Change In Plans

Tallulah with Mimsey

Greetings from Cape Town,  and happy Argus Day!

Every year, on the second Sunday in March, a small army (35,000 cyclists) takes over the Cape Peninsula for a day.  The Argus Cycle Tour is 109 kilometres, and is quite an awesome event.  We watched bicycles blaze down the steep hill by our house for about an hour this morning, the riders smiling and laughing, with only 20 kilometers to go.  As every Capetonian will tell you, the Argus is the largest timed cycling race in the world, and may be the most beautiful.  Every year I promise myself, “next year.”  This year I mean it.

The single road leading into our little village is closed for the day.  Instead of 80 surfers in the water there are only 30, some of whom sleep on the beach the night before.  I am still the worst one out there, but I am inconveniencing fewer people.  Kids play in the streets, and families organize “meet your neighbor” parties.  We went to a three-hour brunch followed by a three-hour lunch.  The isolation and the disruption of normal give Argus Day the feeling of a snow day, but without the snow (and without the 10 below). 

Last night we hosted a small dinner party for some visting friends, which somehow ended up having about 30 guests (including about 12 kids).  The evening ended with all of the kids watching “Marmaduke” projected onto the wall of our bedroom, thanks to the cool new movie projector we got for Christmas. 

Tallulah and friends

The big event of the weekend was the daughter-Dad campout at St. Cyprian’s School on Friday evening.  About 120 six-to-eight year old girls, and their Dads (or “Dad-like male adults”) braved a night under the stars on the school’s field-hockey field.  The campout was a special experience for Tallulah and me: I’m not sure who enjoyed it more.  It also provided insight into what the world would be like without the sensible influence of Moms (and the annoyance of brothers).

The beginning of the evening, when teachers and Moms were still around, was extremely well organized.  Swimming for an hour, then songs and games (while Dads put up tents), then a break, then story time.  By the end of story time, though, essentially all female adults had departed.

For dinner, the school provided huge charcoal grills and packs of sausage and lamb chops.  After the Dads burned meat, groups of Dads and girls sat on the grass to eat.  No one seemed to have any salads or side dishes, or even any cutlery.  Everyone ate meat with their hands, and wiped their greasy fingers on the grass.  Soon after, many of the girls were wandering around with big bags of potato chips and cheese doodles, offering them to their friends, and still not quite believing the junk-food license they were being afforded.  Salty snacks and charred meat: the official food groups of the daughter-Dad campout.

By this time, most of the Dads (me included) were sitting in camp chairs, talking to their friends and having a glass of wine or a beer.  The girls roamed from tent to tent, playing flashlight tag and singing school songs and laughing.  Tallulah remembered that we had chocolate for s’mores, and handed out huge chunks to every girl around.  She got me to lead a game of freeze tag with about 20 first graders.  This was fun until I tripped over the guy wire of a tent at full speed, and nearly broke every bone in my body.

Eventually, girls fell asleep on Dads’ laps, or crawled into their tents and collapsed.  Many of the Dads stayed up until very late, telling funny stories and solving the less-pressing problems of the day.

By 6:30 in the morning, it was light out, and the games of tag and the songs had started again.  Tallulah popped out of the tent as if her hair were on fire, and she was back in the mix with her friends.  Watching the sun rise against the broad face of Table Mountain was beautiful.  After coffee (thank goodness), breakfast and another swim, we made our way home. 

We like it here.  Tonight, both kids were asleep before 9pm.

Makgadikgadi Pan

Greetings from sunny Cape Town!

We have been back in normal life for almost a month: kids in school, India and me in relatively consistent routines, weeks flying by.

Before the memories fade, I wanted to record the rest of the adventures that India and her parents had with Zola and Tallulah up in Botswana after I left them in early January. 

Hot!

I flew out of Jack’s Camp on the Makgadigadi Pan on a Monday morning, after a final game drive and a late breakfast.  Six hours later, I was in Johannesburg.  India & Co. stayed at Jack’s for another couple of days.  The day I left, the rangers organized a mid-day soccer game for Zola out on the open salt pan.  As India described it, the temperature had gotten over 100 degrees, and she and Zola and half a dozen African rangers played 4 on 4 soccer for about 45 minutes.   No one keeled over from heat stroke, but there was consensus to declare a tie, and not come back on the field for the second half.

