I dated an American boy (in my previous life) whose family took the same holiday every year. They had even ended up buying a house there. Which they visited each time. Despite getting employee discounts on a well-known airline. They had never been outside of the US, he told me. When I showed him my crude album of a backpacking trip I did at 17 alone through Europe, I swelled with pride. I took the time to tell him all the stories and share all the private jokes. When I was done, he said, simply ”Thank you for doing that. Now I never need to go there”. I thought this was about as vanilla as you can get. And I felt like I was watching a reality show.
Something’s happened in my generation that is a 360 degree turn from my parents’ era. My mom was already well into her thirties when she took her first overseas trip and because of the cost and distance, my parents went for 6 weeks. They sent us small children postcards. It was a huge journey for them in those days. The olden days. Now South Africans, like those from many other commonwealth countries are compelled to travel like diseased animals if we are to get any contact with the rest of the world. Twitter aside.
Even so, African blood runs thick through my veins and they say that once you’ve been bitten by that bug you can never go back. Not literally, of course. I mean..well, you know what I mean. I have spent the good part of 5 years sharing my love and intrigue of the continent with Alan. I drag him there at least once a year where I point and wave at things I love and want him to love, too. I have an ongoing love affair with the place. The continent too many Americans call a country. He has come a long way, although I must admit, he was a fast learner. Which is why I married him. The whole travel thing is like breathing for me.
I always ask Americans where they’re going and Africa is almost never on the list. They say it is too far. Too expensive. Too dangerous. I never correct them because quite frankly I’d rather we didn’t have our own Phuket or Bali over there. But I smile inside when they talk of a world tour that excludes the mother continent.
When Alan and I took a 3 month window and escaped the 9-5 weekday rut to travel together for our babymoon, it was Asia we picked. I was as surprised by my own passing up of Africa as you are. I mean, Uganda, Egypt, Zimbabwe…all places I am dying to see myself for the first time, or locations worthy of a show and tell with Alan. I’ll confess that some part of my decision was swayed like the palm trees I imagined I’d be under, by the idea of toasting my shoulders and gorging on mangoes in Asia. However, the over-commercialisation by each and every American, European and Australian traveller in that part of the world turned my stomach. I like to get off the beaten track. I have been known to swear at tourists and coin phrases of ill repute about them.
But throughout our courtship and the early part of our marriage, Alan talked up his timeas a bachelor traveling through Asia. It was a part of the world I could not share with him and a story at cocktail parties I was excluded from.
I was jealous of his Asia.
“Why India?” my brother asked, upon hearing of our itinerary. “You’ll hate it. I’ve heard it’s awful,” he warned me with that sober, older sibling voice.
He was wrong. So were many others about just about everything. That’s the thing about travelling. You never know what will climb into your heart and what you’ll despise. I firmly believe it is more than anything about the company you keep.
I still daydream over another 3 month window somewhere down the road in my life. Would I take it to disappear to unexplored reaches of Turkey, Morocco and Croatia, or would I use the time to return to the coffeeshops, townsquares, and coves of past holidays that haunt my memories?
Now friends write to me - short, curt emails or they Facebook me, for advice on decisions such as Asia or Australia. Asia or Mexico. It is is question that deserves more than a short, curt answer. How can I get them into that remote beach bar built into a tree in the little coastal town of Kata with me? Or to stand with the melting sun on your brow and the long grass tickling your knees on that vacant plot of land we wanted to buy in Indonesia? Or sway them in believing that the devastating thirdworldness of Jaipur roughened street urchins have the charm and charisma to steal your heart and your wallet?
Perhaps I cannot because it is possible that our trip across 11 countries in 95 days was less about crossing cities off a list and all about falling in love with somewhere new, and each other.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: africa, americans, asia, Bali, beach, commonwealth, cove, facebook, Indonesia, kata, love, palm, phuket, round the world, Thailand, twitter, uganda
As you know by now after reading some of my gastric-obessesed travel blog postings, I am a huge foodie. And so, as is the case with lovers of fine cuisine, I taught myself to cook. But while my friend Tiffany is a Food Network junkie, I just find watching others mix marinades and bake muffins makes me hungry enough to get off the couch and get the oven going. I tend to throw things in the air a lot and see where they land when I make dinner. Mostly, my dear Alan will eat anything. Sometimes it will become a firm favourite (like last week’s leek, bacon, mushroom…? dish) and then it my job to spend eternity trying to recall what exactly went into it.
So it would make sense that in this year’s Martha Stewart Everyday Food Magazine gift subscription I enclosed a note inviting Tiffany to join me on a challenge of the tastebuds. The idea was to take turns hosting a monthly dinner party for friends in our homes, where each guest brought two things with them: A dish and a bottle of wine. Both were to adhere to a strict set of rules set by the host. Food theme ideas for dinners included those along the idea of a country or region, temperature, ingredient, season or holiday, and color. The wine could be challenged on price, vintage, region, or varietal.
So it was that I kicked off the club last month with Carribean Night.
It’s true when they say that local Carribean cuisine smacks of a spice you just can’t quite put your finger on. This is often attributed to the creativity of chefs of the islands who use traditional ingredients in untraditional ways. Nutmeg, for example, is the accompaniment to allspice (also known as “jamaica berry”) in the wonderfully, tangy jerk chicken. Scotch bonnet peppers, the small, orange, wrinkly and extremely hot chillies are the hallmark of Caribbean cuisine but can go in little else. Food is drizzled in coconut, sprinkled with limes, tossed in beans.
The ladies were set the task and it was agreed the feast would comprise pineapple salsa, plantains, and shrimp sauteed in coconut, followed by bean salad, jerk chicken with mango salsa, lime and cilantro rice, and ended nicely with bananas flambed in rum, almonds and toasted coconut. To my surprise the men rose to the challenge of the kitchen, with my Alan jerking chicken outside to an applewood chip beat, and Chris (of guest couple number 1) nearly burning down my kitchen while lighting the rummed bananas. Alan posted photos of the islands onto our flatscreen and we bopped to some hipswaying beats while Tiff tossed her bean salad.
Tyler Florence’s Jerk Chicken
Jerk Marinade
- 2 teaspoons allspice
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1/2 onion
- 8 cloves garlic or 1 whole head
- 1 (1-inch) piece fresh ginger, sliced
- 3 scallions, sliced
- 3 limes, juiced
- Splash low-sodium soy sauce
- 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
- Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 6 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves picked
- 1 Scotch bonnet pepper, halved, plus more to taste
- 1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
- 1 whole free-range chicken (about 5 pounds), cut into 10 pieces (or one breast
- Limes, for garnish
- Parsley, for garnish
- Smoking chips, soaked in water for 15 minutes
Directions
Begin by making the jerk marinade. Combine all the marinade ingredients in a blender and process until you have a smooth puree.
Add chicken pieces into a large resealable plastic bag and pour in the marinade. Put the bag into a baking dish and let marinate in the refrigerator overnight.
Preheat grill to high.
Prepare the grill, line it with foil and add some soaked wood chips to the bottom. Place a wire rack over the top, upside down, and lay chicken pieces over the chips on the rack. Cover with foil and grill over high heat. Smoke for 10 minutes and cook until firm.
Martha Stewart’s Cilantro Lime Rice
Ingredients
Serves 4
- 1 cup long-grain white rice
- Coarse salt
- 1/2 cup fresh cilantro
- 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 garlic clove
- Optional: coconut milk
Directions
- In a medium saucepan, bring 1 1/2 cups water to a boil. (I cooked my rice in coconut milk). Add rice and 1/4 teaspoon salt; cover, and reduce to a simmer. Cook until water/milk is absorbed and rice is just tender, 16 to 18 minutes.
- Meanwhile, in a blender, combine cilantro, lime juice, oil, garlic, and 2 tablespoons water; blend until smooth. Stir into cooked rice, and fluff with a fork.
The wine challenge was rieslings, he perfect pairing for spicy food, tand we partook in one from each country. This seemed apt, as (is so often the case these days) the party represented the US, Australia and South Africa. Rieslings are seeing a revival, much like roses did in recent years, with two winning New York’s most coveted wine awards this week. A $14 semi-dry Riesling from Anthony Road Wine Co. was voted best wine, and Sheldrake Point Vineyard took the winery of the year title. The two-day contest was judged by 24 experts, half from New York, six from California and six from other states. To steal a quote, Jancis Robinson ends her chapter on rieslings with a summary that’s all-too-true: “Unbeatable quality; indisputably aristocratic. Ludicrously unfashionable.” Recognized by many prominent wine writers, experts and critics as the world’s greatest white wine, Riesling is surprisingly difficult to sell commercially. Despite it’s status as one of the most versatile food matches around, it’s an endangered species on restaurant wine lists. This is most likely owed to the riesling still lugging around baggage from the bad old days when those cheap, thin, sugar-water wines hit the U.S. market by the tankerful.
All in all, a huge success. Bon Appetit!
Chris with his (now famous) flaming bananas
Categories: memoir
Tagged: banana, caribbean, challenge, cilantro, club, coconut, cooking, jerk chicken, lime, mango, martha stewart, pairing, rice, riesling, rum, salsa, travel, tyler florence, wine
Tim Cahill is not a scary man. In fact, he reminds me of an uncle trying to melt into the armchaired wallpaper during a messy family reunion. Tim does not like applause. Nor does he willingly grab microphones. This is all quite off-putting when you remember that he is a man who pioneered adventure travel writing, and drips with awards, books, deals and general fame and notoriety. I suppose he really is more at home tracking down jaguars to rip off his flesh. I got a kick out of closing my eyes and losing myself in his Tom Hanks sound-alike voice. It’s all velvety, comfortable and warm, like wrapping a tired, overstretched cardigan over my knees. He gives his scratchy beard lots of attention when he talks, almost without noticing, and when he likes something, which he does a lot, his eyes twinkle beneath his inappropriate sun-bleached sports hat. When I Wikipediaed him, in readiment for our introduction, it said that “he was friendly in college with Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs.” Prompted me to think Wikipedia ought to be more closely monitored. Then again, maybe he was friends with them. Who am I to judge?
Tim Cahill, very reluctantly speaking on what place moved him…
What is most interesting about Tim Cahill is what turns him on. Like how he set a world record for speed in driving the entire length of the American continents, from Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego in southern Argentina up along the Pan-American Highwayto Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in twenty-three days, twenty-two hours, and forty-three minutes - material for his book Road Fever. He compromised a Christian cult by going undercover to gain material on them. He said he just let them pick him up in the road. I counted 10 books under his penmanship, as well as plenty of fascinating interviews, articles and stories for a coffeetable book of titles like National Geographic Adventure, Esquire, and the New York Times Book Review. He wrote the backpage for the newborn, Afar magazine (on shelves August 2009). He won a National Magazine Award and two Lowell Thomas Gold Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers. He says he’s been to 100 countries. He is the father of adventure travel writing.
It was at last week’s Book Passage Travel Writer and Photographer Conference in Corte Madera that I stopped googling Tim and started watching him. The event teemed with world-class editors, reviewers, publishers, writers and photographers. It broke all the rules, as these teachers expressed an insatiable urge to listen, open up, share log cabin stories over the cheap plastic patio tables in the sun. They were available an approachable and it was almost overwhelming. How very uneditor-like.
At this event I discovered that Spud Hilton, editor of San Francisco Chronicle Travel Section looks like Drew Carey, and is “the cruise guy“. Pauline Frommer tends to get off the beaten track with her tendency to wander off topic during panels and launch into her passionate views on the current political front. Rolf Potts is intense and reminds me of my brother. Jen Leo is a professional blogger and media socialite. (I want to say more, but she will find this in seconds and rap me over the virtual knuckles). I wanted Jeff Pflueger’s life and Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s face. But it was Tim Cahill who’s pocket I really wanted to climb into.
He spent 3 hours a day over the course of the week with a select group of “advanced” travel writer’s he’d hand-plucked from applicants for his intensive class. I liked feeling hand-plucked by Tim Cahill, although it made me neurotic during simple 3-minute exercises. He gave me to-do’s. He said he really liked my writing. He praised it. He made me want to own it.
Tim swears at sketchpads and sets silly rules like “Tim is not always right”. He responds to emails in snail mail fashion, and wears fluorescent Hawaiian shirts. (Then again, that appeared to be either the joke or the uniform of travel editors at this conference.) His photo that appears on jacket covers looks like it was taken moments after Woodstock ended. He made a name with a name as common as Tim Cahill. He broke into the writing world with a book on serial killers – my secret passion. He has friends like Bill Bryson.
In my pre-class research (that in any other age would be recognised as stalking), I also read that he lost his wife last year in a tragic traffic accident. I wished I hadn’t read that on a website because it made me want to hug him constantly. Which is not good for networking with a famed pioneer at such a conference. It made me seem scary.
And now it’s back to my desk for this touched-by-magic (and Tim Cahill) travel writer before I do something else that’s wildly inappropriate.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: advanced, book passage, conference, corte madera, don george, georgia hesse, intensive, Jeff Plueger, jen leo, jim benning, john flinn, karaoke, larry habegger, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Pauline Frommer, road fever, rolf potts, spud hilton, tim cahill, travel photographer, travel writer, workshop
I teased you last time about puppies and haven’t had the chance to fill you in as our breeder, much like my baby in our latest ultrasound, is simply not co-operating.
But yes, we are getting a puppy…AND a baby. Within the same 12 months. Yes. It’s true. Now before you start your rants and raves, believe me I have heard it all before. But Alan woke up one morning and said he simply could not live another day without a best friend, and I said I simply could not live a day without him, and so came Shasta. That’s her breeder-given name. We’re working on a fancier one and I joke around that while Alan did not have a single baby name in mind (Maddison does not count), he had 10-20 ready-to-go for our new beloved dog. I joke that he is more excited about this 3 week old pup than he is about our baby. I joke, but as you all know, there’s an element of truth to every joke. Last week he said that I can have the baby if he can have the dog. Hmmmmm….reality check en route? I think the stork is bringing a whole lot more than a little bean this Christmas, don’t you all?
So we settled on a comfort retriever. A comfort what? Let me tell you. It’s a relatively new breed of dog that’s so cute it’ll eat your heart up on sight. There’s only one that we know of in San Francisco and the breeder jokes that she knows everywhere PJ’s been because she gets calls from interested potential owners saying they saw him waiting outside the gym, dry cleaners, book store…you get the drift. So her mommy (Virginia) and daddy (Teddy) are both comfort retrievers too, making her a second gen, but way back when (ok, only two generations ago) a golden retriever got it on with a cocker spaniel and hey presto, we have a miniature (oh, about 32 pounds) golden.
For now, while she’s being weaned, I get daily weather reports from Alan so we know how she’s faring in South Dakota and he carries her photo in his wallet and whips it out proudly at parties. I am not joking. 
What beloved Shasta is going to do to our extensive and unrelenting travel plans is another question altogether – putting a diaper on her little bottom and carrying her in a sherpabag goes beyond a serious cramping of my style.
I’ll put a photo up of darling Shasta as soon as I get one, so that you can all get your orders in. And vote on a name.
Much wet snouts, Lucinda
Categories: memoir
I don’t want to start going into the pits and valleys of being a mom-to-be. There are a white page directory of those flying around the internet. Blogging about one’s kids or bellies is a worldwide obsession. It makes my head spin faster than a bit of morning sickness while carving up raw chicken. I never want to hear the “TMI” (“Too Much Information”) warnings on posts of a pregnant woman. It’s like apologising before you insult a loved one. These waaaaay too personal (WTP) ramblings get even worse when the actual babies arrive, with spit-up reports and countdown of hours slept each night. WHO CARES?!!! It’s a baby-love fest that’s sorely missing any adult stimulation. Mums always complain they need intellectual stimulation but aren’t they the one’s doing this brainwashing to themselves?
A few weeks ago a status update made its rounds on Facebook about how non-parents resent the birth of Babybook. I added friends because I wanted to stay in touch. not because I wanted a daily account of their loved one’s bowel movements, was the general gist of the grumblings. With adult-to-adult interaction you can give friends schtick. Smartass responses like “get your lazy ass off the couch!”, or “I never knew you knew how to langarm” are perfectly fine, but when the status update is about a baby’s ear infection, not only is it inappropriate, but it’s also just not so red-apple appealing.
In my mom’s day no one even knew what “dilating” meant, let alone putting your centimeters on their Facebook page!
Why, oh why, would you want to change your profile pic to that of your toddler’s? I don’t know that person!
Being an expectant mum now myself, I have promised future me that I will not do all those things. Ever. I promise to keep my mind sharp, my interest in people my own age, and my reflections of a PG-rate level.
Meantime, I am slowly watching my waist lose itself in swamp-like pudding layers (WTH?), and my bust surge to that of a matron. Let’ s see, what could possibly bring me back down to earth and keep me from “gaaning aan” (translated “going on” as we say in South Africa) about it while I really don’t want to even start talking about politics…a puppy! Yes, I am that crazy. To be continued…
Baby kisses and Puppies
Mummy-To-Be
Categories: memoir
Last weekend we ventured into the ‘burbs for Fight Night at The Fox. We were Ron’s guests, and he had booked out several tables in the
VIP section for a mishmash of new and old friends that night. We fell into the new category. While we weren’t entirely sure what to make of the plans for the night, we were excited to see our friend Ron again, after having enjoyed a party at his lush home in Redwood City last month. He had made living in the suburbs seem not such a dismal prospect. Trust an unattached single bachelor to make us feel ok about the settled lifestyle.
The Fox Theatre is one of those old fashioned bioscopes that are going out of business these days, getting torn down, turned into gyms and Walgreens stores. It is a decadent and gracious grand dame. The icing roof on the sinside looked edible as it folded up and down elegantly. 
On the stage they had erected a large red fighting ring, around which tightly wound prancing men danced. They were mock fighting, dodging and swinging at pretend adversaries. We took our seats and I ordered a coke (more to come on this later), and the games began. Slowly the room filled as the men took one another on one after the other. Each game was punctuated with lively music that made me want to dance. They were brave and flabby. Some wiry and neat. But mostly it was out of shape amateurs who’s been coaxed into their first onstage fight. After an hour or so of this, the room became charged with energy, welcoming the professionals. These guys were padded by entourages of bucket-swinging large men, as they made their way through the auditorium to the stage. For them, coming in from the wings was just not good enough. Mostly, their faces were blank and composed, concentrating on some mantra or other going on inside their heads. It looked like they’d prepraed themselves for the guillotine. Maybe they had. I can’t imagine what shapes their brains must be in to 1. sign up for this antic, and 2. after all the swings they’ve taken to their heads. The club had three midriff-bearing ladies – ok, who am I kidding – they were halfnaked. They were young and untroubled.These helpful girls would climb through the ropes with large cutouts featuring the round number, to much cheering and applause. This was what most of the men were concentrating on. It was a night of blood, guts and breasts. I was almost a convert.
As the fights continued and the night wore on, the bodies got leaner and more in shape. So did the pre-fight ceremony. Some practiced a Muay Thai wardance in traditional garb stamping at their glaring opponents in the blue corner. This took quite some time and everybody waited patiently. Alan started noting that those who did the ceremony always won. I would do the ceremony if it were me. I noted the devitaions form the program, as fighters lost the nerve and others gained some Dutch courage.
All in all, it was going well. Not nearly as gruesome as I’d expected. Then one guy kicked another between the legs. There was much in terms of dirty looks (and much ado about nothing in my book) as they brought him an icepack and cleared the stage. He went off with the medics and the title. I felt sorry for the other guy. I mean, surely bodyparts just get in the way?
