s travels without me. I flew out to Toronto, you may recall, via Paris; the Paris layover was four hours or more, and the plane finally left Charles de Gaulle more than an hour late, and arrived an hour or more late – yet all, it appeared, was well, when on landing in Canada I flew through immigration and hastened gladly over to the luggage conveyor belt to collect my suitcase…round the belt went, and round, and round again, and still I waited, and waited, and waited. Finally, giving up all hope, I found the lost luggage counter, only to be told, immediately, ‘Oh yes sir, your bag is still in Paris.’

Thanks, folks, for letting me stand, morale and energy draining away like an airline enema, by that endless roundabout, waiting for a bag that you knew (but I didn’t) wasn’t on that flight at all. Thanks for leaving Rob waiting and wondering, had she somehow missed me wandering helpless and alone out of the arrivals hall, and hailing a taxi, hoping I had her address written down somewhere….

I protested; I complained. I was vocal. The bag, I was assured, would be delivered the next day, to Rob’s house in downtown Toronto. Meanwhile (as I said, I complained) I could go buy myself some clothes (socks and underpants the immediate priority, after thirty-something hours in transit) and I could claim the money back, from Air France, on my return to South Africa. And so it transpired that the first stop that Rob and I made, after I finally cleared Customs – nothing to declare, officer! – was to a shopping mall.

The bag, I was assured, would be on the same flight, next day. Which meant it would land, all by itself, around four on Friday afternoon. Allow some time for unloading, sorting, Customs, time for someone to figure out which bag it was that needed to be picked up and delivered to Marchmount Road – maybe the bag would arrive around 7pm, we thought; by nine o’ clock, surely; definitely by ten. We sat on the front porch, talking and waiting, until eleven, and then we went to bed. No bag; no clothes; no toiletries.

Needless to say, my luggage did not arrive next morning, either. The folks at the airport, however, had given me a number to call, for just such an eventuality, so I called it. Well, wouldn’t you know, the number was for weekdays only. On Saturdays, nobody cares. Nobody answers. So I called the airport. No sir, no Air France staff are on duty before noon. No sir, there is no-one else you can talk to. Cleverly, I called the lost luggage number – only to be referred back to Air France. Who are not available. Who do not answer their telephones. Whose toll free number is as useful on a Saturday as a camel in Marchmount Road.

In the end, to cut short a long story, there is no option but to drive out to the airport again, in search of my wayward bag. Saturday evening is the much-anticipated party that Rob and fifty of her friends are throwing for us, and I would like some clean clothes. From the airline counter we are directed to the basement, a lost luggage room Dickensian in its air of gloom and futility, where Attila the Nun sits defeated and indifferent, as I and other travellers plead and implore for the return of our luggage. No, the bag is not there. We can see for ourselves. The attendant makes no effort to inquire; there is a phone on her desk but she gives no indication of using it, nor does she offer any advice or suggestions. She shrugs, sits. Eventually Rob insists that she calls the agency that was supposed to have dropped off the bag. In slow motion she does so, and then, with a weary gesture, she holds out the receiver. Yes, Rob hears, my bag is there. Why was it not dropped off as promised, she asks, reasonably enough. Some cock and bull story ensues; eventually Rob hurls the phone down on Attila’s desk and storms out of the storeroom. I try to pick up the pieces. When will my bag be delivered? Negotiations ensue. Eventually it is agreed that the bag will be returned from storage to the airport; it will be delivered to Dante’s Circles of Hell – no, Kafka’s Castle – in thirty minutes. Thirty-five minutes later a van roars up to the kerb, where we are waiting, and finally, forty eight hours after my own arrival, my luggage and I are reunited.

Air France, people, sucks. They don’t deliver, they don’t care – if pigs could fly, they’d long be out of business. And they’re only in business because – because – hell, I have no idea why Air France is in business. Because KLM rescued them?

I seem to recall letting off steam, the other day, about sleaze and incompetence, back home in SA. A case, you might say, of Left Luggage. But here, in the first world, in shiny and clean modern Canada, was a display of bureaucracy, inefficiency and indifference that would have seemed entirely familiar to a Home Affairs customer in Pretoria or a pensioner lining up to collect his social grant, in some dingy office in Umtata.

Air travel these days is nothing like dad and Ol’ Blue Eyes knew it, I can tell you. And I have accumulated more baggage, I guess, than Air France can ever hope to deal with.

Suspension of disbelief

Tags

ANC Youth League, business, corruption, South African politics, Zweli Vavi

Coming home after three weeks overseas, the stack of waiting newspapers provides a concentrated, composite picture of the country as it is now. It is not a pretty sight. Gone are the clouds of World Cup glory – instead, from every page of every paper, stare the bloated photographs, the cynical headlines, that tell the tale of pervasive sleaze and venality, arrogance and venom, that increasingly defines our political elite and nouveau riche today.

On almost every page, it seems, one reads of high officials and empowerment CEOs suspended for corruption or incompetence; captains of industry plea-bargaining their way out of price-fixing charges and charges of collusion; jostling for public attention alongside, or below, all too often is the astounded individual’s response: I am innocent, it is all a political plot, I am going to sue the bastards who dared to take me down, for millions.

Millions of taxpayer rands, that is. There seems to be little or no sense of shame, of responsibility, far less of accountability or good governance. Instead, it is snouts at the trough, snapping and snarling, that defines the news these days.

So, too, is the tenor of political debate debased and diminished. The leader of the largest trades union federation, Zweli Vavi, rants about a ‘predator state’ and ‘political hyenas’; the fattened-up Mini-Me’s of the ANC Youth League deploy a language of vitriol and spite and political agitation; the ruling party meanwhile sharpens its knives as it prepares to legislate against the open society guaranteed by our Constitution.

It requires more than a willing suspension of disbelief, these days, to believe that all is well in the Beloved Country.