Jack’s employs a real Bushman/San tracker whose English name is Cobra.  Cool name.  Cobra was training three young guys in the lost arts of tracking and desert survival, and took India and kids along.  He showed them how to light fires with zebra dung, how to set up dung-beetle fights (hours of entertainment), and how to dig a scorpion out of its nest.  Cobra had a sharp stick, and dug about three feet down, pulling out a scorpion the size of Tallulah’s hand.  Through a translator, he explained that scorpions with big pincers and small tails are not very venomous (and the converse is true).  It’s a judgment call, I guess, as to what constitutes “big pincers.”

Cobra Rinses the Scorpion

Cobra gripped the scorpion by the (small) tail and (big) pincers, and put it into his mouth.  My mother-in-law gagged.  He wasn’t eating the scopion, although my guess is he has eaten a few.  Instead, he wa cleaning the dust off it, so that the kids could see the details of the exoskeleton more clearly.  Full service.

From Jack’s the family took a small plane about two hours northwest, flying back over Maun, and into the Okavango Delta.  Mombo Camp has been at the top of India’s wish list for nearly a decade, and it did not disappoint.  The Delta is unique, because a mighty river flows into the desert, disippates into a huge freshwater swamp, and then evaporates.  The islands in the swamp are incredibly lush, and packed with wild animals.  India and I went to the Delta with erh parents way back in 1992, but none of us had been since.  Jane, my mother-in-law, was still surprised that she had somehow been talked into a return visit.

At Mombo, the kids told me that they saw 51 lions.  Lions eating giraffe, lions fighting each other, lions mating, lions sleeping.  Circle of life stuff.  They saw herds of thousands of antelope, buffalo, waterbuck, and zebra.  This is the low season for game watching, so the rangers kep apologizig for the sparsity of the sightings.

Tallulah saw her favorite animal, the monitor lizard (maybe the same one that President Clinton saw on his trip to Botswana and made a joke about, many years ago).  As Tallulah tells me, “Monitor lizards are scary because they can break your leg with their strong tails.”  Apparently this is true.

As the family was checking in, Tallulah also spotted a snake in the lodge, hanging down from the rafters.  I’m told that the dialogue went like this:

Tallulah:  “I see a snake.”

India: “That’s just a tree branch”

Tallulah “I see a snake”

India: “There are no snakes here, Tallulah.  That is a branch hanging down from the roof.”

Tallulah: “I see a snake.  It just moved.”

Annie (the Batswana manageress of the lodge), “Aaaaaaggh.  It’s a bloody snake.  Get someone quickly to take care of it!”

On the flight from Mombo back to Maun, the thunderheads were building, so the pilot stayed at 500 feet the whole way.  Zola told me it was like a bonus game drive.  Herds of elephants trumpeted at the sky, and circled their young for safety.  Giraffe broke into full gallop (which is something to see), and they could see crocodiles slithering into the water.  Not exactly low-impact observation, but something to see.

So, now back to boring old school, and sports, and play dates and violin lessons.  They had quite a trip.

Sunset in the Kalahari

Greetings from Jack’s Camp, a lodge in the Kalahari Desert near Maun, Botswana!

For my wife, India, going on safari is like crack cocaine.  She literally can not get enough of it.  When she is not on safari she is scheming and thinking of ways to go on safari.  As far as I know, she has never pawned our TV or jewelry to get money for safari, but it is not inconceivable.  Her only comment is “Live your passion!”

Roar!

Our post-Nashville summer holidays have been the safari equivalent of a binge.  We were in Cape Town for less than 36 hours, then packed everything to go up to Tswalu, in the Northern Cape.  Our days at Tswalu with my sister and her family were magnificent.  It had rained a lot, much more than normal, and the desert was coming to life with flowers and insects.  Our campout under the stars was invaded by about a billion kamikaze bugs of all varieties, which freaked out all kids and some adults, but was a minor inconvenience.  In 2011 I am trying actively to not take for granted the amazing confluence of hard work and good fortune that make anything possible.  When I think of it this way, a dinner and campout in the middle of the Kalahari seems nearly miraculous.