So, as I was saying, everything was going just swimmingly until the two girls fighting for the world bantamwight championship title came on, that is. While half of me wanted to be them, the other half was aching for them. Both wore plaits across their heads like a messy array of beaded necklaces. These hairstyles could come at you from nowhere and do just about as much damage as fists. Mostly, it was hard to watch the fighting between the girls as they fought on a different plane. Unlike the men, they went at each other’s faces, in a clawlike motion, without the nails (which were tightly embedded in the trappings of mutiple bandages and massive plastic gloves). It was
a catfight of epic proportions. And it seemed terribly taboo, like eating ice-cream out of the container. I mean, were their mother’s watching?! Jenna Castillo was the firm favourite (Gina Reye’s having nominated herself at the last minute, poor thing) and she took the belt, after Reye’s corner ended the match in round 3. They hugged each other with tenderness, decency and sportwomanship. 
Never say never. We skipped the afterparty.
Categories: memoir
I do work for a website on general tips and advice. Somehow, I am somehow finding myself strangely drawn to the etiquette section. In the US acceptable social customs, like class, are a little more loosely defined than in other parts of the world. As a result, sharing space with others can at times get confusing and downright hairy. So for those of you wanting a little more direction, here’s a segment on cell phone etiquette.
10 Most Important Cell Phone Etiquette Rules by Lucinda Tikwart
Long gone are the days when we carried bricks in our briefcases and whipped them out at traffic intersections to make calls while demonstrating how “with it” we were. (Although we all get nostalgic remembering that Rodea Dr scene in Pretty Woman). Now everyone who wants a cell phone has one, and you can bet it’s the G3 iPhone, or at the very least a crackberry. One of those versions that does everything except walk Rufus and fold your socks.
It continues to intrigue me how you can put a cell phone in the hand of an otherwise courteous, normal person and then sit back to watch how that person loses all sanity coupled with awareness of the people around him. Just as some of us hide behind email to avoid face-to-face communication, too many cell phone users think a phone in their pocket makes them more important than everyone else.
Unless you are one of the final few on this planet to invest in a cell phone, taking note of the following ten simple cell phone etiquette rules are a must.
1. Wherever you find yourself, use your inside voice. Here’s an interesting behavior to consider. Why do cell phone users shout into their phones as if it were a tin can connected to another tin can by a string? Most likely it is because you yourself are in too noisy a spot to hear the perosn on the other end of the (non-tin can) line. This one’s really simple: find yourself a spot to talk outside and away others where you can shout all you like. Realize that yelling in any public area or around others is rude, frustrating and uncalled for, whether you are on the phone or not. A quick no-fail test to see if you are the kind to raise your voice when talking on a cell phone: Take your cue from the response of those around you. If anyone looks in your direction, lower your voice or find a spot way away from bleeding eardrums.
2. Put your cell phone back in the cradle. We have all at one time in our lives found ourselves slaves to our phones, and there are very few of us who don’t resent this needy, blaring device in our pockets. Thus, we resent the person who interrupts our vacation from it with a “Hello?” breaking the calm. Start by thinking of your phone as a tool for emergencies only. Examples of such include your boss calling to say you uploaded your personal photos instead of the report to the site and it is drawing traffic and comments from customers; your grandmother phones to say she’s leaving her retirement home in Florida in the morning and is moving to Vegas where she’ll take up exotic dancing. Second, think of your phone as a portable answering machine. Yes, it records missed calls and it takes messages when you can’t talk. It really does. Never make a friend, colleague or boss feel that the conversation you’re having on your phone is more important than the one you’re already having with them.
3. When in doubt, vibrate. Any place of worship, museums, shows, planes, stores, hospitals, in an open-plan office, while giving a speech, during any kind of medical appointment… all these are off or vibrate moments. Initiate only essential calls, and keep conversations brief when you are in spots that aren’t phone-friendly, such as restaurants and while visiting friends. If your phone does not have a vibrate capability maybe it’s time for an upgrade.
4. Guilty, as charged. If you forget both “off” and “vibrate” and your does in fact annoy everybody in your vicinity and rings, turn it off immediately (and be thankful you chose a grownup ring tone). Sink lower in your seat, glare around as if joining the search for the wrongdoer and no matter what, NEVER ANSWER IT!
5. Live people come first. Even though you’re on the phone, you still exist in the world to those around you. Don’t continue a call while someone is trying to take your order, locate an upgrade for your flight, or understand the details of your returning a worn sweater. Attend to face-to-face business first and foremost.
6. Consider availability. Now here’s a thought: Do you really want to be available all the time? Does that make you more productive, or make you feel more important, or needed? The more available you make yourself, the more everyone will expect you to be. Experiment. People will actually be annoyed with you for not being instantly and constantly available rather than just happy to hear your voice. Being connected 24/7/365 is like never having a weekend or taking a vacation. Repeat this mantra: “If it isn’t important, you’ve interrupted yourself , and in the case that it is, they’ll call back.” The world will still turn, I promise you.
7. MACD. Mothers Against cell phone driving. America is behind the times when it comes to legislation regarding driving and talking but the international results are clear. Driving and talking on the phone kills. We have no data yet on the impact on road deaths caused by texting, but the first thing authorities do after a railroad accident is pull the driver’s cell phone texting records. If none of these reasons compel you to change your risky actions, think of all your fellow drivers cursing you for your erratic, clumsy and downright idiotic driving style while yakking away.
8. Big No-No’s. I don’t care how important you think you are. The gym is no place for a cell phone. Don’t talk when you’re doing cardio and don’t take up space on equipment while catching up the latest gossip. That goes for public (and private) restrooms, too. Too many of us have heard a toilet flush midway through a conversation know how much of a giveaway this is. Others that agree have experienced the embarassingly awkward experience of reporting a drowned cell phone to their service provider.
9. Repeat after me. “I promise to never, ever conduct an emotional, confidential or private phone call in public.” Mobile addicts everywhere are blurting out steady streams of shocking and secret revelations to large masses of unsupecting strangers every day. Don’t be a statistic.
10. Yes you! All of the above applies to the world of text messaging.
Categories: memoir
A sultry Mexican heat deadens my muscles and mind, furthering the general sleepiness from a red-eye flight aboard Mexicana.
Cultural quirks of an exotic land seep into the routine of daytime airport mania. The thud of eager passengers lining up to watch the offloading and reloading of each plane, noses pressed to the glass. They share the dedication and loyalty of a lab awaiting his master. Women prop themselves on tottering heels (‘a minimum of three inches’ notes Alan, yawning from his bench across the cavernous airport hall)., as they generously sway their curves dangerously across the slippery floor.
The dusty landscape surrounds out hurtling van quickly absolving our travel-weariness. We are now feeling the excitement of our arrival in Los Cabos. Alternating spotlights of sunlight polka dot the surrounding hills which are as pimpled and hairy as a teenage boy. Angry graffiti (is there any other kind?) swears at us from bridges, pavements, open storefronts and homes. The shame of the community, nakedly honest, for all to see. “Abierto” swings a sing from the tortilleria, staking its claim on the corner intersection. The swell of hills, leads us down to the shimmering sarong of water below. Coco trucks melt in the side-windows as we pass. A string of low grade resorts splatter the roadside, and I shiver in the air-conditioned car.
Our resort, The Pueblo Bonito Sunset, it turns out, is at the end of a long line of orchestrated avenues scarring the dry hillside. Below, the rough sea smacks the shoreline with vengeance. Their lobby smells of lavender and perhaps it is this which softens us up to agree to a complimentary breakfast and timeshare tour the following morning. 90 years of jail time in this egomaniac’s empire. I’m just doing it for the spa and food vouchers. Alan, I suspect, wants the bottle of tequila. He tears into their numbers pointing out the inefficiencies of such a model. The retiree salesman is so unsuspecting shifting his flipflopped feet. “The more time you give me on the beach, the more likely I will be to sign up for a lifetime of this” I announce, pushing out my chair.
Staff dressed for a tennis match and in hair nets pad around us, in their great numbers. It is like they never sleep. There’s always a golf cart waiting to take us to our turret at the top of the castle. I pity the brides for their formulaic, calculated nuptuals, as they receive a standing ovation from the poolside set en route to the beach. It’s Disneyland on speed.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: mexico, pueblo bonito, sunset, resort, mexicana air, timeshare, los cabos
This Mother’s Day we spent without our mothers. Instead we lapped up the sunshine hours with our friend Scotty, viewing his gorgeous newly renovated apartment on Guerrero Street in The Mission. The dreaded Mission.
There’s this battle of the neighborhoods that exists in San Francisco, like so many big cities in the world. Where you choose to live is supposed to say everything about you. And it’s (of course) one-sided. Reverse racism, so to speak. Let me explain.
If you choose to live in the Mission, the Haight, or anywhere inbetween in San Francisco you naturally absorb qualities such as edgy, “real”, and smart. You are also free to throw rocks. If you live in any of these areas, you can call people who live in The Marina, Cow Hollow or Pacific Heights any number of names. Some that have been thrown down in the sparring include “Baboonnettes”, sorority sisters, frat jerks, “snotty, stuck-up white women who think they’re super hot and have really stupid attitudes”, and my personal favorite “dude bros with their checkered shorts out of Macy’s and nautical star hats live here and throw up on street corners we have to stand on” (check the grammar). It seems to bring up so much hate and anger in people. In the end, the ugliness they intended to land on someone else boomerangs right back at them faster than they can finish their Bud.
I personally don’t associate my personality with any one area of a city. Having said that, I have always found the Marina to be clean, safe, pretty and full of interesting shops and cafes. It is also undoubtedly the most beautiful part of San Francisco. No one wants to admit that. For that reason it is also the most expensive, and also the most unaffordable. A a result, it attracts the young, successful set who are said to spend too much time admiring each other’s diamond rings and blowing their inflated salaries on overpriced foreign beer in frosted glasses.
If, on the other hand, you were to categorise the opposite end of the city (the one throwing judgements, remember?) you’d have to first climb over the piled trash, abandoned homeless trolley carts, and of course, sideswipe the broken windscreen glass. The Mission may have personality and history in the form of “infestation with $5 whores”, edge and inner-city reality, but beautiful it isn’t. It is possibly, very likely, really, “actually purgatory”. No getting around it.
Yet, if the Marinites took some time out of the workout, mani-pedi, couch-shopping activives to rate those on the opposite end of the city they would be crucified before they opened their lipsticked mouths. Perhaps this is the real price of living in the Marina.
In all my years of living in this great city, I have never ever heard a bad word spoken about the Mission by people who live on the water. Only that it is an expensive cabride away. Much like yelling racist slurs from the passing window at a black man waiting for the bus, this would not be ok.
I have this theory that is about as un-PC, and probably equally unpopular, as you can get. At a disappointing but standard restaurant opening last night I met two guys who work in the nightlife world in the Mission. They threw the usual pebbles and we apologised away. And then I asked them if they ever wanted to do anything else with their lives beyond serve beer from behind a bar for tips and a few lines of low quality blow. And surprisingly (or not) they assured me they didn’t. Life for them was too easy and resposiblities too few and far between. Forget the fact that they were both edging from an edgy lifestyle toward their middle thirties, still sharing a shoebox in a dirty part of town with a random guy of equal descent. None of this I could say out loud, obviously. Obnoxious Hipsters!
Categories: memoir
Tagged: area, Cow Hollow, frat, Haight, Marina, Mission, neighborhood, Pacific Heights, poor, San Francisco
Ever feel that our world is flipping out of control with a head-spinning competition of needier than needy causes?
We don’t know where to start with our caring (and tax-deductible spending)…attempting to prioritise needs is oh-so-Sophie’s Choice. At times, I feel torn between malarial outbreaks, the AIDS epidemic, a bacterial killer I just learnt about this week called MRSA, Oprah’s new pet project Invisible Children, and of course, general poverty and starvation.
But as my mother always said, good housekeeping starts at home. And South Africa’s grocery list is just as long.
Living abroad, I have so often been met with wrinkled noses when I start to unravel the story of my land. To Americans, Asians and Europeans, it is just too far away to care too much about. South Africa is insignificant.
But it shouldn’t be. Here’s why you need to care.
You see, the power behind the mother continent of Africa, rests in the hands of our little country at its tip. As the only African member of the G20, South Africa hobnobs with the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Our post-apartheid constitution is among the most progressive worldwide, and we’re the largest energy supplier and biggest consumer on the continent. We are the breadbasket of Africa.
And here’s why I am worried…
Since the ANC first came to power in 1994 an estimated 1,000,000 whites have left the country, taking their skills with them in an exercise referred to as “brain drain”. Estimated because burning bridges and all that prevents them from filling out that redundant emigration form at Oliver Tambo Airport when they leave. This departure of the previously advantaged is not altogether uncelebrated, as SA’s aggressive affirmative action policies have all but bought the “pale males” in SA a one-way plane ticket to London. The number of departures of these educated, somewhat wealthy few is significant, considering it is estimated only 4.5m whites remain. This equates into 9% of the population. Who have the skills, training and education to do all that needs to be done.
Crime has certainly played an equal part in emigration, although the real stats of violence are unknown, owing to the muzzle on the media. Most everyone agrees, despite actual, reliable numbers, South Africa has one of the world’s highest murder rates. According to a survey for the period between 1998 and 2000 compiled by the UN, South Africa was ranked second for murder and first for assault and rape per capita. In the world.
But whites are not alone in their pessimism. “We are in a bad place at the moment in this country,” liberation struggle warrior and hero Archbishop Desmond Tutu has lamented. The rose-tinted ideals of Nelson Mandela’s “rainbow nation” were overdue in their transition to a harsher reality. The table has turned for even Mr Mandela, the international hero, is being scolded for going along with corruption and making poor use of his immense authority, as he watches of the mistakes of his party. In my point of view, however, pointing out all the wrongs of Nelson Mandela, doesn’t make our new leader right.
Yes, new leadership is what keeps me up nights most of all these days. Let me explain. Unlike the rest of the world, South Africans vote in their general elections for a party, not a person. And that party has a conference where its leaders vote for the president. So in essence, democracy is dead. The party can at any time ask the president to step down and will replace him, without so much as a backward glance at the will of the population. This happened last year in the country. And when Zuma won 60% of the vote at the ANC summit at Polokwane, he also scooped up the top 5 positions within the party for his candidates. The ANC is his. And so is the country.
According to Dr Zweli Mkhize, the KwaZulu-Natal chairperson of the African National Congress, “South Africa was eternally blessed to have a leader like our beloved Madiba. We must also face up to the reality that there will only be one Madiba. Therefore, our leaders will increasingly become more and more ordinary.”
After last month’s general election, Jacob Zuma will take over leadership of South Africa, and that presidential inauguration day will be a dark and gloomy one for all South Africans. And not just because it is the birth of winter in the Southern Hemisphere either. You see, Zuma is a real character. He flaunts his polygamy as he moves onto his 4th or 6th wife (no one really knows), who is 30 years his senior. He dances well. He is a people-person. And that is why the masses want him. But here’s a bulleted-list of why any thinking person who cares not about his rhythm would agree that this new president is a really bad idea for the future of SA:
- More than ever, there is talk these days amongst his henchmen of “reracialising” the country that once bonded over a rugby jersey back in 1995
- SA is saturated with Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment policy, designed to broaden the ownership and management of the South African economy. Black employment equity policy outcomes are clear – they have merely enriched the elite politicians and sent the skilled overseas. Mr Zuma is a proponent.
- Mr Zuma has been an active member of the Communist Party and served on the Politburo as recently as 1990.
- This leads me to my next red flag. Corruption is obviously not new to African politics, but our struggle heroes seem stained by many a controversy. Joe Modise, Mandela’s choice of minister of defense, described as a big-time gangster, is being investigated post-mortem by German, British, and South African prosecutors for conflicts of interest in awarding lucrative arms deals. This has become an increasingly complex and far-reaching web benefiting leaders such as Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and other prominent ANC leaders. This is just one of many scandals come to light in the past decade. Today, it is difficult to find any SA minister apart from Trevor Manuel who has not presided over a steep fall in standards. Unfortunately, many have come to see the ANC as nothing more than a nest of racists, thieves and hypocrites, who have done almost no good at all since they won power in 1994.
- So now we face a future under a President Zuma and an all-powerful, perhaps even vengeful, ANC.
- Yes, Mr Zuma is angry. He’s angry with the Constitutional Court who have several times voted against him. He now says he would like to review the status of the Constitutional Court “because I don’t think we should have people who are almost like God in a democracy.” He also blames the press, which he loathes. He threatens to weed out the “lazy, corrupt and incompetent” i.e. those he does not like from government.
- Zuma’s gangster friends aren’t limited to the late Mr Modise. Julius Malema, leader of the ANC’s Youth League decalred just last year the powerful Youth League was “prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma” if his prosecution went ahead.
- For many, it is Mr Zuma’s eight-year tussle with the courts that turns their stomachs the most. First, there was that pesky rape case. It wasn’t so much that he was accused of rape but that in his statement his views on prevention of the risk of AIDS came down to a taking a shower after this unprotected unconsented sex. Moving on, corruption is his favourite vice, evidenced by his long legal battle over allegations of racketeering and corruption. His financial advisor, Schabir Shaik was convicted of corruption and fraud, and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment in 2005. The judge on the case said that the payments totalling more that R4m ($596,000) between 1995 and 2005 from his friend in exchange for using his influence to help secure government contracts for Mr Shaik’s companies “can only have generated a sense of obligation in the recipient”. President Thabo Mbeki promptly sacked Zuma as deputy president, (leading to his own demise). Last month, Zuma announced that if elected he would consider granting a pardon to his friend and advisor Shaik. Three days later Mr Shaik, suffering from hypertension and depression, was released from jail on “medical parole”, normally reserved for the dying. He has served only two years and four months of his 15-year sentence.
- It is the speed and outcome of the way the case that had gripped the nation and dominated world headlines was snuffed out that shocked South Africans most. On 6 April 2009, the National Prosecuting Authority decided to drop the charges citing political interference. All charges of corruption, racketeering, tax-evasion, money-laundering and fraud against the president were withdrawn. The actual merits of the case were not in question, they admitted. Nor was the prosecution in any way flawed. The issue was the timing of the announcement of the charges were deemed to be an attempt to thwart Mr Zuma’s political ambitions. This made it “neither possible nor desirable” to continue with the prosecution.
- And so the corruption continues. A poll taken in February/March of this year, shortly before the charges were dropped, showed that 50% of all ANC members believed him to be innocent. Yet nearly 75% continued to support him “wholeheartedly” and unconditionally.
- With South Africa sinking into its first recession after 16 years of expansion, the last thing we need is a leader with a personal agenda and a hard heart. Footage of Mr Zuma belting out his “Umshini Wami” (“Bring me my machine gun”) theme song are not the sort to encourage international investors.
I can’t help but wonder why I still care so much about a country that welcomes my dollars on a holiday, but continues to discourage my vote. Not that it would count.
