Celebration
Greetings from Cape Town!
Just before school started, I promised Zola and Tallulah that we would have a family celebration at the end of their first full week of classes.
Because they started on Tuesday, January 19th, the end of the first full week was January 29th. I guess I don’t make many promises like that, because the celebration became a rallying cry and a countdown for both kids. “Only five days until the celebration, Dad!” “When you get back from Johannesburg, we have the celebration the very next day!” “Hooray, today is the celebration!”
In the end, the big celebration turned out to be a family lunch and a trip to the mall. On Friday afternoon, India and Tallulah went to the extremely popular “Grand at the Beach” restaurant to hold our table, and I waited at school while Zola had tryouts for the cross-country team. In their school uniforms, the kids ran seven laps, barefoot, around the inner perimeter of the school’s courtyard/synthetic turf field. It reminded me of a scene in the movie “Chariots of Fire.” Zola ran pretty well, but another little American girl crushed the rest of the kids, literally lapping the field.
Tallulah and Zola were practically the only kids in the ’see and be seen’ Friday lunch and drinks crowd at the packed resturant. It looked as though most tables were groups of work colleagues who had gone to lunch together, and decided to start the weekend early. Wine was giving way to mojitos, and many people had taken their shoes off to walk on the sand outside the restaurant’s open doors. Cape Town is a little relaxed in the summer (unlike the rest of the year??).
At the Waterfront Mall, Tallulah had her long-awaited visit to the Build-A-Bear workshop. She chose a flattened she-wolf, named her Lily, and helped fill her body with stuffing. Then Tallulah was given a red satin heart, and told to rub it on her arms, to give Lily strength, on her belly, to make sure Lily always had enough to eat, and on her own heart, so that Lily would know that Tallulah loves her. After all of this rubbing, Tallulah thrust the heart into Lily, and the kind attendant started sewing Lily up. Tallulah performed her part of the ritual with the seriousness and barely contained joy of someone joining a secret society, or taking an oath of office after a tough election. Tallulah typed the information for Lily’s birth certificate, and she selected a golden satin dress and high heels for Lily to wear. Tallulah and Lily have become inseparable.
Zola took us to the hobby shop in the mall, and selected a set of ‘Warhammer 40,000′ soldier figurines. He has been mildly obsessed with these for months. We also had to buy paint and glue and brushes and a Codex catalogue of the Tau Imperial Army. The young, tattooed, hobby-store clerk, said,”This is only the beginning, man. We’ll be seeing a lot of you from now on.”
Zola and I spent many happy hours together over the weekend, gluing tiny plastic body parts together, individualizing each soldier with curved swords, and skulls on chains, and huge multi-barrelled pistols, and then painting them with teeny, tiny brushes. Most of the time while we were working on the models, Zola made a “thut-thut-thut-thut-thut-thut-thut-thut-thut” noise with his mouth, imitating the noise of a machine gun. Ten-year-old-boy bliss.
So, we survived the first week of school, and felt we had much to celebrate. Zola has been thrown in the deep end of a pool called “everything’s different” - new country, new school, new educational approach (uniforms and clunky shoes, switching classes), new sports (cricket, surf lifesaving), new friends, new, new, new. I am very proud that he has handled the changes with grace and joy. Tallulah has had an easier go of it, but has been equally adaptable.
Our re-entry is becoming a little less ragged.