After saying goodbye to Su & Dave and kids at the Johannesburg Airport on Friday afternoon, we greeted India’s parents, who arrived from Nashville about an hour later.  The next morning, our Air Botswana flight to Maun was cancelled, so we spent another day hanging out in the airport.  Zola and I watched an endless series of Barclays Premier League soccer matches on the television at an airport bar, which was fun for both of us.

By the time we reached Maun, it was too late on Saturday evening for a pilot to fly us to Jack’s Camp, which is another hour into the desert.  The last time India and I were in Maun (with her parents, coincidentally) was in 1992.  What was then a dusty tiny village has grown up into a dusty small city.  Boom times in Botswana.  Air Botswana put us up in a motel near the river, which we agreed was almost exactly like the motel in Churchill, Manitoba that we stayed in when we went to see polar bears in October 2008.  Maun was considerably warmer.

We finally got to Jack’s Camp about 24 hours later than expected.  As the lodge manager strode down the path to meet us, I practically heard India’s heart do a back flip.  Oliver is a tall, handsome young American, with Johnny Depp hair and a great tan, managing a tented safari camp in the Kalahari.  If India has a Platonic ideal of masculinity, Oliver gets pretty close to it.  He even went to Vanderbilt, so her parents immediately liked him.

Our guide was named Dabe (pronounced DAH-bay), he was a mix of Herero tribesman and San Bushman.  His ancestors have hunted and gathered near the site of Jack’s Camp for the last 35,000 years.  Until he was 15 years old, and was sent off to boarding school, Dabe and his family lived as nomads, roaming a huge part of Central Botswana.  Dabe’s knowledge of the desert was like nothing I have ever seen.  Whenever we stopped, he mimicked bird calls so expertly that birds flew right up and into the open game vehicle.  Dabe told us that his six-year-old son recently made his own bow and arrow, shot a bird, and roasted it over an open fire that he had built himself. 

With Dabe, we drove out to look for animals.  This part of Botswana is famous for its zebra migration, and at one point we were surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of zebras as they walked the 400 kilometers from the Makgadikgadi Pan to the Okavango Delta.  Zebras as far as the eye could see.  In the late afternoon, Dabe took us to the edge of the salt pan, which is the size of Switzerland, where he had laid out a full bar and a camp fire.  He placed a map on the desert floor and gave us a lesson on the geology and history of the long-dried inland lake.  The sunset over the desert was indescribably beautiful.

hq black swan movies

Meerkats tickle!

Early this morning, Dabe took us to look at a colony of meerkats that lives near the lodge.  At Tswalu, we had also gone to observe a colony of meerkats as they woke up and set off to hunt.  These little animals stand tall on their back legs, and have mannerisms remarkably like little furry humans.

Unlike at Tswalu, where the scientists studying the colony kept us about 15 discreet feet from the colony, Dabe insisted that we sit in and among the meerkats.  His only warning was, “If they run up you, stay calm.” 

Meerkats always climb the highest nearby object to scout for their prey (eg, mice and scorpions) and to watch out for their predators (eg, big birds and snakes). Suddenly, Zola was the highest accessible observation point, and he had the alpha female meerkat, heavily pregnant, standing on top of his head to scout the surrounding terrain.  He stayed calm, and other meerkats occupied his shoulders.  Tallulah had two baby meerkats wrestling in her lap.

After about 20 minutes, the alpha female gave a signal (their chirp sounds a little like a bird call, Dabe could imitate it perfectly), and all 20 members of the colony dropped down onto all fours and took off running in a northeasterly direction.  We could see their tails sticking up for about a hundred meters as they scampered off for the day’s hunt.

Dabe drove us to see the biggest tree in Botswana, a 5,000-year-old baobab standing alone in the desert. He told us it would take 17 people holding hands to encircle the trunk.  Like big meerkats, we climbed as high as we could, and looked out to the horizon.  Finally, Dabe took us to visit a homestead of about 20 people and 400 cattle.  The homestead family sells about 100 cattle a year for export into the European Union, supplementing their income of cash crops and illegal beer sales.  Even very far from the cities, Botswana is prosperous and organized.