For more on the current situation in South Africa and its political future, take a look at Peter Hitchens’ excellent article most recently published in the UK’s Daily Mail.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: "Umshini Wami", africa, aids, anc, archbishop desmond tutu, brain drain, broad based lack economic empowerment, corrupt, courts, crime, Daily Mail, Dr Zweli Mkhize, election, emigration, g20, joe modice, legal, madiba, mr jacob zuma, mr Thabo Mbeki, mrsa, National Prosecuting Authority, needy, nelson mandela, Peter Hitchens, presidential, project invisible children, rape, South Africa, un, youth league
We hopped in the jeep on this past wooly Sunday, my husband and I, on an impromptu roadtrip. I have never been to Oregon before, and he loves Pinot Noir for its earthy, mushroom flavours, so it was set. I must admit, shortly into the drive, I realised as much as I love to travel (and I love it even more Pinot Noir, believe me!) I am a homebody. Meaning, driving past those little farmhouses, as the dusk settled in and filled the air with a gray blurriness, I wanted to be in those homes. Cuddling up to a hearth inside is me. Regardless, we sped by, fighting my primeval need to break and enter, and I am so glad we did, because I had almost forgotten the joys of an American road trip. Starbucks drive-thrus slowly give way to Java Houses and Zippy Cups – the mom and pop-alikes of small town America. I started out counting the fast food joints, until I got dizzy. Jack and the Beanstalk roadsigns tower ahead, waving at us, pulling theirs heads through the gaps in the trees for miles ahead, against a competing billboard backdrop. On the American interstate highways, bigger is always better, and I love to marvel at the giant lorries, pickup trucks, and sometimes, people. But if friendliness counts for something, small town America wins that prize, and we were charmed from head to foot. Jack In The Box, Wendy’s, Carl Junior, McDonalds, Burger King, Jack In The Box, Wendy’s, Carl Junior, McDonalds, Burger King…it feels as though we are driving in circles. And it’s all so not fair. 2 burgers for $3. The Dollar menu. Not a sushi bar in sight. Healthy is hard. So eventually we caved, and on the backseat we began to mound our Sour Patch Kids and Subway wrappers, like squirrels hoarding for the winter. Ad there’s always that wonderful American efficiency. By this I mean the odometer testing, brake checking, altitude notifications, snow chain shoulders, and inspections. It’s hard to explain my wonder to kids who grew up with all this and sophistication. In third world countries, you just drive, swerve for cows, and hope for the best.But this Oregonian landscape is beautiful – far more vivid than any painting, we veer dangerously into oncoming traffic, cooing at the white-capped mountain tops, and valleys of green and blue. In San Francisco, we don’t get Fall, and we realise how much we miss the shower of red and gold leaves. The streets are a bridal path of Mac make-up palettes of yellow, gold, red and purple. Oversized trucks lit like Christmas trees make me think of trannies showing just a trace of stubble. Everybody pulls aside like friendly housewives navigating a crowded supermarket, and we count down the last few hours. I’m sad we did not see the bears promised on warning signs, but feel rewarded with passing towns named Weed, Susanville and Eureka.
Categories: Road trip
I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight, I just know it. There is way too much on the table, and I feel for those two guys. I want to stop time before tomorrow happens. Just for a moment. If I, in my microcosm of a life, ever felt I had a big day coming, this puts it all in perspective doesn’t it? When did this whole experience become so heated? So much hate speech. Rising up of passion that could ignite in a second. A tide of fear. I feel pressured, and overwhelmed, and I don’t even have a vote. I want them both to win, and to be happy. I want us all to be happy. And mostly, I want America to be proud, happy and strong. Why do I feel like with the two options I must choose an adjective from the three? So I’m stepping back from American election madness on this day to review how and why we do things this way. Despite the monstrous amounts of money spent that could be put to better use (frankly), the media hysteria/bias (even more frankly), and the historical tipping point on all three fronts; even with record numbers of Americans heading to the polls, the US won’t even come within a rabbit’s tail of the top nations in the world for voter turnout. Regardless of international media domination and interest, the US will still be well behind Sweden, New Zealand and Iceland. Steve Israel and Norman J. Ornstein of the WSJ believe the common element might be voting on a weekend. Hard to overturn a 150 year tradition, where farmers focused on…well, farming on Saturdays, “Sunday was the Lord’s day”, and Monday was travel day to get to polling stations, in time to return to the land for farming again, yes, you guessed it, over the weekend. Not surprising, most Americans don’t follow the same schedule as our agrarian forefathers, and many go so far as to state that Tuesday is one of the most inconvenient days to vote. One in four people who didn’t vote in 2006 said that they were “too busy” or had “conflicting work or school schedules.” However, making the day a holiday would be too costly. Perhaps we should turn to today’s most successful fundraisers in this race for inspiration. For me, I have my big day on Wednesday. I get to assume the American identity. Gather the rights, responsibilities and privileges of that piece of paper I have earned. And yet it still feels so fake, and I am ashamed. I am torn, though I need not.
A few simple thoughts on a couple of complex matters. It’s late, and tomorrow is a big day.
Categories: America · Citizenship · Election 2008 · Naturalisation · Tradition · Tuesday · Voting
Yes, that and “America the Beautiful” rang in the cringing ears of myself, and 1,495 immigrants who became US Citizens in a San Francisco ceremony today. Together we represented 92 countries, although I do believe I was the only South African present in that cavernous, yawning Masonic Center Auditorium. And we walked out representing only one. A day after the election of a lifetime, we gained the right to a voice.
Regardless, I will admit that mostly it was the finite details that disturbed me most this crisp California morning. Where was my husband in that blurry kaleidoscope of fuzzy colours upstairs, and is my eyesight going to fail me at this ripe young age? Why is the British woman next to me not saying the oath, and did she really just call this morning’s legalities a “thing”? That would be much like calling yesterday’s presidential election a “landslide” when just over half the population voted for the winner, and only 800,000 more than voted for Bush in 2004. Feeling much like a chorus of trembling voices in the preschool nativity play, we avoided eye-contact with our beaming, flag-waving families upstairs, and trudged through a predictable, but no less warmly welcoming ceremony. And tonight we sleep, deeply and soundly, in the knowledge that we too can soon have our say on the renaming of sewage plants and gay marriage in the coming years, living in this, our new home. America. The Beautiful.
Categories: America · California · Election 2008 · Naturalisation · San Francisco · South Africa · Voting
Tagged: America, america the beautiful, american, British, Bush, California, ceremony, citizen, democrat, Election 2008, flag, gap, immigrant, independent, landslide, legalities, liberal, lifetime, marriage, masonic center, mccain, moderate, Naturalisation, obama, republican, right wing, San Francisco, sleep, vote, winner
Do you ever feel like you don’t know where to start? A greedy, clean page awaits your stain; your fears and insecurities, egoic bravado, tidbits, silliness..your life. Ever tried to coherently and simply describe yourself? Ever wondered how someone would put the entirety of you, all those memories shared, hidden and extracted to be polished and told again, into one tidy shoebox? A memoir. A epitaph.
At times I just want it all to be tidy. To be right with the world. Happy, good looking, healthy and on top of it. Then I tear myself down. Like ripping off the party dress and smearing my lipstick, I run free and in my knickers to the end of the street, wildy.
Perhaps at some very young age, far too young to remember, we decide – make this contract with the world that this is how we will be. I’ll be the wise one, this trip. No, wait, can I be funny – you know, in an intellectual, dry way. Well, more amusing actually. But only the smart people in the room will get my joke. And I want to scan the room for the beautiful but ineffective faces wondering if the joke’s on them.
Just wondering, this idle Friday night, before it all comes apart. Another weekend of mornings slipped into slow afternoons. High heels and red wine. Clinking glasses. I want it to go fast so I can lament at how fast it flew.
Categories: Friday · contract · epitaph · high heels · joke · memoir · red wine · uninspired · weekend · world
Tagged: afternoons, clean, contract, epitaph, funny, glasses, greedy, hidden, high heels, idle, memoir, mornings, naked, red wine, shared, shoebox, tidy, weekend, wit, world
Waking to a grey morning and a blue mood in San Francisco, I was relieved to note a scheduled call with my mentor this morning. ”What do you mean you don’t have a mentor?” I demanded of my husband, agape. Everybody needs a mentor. I am amazed to discover some of the smartest people I know tread water in their roughest seas without a trusted keeper of their best interests. A counselour with clarity of mind, and fullness of heart. Someone to get you to put down that camera, or pen, and to challenge you on your deepest fears and dreams.
Two hours later, I put down the phone and surveyed my doodles, tracing their way between the list of characters, websites, books and links of our discussion. Personal homework. The coffee dregs of a stimulating discussion. A meeting of minds. A cross-pollination of ideas. A firepit of burning confessions. It’s a dance of intellect, inspiration, out-of-the-box thinking, and intense baring of souls. One must become quite naked to find one’s bearings, I have learnt. I met my mentor while still a child, and little has changed between us. We live world’s apart, although I suspect at times we’d both like to swop geographical starting points for a moment in time. Every touchpoint is a deliberate, measured connection, as we no longer share friends or acquaintances. This takes effort, and is fully conscious. Our outstanding needs fit perfectly, as I covet his successes, I hope he wouldn’t turn down mine. I dedicate today’s triumphs to this.
Categories: San Francisco · counselour · geographical · mentor · mind · naked · sea · success
Tagged: Call, challenge, changed, child, confessions, conscious, counselor, Cross-pollination, discussion, Dreams, fears, geography, grow, homework, inspiration, itellect, keeper, mentor, minds, Phone, San Francisco, sharing, success, triumph
My husband and I argue a lot. About small things. In a healthy way. Italian style. Unlike other couples, we are so ridiculously close, and from ground zero have been attached at the hip, that in these moments, it is almost a relief to finally have some friction that allows us to find that space for ourselves. Even if is a life-altering, world war 3-type dispute. One of our roundabout arguments starts around 10pm every night.
“We need to stop this movie, so we can get to bed” say I, coaxingly, keeping my voice light. “No, just a few more minutes – I want to see if the prostitute’s children get into a school in Calcutta” he begs. Okay, I think, I’ll give it a few. He knows I’m ready for bed and this was my warning. I don’t want to be uptight or controlling, but having different bedtimes has never worked, and frankly, when it comes to sleep, I am a uptight controller.
30 minutes later…”Sweetie, can we switch if off now? I want to be up at a reasonable hour, and we’re both a bad influence on each other. We’re sleeping in these days past 8, and I want a proper schedule” say I, with emphasis. “Alright…” he drawls…(pause)…To my relief he’s on his feet. But then, as he disappears round the corner, it’s: “Let me just check my email”.
We come from different continents, and universes, my husband and I. When the phone rings, my heart stops beating for such a split-second you wouldn’t notice, and 9 times out of 10, I just let it ring. Technology, for some random and inexplicable reason stands for bad news, in my world. And even if an email I received at 10pm on a Thursday night was full of lottery winnings, inheritance notices from a long-lost great aunt, or tax refund specifications, that would affect my ability to fall asleep. Sleep – a currency so valuable in my family home growing up, my parents simply never woke us. And I recall clearly getting beatings for screaming out in the garden during my mother’s daily naps. My sister, to this day, goes to be in pitch darkness, with ear plugs, a mouth guard and a fluffy eye mask. Yes, she is single – but that’s another story for another day.
I round the corner, yawning, having finally completed my Sephora-inspired beauty ritual, to be overtaken in 5 year old style, by a sprinting fully grown man, who leaps onto his side of the bed, clutching the remote, tuned to the evening news. It’s midnight, and now in his world, is the time to make sure he’s on top of all happenings on our glorious planet. One of those teensy little downsides of not living together while dating is that you discover only after promising to spend the rest of eternity that you’ll fall asleep together, that your husband would do anything not to ever have to go to bed. Not that I’d trade him or change him for a second, of course.
So in answer to C. Beth’s 1 Minute Writer Challenge of the day (oneminutewriter.blogspot.com) “What modern technology would you have trouble living without?” I would have to sheepishly admit that no matter how attached I become to Steve Job’s latest brainchild, at the end of the day, I know that it is these gadgets, together with my husband who collects them, that most keep me from getting the fullness out of my life.
Categories: 1 Minute Writer Challenge · C. Beth · India · Sephora · Steve Job · argue · calcutta · couple · email · gadget · italian · news · sleep · sleeping in · universe · world
Tagged: 1 Minute Writer Challenge, argue, Bed, Blog, C. Beth, calcutta, couple, email, gadget, India, italian, news, Sephora, sleep, sleeping in, Steve Job, Technology, universe, world
I am not a regular churchgoing person.
I find that 4-cornered box claustrophobic to get into, so would rather meander my way into it, making room for a quick escape before anyone notices me. I shrug off the tea and cookies afterwards, trying to be polite without looking like I’m making a mad dash for the door. My relationship with God, has to be on my own terms. Having said that, last week was a particularly rough week, and we were kind of at our wits end by Saturday, so I threw the idea of a visit to Grace this Sunday out there. Alan, I believe out of sheer desperation to make peace, and find solace, quickly agreed.
Alan’s mother once told me he was too cerebral for religion and spiritual reflection. Which was why I am particularly drawn to Grace Cathedral’s twilight contemplative Eucharist. The Episcopalian route is a good one for us, as they welcome this recipe of blended scripture, innovation and open-minded conversation, where inclusion is expected and people of all faiths are welcomed. I love that we’re encouraged to think and debate the gospel.
On the way, we’d had this intellectual debate about the environment, and opposing theories as to global warming, as we whizzed through the trolley-crammed backstreets of Nob Hill. It was 70 degrees in the evening in what is traditionally Fall in a chilled city. We’ve had 4 days of these mellow, shrug-off-the-jersey temperatures. And then the opening hymn: “the earth is bruised and broken by the ones who still want more”. I can sniff out manipulation in a heartbeat, cerebral as I am, and am bothered by untempered media bias and mass hypnotism, so I am not necessarily buying global warming, but mouthing these words alongside my husband’s off-key singing, was all I needed to dump the resistance and just want to do more. Regardless of who is causing what, I am going to borrow my smart brother’s response, which was one cannot deny we are harming our earth. So today I will make an effort to give back, want less and listen all the while to the sighing of our planet.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: bias, Cathedral, Church, earth, environment, Fall, global warming, Grace, harm, hymn, media, Nob Hill, planet, San Francisco, singing, temperatures
It’s the middle of November and I have thrown open all the sash windows to catch a breeze through this oven-warm apartment of mine. I know global warming is being strongly disputed by some scientists, so I won’t attempt to throw my hat into the ring on such a hot topic, but I will say I have never been warmer in Fall. I recall several years ago, wandering the quaint and charming, fairy light-bedecked Union Street below, at dusk, stuffing my hands into my pockets for relief from the wet, chilled air. Yet this year, I haven’t even unpacked the space heaters I invested in from Home Depot this year in a vow to stay warm. This year it is definitely warmer, and this week’s heat wave, and all the arm-baring tops and open windows that have gone along with is, has made it all the more impossible to ignore.
I am African, in blood and in mind. Recently, I discovered that for many in the world this translates into the assumption that I can stand incredible heat. Firstly, Africa has a more predictable, but not necessarily hotter climate, than other places in the world. Sure, we have scorching deserts and toasted plains, but so does America. Mostly, in cities like Cape Town and Dar Es Salaam, the difference is that you know you have 5 months of warm days and nights, and 5 months of cold. It’s just a given, and we might as well pack away our sweaters and scarves for the season. I have heard that in Kansas, one must be prepared for a tornado in the summer months, June brings tropical storms to Florida, and San Franciscans curse the July fog. This, for me, is the difference.
In fact, the hottest places I have been fall onto the Asian portion of the globe. I can recall crawling out of the soaked sheets at 4am in India, to rouse the boatmen for a dawn sail on the Ganges before the heat took over the city by sunrise, and we would retreat back into the cool darkness of our hotel room, like slugs, for most of the day. In Hoi An, we rented a moped to whip up some wind that would cool our skin. And to explore, as the stifling heat disspated any plans of strolling the alleys crowded with silk bloody lanterns.
I was born in March, which is the dregs of summer where I come from, and I think it touched my soul, birthing a yearning for the last days of golden happiness, for ever. There is always a part of me, like a sunflower, that always wants more sun on my face. I get actual sick happiness from liquid sunshine, and I horde it secretly and shamefully like a housewife collecting shoes.
Unfortunately, San Francisco is hardly warm, and when we do get sunshiney days, we never know how long they will last. It is a daredevil move setting out for an afternoon without layers, and summer melts into winter, which evaporates just as quickly into another seasonal cousin. This incestuous changing of the seasons leaves us all wondering if we are the butt of some heavenly joke.
So for now, I swop weather remarks, like a purple rinse in the old age home, with my friends around the world on that wonderful Facebook-go-ride, smiling inwardly when we Californians yet again steal the sun from another deserving corner of the world.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: africa, blood, breeze, Cape Town, charming, Dar Es Salaam, facebook, Fall, flower, ganges, global warming, happiness, heat wave, housewife, India, lantern, march, mind, predictable, San Francisco, seasonal, sick, soul, sun, union street, Vietnam, warm, weather
It’s been 5 years, and 6 months, to the day, since I left South Africa. I had 2 suitcases of dreams, the penny-pinching savings of a twenty-something, and a broken heart.
America may well be the land of dreams, but as an African, that bloody soil continues to marinate in my bones, churning up mixed emotions daily. With the coming of Fall, and the lights of the holiday season on the horizon, it’s easy to remember why I fell in love with America. I admire the hospitable and giving, innovative, demanding spirit of the people, covet their bountiful harvests of food, iPods and wooden homes, marvel at the unending landscapes of New York, Miami, San Diego, and Texas, and draw strength from their world power status. Full stop. As a people, they are so border-less, with a moral integrity and humanitarian character, I have never gotten around to prioritising or developing within myself. First on the scene in the red light district of Calcutta, the Asian tsunami, and sending their offspring to Africa to build schools during the summer. Where I come from there’s a “me first” approach to living that is so necessary in the constant unspoken battles of daily life. Looking after others is a luxury – an afterthought to just surviving. I relish raising my young ones somewhere as beautiful inside and out as this.
Having said that, and this is the hard part to get into, there’s always a part of me missing. Like someone died, and only a handful of people around me ever knew them. At first, I horded everything African. I hung masks from Nigeria on the walls (to the consternation of my roommate from Colorado), joined the expat clubs where we thickened up our accents and talked up our flights home in December, read the books on District Six, the Anglo-Boer War and everything in between, enbalmed my aching heart in traditional dishes, filled the corners of my apartment with drumbeats and tribal choruses…Then I married an American.
But the hard part is staying in touch with my previous life. If the 10 hour time difference doesn’t challenge you, Skype’s faulty connections, and the resistance of others to the digital revolution will get you. Perhaps in the end, this is the charm of distant shores, but still, it gets me every time!
Categories: memoir
Tagged: accent, africa, America, anglo boer war, cape minstrels, colorado, digital, district six, Dreams, drum, enbalm, expat, festive, flight, mask, miss, revolution, skype, soil, South Africa, spirit, suitcase, traditional recipe
“Welcome to America!” screeched Kate, my older sister of 16 months, hugging me so tightly it hurt.
I still remember my first 24 hours in America.
It was late one weeknight when my plane finally landed, and it was my sister who met me at SFO, with a bunch of daisies dyed blue that had stained her palms. She was grinning with glee. That stolen happiness we so rarely want to show in case it turns out to be some cruel trick and is promptly taken from us. We squeezed and shoved my two over-sized suitcases into the boot of her little faded cherry Honda and set off for the lights of the city. I remember she took the long way home, cutting across the glittering buildings of downtown and I arched up to see the tops of the skyscrapers. It felt quite magical. And far from Africa.
She pulled into a parking space, and we each took a case on wobbly wheels, while she led us down a dark back walkway of a building, through a frosted glass door hidden behind massive rubbish bins, and into the warmth of her little studio. In my former life, a studio was something belonging only to artists – an airy, dust mote-filled room above the garage where they painted for hours. I soon learnt it is a one-roomed living space. Kate’s was a maze of rooms leading off one from the other, without doors or privacy. In true Leinberger style, she’d vacuumed every corner that afternoon, and left atmospheric lights and a classical CD on before she’d left. It was perfect, and Kate-esque. I was overwhelmed by the genuine welcome, and grateful for a home away from home.
The dial tone of our calling card sounded tinny and distorted as it made it’s convoluted way under the concrete giants of San Francisco city and the Atlantic Ocean to Cape Town. It is customary to call home the minute we arrive so my mom can breathe again, and unglue herself from CNN, where she’s been dutifully watching for plane crashes or storms. Already, I felt so removed, and wavering in my choice to leave everything I knew for this strange place that smells of freshly brewed coffee.
America has always smelt like coffee to me, possibly because Starbucks is the first stop in JFK airport after such a gruelling, long haul flight. In South Africa, we make a cup of instant when we wake, or need a pick-me-up, but coffee as an accessory while shopping, or in the cup-holder of the car is as foreign as a Starbucks to South Africans. Something we’ve heard of, and believe exists, but would never enter our minds to try to emulate. To brew a pot of filter coffee for oneself is unheard of, as is an afternoon office coffee-run.
We walked down to a neighbourhood cafe next morning, where Kate continued to beam at me over the sugar. I was “fresh off the boat”, and expats would crowd around me for weeks hoping some of home would rub off on them. They wanted my newness. My very unAmericaness. And also the endless opportunity to recreate oneself.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: 24 hours, airport, America, atlantic ocean, blue, boat, Cape Town, cnn, coffee, concrete, crash, daisies, downtown, filter, fresh, instant, jfl, kate, neighbourhood, plane, sfo, sister, skyscrapers, smell, South Africa, starbucks, studio, suitcase
November 25, 2008 · 1 Comment
Yesterday afternoon the doorbell rang…lo and behold, it was the chilly-fingered postman fingering my new American passport. I probably don’t need one for some time, with no plans to travel internationally for at least 3 months, but had to just have one, so they can’t change their minds and take it away. I pinch myself that I now belong in a country where passports take a week to arrive. That’s stupendous. Do you know that in order to change my name in South Africa after my marriage, I need to re-register my birth and that this takes 12 months? You don’t know the inadequacies of government bureaucracies until you are in Africa, my friend. Americans have absolutely nothing to complain about when they moan about red tape. They’re kind of like those skinny chicks who sit on the wall, legs dangling their legs with the fatties, commiserating on how much cellulite they have. It’s just transparent and silly. Rejoice in what you have, my friends! Americans are waaaaaay to quick to berate their own country.
So, today I dedicate this to America and all I love and covet about her:
1. Starbucks for the seasonal drinks – the fall salted caramel hot chocolate is my vice. It calls me from way across the street and kills my plans to not eat any sugar. Who knew? Salty and sweet?!
2. Government services that are lightning fast and beat their own timelines
3. WIFI everywhere, like nosy neighbours, letting me download music, books, websites and maps to my little heart’s content
4. Supersoft Charmin toilet paper I want to put my face to – but don’t
5. Oversized melons, pineapples and bananas that are shameless about their curves
6. Amazon-like showerstorms in the vegetable section of the supermarket that keep the flesh of my melons soft and sweet, the leaves of my lettuce moist and juicy
7. $0.03 a minute calls to South Africa, Antarctica or Israel
8. Exotic food stores where I can load up on Aromat, Ouma rusks, tamarind and ghee
9. Police that pull you over for traffic violations, and men on bicycles that just post tickets under windscreen-wipers. Talk about a charming upsidedown world
10. Streetcleaning, and the revised weekly schedule that lets me forget I own a car in a big city
11. Smoke-free restaurants and bars, clean clothes and less colds
12. Social services and unemployment weekly payments that pay my rent when the economy crashes, slides and burns
13. Zipcar – the world’s largest car sharing service, and how everyone uses it
14. Red Lobster – cheap seafood lunches with bottomless scrumptious cheese herb scones enjoyed elbows-deep with everybody in churchgear on a Sunday
15. $50 flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Virgin America
16. Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, Diet Coke Plus, Diet Coke with Lemon, Diet Coke with Lime, Diet Cherry Coke, Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke (you knew that was coming), Diet Coke with Splenda, Coca Cola C2, and Coca Cola Blak. For my many moods
17. Debating the blessings and importance of lime vs lemon with Americans
18. Over-sized sodas, burgers, coffees, cars, highways, and fruit…and mini-vodka cranberries with double oversized shots of Grey Goose
19. Educating Americans on our versions of scones vs muffins vs flapjacks vs pancakes
20. The Kindle, iPod, iPhone and everything other gadget that changed the world and steals my time
21. Facebook, Netflix, Meebo, Amazon, Yelp, Flicka, Drudge Report, Rotten Tomatoes, and the CIA website: THE source for all you ever wanted to know about the world
22. Making up words like “laundried up” and not getting a second glance about it
23. Whistling for cabs in the middle of the street, while still looking perfectly normal
24. Calling everyone “sir” or “Ma’am”
25. The wonderfulness of Thanksgiving – Christmas without the commercialism
26. The craziness of Black Friday – commercialism’s backlash the day after Thanksgiving
27. Victoria Secret – the shows, models and underwear. I’ll take it all
28. Dirt cheap cellphone plans and unlimited home phone lines
29. Cranberry juice, the OJ of America
30. Dogs equal children
31. ATMs that scan my checks
32. Deepak Chopra talking at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on a random evening
33. World class cities – a spoiling choice of NYC, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, and Chicago
34. Small town and Midwest real America – a welcoming choice of Kansas, Indiana, Illinois, Virginia, and Idaho
35. Being only one flight away from Hawaii, when you live in California
36. Road trips – the endless blistering tar ahead, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, and Arby’s curly fries
37. The smell of fresh, rich, roasted, hot coffee
38. Donuts, bagels and cinnamon buns – the breakfast of champions
398. Thursday night TV extravaganza, Sunday night TV extravaganza and Wednesday night TV extravaganza
40. Drive-thru pharmacies and banks, online grocery deliveries, farm-fresh vegetable orders, and movie DVDs in the mail
41. The way they say “Welcome Home” every time I get to the front of immigration line at JFK
42. National parks a dime a dozen, like Yosemite, Appalachian, Bryce Canyon and Death Valley
43. Sayings like a dime a dozen, getting on the horn, pro ho, to pull a Dr Seuss, and a day late a dollar short
44. The goofiest inventions like the cheese-filtered cigarette, the diaper alarm and the pet toilet
45. The more money they make, the more they want to give away. Thank you Warren Buffet and Bill Gates
46. The non-rich in places like Iowa and Texas, giving the most at Christmastime to the poor
47. 24-hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year supermarkets
48. 24 Hour Fitness closes at 10pm
49. Shops that open on a Sunday
50. 1 hour turnaround on emails
TO BE CONTINUED
Oh, we foreigners moan and complain about Americans endlessly, but it is much like those skinny chicks sitting on the wall…we just want to be cool.
Tell me what you like about America – or don’t.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: amazon, America, aromat, Black Friday, bureacracy, cabs, charmin, CIA, coca cola, coke, Drudge Report, efficient, facebook, flapjack, Flicka, fruit, ghee, grey goose, iphone, ipod, Israel, kindle, Meebo, muffin, Netflix, ouma rusks, oversized, pancake, passport, red lobster, Rotten Tomatoes, scone, South Africa, starbucks, Thanksgiving, toilet paper, vegetables, virgin america, vodka cranberry, wifi, yelp
This morning, I woke while the light was still grey and the air crisp, to catch my little niece before her bedtime. She’s still pink and plump like a raw chicken, and has huge eyes that miss nothing.
Technology is truly amazing today, although I think we can no longer be amazed. The sky is the limit. I am just happy because I see it as a bridge that lets me into her life halfway across the world, so I can see her little milky oversized face, that’s a fabulous melange of my brother and my sister-in-law, reaching for me on the screen. 
We rely on technology so much these days it’s hard to imagine our lives without the blessings and curses of the gadgets that dot our lives. In America especially, laptops, digital cameras, unlimited high speed wifi, and ipods are so affordable, we have intermeshed our lives to fit between these buttons and keyboards. The fast food of this generation. We’ve hardly noticed we’ve all but disappeared from the stage. And personalities have dissipated too, with stories of Facebook breakups, text mishaps, and the 1 hour email turnaround. The family that used to crowd around the nightly news together is now holed up in different rooms, each glowing with the LCD of a computer screen, streaming tomorrow’s TV show realtime.
I’m going to date myself for a second…I remember learning computers in school once a week for 45 minutes, and it was DOS. Yip, black screen, green letters and numbers, lots of these >…< Commands I hated and couldn’t remember. Talk about learning something we never used! When we printed, it was on that paper that made that robot beeping sound, and the pages would come out in reams with tear off ends on either side. I recall the day our first PC arrived at home. It took up the entire dining room. I didn’t see it again for a year, as my brother laid claims on it immediately. Together with his friends, they teased one another by hiding icons under windows (thanks Bill Gates), and shooting assailants in grim, grimy buildings that went on forever, in games that lasted weeks. When I was 17 and living in Holland, we mailed letters still, and planned backpacking trips from different continents, all on paper with a pen. Hotmail was my first email account, although we only used private email to fight with our boyfriends while at work. They had those damn storage limits which meant you either deleted emails you wish you had kept today, or you had multiple accounts. There was lucindal@hotmail, lucl@hotmail, and lucl21@hotmail. Keeping it all straight was as tricky as saving a document you’d worked on for hours. Ah, the big unsaved document dump of that day must be an interesting place to visit. I thought my boyfriend was ridiculous and showy for wanting a cellphone when we were at varsity and told him outright so. We were resistant, untrusting and old-fashioned. We definitely had more time for ourselves, and connected less with everybody. Now I can but only wonder what it would be like to still have all those childhood emails that were never written, texts not sent. Sophie is going to grow up in a digital world where she’ll laugh at our archaic communication of the 1900′s. She’ll have a cellphone before she finishes school if they still exist, and will probably hunt for my diaries to pour over the blog of that era. But for now, I’m just putting all that energy into stealing time with a 1 year old that bangs the keyboard not the keys, and can only say “goldy goldy” to nobody in particular.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: America, backpack, bill gates, blessing, Blog, camera, cellohone, command, continents, curse, diaries, digital, dos, email, games, glow, halfway, hotmail, iphone, ipod, laptop, lcd, letters, neice, print, ream, skype, sophie, storage, stream, Technology, text, time difference, tv, world, yahoo
Whew! It’s Monday, and the extended Thanksgiving weekend is now but a Facebook upload of blurred photos of turkey, although our waistlines may take a little longer to recover from all that pumpkin pie. I haven’t even but put away my Cuisenart mixer, and it’s time to dust off the psychadelic tree my crazy sister gave me for my Birthday 2 years ago.
Last Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) is traditionally known as “Black Friday” in the US, for it is the start of the shopping season – the so-called horn of the hunting season. ”Black” because it is when stores go from hanging out in the red (accounts speaking-wise) into the black (i.e. making a profit.) He he he – like we are to believe Apple stores don’t make money year round! Like most opportunists in this great nation of ours, Commercial America makes a big deal of the day. Some open a minute after midnight to encourage the spree. Others set up camp for those willing to brave a night in the carpark, for what the stores like to call “doorbusters”. These offers are streaked across the newspapers that week in black and white, so you can be strategic and pick your slaughtering ground. Electronics stole this show this year, in almost all the “Early birds”. The catch is that you have to face up against the glass at 4am, and willing to fight off the ravenous crowds, like crazed brides at a wedding gown half-price expo. This year, the poor Walmart employee who’s task it was to open the doors was trampled to death! On the upside, the market had it’s biggest gains since 1934, so we can assume lots of Christmas shopping was ticked off the list. Probably more self-shopping when we consider those printers and digital cameras that topped the list at Target, but it’s economy-boosting, and that’s what we all need now.
My first year in America, and not knowing all these specifics, I took advantage of a day off work, to head for downtown for some good old fashioned endorphin release. The mass crowds nearly stomped me to death, and I must’ve looked like a salmon swimming upstream. To add to my difficulties in crowd-management, I normally veer left which I blame on my upbringing in a country with lefthand rule of the road. Interestingly enough, while originally most of the world’s traffic used to drive on the left, 66% of people live in right-side traffic countries today. I came home shaking my head of roadrage.
The Monday following this credit card-busting weekend is known as “Cyber Monday”, as we return to work from the long weekend, and it’s the online stores that get their Christmas bonuses. I may be wrong, but this year’s sales don’t look as promising, considering it’s past lunch on the East Coast and the gold price isn’t looking too golden.
In foreign countries, none of these commercial markers of time exist. Christmas carols play in the supermarket aisles, alongside fake greenery with big red bows, around November. It’s warm in South Africa, and we shop en route to the beach. Lights go up halfheartedly on the roofs of around an eighth of homes in my neighbourhood. A teller here or there may don a Santa hat till the wool prickles with warmth. Some part of me both loves and hates the Christmas spirit of America, although it could just be the homesickness in me talking.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: apple, beach, Black Friday, bonus, christmas, commercial, crowds, cuisenart, cyber monday, doorbuster, downtown, early bird, economy, electronics, gift, gold, homesick, lights, newspaper, pumpkin pie, red, red bows, salmon, santa, spirit, target, Thanksgiving, traffic, tree, turkey, waistline, walmart
It’s an ordinary weekday morning and I am up relatively early, while Alan is still shamefully under the covers. Today is no different from others:I have opened the curtains to get his clock going, and turned the light on into his eyes. I am desperate to be normal, and resist my genes. I had a grandmother who would wander around her home till past three in the morning, and sleep in till noon. I never wanted to be like that, but I must say, Alan and I are our happiest around midnight.
This time, I won’t be yanking him out from under the covers. I am just going to give in and accept that we are on playing on different time zones. I am not going to fight it any longer.
While we both have always naturally been night owls, and I think this might be one of the keys to the strength of our relationship, things for me have changed. I still struggle harder than a kid who’s candy’s been yanked away when it’s time to get up in the morning, but for me now, I feel stronger, better, more accomplished and alive when I do actually rise on time. I am ahead of the curve, and efficient, while I used to just feel tired. Now, it’s the late hours when that tiredness seeps into my bones. While I can still stay up extraordinarily late, and often do together with Alan – it is now a general mental exhaustion I feel past 10pm that kills my general mental productivity. And these days I am a powerhouse of motivation. So up it is and full frontal on a Tuesday.
It’s December and I must get going, as I am in awe of how fast the year has spun. A good friend responded to my woes on where the year has disappeared to, that I spent 33% of it in the third world, which is true, but that should slow down time, surely? I must have soaked up some of Asia’s healthy regard to life and time while exploring right? Last night, my Indian friend commented that his native food is delicious but a rarety for him, owing to the tie it takes to prepare. Something they indulged in while most Americans were carving their turkeys. This struck me as terribly sad. Indians in India make time to make their food, yet Indians in America struggle to find the time for that “luxury”. Who’s living the life of opportunity now, huh?
Regardless of my pondering, it is a Tuesday in December and I am up early, so I must get cracking. That way there’ll be more time before 10pm to put on those carols and mull some wine. Yes, I still do that. I am a romantic, afterall.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: carols, christmas, clock, december, exhaustion, genes, India, indian, luxury, morning, noon, rise, time
December 3, 2008 · 1 Comment
As 2008 does it’s final lap, it’s time for reconciliation. I am a big one for tying up those loose ends while dressing the tree, and accountability is my middle name. So, in retrospect, how many of those New Year’s Resolutions I jotted down back on December 16 2007 on the transatlantic flight back to Cape Town for my wedding did I really manage to keep these very full 12 months? Here’s my very public come- to-Jesus reckoning.
December 16, 2008
1. Simply stress less. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Focus on what is life-changing.
2. Put Alan, and Us, first. Always.
3. Build on our circle of friends. Open ourselves to meeting people, look after old friends, and renew lost connections. Make time for those we love.
4. Take advantage of San Francisco, one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Rediscover what we have loved, and find new favourites.
5. Travel, travel, travel.
6. Save.
7. Get a great job – both of us.
8. Keep the healthy upkeep – look after our God-given bodies.
2008 was surely a landmark year for us. If friends are what makes the world go round, we certainly did some good housekeeping this year, cutting away the rotten dead wood, making fresh, healthy connections, and spending happy times with old trusty faithfuls. Travel was top of mind, as we took out a chunk of the year to explore together a corner of this world close to Alan’s heart, and closer to home, conquered the American pastime of road trips. Saving gets out the elevator when it spots travel, so I’m forgiving myself for that one. As a newly married couple, we also took on the largest challenge of all, which involved complete career turnarounds. Alan said “no thank you” to a deal with the devil, and I finally found that it was writing that was really in my heart. My “3rd helping, please” darling has slimmed down even further since landing back on American soil (something I have made up for on his behalf) and we both love to run those Lyon St stairs together. San Francisco is as beautiful as ever on this milky morning, and with the store next door piping out the carols at 9am, I remember all it is I love about her. And in these last days of the year, with airport holiday travel, Christmas shopping at Union Square, and concentrated family time, we’ll do our best to work on the stress less and put us first agreements.
Watch this space for my 2009 Resolutions. As they say…”many people look forward to the new year for a new start to old habits”. Happy Holidays!
Categories: memoir
Tagged: agreement, America, blessing, bounty, career, december, explore, grateful, happy, health, holiday, Lyon st, married, new year resolution, reconciliation, Road trip, San Francisco, save, travel, union square
It’s December, and as of yesterday, I had no plane ticket to go home. Today I am borrowing miles to book one.
When I moved to this country, I promised myself I would be home for every Christmas, and that if the going ever got too rough, I would just get on a plane, whether to take a deep breath, like coming up for air when eyeing the fish on the ocean floor, or for good. But then I married an American, and I learnt the true meaning of compromise, and I also woke up to find I had roots firmly planted in this soil.
Last night a friend of Alan’s popped by for a glass of ruby-red Kumara. He is an Aussie, living in Manhattan. He told me that is costs him $25,000 to fly his family of 6 home for the holidays. This threw me off kilter completely. In all my visions of going back and forth for some grandparent time, I hadn’t ever calculated selling off my unborn children to get my existing ones back on to South African ground.
Sometimes that $25,000 is just worth it, though. In fact, a trip “home” can be priceless. Money, and the value we place behind it is so emotionally charged. Times like this morning when Alan explained to me that some employees working for not-for-profits in this country (cough: Harvard) make as much as $5 million a year to manage their funds. Let me see, if 80% of this population is excited about Obama’s new tax plan because they make less than $200,000 a year, shouldn’t excessive earnings be an area we ought to tackle pronto. If the CEOs of the big 3 automakers suggested they take only $1 in remuneration for 2008 as part of ther bailout plan, how much of a cushion do they already have? While I like to think of myself as a free-market capitalist, this is a case where the system is clearly failing. While I am not sure how I feel about government-mandated charity, and I definitely don’t think the rich ought to be punished for being rich, and making money is healthy for everyone in the end, excessive anything still needs to raise the flag. When homeopathy isn’t healing your cancer, even the medicineman is going to make that appointment for chemo.
My mother thinks we live an excessive lifestyle in America, and while I don’t think we do, I guess we don’t have as raw and natural a lifestyle as my friends back in South Africa do. We do fly to places to catch a fleeing sun. I buy milk that’s short on lactose for double the price. Most San Franciscans eat out more than they cook.
Sometimes convenience is worth its price tag.
And if I believe that, I suppose, it’s a good thing this expat is recharging my South Africaness again back ”home” shortly.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: America, Aussie, auto, bailout, capitalist, ceo, excessive, expat, flight, harvard, lifestyle, obama, price, remuneration, rich, South Africa, tax
It’s the first Friday in December. The sun is shining, and I am going to go out and run those infamous San Francisco hills. I’ll zigzag up them, collecting passing stares from the immigrant handymen building fences and attaching Christmas lights to our mansions of Pacific Heights. I happen to live on a quaint neighbourhood shopping street in sweet, little Cow Hollow, filled with cafes, antique shops, bookstores and winebars. The options for grabbing a bite from anywhere in the world, and meeting friends for a cocktail is as easy as stepping out the door in flats. My visiting girlfriends always laugh at the incline, giving our walking credit for California girls’ good legs. It’s especially beautiful at this time of the year, as every building and tree is coated in twinkling lights – their holiday best.