The homestead had one cell phone, which was hung from a tree branch about 10 feet off the ground.  The altitude was necessary to get reception from the nearest cell-phone tower, about 40 kilometers away.  A hands-free kit dangled down, and the family patriarch demonstrated how he talks on the phone: he stands on his tiptoes and puts the earpiece in his ear.  I asked him, “Who calls you, way out here.”  He said, “I call every day from my house in Gaborone to make sure the family is OK.  I am a soldier in the Botswana Defence Force, stationed in the city (about 600 miles away), and only get out here about once a month.”  Wild.

The comic highlight of our time at Jack’s was when they served afternoon tea.  One of the rangers put down a big bowl of crunchy, salty snacks that looked like mis-shapen pretzels.  They were boiled and sun-dried mopani worms, little tree caterpillars that are considered a bush delicacy.  About half of the guests, including a family of young Australian girls, tried the worms.  They did not taste like chicken, but were not terrible if you didn’t think too much about what they are. 

Zola is by far the pickiest eater in our family, but he eventually succumbed to peer pressure, and put a worm in his mouth.  Poor guy crunched down twice, made a horrible face, and barfed all over the table.  He is old enough now that the physical discomfort was greatly outweighed by the social embarrassment of throwing up in front of a bunch of cute girls.  I felt terrible for helping to pressure him into eating the worm (particularly after just having re-read “Lord of the Flies”), but was proud of him for trying something new.  I think he will stick to chicken nuggets.  Dabe and the other guides just reached into the bowl and ate the worms by the handful.

So, India is blissful in her safari experience.  She and the kids and her parents are going off to the Okavango Delta for the rest of the week to look for lions.  I am going back to Johannesburg to work.  An action-packed day in Africa.

Greetings from Johannesburg!

Zola’s New Year’s toast was “Anything can happen!” He shouted this before jumping into the pool at the stroke of midnight, up at the farm in Tulbagh. It was an expression of optimism and energy, and has become our family’s new rallying cry. Anything can happen.

The morning of the new year started with three events that would be metaphors if life were a middlebrow novel.

Event 1 was an extremely violent pre-dawn thunderstorm. Tulbagh is on the edge of the Klein Karoo desert. In the 50 or so days we have spent there as a family, down through the years, we had never seen even a flicker of lightning. Suddenly an Old Testament-style deluge.

Event/metaphor 2 was when I realized, as the rain poured down, that the windows of our truck were open. I scrabbled around the dimly lit kitchen and dining room., looking frantically for the truck keys. As I searched, a bolt of lightning struck nearby, and the electricity went out. Somehow I found the keys in the pre-dawn dark.

Event/metaphor 3, still during the thunderstorm, was when I ran the 100 feet or so out to the trucl, getting drenched by the rain. The windows were already rolled up. As I always, always do, I had rolled them up and locked the doors when I went to bed the previous night. Not thinking clearly, I had forgotten. I opened the truck door and sat in the cab for a few minutes, dripping and catching my breath before going back to the house.

So I’ve been wrestling with these three
metaphor events for the last week, wondering if they mean anything. If life were a middlebrow novel, how would the author use them? Would they be ominous or encouraging? Would they be too trite even for bad literature?

A few days later, a fourth metaphor event occurred that I really don’t know what to do with. It definitely seems on the ominous side, though. We were up at Tswalu, an amazing game reserve in the Kalahari Desert with my sister and her family. The Kalahari has gotten a lot of rain recently, which begets a lot of insects, which begets bats. They swooped in and around the dining room as we ate at night.

Outside our befroom door on our second morning, I found a bat that had been neatly decapitated. Like a mob warning, his bat head lay on the floor a few meters away. Our crime-scene analysis indicated that the bat must have flown into a spinning ceiling fan as he hunted insects in the night. None of the staff members at the lodge had ever seen such a thing. My guess is that the bat did not suffer.

Morbid tone. Our time at Tswalu was amazing: spectacular desert sunsets, camping under the stars, a long trail ride on beautiful horses, and chasing animals in a battered old Land Rover. We saw four baby lion cubs under a bush, each no bgger than a one-liter soda bottle. The lion mom looked on with pride.

As we boarded the small plane taking us away from Tswalu, the head ranger asked whether we minded transporting a baby roan antelope to an animal rescue center. In Johannesburg. The newborn antelope was ill and not taking milk, and would otherwise die within hours. We agreed, and watched the baby carefully during the hour-long flight. Another metaphor? We hope the baby antelope thrives, and is soon back in the wild. .