Tonight we have our first Christmas party of the season, and no one does Holiday the way they do it here. I recall my sister and I collecting so many party invites we spent the evening looking for parking – literally all night, as we moved like politicians from one do to the next, my first year. I’m older now, and part of a couple, and twosomes don’t do things as much as singeltons do. There’s isn’t that primeval drive to meet your other. So we succumb to cuddling on the couch and catching Bourne Identity reruns on Tivo. Which in effect, is tempting to everyone, single friends included. We just give in to tired.
But tonight, we’ll crank up the espresso machine and wrap up for a night on the fairy-light lit streets of San Francisco. Because December is here but once a year.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: christmas, december san francisco, fairy lights, festivity, flats, heels, hills, holiday, legs, shopping
This weekend we had a houseguest. My South African friend who has been living in London for a decade, and is marry his English sweetheart this Spring, came to stay.
Around the dinnertable last night, we compared notes on his vs my feelings of living abroad. Our late night chat reminded me of a lesson I keep learning. We all think we are so uninteresting until we examine our differences, and when we do, we are so rewarded with a richness of immensity and intensity.
The way my expat friend explains it, he sees living in England as an active choice to enjoy another part of the world, experience life afresh and make a wealth of new friends. He feels no less South African, although he admits he feels no longer connected with the idea of living there. “Yes, I do love and enjoy the beach and the land when I am there, but there are many beautiful parts of the world”. He has no urge to return. None at all. He even goes so far as to proclaim that he has no idea where he will find himself in the next decade, let alone the second half of his life.
He might as well be speaking sanskrit to me. I must confess that mostly I have seen leaving South Africa and living elsewhere, for the moment even, as a sacrifice, and a betrayal. I mourn my time spent away as a loss. Yet, I know that returning is not the answer for me at this time.
Perhaps our differences are best decsribed in a report published by Jonathan Crush on the gender differences in why and how we emigrate. According to his policy paper, women were more likely to express a desire to live outside South Africa temporarily, whereas more men expressed a desire to leave permanently. In addition, he asserts that as prospective emigrants, “women were more likely than men to make frequent return visits to South Africa, less likely to dispose of assets in South Africa, and less likely to wish to retire or be buried in a foreign country.” In short, women make reluctant emigrants. Could it be as simple, and as black and white as this?
If you asked me, I couldn’t wrap it up into any pretty bundle, and being a person who likes to define things, all this fuzziness is disconcerting for me. Like a little worn and salty mussel, I have grown into the African rocks of the Atlantic ocean, and being ripped away never stops hurting. Trust me, I have tried to tidy it up. I want to know my future. Could this be owed to Crush’s resasoning that women find is harder to leave South Africa? Perhaps it comes down to or reasons for uprroting ourselves. Apparently women arre more likely than men to identify “family” as a reason to stay in South Africa; men cite “patriotism”. Does this mean that the uncontrolled crime, political uncertaintly and myriad of other problems plaguing my mother earth, men are finding their patriotism being questioned?
I always believed we fell neatly into two groups. There were those who left home because they felt they must, and are a always quietly working towards a return. And there are the 1-x=y group, who left because they felt they must, but since, they have accepted that returning is no longer an option – a situation they grieve openly given a second Castle beer. But my friend has opted to sever his emotional longing. He has adjusted his home base status and inner directional magnetic draw. His very gray idea of being a citizen of the world both scares and relieves me.
Choosing to see my life as a choice, as he does is, in this unlabeled, male, way, is new to me. A freeing restraint. Blurry lines. It is something again I attempt to attach myself to, as a life raft in this sea of uncertainty. The act of which, I think further deepens our colourful differences.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: african, America, beach, betrayal, black, decade, difference, dinnertable, england, expat, houseguest, impatience, leave, london, loss, mourn, mussel, neat, pretty, restraint, rock, sea, South Africa, spring, white
I’m doing Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a famed course on releasing your inner child and creativity. Through the pages of this workbook, I am to delve deeper into my psyche and renew dusty, old memories. It’s a brave exercise in nostalgia unpacking those boxes so carefully stacked in the back of my mind.
Some of the questions I have had to answer relate to the favourite treats of my childhood.
Growing up, my parents didn’t have a lot of money, and with a rambling home in the suburbs of Cape Town we ate every meal together as a family of 5. There were no snacks with drinks in the evening, and no fancy cheeses, breads, meats or nuts. It was simple salads, vegetables, and home cooked meals. Family meals were healthy and hearty. Our sugar was as brown as our bread, which matched our rice. We never had soda. Our live-in domestic help made nutritional dinners that comprised all 5 food groups, and my dad cooked up leftovers on Sunday nights, into one big tasty risotto that never tasted the same. We did not have any junk or processed food in our kitchen, and never indulged in fast food. As South Africa isn’t really a fast food mecca, we did not miss that experience, but my mum did use to make the most juicy hamburgers on Saturday afternoons after we got back from shopping, which we also did together as a family every week.
On our Birthdays, we would get to go with the family to Mike’s Kitchen, and there we’d order steak (the most decadant item on the menu, in our eyes) which would come to the table decked in little flags. They’d give us badges, and sing happy birthday when our clown ice-cream dessert arrived.
And sugar was a sinful treat. “Dessert ” for us kids was always sour bulgarian yoghurt topped with powdered brewer’s yeast. My grandmother was on the same bandwagon as my parents, and would treat us with massive bags of almonds and dried fruit over Christmas. Never sweets.
All the while, we all knew my mom has a weakness for sugar. ”I need a pick me up” she say, staggering into the kitchen after one of her afternoon naps, hunting for “something sweet”. If there was nothing, as was most often the case, she’d get creative, adding maple syrup to cheddar cheese. On special occasions, she’d pull into an Indian-run corner cafe en route home from our afterschool sports, and pick up a piece of fudge, or Kitkat bar, which we’d all share. Once my mom, in a moment of weakness, bought us a real chocolate cereal, and we’d be rationed helpings by my father each morning for the following week. If we were lucky, we’d come upon (okay, find, after much hunting) fancy Cote D’Or Mignonette chocolates in the liquor cabinet, or my mom’s famous vanilla ice-cream, left over from an adult dinner party, which we’d as stealth-hunters, nibble at secretly in the dead of the night.
When I was 12, my mom was in the height of her agoraphobia and couldn’t face large crowds in public areas. This meant we all had to step up to help, and my task was the grocery store. She’d drop me at Pick ‘n Pay in Claremont with a chaotic list of our large household’s weekly needs and a blank, signed cheque. I’d spend the hour filling the trolley with milk, bread, meat, and a cream-filled donut as reward. As a teenager with other less charitable things on my mind, I confess I did it for the donut.
One day about the same time, my brother forgot me at the dentist, and went on to the beach for the day with friends. I sat alone and bored out of my mind in the sterile waiting room for 10 hours. There were no cellphones in those days, and no one missed me. When the misunderstanding became my clear, my mom showed up shamefaced, with a sweet treat on the seat.
When I was 14, I discovered my mom’s soda water bottles yielded a deposit at the store on the corner. My neighbourhood friends and I would nick a couple, and using the change, would stock up in candy cigarettes, black toffees, nigger balls (as they were called in those days), Chappies chewing gum, and creme soda. One day, this trick got bigger than me, and my mom caught me with my balletbag choc-a-block full of every type of candy the tuck shop offered. She confiscated the loot, and put it in a copper pot in the hallway to monitor my intake. It was around this time that my family’s sugary stealth habits moved up a step and on to condensed milk. This was the only accessible sweet, as it was an ingredient in my mom’s dinner party ice-cream. We’d boil the can till the milk became creamy caramel, or punch a hole in the roof and suck the creamy dew out. With friends, I bake trays of fudge and finish them in an afternoon. I took to nicking the cans, and it was one afternoon that the maid caught me guiltily disposing of two empty tins in the outside bins, that she alerted my parents who staged an intervention. Even I knew I had gone too far. I recall making up stories to friends about magic sweet cupboards that never existed at home, just to feel more normal.
As adults, one of us discovered my dad’s chocolate stash. We all thought we knew him until that day, and no one was more surprised than my mother about my father’s love of white and dark chocolate. They now play a game for two of hide the chocolate with him burrowing slabs in tall places she can’t reach.
Today, I thank my parents for helping us all establish healthy meal habits. Thanks to them, as teenage girls, my sister and I never suffered the popular weight issues our friends bemoaned, as dinners were balanced, healthy and moderate in serving. But our hidden sweet tooths are an altogether different story. Whether it is genetic, or the result of growing up in a household where sugar was coveted as a forbidden reward, I will never know. We stash, collect, snack and steal, like the confectionary addicts we are. Comparing notes with grown up friends, I can confirm our sugary behaviour is and was nowhere near normal, and we continue to be quite mad in our quest.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: ballet school, black toffess, burrowing, caramel, chappies, condensed milk, cote d'or, creme soda, fudge, healthy, hide, loot, mike's kitchen, nutritious, seek, stash, sugar, tuck shop
December 12, 2008 · 1 Comment
In this shattering time of cutbacks, heart-rendering lay offs and total uncertainty, I am taking the time out to be a little thankful for all I already have. Instead of the 12 things I want this year, I am going to take some time out of the Union Square dash and pudding eating the 12 days before Christmas, for some ol’ fashioned gratitude.
Today, it’s a big thank you for the coolness of today’s Christmas Carols. From I-like-to-call-her-slutty Mariah Carey, Faith Hill, and the great Keisha Cole to the classic crooners of the Dean Martin and Bing Crosby era.
To some, the tinny carol music on the supermarket sound system illicits nothing but groans and complaints over retailer conspiracies to get us shopping before we’ve stored that barbeque in September. But I am a sensitive fish, and when I put those sweet tunes on, it’s like the Christmas spirit takes over. Troll-like, I find myself staring into a pot of sweetly, spicy mulled wine, and reaching up dangerously high to hang that tinsel. This year I put up my crazy tree my crazy sister gave me for my 30th Birthday. It’s psychadelic and schitzophrenic, switching madly from purple to green to pink. I think it must’ve been on sale at Target, cos she gave it to me in March. Alan made fun of its size, but I like to think it brings joy to the little kids in the apartment across the street. I have filled it with African artisanal trees made out of wire, foil and anything else the people of Africa could lay their hands on.
Tonight we are hosting a traditional boardgame night. Cherished friends will join us, bringing their festive spirit and holiday buzz, as I whip out Taboo, Pictionary and Apples to Apples. Of course, its mandatory to flip on a bit of Nat King Cole singing O Come All Ye Faithful. And this time I will be sampling my very cool mother-in-law’s favourite eggnog and bourbon recipe. According to the results of the taste test conducted by the crack team specialists at 7X7, the very best brand of the season is green. By that, I mean organic.
But we don’t have to be serious when we select our festive soundtracks, and so I’ll leave you today with the very sweet, funny carol that’s doing the roundabout in my head today:
I’m gettin’ nuttin’ for Christmas
Mommy and Daddy are mad.
I’m gettin’ nuttin’ for Christmas
‘Cause I ain’t been nuttin’ but bad.
I broke my bat on Johnny’s head;
Somebody snitched on me.
I hid a frog in sister’s bed;
Somebody snitched on me.
I spilled some ink on Mommy’s rug;
I made Tommy eat a bug;
Bought some gum with a penny slug;
Somebody snitched on me.
CHORUS
Oh, I’m gettin’ nuttin’ for Christmas
Mommy and Daddy are mad.
I’m gettin’ nuttin’ for Christmas
‘Cause I ain’t been nuttin’ but bad.
I put a tack on teacher’s chair;
Somebody snitched on me.
I tied a knot in Suzy’s hair;
Somebody snitched on me.
I did a dance on Mommy’s plant.
Climbed a tree and tore my pants.
Filled that sugar bowl with ants;
Somebody snitched on me.
My Favourite Tree This Year
Categories: memoir
Tagged: 12 days, bing crosby, birthday, cutback, dean martin, eggnog, faith hill, gratitude, keisha cole, layoff, list, mariah carey, mulled wine, spirit, supermarket, target, thankfulness, tree, uncertainty
Starbucks has this incredible new drink of the season. It’s a salted caramel hot chocolate that stole my heart. I discovered it one frosty fall stroll in Portland on an impromptu road trip with Alan to celebrate a new job offer that later turned sour. The barristers shake this seasoning mix over the cream topping, that leaves you with a salty mustache you can’t stop licking.
This afternoon, we braved a buzzing Williams Sonoma down at Union Square, and I made Alan buy me roasted chestnuts from a red-nosed vendor. It was icy – with air that felt as thoough it had come directly off the snowy mountain tops. On entering the store, we were treated to spicy, sickly sweet hot cider that warmed my chest and made me want to ask the stiff elderly lady serving them for a second. The cider I am used to is spiked, but in the US it’s served straight.
We rounded the corner slapbang into a crowd oohing and aahing over the Macy’s Holiday Windows. Every year they handpick the cutest and most endearing of the SPCA’s puppies and kittens, which they plop into little street scenes designed to encourage the process of adoption. On the way back to the carpark, we had to fight our way through armies of santa clause – the dressup theme of holiday parties in 2008.
On getting home, I put on those frivolous carols and a pot of leftover mulled wine , or glogg, from last night’s successful game night that went on till dawn. It’s an old trick I use to remind me of the magical night I met Alan. He was a a mutual friend’s plus one at my Christmas party 4 years ago. With both of us recovering from breakups, we sampled the welcome mulled wine together and broke the ice. Overindulgence of this potent, merry drink was blamed for many a mishap, reunion, and missed flight that weekend. Mulled wine has a long history that dates back as far as 500BC where spices and herbs were added to their sour spolied wine for both health reasons, and of course, to make it drinkable once again. I first discovered this delicious beverage that warms the very soul at lunchtimes on the Swiss ski slopes. We owe gluhwein, as it is known in Europe, a debt of gratitude as Alan and I look forward to celebrating our first wedding anniversary this month. 
Categories: memoir
Tagged: Fall, starbucks, union square, mulled wine, salted caramel hot chocolate, Portland, roadtrip, impromptu, celebrate, job, frosty, spiced cider, williams sonoma, roasted chestnuts, macy's, window, santa claus, spca, puppy, kitten, anniversary
I know I have a love-hate relationship with technology.
It doesn’t help that Alan is addicted. I mean, he has a whole seperate relationship with the internet, and gadgets. When boys come over, they take a moment to review the HD on his TV together, politely, they put their heads together, quite seriously, like surgeons conferring on a patient’s diagnosis. I really can’t tell the difference, except that it’s taken over my mantelpiece on which I used to balance Christmas cards. He spent months researching the variety of options available as well as upcoming deals. I mean, he could have started a company with all the time he put into this big black box that stole my space. For the first month we had it, he used to roll over in the mornings, and looking me dead in they eye, would whisper “do you think it’s still here?!”.
Alan adores technology, like I love cosmetics. He reads the news online several times a day, signs up for news alerts and is always on top of email.You can never break any news to the guy.
I differ greatly. To me, email, the internet and the phone all steal my time. I absolutely get their importance, am not in any way intimidated by them, but know that when I am being sucked into their atmosphere, I am not truly living. Like someone really smart once said, TV is chewing gum for the mind.
I suffer from that daily feeling of being overwhelmed. I study people who manage their time well, and note that they all share one technique. They control their time spent on technology. This way, they have an extraordinary amount of time to buy, write and mail meaningful Birthday cards. They do beautiful, personalised Chritsmas cards with newsletters tucked inside. Their gifts are always special, and well thought out. They have t he time for gestures. It’s like they have all that hard-earned time I lose in that big, black hole for their leisure. Time IS money. I truly resent getting stuck, as an alcoholic I am shamed by all-night benders.
My wise mother claims it is the very speed and efficiencies of today’s technology that have stolen our hours. She says that the month we would gain by writing, mailing, and waiting for a letter to a loved one to arrive at its destination, the recipient to enjoy it, then craft a reply and mail a response is stolen in the seconds it takes one to hit reply to an email. But I do love the efficiencies and luxuries the speedy movement of information affords me. This moroning, I could log on and know in an instant that my cousin in London partied till dawn, an old friend had a little boy last week, and my mentor is “in a state of grace”.
So, as a sore loser, I am willing to show my own grace, by appreciating my victor’s gifts and generosity.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: christmas, email, facebook, gadgets, grateful, HD, internet, overwhelmed, Phone, Technology, thankful, time, tv
We woke at 6am to hail. It was hard-hitting, and quite scary. It made our little sound machine’s rain pattern sound quite silly in comparison to nature’s alarm. Alan got up to run to the front room, like a little boy, and look through the windows at the street, which were dusted with whiteness. Pea-sized hail broke the roof of the restaurant below our bedroom window, and we watched with trepidation as a waterfall of gushing water flooded past ruining god-knows-what in their kitchen.
Watching ABC7 this morning, I discovered the Bay Area was dusted in SNOW last night. California. Snow. Yes! A nippy 4% in San Francisco this morning, and all week.
Then, I checked out the weather report, which in this country always makes me laugh, because they use words like ”frigid” and “rainmaker”. One interesting fact is that in the US, they scrunch up their faces when you say “Autumn” like you just said “bottom”, yet the word “Fall” does not appear as a recognised term on www.weather.com.
Now I’m going to do a “did you know?” I just discovered. Did you know that there’s an Absolute Zero? Considered to be the point at which theoretically no molecular activity exists or the temperature at which the volume of a perfect gas vanishes. The value is -273.15° Celsius and -459.67° Fahrenheit. Whew!
So today, I take the time out to be appreciative for the little surprises we wake up to, that turn our day upside-down. Just when we think we have it mapped out, the universe says “No, you don’t!”. I like surprises in a country where money buys everything, and nothing feels out of control. There are days where ozone levels are so measured and controlled, we cannot build fires without checking the daily report on http://www.sparetheair.org. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District can fine people who use fireplaces, wood-burning stoves or pellet stoves when the air quality is in danger of exceeding federal clean air standards. We’ve already had 5 days of bans this winter season. One was Thanksgiving, which was a real downer. But the good news is that significant progress has been made recently in cleaning up outdoor air pollution in the U.S. Between 1970 and 2004, total emissions of the six major air pollutants regulated dropped by 54 percent. This is particularly notable as GDP has increased 187 percent, energy consumption 47 percent, and the population grown by 40 percent during the same time. Globally, its estimated 800,000 people per year die prematurely due to outdoor air pollution, according to a 2005 study published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, so I won’t complain. I’ll just put that chimney-sweeper appointment on hold, and snuggle a little closer to my honey, as we bear out the California winter season.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: America, autumn, control, Fall, fireplace, hail, pollution, San Francisco, snow, spare the air day, weather, winter
December 16, 2008 · 1 Comment
Yesterday I renewed my 50. That is, the 50 things I want to do in my lifetime.
There is an actual site to help you along, where you can set up your list, update it, get ideas and check off those you’ve accomplished. (The site makes money by linking you to specific companies who specialise in these activities. Ah, commercialism). But I think getting your 50 down, and updated can also be an act of gratitude, as it forces you to realise how many of your dreams are coming true. We are all creators, and whether or not we know it, every day we put out a message of what we want to accomplish, and want we are thankful for. So as an exercise in thankfulness, here are my 50:
1. Win the greencard lottery, and become an American citizen
2. See Death Valley
3. Be the lead in a play
4. Find my soulmate and marry him
5. Have a wedding in Cape Town
6. Share Alan’s beloved Asia with him
7. Get a puppy
8. Get a cat
9. Start a blog, find a writing mentor
10. Have kids
11. Write a book
12. See a polar bear
, and a wild tiger, and spot a leopard in a tree
13. Gamble in Vegas
14. Go on a cruise – anywhere
15. Go up in a hot air balloon
16. Attend an Oprah show
17. Learn how to salsa, tango and bellydance
18. Take on pottery and drumming classes
19. Master communicable Spanish and French
20. Sponsor my family with greencards and get them over here!
21. Learn about wine enough to impress Alan’s wine expert friends when we visit Napa
22. Start a cooking school in my kitchen, and take a cooking trip to another part of the world
23. Show Alan Greece
24. Find a life mentor
25. Take a trip with my mom, alone
26. Throw a surprise party for someone
27. Be a godparent
28. Win a competition
29. Design a fancy cocktail
30. Go up the Eiffel Tower
31. Go to India
32. Go back to India
33. Roadtrip across the US in a RV or convertible, making it to both Sundance and the Jazz festival in New Orleans, eat seafood in Louisiana, take photos of the fall leaves in New England, take a cruise in Alaska
34. Visit the backstreets of Mexico, Hawaii, Morocco, Hong Kong and Japan
35. Throw a fondue party, both kinds
36. Learn how to make the best cupcakes, and make someone a set for their birthday
37. Find MF, my old school bf
38. Fly home as a surprise
39. Name a child after someone
40. A one-on-one seance reading
41. Meet Lisa Ling
42. Learn how to enjoy whisky
43. Quit smoking
44. Get an A aggregate for finals in high school
45. Have a piece published, and sell a piece
46. Drive a moped
47. Win a big client
48. Get a raise
49. Be a bridesmaid
50. Make a wedding speech
What are your top 50?
Categories: memoir
Tagged: achieve, cat, cocktail, cook, cruise, cupcake, dog, dream, drink, eat, french, goal, godchild, gratitude, India, job, leopard, lifetime, lisa ling, oprah, polar bear, raise, salsa, smoking, spanish, speech, surprise, thankful, tiger, travel, trip, whisky, wine, write
I was on Alan’s favourite website this morning, (picking just one is a victory in itself, as he surfs the news obsessively day and night, and on his cellphone when out and about), and I came across a news story that really made me sit up. It turns out, China has quietly started reblocking the websites that they had, under immense pressure, reopened during the Olympics Games this last Summer.
So I did a little digging into the life of an internet surfer in other parts of the world. What I learnt was that Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China are all believed to extend greater censorship over the net than any other countries in the world. Most of the blocked or blacklisted sites in Saudi Arabia are about sex, religion, women, health, politics and pop culture. Did you know that they even block access to websites that sell swimming or bathing suits?! In China, websites that talk about sex, Tibet or even democracyare blocked. Social sites that are often blocked include Google News, Typepad, ebay, Blogger blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Orkut, MySpace, Pandora, Bebo, Photobucket, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL AIM, Flickr, and last.fm. Oi, I would not survive!
The Golden Shield Project (a.k.a. Great Firewall of China) started in 1998. The escalation of the government’s effort to neutralize critical online opinion cames after a series of large anti-Japanese, anti-pollution and anti-corruption protests, many of which were organized or publicized using instant messaging, chat rooms, and text messages. Now get this, the size of their Internet police is estimated at more than 30,000-40,000! Critical comments appearing on Internet forums, blogs, and major portals are erased within minutes. Censorship is apparently quite the industry in China, and every village has spies to watch their neighbors, while mail and the poster boards are watched.
Now at the end of March this year, in preparation for the Olympic games, China unblocked access to some Internet Web sites, including non-politically sensitive parts of English Wikipedia, after immense international pressure. The International Olympic Committee protested that ongoing blocking “would reflect very poorly” on the host nation. For one of only a handful of times, they listened. Historically, the blocks have only ever been lifted for special occasions. For example, The New York Times was unblocked when reporters in a private interview with Jiang Zemin specifically asked about the block and he agreed to look into the matter. During the APEC summit in Shanghai in 2001, normally-blocked media sources such as CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post suddenly became accessible. According to a Harvard study, at least 18,000 websites are blocked today from within mainland China
In fact, the regime not only blocks website content but also monitors who is online and what they are doing. Amnesty International notes that China “has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world.” The “offences” include communicating with groups abroad, opposing the persecution of the Falun Gong, joining online petitions,and calling for reform and an end to corruption.
According to Wikipedia, research has shown that censored websites included, before the 2008 Summer Olympics:
- Websites related to the persecuted Falun Gong spiritual practice
- News sources that regularly cover some taboo topics such as police brutality, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, and Marxist sites. These sites include Voice of America, BBC News, and Yahoo! Hong Kong
- Media sites which may include unregulated content, social commentary or political commentary. The Chinese Wikipedia and Livejournal are examples of such blocked sites.
- Sites hosted by Taiwan’s government and major newspaper and television media and other sites with information on Taiwanese independence
- Web sites that contain obscenity, pornography, and criminal activity
- Sites linked with the Dalai Lama and his International Tibet Independence Movement, including his teachings
According to the Herald Times, at a recent news conference, Liu defended China’s monitoring of the Internet by saying that others also restricted access to some websites. The Chinese government “needs to do the required management of Web sites based on the law, just as what other countries are doing,” he said. It is true. In recent days, Britain and Australia have both moved to limit the sharing of online child pornography. Germany requires search engines not to show links to Web sites linked to Nazi activity.
This all reminds me of an experience I had meeting a Chinese girl on a train heading to Sapa in Vietnam. Our passengers in this 4-soft sleeper included a chain-smoking, over-drinking, buddha-like, aging American expat now based in Beijing, and his youthful Chinese girlfriend. We learnt from this duo the defences of a modern day China that denies the existence of all STDs to its citizens, causing women to use terminations as everyday birth control. She counted on average a Chinese woman can have anywhere from 3-4 abortions in a lifetime, and as many as 10. Stories were swopped of the Chinese government infecting entire villages with HIV, but that this is “all fixed now” as they started testing blood for HIV two years ago. And of course we were thrilled to learn that (in her own words) “pollution doesn’t kill people”. Whew, what a relief. But really it was their comments on Tibet that enlightened us the most, and that questioning your leader is not ok. End of discussion. I left feeling sorry for a people where foreign satellite is illegal, “chai” allows the government to give me only 24 hours notice on demolition of my home, and CNN is interrupted during shows on poverty in the homeland.
Today, I am eternally grateful for the freedom to write this blog.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: block, censor, china, Drudge Report, facebook, flickr, golden shield, iran, journalist, monitor, myspace, search engibe, social site, Vietnam, website, yahoo, youtube
This morning I woke to an iced-over San Francisco morning, a french vanilla coffee, and a world that couldn’t be any weirder. Nothing feels as if it is where is should be. For the organisational freak in me, this is quite unsettling…like watching a journal burn. According to last night’s news, not only is it snowing in the desert (aka Vegas)
(what are the odds on that?) but it is also snowing in Malibu! (Cue shot of Pamela Anderson streaking through the snow in that infamous red swimming costume.)
And then, just yesterday we filled up the SUV, and it cost $30. Yes, you heard me. Less than half of what it cost in October when we did that damn roadtrip to Oregon. Gas prices have dipped to four a half year lows. Woohoo! The surprise here is that no one is talking about it. The major gripe of 2008 , the one we were force-fed alongside sorrowful stories of truckdrivers not feeding their families, is no longer even a passing mention on the crammed Obamamania pages.
And then something everyone is talking about made me sit up. Take a look here:
“Barack Obama’s choice of a prominent evangelical minister to deliver the invocation at his inauguration is … Rick Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California…opposes abortion rights… But it’s his support for the California constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage that drew the most heated criticism from Democrats Wednesday.“
So wait…let me get this right. Obama chose an uber-conservative Christian evangelical? Who forced him to publicly reverse his comments on abortion? And is anti-abortion? But what really matters is that he is opposed to gay marriage?
One thing that has not changed is that Obama is turning our world around. And now even his staunchest supporters can’t make up their minds how they feel. See Barack Obama Is America’s Favorite Republican!
Let’s hope that like OPEC manoeuvre to normalise prices, a few of these issues take a moment to recollect themselves and settle somewhere a little left of crazy. Then, I’ll be thankful for the reality check. And when we’re back to right-side up, I can be grateful for normal. Or I’ll just go with the the new trend and steal a Christmas tree.
Categories: memoir
Today is going to be short, sweet and to the point. I have too many socks to sort, and cold weather packing for tomorrow’s flight to Kansas, to ramble on.
I want to know, what’s your personal quality you are the most thankful for? This is an excellent exercise in turning that inner critic around and get it going debating your good points. Heck, you might even get into an argument with yourself! Just one? No ties? Nope – just one quality you think is your best. You’ll watch yourself trying to squeeze two into one. Like a bad song, it’ll return to your thoughts again and again, growing bigger as the day wears on. So this might help: If you could frame it and stick it on the wall, for all the world to see, your crowning achievement, your little darling, what would it be? Patience, positivity, unconditional love, open-mindedness, people skills, maths…? It has to be the very best – the one you like, feel is the strongest in the race, would get your furthest, are the most proud of. Try it and see. It’s not as easy as you’d think to pick just one thing you like about you.
I start off with organised, because that’s what Alan showcased in his wedding speech on why he loved and married me. I was disappointed, not wanting to be a Bree Van Der Kamp, I wanted everyone to picture me with softness around the edges, compulsively giving, or super smart. Organisation always seems a controlling, on-edge, uptight quality. But then I see others’ lives (like my sister packing skills or my husband’s desk) who have zero organisational skills, or maybe they just don’t want to be on top of stuff, but I realise it’s something I very much value.
I am terribly tenacious. I don’t give up. And it’s got me quite far on the path to my goals in life. I recall going to some horrible job interview at the beginning of my career, desperately wanting to be in advertising, but having not attended the Red and Yellow School, South Africa’s premier advertising program. I was up against the best, and all I to show for it was was how badly I wanted it. I felt defeated, flat, torn open after several hours of interrogation, and I slumped back up the road to my beaten- up hand-me-down car I’d parked up the hill away from prying eyes. En route, I passed a little pub that caught my eye because of its name: “Tenacity”. I took it as a sign, and went with that tencity that flowed through my blood thickly and determinedly, and it got me that job and others, before I realised I wanted to be tenacious in something else altogether.
Loyalty, my sister would answer if you asked her for my greatest quality. If I love you, you can do no wrong. To get to the point where I’ll stand up for you, even when you’re on my toes, is a test in tenacity for sure. I don’topen up and trust easily. You have to prove yourself and your own loyalty, but once you wear the badge, I will always look the other way when you’re a slime dog, and don’t deserve it, and against all popular advice.
I am great with creating memories. I know how to throw a party you’ll remember, set up a theme, make people happy. Every moment is an opportunity to celebrate something. I am all for traditions, decorations, tryng new recipes for honourary lunches, cracking open the champagne. And I can get quite excited about the mundane. Movie night turns into a popcorn-fest with cocoa at the end. People say that makes me fun to be around. I know when I am being leant upon to make others happy. And I really don’t mind. It comes from my mother who has the imagination of a writer and the budget of a German’s wife.
But I have to pick one, and it has to be my own choice, so I am going to go with intuition. I have this odd sense of knowing what people are really thinking, if they actually like me and what they’re going to do next. I can see what’s coming. I sense things all the time. It allows me to dream when I am asleep and awake, and make things happen, it keeps me connected on an esoteric level, and allows me daily miracles. Without this, life would be black and white, logical and quite scary, I think. Too uncertain and unknown, I would cling to the edge of the swimming pool like I did for much of my childhood. It would be like an ongoing reality show where the director’s only trying to confuse the audience. A one-dimensional wartime poster. Nope, I’ll take intuition and raise you magic, any day.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: advertising, celebrate, champagne, intuition, magic, maths, mother, movie, patience, quality, red and yellow school, sister, skill, South Africa, tenacity, theme
I’m sitting in Denver Airport, as I have been for several hours now. It’s mindnumbing, and my courage is failing me. Our connection to Kansas City has been delayed, again, and we’re tired. When you lose strength it’s easy to get complacent. I am already quite emotional this holiday as it is my first Christmas in the US. When I moved here 5 and half years ago, I promised myself I would be home with my family every Christmas. This is my first 20th of December on American soil. It’s like a breakup. But I understand that marriage is about compromise. There’s a whole lot of sacrifice on that wedding registry. And so, I well up constantly. Walking into Walgreens makes me cry becaue I see the Reese’s cups I stock up on this time of year for my parents who bicker over the flavours. I cried when I arrived at the airport. I got teary at the sight of my suitcase coming out of the storage, all dusty and tagged by SAA.
And then I was sitting at some Belgium airport pub wth Alan sipping frothy seasonal draught beer called Below 2 degrees, and I remembered being alone. When you’re single, you make all sorts of deals with God to not be alone. You are so deathly lonely. It’s like a breakup.
You’ll fly to the moon in moonboots to find him. And then you do. And then you forget.
The truth is, I still feel that way, I am as in love with him this icy night as I was 4 bright years ago when we were fatefully introduced at my Christmas party. I raise you one Cape Town for a second helping of Gate bbq.
Hearing abour a Houston-bound flight that skidded off the very runway outside our pub window a couple of hours ago, leaving 23 people bound for hospital this Christmas, I am thankful. Once again.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: Cape Town, christmas, denver, kansas city, love, promise, South Africa
What a great book! I recall long car trips with my eccentric family where I would read out loud chapters from Lawrence Durrell’s masterpiece to squawks and hoots, never realising the joke was on them. I’m the first to admit, my roots are a little to the left of crazy.
But tonight arriving in Alan’s family home, and being welcomed like I really belong, made me all misty-eyed at not only how much I miss my own family this Christmas, but of how nice it is to have a second home somewhere in the world. Families are made not born, and I feel blessed to be an insider at someone else’s Christmas table this week. Even if no one throws the butter across the room, beats pans to the tune of Drummer Boy, or plays charades till 2am.
Now it’s 3 degrees fahrenheit and I’m going to snuggle up to steal some warmth from my other.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: crazy, family, freezing, home, kansas, welcome
I am at the opposite end of the world, and there’s no mistaking it. Freezing my bits off at -26 degrees celcius (Ouch!), one cannot deny they are nowhere near the vicinity of watermelons. I am colder than I have ever been, and can’t help but think that Africans were not made for such temperatures.
But, today, as always, I found moments of wonder, such as discovering a drive-thru post office, and bags of shoveled snow piled for collection, like trash at the end of driveways.
In the midst of all this, I feel quite blessed to live in a global village, where Alan can impress his folks with an Asian dish he shopped for in Kansas City this snowy afternoon. I was thrilled to scoop up bright red pregant crackers, and Quality Street choccies for the Christmas dinner table. Alan retrieved a shamefaced, crushed pannetone cake from his carry-on to add to the nostalgia feast. I will gorge myself come Thursday, stroking that one sense that is so heightened in matters of the heart.
When people walk into my home in San Francisco, they are only slightly less excited to see the African masks, tribal paintings, and street crafts than are my South African brethren. I shop regularly to top up on Ouma rusks, Provitas and Bovril paste, down in San Bruno, alongside the cardamon, ghee and English toffees. We turn up the Mafikizola on Sundays while our neighbours are at Starbucks, and Tivo movies like Ghandi and Cry Beloved Country. My bookshelves are groaning with the wise words of Pamela Joost and Andre Brink. When I get truly nostalgic I whip out the Melk Tert recipe, or give in to my friend’s demands for bobotie. But for now, I’m happy to toast my American family with a French wine, while nibbling on a sugary mince pie. Happy Holidays!
Categories: memoir
Tagged: America, andre brink, cardamon, cry beloved country, ghee, India, kansas city, mafikizola, mince pies, pamela joost, quality street, South Africa, starbucks, tivo
This is it. I just dwell in these moments, savouring them for other times, lonelier times, more normal days in the 365 ahead. Family all around buzzing and bopping, kids weaving between the adults who are either arguing over how best to cook a roast, or who last had the sugar bowl, or whether the dog should be in or out. It’s that chaos around spilled champagne on Christmas sweaters, the wrong card on a gift or whether the lights are on that are the equation for happiness. No one works. There’s lots of sleep. Martinis. Chocolates. And kisses. I’m certainly not complaining about anything. Not until tomorrow, that is. Happy Christmas, my friends!
Categories: memoir
Tagged: christmas, dog, family, kids, memories
Even the luckiest of us all become blase about our successes over time. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that it is perhaps the biggest winners amongst us that are the worst culprits at taking their happiness for granted, and becoming well, less happy about it all.
Five and a half years ago I decided to pick up and move my life to the US, choosing San Francisco as my new home away from home. Years later cabdrivers, cocktail party minglers and dogwalkers all continue to ask me why here. I want to mock them in that moment for their silliness. I mean, America is big and beautiful. Living here affords me the comfort of a strong(ish) economy, unequaled opportunity, unrivaled convenience, a wealth of choice, hospitable and interesting people, and a spot centerstage on the world’s platform. San Francisco because it is not unlike Cape Town in its natural landscapes, mild seasons, melange of worldy people, and sophisticated culture. The choice was obvious.
I don’t laugh outloud at the question anymore though because the downside of Americans, I have learnt, is that while eager to ask about my home, history and harboured doubts, that is about as far as that curiousity extends. It is true – many do still believe we know or are related to everyone else in Africa, and walk amongst lions on Sundays. I don’t blame them. An American girlfriend of mine worked to continue that legacy by taking a trip to an animal rehabilitation center in Oudshoorn where her job was to take the lioncubs for afternoon walks. I also recall asking foreigners who picked up and moved their lives from Berlin, London and Sydney down to Cape Town why. It is such a leap of faith, an earthquake in your life of shattering magnitude 9.9, to emigrate. Even if it is not for ever. It feels like giving up on all you know. For most of us, change is something we avoid like getting parking tickets. Time is the only limited resource we cannot buy, and watching our nieces grow up, and our parents grow old, over Facebook is a sacrifice. Travel, like anything, loses its lustre when there’s too much of it. Ask anyone in sales who spends a decade waiting at airport gates.
So this weekend, in the project of reawakening my love for this country and city, I set out to fall in love with San 
Francisco all over again. Like a golden couple sharing a bowl of soup without the kids, I probed and peeked around corners and through doors. At first it was hard, drawing nothing but a dull numbness from the plain beauty around me. Losing one’s curiousity and wonder of the world about them is my loss. Driving around the blurry corners of the Presidio, I discovered a rough-hewn viewing site with millionaire vistas of the Golden Gate Bridge. For the first time I was able to finger why ”international orange” just works when it is bounced off a dusty landscape of slopes and hills. Finally, I agree with Architect Irving Morrow who selected the color for this reason. I watched one of 250 daily vessels moving like a slug under the arches, leaving a moist snailtrail path of evidence. A year ago, an infamous atnker smashed into one of the bridge towers causing a massive oil spill that killed over 2,000 birds and damaged 26 miles of one of the most prized coastlines in the world. Reports filled the blogosphere and newsreels of the pilot, John Cota’s reported sleep disorder issues and questions were raised over the effect of his stimulant medication on his ability to effectively navigate on course.
As the wind shifted, I buttoned up my coat reminding myself that this coldest time of the year in the Northern hemisphere will be over soon Salted caramel hot chocolate awaits at Starbucks. In the meantime, I will continue to work on that new year’s resolution to stay awake at the wheel. And warm under my Gap coat.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: accident, africa, America, americans, curiousity, emigrate, expat, golden gate bridge, home, irving morrow, landscape, lionfacebook, magnitude, marvel, opportunity, outsdhoorn, presidio, San Francisco, time
My good friend Albert, with his irreverent laughs and structured single life, interrupted my escalating work ethic recently with temptations to spend the rest of my Thursday the way we all want to live our lives. This time, it was wine and cheese downstairs in the darkening sunshine of a San Francisco afternoon. While we sipped Italian wines I could not pronounce, served by a waitress who does not like me for reasons unexplained, we talked about our families. And the waitress, whom Albert, after a while, agreed does not appear to have fond feelings for me. Our friendship reached a deeper level as we confided and our friendship shifted like a slab of stone, shedding a layer of skin. It feels so wholesome to be gaining and developing friends this decade, as opposed to the pruning and severing of my 20’s.
Unfortunately, the downside of an afternoon spent in an Italian café is that I ended up quite ditzy. I am a cheap date these days. A sad state of affairs considering the cocktail in front of Grey’s Anatomy I had promised myself all week. Instead, a cup of tea and some chicken satay from a recipe I garnered on a small Indonesian island on my travels was all I managed to whip up in my state. Regardless of these slothful affairs, I feel so thankful for the ability to sample wines on a Thursday afternoon without lifesaving responsibilities. As I wound my legs around my delicious husband later on the couch, I breathed a prayer of gratitude for everything that is so juicy in my life. I know we create these things, and I have been busy!
And so while I take a few moments to start my day with my stories of a day past, my sleepy husband, who is always at his best, his funniest, his most smart, first thing in the morning, clanks away last night’s pots and grinds up coffee. It’s one day short of a new week and I am bursting with promise of a full second half of a week. Yesterday I received a prize in a writing contest and I can ask of no more recognition this morning. My personal manifesto means I will do something I dread, slip in stolen fun and enjoy a friendship I value today.
Categories: memoir
The Minority Report scared the heck out of me. Not because of Tom Cruise, who does the job of freaking me out well enough on his own. But because of the sketching of a world where thought is monitored, future intention noted and pre-guilty persons sentenced before breakfast. If I’d known that our planet could look something like that within 10 years I would have had a complete melt-down for sure. Thank goodness 60 Minutes only covered a story on today’s echnological abilities to “read” our minds, this last Sunday.
According to the brightest minds today, neuroscience research internationally is being focused on what we once saw as science fiction. That is, the ability of machines to read how and what we’re thinking. They’re calling it “thought identification.” “Functional” MRI scans are already successful at reporting on brain activity and then relating it to thought ie. whether a person is thinking about one thing or another. This is all thanks to…yes, you guessed it, computer science and today’s technological ability to sort thorough massive amounts of data. Specialists are convinced that within 3-5 years we will be able to diagnose intention, which neuroscientists in Berlin are burning the midnight oil already to conquer. By asking subjects to make a decision between two options, such as to add or to subtract, and then measuring the changes in brain patterns, they believe they can already successfully read intent.
They’re also testing the ability to read from brain activity whether you have been somewhere before or seen something before. The opportunities to use this against our own will are endless. It’s also true that is could help us catch Al-Queda training camp graduates, as they point out. But mainly, it raises a question over ethics and who should have access to this kind of very personal information. Once the only property we could truly call our own, questions are being raised over whether we will have the right to keep our thoughts to ourselves in the not-too-distant future. The fifth amendment which protects us from having to testify against ourselves comes into the equation, and undoubtedly the Supreme Court will have to decide whether brain scans are considered testimonial or defined as DNA extractions, which are involuntary.
Next they will start to measure emotion. Whether we like someone or not, and whether we are having selfish or hypocritical thoughts is something neuroscientists back on US soil claim they have already uncovered via signatures in our brains.
This makes me feel both selfish and hypocritical at once.
And speaking of hypocrisy, is turns out that in India last summer a woman was convicted of murder after an EEG of 
her brain allegedly revealed that she was familiar with the circumstances surrounding the poisoning of her ex-fiancé. Now I am in a mad love affair with India. I love India more than just about any other country I have ever visited. But what struck me as jaw-dropping was how difficult it was to find a computer in a city like their capital, New Delhi. I was struck dumb, blind and stupid by how difficult a task it was to navigate their dial up internet, type on keyboards missing strategic keys (I dare you to attempt an email without an ”enter” key), and on most public computers searching for Skype software drew a flickering blank. India, the largest democracy in the world, is as Michael Woods so ademptly describes in The Story of India ( a documentary running on KQED this month); an incredible blend of a culture and traditions dating back to 70, 000 BCE and simultaneously, a rising economic giant. Now as well known across the globe for their mastery of the digital age as for their ”many-armed gods” and famous spiritual traditions. Now, in the era of globalization, India has again become a leading player on the world stage. Home to more than a billion people and a land of amazing contrasts. With both the high tech brilliance of Bangalore’s Silicon Valley and the ancient spiritual traditions of endless festivals and sacred bathings, India is possibly one of the last civilisations on our planet skidding at a high speed toward the third century while remaining firmly planted in an ancient past.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: 60 minutes, accuse, al-queda, berlin, brain, digital, dna, fmri, functional, intention, kqed, michael woods, minority report, neuroscience, sentence, story of india, studies, subjects, thought, tom cruise, Tradition
I have a real love-hate relationship with dogs. I can see that some are darn cute. So much so that I yearn to reach out and pat a wet, black nose. The wagging stump, grinning yellow teeth, and unerring patience make me want to be a dog person. But truthfully, after a harrowing experience as a child, probably like most spinster great-aunts feel about our dribbling offspring, while I can see their likeness factor, I would just really rather not be touched, licked, or peed on by any dog, of the cute or scary variety.
Alan, my sweet determined husband, lives for dogs. He spots them everywhere, and makes up heart-wrenching tales about them for me. He’s indiscriminate, and will pet just about any, barring a pit-bull or manicured lapdog. Together, we have found a middle ground, creating imaginary relationships with dogs (and sometimes also with cats) around the world, which suits me just fine. Years later, we still play silly newlywed sickening games, fantasising about what they are getting up to. There’s Peanut on Koh Phangan, who loves to fish, dig holes in the sand, climb aboard your raft where he’ll puncture the cheap Made-in-China plastic it with his nails, and swipe pottery ashtrays from loungers to chew on privately. 
He’s probably recovering from this weekend’s full moon party in the shade of a palm tree this very morning. Miss Nuggles, the sweetest kitty in the world, is a member of the Beach Club Resort family on Phu Quoc in Vietnam, where she pinches bread rolls from guest plates over breakfast, doses under hammocks in the sand and mounts hip-high bungalow windows in an escape from sudden afternoon downpours. Today she’s planning a trip to Paris, the capital of baguettes, for this coming summer. Yesterday we met Bolt. She raced past us at Fort Funston, the wildly beautiful beach for dogs south of Ocean Beach in San Francisco. We had taken a daytrip along the exquisite coastline to see what all the fuss around a beach for dogs was about, and to give Alan another serving of his beloved canines. It took me the length of the entire walk to recover from all the leaping, barking, swirling, chasing action. As the Great Dane to my left taught a squirming lapdog his lesson, a posse of retrievers shook their wet tendrils ahead, racing through the waves for a gummy stick. Lucy, a spotted mutt sniffed the black sand, before chasing back up to his master who’d gained some distance ahead in the blinding sun. Even rottweilers named Spike and Spud pranced like naked schoolgirls, amongst twin shaking Italian greyhounds.
But it was Bolt, the gleeful blond labradoodle, who captured our attention, as she streamed past. She spent the full half hour sprinting manically and ecstatically in opposing directions, forgetting to stop to catch her breath. Her perm splayed back beautifully like the model in a TV shampoo ad, she galloped past, turning to catch us in the corner of her eye, checking we were watching. Her mistress looked a little shamed, like the mum of an overly aggressive toddler who’s caught pinching his friends in the sandbox, as she shrunk away from the crowd, watching Bolt cause a scene.
After a long while, I tugged Alan’s sleeve, motioning to the path back up the cliffs to the car. The fresh air had done us good, as had dog-time. Studies abound with the stress-relieving benefits of being around dogs, and so with lower blood pressure, in a better mood, and feeling a whole lot less lonely, we set off. I like dogs an inch more after my gorgeous Sunday on their beach with them, which many dog lovers would say was worth the exercise itself. What I think is more convincing of the benefits, is the voice in the back of my head telling me that next time we return we’ll have to bring our own, to prevent that feeling of a paedophile pacing the linked fence of a grade school baseball game.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: Beach club, Bolt, dog, Fort Funston, full moon party, italian greyhound, Koh Phanang, labradoodle, lapdog, Lucy, mutt, Ocean Beach, Phu Quoc, pitbull, rottweiler, San Francisco, Spike, Spud, Vietnam
Alan’s cleaning and clearing. I hear the clink and clank as he moves his Stuff around from the scary, toppling storeroom in giant heaps. We normally keep that door closed. I’m gritting my teeth, trying not to get agitated as it all comes out, like unpacking Pandora’s box. There are tiny earthquake piles of grime, post mortem papershreds littering the destruction path. Alan’s very good at starting a monumental task and then giving up halfway, leaving it strewn around on the floor like he’s just emptied giant coat pockets after a long trip. Left, for me to trip over en route the the bathroom. Our apartment is big as San Francisco city apartments go, but no space is going to be roomy enough for a vomit episode of Alan’s personal collections and momentos.
Another Alan tactic is moving the bits and bobs around to different rooms. I call it geographic relocation. Transferal of membership. I’ll find myself sharing precious countertop at dinnertime with a blender manual we long since sold on Craigslist. In navigating my way across the study, I’ll stumble over skew piles of textbooks like the “What Color is Your Parachute” 1998 edition that introduces the internet.
I would take charge but I am truly nervous about I’ll find. This morning it was “Is this yours?” to a bottle of yellowing sickly sweet perfume. Most certainly not, I scrunched up my nose. These women who leave expensive personal momentos behind in their ex’s lives dumbfound me. It’s rare I’ll score a find of lah-de-daa anti-aging face cream over imagining why some woman would have left this in my husband’s life. I just am gleeful she needed wrinkle cream when I was just legally able to drink. But it is an awful lot like they’ve peed on a lampost determined to leave a mark for a settled wife to overcome years later.
It’s been collecting.
I’d take a before and after photo if I weren’t so shamefaced at it. Getting married, his becomes yours, and you become him, and as a We there is no, “that’s not mine”. I never expected I’d live in collective Stuff. I clean daily, tossing, purging and sorting. Organisation is my middle name. Lucinda Organised Tikwart. Didn’t you know it? I nearly killed Alan when he stood up on our wedding day and talked about my organisational skills instead of how perfect I am. “Who wants to be a Bree Van der Kamp?” I threw back at him across the room after the honeymoon was over. “Bree who?” he looked up at me from his copy of the Wall Street Journal. Ugh!
I couldn’t believe I was chosen because I know what to do with Stuff. Now I can. Silently, watching him unpack junk bags of gum, antibiotic fungal ointment, coins, pens and business cards from his last 10 years of junk drawers, I realise he needs me. And while I won’t touch a single coin, pen or card of his, unprompted, I will be there for him when he wants help with finishing the task.
Regardless, I probably should take it to heart and make something of my natural ability to find the right home for Stuff. My mother raised me echoing the organisational strategies of my grandfather, a brigadier in the South African army, he said to imagine your home to be that of a submarine. With size limitations everything has a place. And so you will never lose anything. I realise Alan’s normal and I am not. But the benefits are unending. Starting with how I never lose anything. And ending with how wonderful it is to wake up after a long trip to clean clothes and fresh milk. Getting one’s Stuff in order is the metaphor for being in a good place in one’s world in general.
And so I won’t stop him clinking and clunking for the world, because I know that his springcleaning has less to do with the heatwave we’re enjoying in the middle of January in San Francisco and more to do with him being in a place in hs life where he’s ready to lose the baggage and take on something new.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: San Francisco, South Africa, spring, internet, what color is your parachute, cleaning, alan tikwart, ex'es, wrinkle cream, Lucinda Tikwart, organised, bree van der kamp, desperate housewives, brigadier, army, january, baggage
I’m going home. It’s a feeling of relief. So much so, that I sigh when I say it out loud. I have lived in this wonderfully blessed country now for nearly 6 years, but my heart is still in South Africa. It is still “home”.
So, for me, this trip is annual, like going to the dentist, doing your taxes, updating your resume. It’s budgeted, expected, planned, non-negotiable. Stripped of the niceties of “holiday”.
I can already taste the dry bright light, flat open accents and shock of interminging vibrant cultures.
I want a slice of melktert.
I pack as if I am going off into the jungle in India. It’s emotional. An exercise in futility. Ridiculous assortments, hoarded American candy, books as heavy as treetrunks. An extra suitcase gaping with hope. Cape Town trinkets and treasures, koeksisters and You Magazines. A bit of home. But return is a line of data on my ticket I am ignoring. Denial.
I am so eager, I slip to the edge of my seat with wanting. Impatience. But wary too. Going home is always dangerous as I will not want to return. This trip is a topping up of family, and work. I plan to stamp the bruised blue colour of the rippling sea under the window into my memory. And my face into the little heart of my niece. With the peace of being back under the wing, I expect the flow of writing to be cathartic and easy. We shall see. Internet is spotty, and difficult, like a diva. The African sun will tempt me to come out and play. The drumbeat, like breathing, a calling to rendezvous under a glittering night sky. And the cicadas and crickets playing catch in the grass will lull me to sleep.
I am not enthralled about leaving Alan alone for so long. We are a team, and do better together.
But this 36 hour journey is a guilty gift I cannot refuse.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: America, Cape Town, cathartic, expat, home, journey, koeksister, melktert, pack, San Francisco, South Africa, sun, you magazine
“Is your name Lucy?” It’s a Xhosa man with a sweet round face and perfect skin peering over my shoulder while I fill out the rather confusing lost luggage form for Delta. “Your mammy is outside and she wants to know if you’re still here” he enquires rather robotically. The baggage hall is empty. I am trying to work out how my missing suitcase ended up in Atlanta, a city not appearing anywhere on my itinerary. Did they offload it in Dakar at our 2am stopover and send it back to the States, I wonder. Shelving my growing impatience, I smile sweetly at the man in charge. “Tell her I’ll be right out” I sing-song back to the friendly porter my mother has tasked to cross the customs line and report back with my whereabouts.
It is the second time I have smiled since disembarking that stuffy plane a half hour ago. “This line is only for Suth Efrikens” yelled the immigration agent at two blank-faced Indians next in line. Mounting her chair behind the counter, she gesticulates madly. “Go over there!” she waves over the heads of the sniggering South Africans, towards to the alarmed foreign crowd. 
So they lost my suitcase and I am without pajamas, any tops for my bottoms and a bottle of murky Vietnamese fish sauce for my famous pad thai dish. I can’t help but admit that despite the hodge podge service everyone is always so nice. The lack of attitude and general contentment is part and parcel of that South African lassaiz-faire personality.
The warm, salted air blowing from the Indian Ocean misted my face as I rounded the corner to my parents’ home in my Avis rental the lady described as a “vacuum cleaner”. The car suits me almost as much as the weather. So what if jetlag will be the winner and I will be up in a few hours pacing and ushering in a new dawn sky? A school of dolphins playing leapfrog in the bay below are delicious welcoming committee, and soon the porter, the manic immigration lady and missing pajamas are nothing more than a mildly amusing story.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: atlanta, Cape Town, delta, dolphin, flight, immigration, indian, missing suitcase, new york, pajamas, South Africa
That…and “But are you happy living in America?”
The two questions that have plagued my first week back in South Africa. Strangers in carpet stores, owners of art shops, my mom’s friends, my own family. All alike. Everybody just wants to know if leaving is the right thing to do. Or more likely, if leaving will be like they imagine. Unabashed, unashamed, they just want to know the truth. No one is feeling safe, but this sitting on the edge of a cliff seems to draw everyone together more and there’s no space for secrets.
If feels wonderful to be “home”. The sun is shining, a glass of sauvignon blanc is delicious and dirt cheap, the rush of Christmas season is over, and people are generally more relaxed. The vibrant, colourful, noisy culture comes back in a rush as I click the radio dial on to Five FM. Woolworths shelves, a smorgasbord of first world Africanness in Ethiopian curry pastes, rooibos and honey teas and fresh granadilla juices. It’s emotional, and difficult, like having an affair with a married man.
As the Indian Ocean prostrated itself below my windows this morning in total honesty, I was reminded of how I find South Africans to be this trip. Never the sort of people able to hold back, I am sensing some part of me has become lulled into comfort by typical American sugar-coating. I gulp for breath at their unaccustomed boldness. Conversations drift from emigration to pesky Zuma, the dipping South African Rand, and a story about crime. But that is not all. My weight, the condition of my skin, the depleting blondeness of my hair has all been up for discussion these past seven days amongst my family. When will we be starting on babies? Whew! (Drawing breath). That’s a general one again for public consumption.
This all makes me feel quite comfortable and at home, in that way a large family’s passionate fights make you feel more loved. Like the preening of monkeys, digging for ticks. But living in a safe, foreign country, with the nearest relatives a hop, skip and jump of several states away, our obligations are few. Real conversations about real things even fewer.
Yes, I am happy. As happy as newlyweds facing the uncertainty of a recession first hand can be. Blessed, but unable to afford the luxuries yet that come cheap here. I miss my family. I won’t ever sugar-coat that. But we have a good life. We’re safe, building awesome careers, with an assortment of first class opportunities. San Francisco is a paradise. My friends are there. For now it works. That may change and we may crave the peace big city life can not afford us, in time. We may want to live closer to the beach. We will one day want to buy a house.
Regardless of this, I draw strength from the predictability and stability of life in America. Obama can only do so much damage. Bush did some already. But no one ever emigrates to Australia or London, when they do disappoint. It can’t ever get that bad. But when your back is safe, you start to critique the view in front of you. Net net (American-speak) I’m as torn as any of you. Leaving won’t give you the answers you crave, so how can I? We’re all just doing the best we can. Because that’s the best we can do.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: America, blunt, Bush, Cape Town, emigrate, expat, faimly, five fm, foreign, honest, obama, politics, rooibos, safe, San Francisco, secrets, South Africa, woolworths, zuma
My first morning waking in bright, sunshiny St James, my mum took me by the hand down to Knead in Muizenburg. This bakery on the beach is in the old converted cinema, and is perched like the director, middle seat front row in the burgeoning new development of Surfer’s Corner. 
When I was growing up, Muizenburg Beach was the choice for families and friends in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. We’d lug our towels, cooler juice boxes, umbrellas and beach bats, and head down for a day of over excitement and eating gritty sandwiches. Oh, how I loved those big, warm, wet waves. But the changes in the beach zoning laws inherited from Apartheid precipitated the masses. Shortly, we felt curious eyes on us from all around. It became clear we were the odd ones out, and this was no longer our beach. Soon, quite frankly, walking on the shortbread white sand of Muizenburg Beach was considered unsafe and unwise.
Driving around the circle of Surfer’s Corner looking for parking was eye-opening, as I negotiated mums toting tots in wet wetsuits over to their BMW X5’s, and aging bachelors with bald spots propping up surfboards onto the roofs of their landies. The place was buzzing and sandy, wet people with wallets were everywhere. But more than all this, it was the rehabilitation of the buildings that made me most happy. The decay of the past decade is on the mend, as edges are being smoothed, broken windows replaced, and fresh paint is in the air. What was once nothing but a sad reminder of days of carefree beach fun is on the mend.
Evan Faull, co-owner of Knead Bakery, made the time to sit with me, in typical laid-back South African fashion, a good hour after we’d first arrived. This suited me just fine as I let my macchiato work its magic on my jetlag and sipped in the beauty of the azure sea against a bleached sky reflected in the mirrored tiles of the columns. This place is a story waiting to be written, I finally told him, marveling at the chandeliers, and black and white tiled marble floors – their nod to historic art deco roots. 
The adjoining women’s surf shop is owned by Roxy Towel, and it brings the hordes of lunching ladies their flinging pink towels on the surfbeach to dry, while clearing the display cases of croissants and custard slices. The men don’t seem to mind. Unlike their Cavendish Square counterparts, these au natural clientele shake wet tendrils off their sun burnt faces, and smack misbehaving small, sandy bottoms without pausing from excited chatter about the swell. The pastries are divine, and made daily.
Evan and his family have been inspired by the intensive and soulful artisanal craft of breadmaking, and you can taste it in the fresh rolls. Organic is not a staple here like it is the States so of course, this is not an ingredient. In fact, while they buy local wherever possible, he admitted that in an effort to provide a truly European product, they do import their flour from France. I love the fact that it’s so local in feel though, and everyone knows everyone. The barristers are trained to know your order, which is refreshing after dealing with a Starbucks on the corner of Union and Laguna who still don’t know me.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: bakery, Cape Town, cinema, croissants, knead, muizenberg, roxy, surfers corner
On a trip up Baden Powell Drive’s R310 this weekend, I discovered a fantastic display of organic art alongside the busy road. It took just a minute to stop, reverse the car and run across the road at the break in streaming cars back and forth. I have driven past too many expressive creations at robots and stop streets this week without stopping.
With the artist nowhere to be seen, I could take my time taking in the detail on his handiwork. 
The stonework angels spread their wings over the desperate hope of miles and miles of shanty homes as far as the eye can see. In the background, the majestic profile of Table Mountain, ancient in blue robes, watches quietly and gracefully. I adore the humouristic jab at conventional female beauty with their enlarged heads, blackened nipples and child-bearing hips.
South Africans traditionally tut when they drive past this eyesore of endless bitter poverty. They resent what did not exist 20 years ago but is so permanent and out of control today. It’s hard to miss, too. The first welcome for foreign guests as they drive into the Mother City from Cape Town International Airport. The word “shantytown” may have been derived from the French Canadian word “chantier”, meaning “hut in a lumber camp”. Or it could have originated from the Irish “sean tí” meaning “old house”. You see, this is not a uniquely South African problem, as so many expect. It didn;t take m long to do a little digging to learn that shanty towns are present in a number of countries, including the largest in the world is in Mexico, followed by Pakistan’s version which is the largest in Asia and then Africa’s largest being in Kenya. But let’s not let those Aussies, Canadians, the Philippines, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, the West Indies, Peru, Haiti, Blangladesh and China off the hook. They are literally springing up everywhere. And they differ from slums in that “despite their unattractive building materials, they may also be places of hope, scenes of a counter-culture, with an encouraging potential for change and a strong upward impetus. There was a time when one did not traverse past one en route to the sirport without a companion and stopping was never an option, especially if rocks were being lobbied through your windscreen. 
At times, these settlements have expressed a unique power of the people, like the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) which grew out of a road blockade in Durban. The words “Abahlali baseMjondolo” inisiZulu mean “people who stay in shacks.” In Brazil the Movement of Workers Without a Roof (MTST) is said to be very strong politically.
For the first time I could separate myself from the battleground of the story of haves and have not’s fighting with little but a shaky law in a country where laws are meant to be interpreted with a R100 note, enough to admire these people’s ingenuity and creativity. Some shacks are quite beautiful, with puzzles of mismatched tin roofing, tear-shaped peepholes and splashes of colour. They are here for many reasons, and they pay the price with crime amongst friends, bleak joblessness and cramped, shared living spaces.
The mountain together with the map of human poverty sets quite a poignant landscape for the artist’s statues. Wrinkled aging angels eye younger, perkier breasted ones carefully. A leopard is frozen, dangerously mid-stalk to the edge of the flitting traffic but no one blinks or slows down. 
His form is crude, with swollen chest cavity, I wonder if the urban creator has had the luck to see one such animal in person. I know spotting a leopard changed my life. At the corner of my eye, there’s baboon cheekily looking back from his position in limbo mid-climb across the wall. Through cracks in the bricks, I can see the concrete encircles unemployed stone limbs and heads. Like God’s great warehouse of bodies in various state of manufacture. There’s a cellphone contact number painted on the wall, alongside the title “African Gadern Art. Waterfalls, ponds…”. 
“Can’t someone just take one?” ask I, incredulous at the complacency of the seller, in this crime-besieged country. His abandoned bakkie tells me he could be somewhere in the nether regions, perhaps working on more pieces, but he is yet to appear. “Well,” laughs my dad, “that would be fairly tricky considering their size and weight”. “Still,” say I, playing the role of the rebellious daughter, “I can see someone wanting to do that.” For this missing artist, it seems, the angels do a good enough job, watching over his lot. 
Categories: memoir
Tagged: angels, art, artist, baboon, Baden Powell drive, Cape Town, cape town international airport, leopard, mother city, shack, shanty town, south arica, squatter, statue, steal, stone
It didn’t take long for the main artery roadway between the sleepy washed up beachtown of Muizenburg and the N1 highway to be clogged with distracted drivers looking for a spot to offload their vehicles. Everybody was joining the masses running in the sand, skirts hiked high above their knees, flipflops bumping in their hands, steadily drawn towards the nets. 
The fishermen had arrived in a land rover and having jumped out the back, were now getting a grip on the emerald green nets, ready to start hauling them out of the flashing waters. 
Within seconds, the growing crowd was moving swiftly, drunkenly, stumbling over their feet to get a closer look at the action as it moved from left to right. The moment belonged to the fishermen. Everybody was pumped with anticipation, which had spread like a virus from the fishermen to the watchers. It was a haul that belonged to them all. 
Soon, the fishermen were yelling with broken teeth at the people to get off the nets, and sticking their elbows out, blocking the children from grabbing at lone fish jumping out of the nets with flicking tails. They were silvery and slippery, and agitated at having been stripped of the warm, salty cocoon of sea waters. The seagulls swooped ahead, aggressively snatching at the catch and simultaneously dropping fish from the sky above when something glittering below caught their eye. It was raining fish. One of the catchers stuck his thumb in a fish’s neck, ripping its head off and splattering the closely thronging onlookers with gritty guts. A giant jellyfish was detached from the twitching heap and set to one side, drawing a crowd of pointing and screeching children. One fisherman dragged a stingray with gaping pornographic mouth across the sand and up the hill. Set aside for later, like the antlers of a hunted deer. 
Not unlike the hoist of a drug cartel deal, the fuss was over almost before it began, and the scene cleared, leaving the crowd excited and deflated all at once. Tiny flicks of bloody sand splattered across their faces, bleached t-shirts and fancy sandals. Wondering whether it had all really happened, they dissipated as the land rover revved its engine and disappeared once again into the landscape of the beautiful, bountiful coast.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: beach, Cape Town, catch, fish, jellyfish, land rover, muizenberg, n1, nets, South Africa, stingrap
To Julie Powell, the looming prospect of turning 30 felt the end of her world. A life she describes as a highway of mediocrity, peppered with the props for the opening scene in a modern Cindarella movie, complete with a dead-end temp government secretarial job, ailing marriage, and reeking Queens apartment. The despair of middle age became her tipping point, and so driven by the urge to accomplish something worthwhile and memorable, she made the random decision to teach herself to cook.
For her, that meant making all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in 12 short months. Standing over the stove late into the night after a full day day at the office gave her all the material she needed to fill a quirky blog on her pet project. Then one stray afternoon, the New York Times called her to let her know they’d be profiling the blog, which led to a major book deal, and Meryl Streep picking up the lead role in the movie that followed.
Entering the third decade of my life had the cruel opposite effect on me. Expecting to feel the need to be promoted, run a marathon, or buy a convertible, all before my time ran out, I was completely blindsided by my unique side-effects of entering thirty. The urge to do less, slow down, quit my successful and high-paying job, backpack around Asia, go to the movies alone on a weekday morning, doodle my thoughts into a virtual diary, scrapbook, take long winding walks through the alternating grime and icing cake mansions of San Francisco, all overtook me. My life ever since has been a to-do list of not-do’s. This need to stop rushing, uncross my tapping legs, and see my partner’s face over coffee in the sunshine was a surprise that took some getting used to.
Alan finds it unendingingly amusing that I turned thirty, got married, quit my job, heaved a backpack onto my shoulders and started writing it all down in 12 months.
A good friend of mine believes he knows it all. He says that life is simple. You just have to learn the lesson. Once you go and do that, he claims, the problem goes away. My mentor and I pondered this theory over Horlicks (for him) and tea ( for me) the following day. We probed, what if it really is that simple? Find the lesson, accept it, memorise it, put it in action, and then voila, move on. To the next challenge, that is. He encouraged me to explore this theory, as a good mentor does.
If this is a real life strategy, application would stand the test, I continued, and so I applied it to my so-called midlife crisis. What if my to-do was to not-do. Can it really be that simple? Breathe. And wait. A surrendering of sorts. Of the directing role in your life. Still the mind, wharble into numbness. And smile, of course. To the passing crowds.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: breathe, challenge, fear, horlicks, lesson, life, mentor, tea, theory, wait
I think I was born to be a travel guide.
When little more than a starry-eyed girl with ridiculously complicated plaits on my head I announced to the adults around me that I wanted to be a vet. My mother’s response was a question: How would I feel about “sticking my whole arm, elbow deep, up a cow’s bottom?” she asked. Ok, I responded quickly. Then…I want to be a travel agent! “What, and sit around planning everyone’s else’s holidays all day?” she said…
So instead I dated one. He had sandy blonde hair, a big smile and bite-sized historical facts to share. I was sick with envy that his job was to help people have a good holiday. Ironically, it’s the antithesis of being an airline agent who faces grumpy people with delayed flights. I was reminded of this dream, and of him, when I passed the oversized swaying tourist-filled buses headed for Cape Point en route to work each morning. I took on my duty as a Capetonian specimen, waving at their confused faces.
It’s true. I get so excited when people come into town. In fact any coming and going, in any direction excites me. Of course, it’s all related to travel, which is one of those things everyone says they love, but few really, definitivly do. My mom is the only person I know who is honest about being a “bad traveler”. She’s just awful at packing, unpacking, finding things, and being without the general orderly array that is her life. Let’s face it, any sort of travel confuses her.
Most people say they love travel, but what they mean is that they enjoy the resorts of Hawaii.
But I do genuinely love travel. I don’t mind waiting around in airports. Flight delays translate into added excitement, and more time en route. I secretly covet that long-haul 26-hour gruel to Cape Town. Packing is a passion that starts a week ahead, and my organisation would make Martha Stewart look like a slob. I ache for that dusty beach in Vietnam, the scary airport in Naples, and those cocktails that made me sick in Tanzania. Alan and I have always picked the dubious and the divey over 5 star retreats.
So, it makes sense that I would end up spending my life split between arguably the two most beautiful cities in the world. I fail to get my head around a) people that ask me what brought me to San Francisco, and b) those who choose to live in identical housing units in the scrappy landscape of suburbia. I secretly placed myself in the path of tourists tripping their way through the most scenic cities in the world because Iwant to be a guide. When friends come into town I put away my life and dedicate myself to their desires, wishes and needs. I could no more schedule a dentist appointment on a day with visitors in town than I would poke my eyes out with a rolling pin. It is play time! I set my sights on detailing a special event-filled day coffeeshops, the best pasta in town and views to die for. No one visit is alike, as itineraries are plotted and planned with the precision of a general going into battle, according to individual energy levels, median age, penchant for wearing high heels or need to be seen by the scene.
My friend believes I should join one of those agencies who plan thousand dollar tailored weekends for people who work too hard and want to cram two days with tropical fish, smelly cheese, ancient Turkish tapestries or whatever. But for now, I think I’ll just continue to write and sell guides. And during my coffeebreaks, I’ll slip out to show my mum the best tapioca shop in Japantown.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: Cape Town, general, guide, love, martha stewart, plan, San Francisco, town, travel
Yesterday I smellled summer. It crept up on me, taking me by surprise. I had all but forgotten its seduction, like bumping into a forgotten lover who makes you giggle in that humiliating way, and smooth you hair, all the while your heart thumps like a racehorse. A definitive warm haze that tastes of overripe grapes, sugary cocktails and suntan lotion, came in through the window and at me.
For me there are only two seasons. summer, and not summer. If I can’t bear my arms in vests all day and night, it’s not summer. I can no more understand a bride who chooses an icy landscape and furry cape, than I can get into the head of Octomom. Summer is about spaces opening up and pushed up windows to let the outside in. It’s about the best fruits, long evenings of crickets peeping and weekends of waves. It’s a time when I can feel my own skin, not the skin or hair of an animal or plant. It’s when I feel the happiness of a naked newborn baby once again.
March was always so bittersweet for me growing up, as it held my Birthday, but also signalled the dipping of temperatures. I can recall moving about on the carpet of my bedroom, the pinched faces of fashion models following me from the walls above, as I chased the final rays of warmth on a day at the end of summer. I always went into denial at the end of the season, until the cold finally won, sending me home clutching blue arms and splotched legs. I hear it is still baking in Cape Town this final week in March. Can’t be “global warming” in light of the stories of record snowfalls all through Christmas in the northern hemisphere. Perhaps we need to come up with a better term like “temperature schitzophrenia”. California is favoured because it is pretty mental in that there are days in February that demand shorts and light sleeves.
I always wanted a life where I could chase warmth around the globe.
And all this brings me to my final meandering thought which is why we humans spend so much time discussing the weather. The Brits are famous for filling empty silences with chitchat on sunshine dispensation, cloud formations and dew concentration. We make fun of the aging for their propensity to revert to light banter on the weather at a time where they have so much more to teach us. Alan’s family waits up for the late weather slot to tell them how easy tomorrow will be, but they do live in Kansas, land of extremes. As a South African growing up in a place where the seasons are as predictable as knowing the sun rises tomorrow, I cannot grasp the idea of schools closing when it gets too cold. From November to March it is hot with blue skies and warm evenings in Cape Town. The middle of the year brings rain and bone-numbing evenings.
A few decades back when professional sport was limited to the seasons and was not evergreen, there was this TV ad for cricket. It featured girls in bikinis on the sidelines, potbellied men braaing wors on the grassy slopes, Hansie putting zinc on his nose. “C’mon Summer, C’mon, Cmon!” went the song. As much as I love summer, part of me wants it to be put in a box at the end of the season, like it used to be, so I can pull it out with my light, breezy dresses, and get excited all over again.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: cricket, evening, grapes, hansie cronje, heat, kansas, rain, summer, sunshine, watermelon, weather
What’s your thing? You know, that store you’d like to get locked up in all night? Mine is pharmacies. I love them. I get high just driving past a Walgreens. For me, they signify good things. Lavendar foam bath, stocking up on bulk packages of snow-white cotton wool pads, keyring gadgets you’ll never need, oversized bags of Jellybellys, and the end to flu.
The pharmacy is always your first stop after finally getting a diagnosis on mystery ailments. Yes, there is a joyous end to back pain/energy depletion misery/sinus pain. I have been to pharmacies a lot in the last week, nursing flu. Every time I go in, I stockpile on promotional cosmetics. Buy three, get three. If there ever was an earthquake of magnificent proportions (not the one of 4.6 the other day) I could go for weeks on the face-wash I have stored.
Talking about earthquakes, why is it no matter how much you prepare, when they do eventually hit, we always freeze?
My mom (who is still staying, and might be till the end of time) has been keeping her handbag at the front door in the event of a shake. Yes, she’s kind of paranoid. When I left her alone one evening to attend bi-monthly writer’s group she made me place the emergency kit backpack next to her handbag so she could make one big sprint. This is amusing if you have lifted it and seen how heavy that pack is, and also if you happen know anything about my mom. These days she seldom sprints anywhere. Or lifts anything heavy. What slowness of pace issues she has are considerably worsened by her directional deficiencies.
She said she wanted to run outside the building if there was an earthquake, which I told her was expressly the opposite of the advice we are given. We’re told to stay in, and cower under a heavy piece of furniture. A bed or desk. I am laughing even now as I imagine her doing such a things. No, she wants to rather run out, and swerve the collapsing buildings in the narrow street. Ok, I capitulated, as one does so often with one’s mother. “Then take a left UP the street”, I instructed. “There’s a park at the top of the clearing and we’ll meet you there.” Lord, she can’t remember left from right. How are we going to get this to work?
Then it happened. We had just got back from the SFO. Alan had a flight to Chicago at 6am and no amount of begging would let me off the hook. He said he wanted me to take him. Cabs be damned! So, nursing approaching flu, we both climbed back into bed for a morning nap on our return. It was between dreams that I felt the bed shake. The shaking of its legs reminded me of how I’d put it together 5 years ago, and of how it can be wrenched back apart all too easily. The windows started rattling too, but we’d had a windy few days and this was not unusual. The bed shaking was a whole different ballgame. So I hopped out of bed, like I’d been shocked. I remember thinking how shamefaced I would be explaining to people my whereabouts at 10am on a weekday. But then again I was glad I’d finally remved that bed from above my bed – beginner’s stupidity. Walking down the passage tenderly, stopping to listen every few steps, I reached the open door to my mom’s room, where she was lying, eyes as wide-open as her door.
“Was it an earthquake?” she asked quietly, as if it was still in the room and she didn’t want it to hear. “Yes,” I said, proudly, “it was”. I love having visitors experience this fear. Leaving a nation where adrenalin is the staple food, to live in the land of safety and security, I miss that excitement of possibility. I want tourists to know we live on the edge. It’s worth it. San Francisco is that beautiful.
But yes, we’re also shit-scared. “I thought you’d come in and jumped on the bed, but when I opened my eyes, I saw I was still alone…” she said, confused still. And it was then I noticed her abandoned handbag, it’s contents disgorged on the bureau. She used to do this every night when I was growing up. Everything would be orderly placed into piles – coin purse, cellphone, mascara, sunglasses. She’d say it was a metahpr for the organising of her mind. I’d always laughed, thinking about how the contents of her mind looked as jumbled and chaotic as her handbag did inside. It was then, seeing itunpacked and unready to go that I knew she’d really settled in my home and my city, and having experienced our fear, was no longer in fear.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: earthquake, emergency, flu, San Francisco, sfo, South Africa, walgreens
I heard the above phrase somewhere this week, and promptly lol. Half of my laughing out loud was out of the public embarrassment of being outed. It rubbed me up just the teensiest bit - the way you get when someone makes fun of you, until you realise how right they are, and find yourself chucklingly joining in. San Franciscans do take themselves a little too seriously.
When I first moved to the US I felt unbelievably hemmed in. All the laws, written and unwritten rules made me feel so controlled and angry. Like a 5 year old does the first time they face a parental curfew for bedtime after nights of running wild with open scissors. Curbing my wheels, right on red, recycling, no-fire days, save the air days, street cleaning…I can go on and on. I just have to make a list of all the itty bitty things that confuse my parents when they visit. Which has been frequently, of late. My mom, who is frantically tearing into my easter eggs over my shoulder as I type, says the rules are what makes it all work. But if I left her to choose our parking space, we would have come out to find our car towed more than not. 
She’s inspired by the creativity of San Franciscans. Today we passed a homeless man, on a almost poetically fully-laden bicycle with his worldly possessions, and a twittering American flag. Our South African homeless leave much to be desired. I remarked that I think it this ingeniousness is more about the fact that everyone in San Francisco is slightly mad. You know, that line line between genius and insanity?
But I must admit what still gets me today, (and I’ll step on that soapbox for a minute, if you don’t mind) is how intolerant they are. For a culture that was framed out of an ear that embraced free love, accepting everyone, peace (pass the bong), and giving back, they seem to awfully rigid in their thinking. We don’t mind who you are or what you think..so long as you agree with us. By that, we expect you to paste an Obama sticker on your car, and recycle. Oh, and don’t you dare ask for plastic at the grocery store – what do you mean you didn’t bring your own Whole Foods canvas bags?! Religion is constipated, oil is bad and the Midwest is full of redneck hillybillys. Yes, free love.
Categories: memoir
Tagged: bong, canvas, creative, curb your wheels, flag, free love, homeless, recycle, rules, San Francisco, visitors, whole foods