2011 - anything can happen.

Greetings from snowy Amsterdam!

We were lucky in our trip around the world to have very few big travel snarlups: Kathmandu to the Maldives, emergency turnaround halfway between Sydney and Queenstown, a missed flight in India (that saved us from a terrorist attack).

Part of that good fortune was because we were chasing summer around the globe, and had minimal weather-related delays.

At the moment, we are en route from Cape Town to Nashville, but are stuck in Amsterdam. Our overnight flight landed nearly three hours ago, but we are sitting on the runway, within sight of the airport. The snow has stopped, after maybe 6 inches of accumulation, but all is chaos.

Apparently, no planes are leaving, so the gates are all occupied, so no planes can disembark. For some reason (unexplained), they can’t deplane us somewhere and send us to the terminal by bus. Also, they can’t empty the planes at the gates, move them off, and let us get to a gate.

Instead we sit here. And sit, and sit, and sit. My perception of the Dutch being highly organized and functional is eroding rapidly. You would think this is a problem that has occurred at least once before in Amsterdam. It’s a small snowstorm, for heaven’s sake.

So, we are indefinitely delayed, while sitting on board. Kids are watching movies, I am half watching ‘Inception,’ which is baffling. Maybe it requires full attention. Not much risk of us missing our flight to Atlanta, I guess, but we have been told that no trains and buses are running either. KLM’s ineptitude and lack or preparation is shocking.

Postscript: we have now been waiting for nearly five hours on the runway. Twice we have been told by the purser, “in the next half hour,” but they were false alarms. Up until now, everyone on board has been calm and co-operative and patient, but this “all part of life’s rich pageant” thing is no longer sustaining me. Plus, it is starting to stink in here (or maybe that’s just me). Grrrrr. Can’t we get some South Africans to get this situation organized?

Post-post script:
At some point in the last 24 hours we plumbed the 5th or 6th circle of travel hell. It may have been when the gypsy cab driver spat on my feet, after we told hime we did not need a ride. It may have been while the 20-minute train into Amsterdam was stopped for 45 minutes in the middle of the night, about 100 meters from Centraal Station. We definitely hit a low when we clawed our way to the front of a several-hundred passenger queue at 6:30 this morning, and the agent had no record of our recently made booking from Amsterdam to Detroit.

We did make a good call by finding a (one-star) hotel in town last night after our flight was eventually cancelled. Being cheap, I wanted to wait for some of the promised “thousands of comfortable beds” that several passengers said never showed up. We made another good call (literally) by asking our wonderful brother-in-law, Jason, to book us a new flight through delta.com. Many people waited 5-6 hours in customer-service lines in the airport, only to be turned away when the agents went off duty at 11pm.

Incidentally, according to a recent study, the Dutch are physically the largest people in the world. The largest of the Dutch must be police officers, and several hundred of them were deployed at the airport this morning, as tempers have definitvely started fraying. Huge cops, automatic weapons (that Zola immediately identified as MP-5s or “skinny poppers”), angry crowds: we need to get back to South Africa, where are calm.

Many other comedic adventures ensued. Our hotel room was a large basement closet, that smelled of smoke and had a prison-style window high on one wall. We got ripped off badly by a taxi driver who sped off when I questioned him on the fare. We got booked onto the wrong Detroit flight, which was then promptly delayed by three more hours, late into Saturday afternoon. None of us have changed clothes, bathed, or brushed our teeth in three days. Our luggage is nowhere to be found.

India charmed us onto a flight to Atlanta, which is only three hours delayed. We are sitting on the runway, ready to go, but I don’t want to jinx it. Hard to believe that a six-inch snow storm created this much havoc in one of the world’s busiest airports. Everyone has more or less kept his/her sense of humor (Dad occasionally excepted), but we are ready to be in Nashville!

Greetings from OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg!

As an American, it is difficult to describe how completely South Africa goes on vacation when mid-December rolls around.  Schools are out, government offices close, construction workers go on leave (”builders’ holiday”), business activity just stops.  Phones go unanswered, e-mails get immediate “Out of the Office until January 10th” responses.  It may be like summer holidays in Continental Europe, but feels even more comprehensively switched off.

Every family that is mobile flees Johannesburg for the beaches of Durban, Cape Town, or Plettenberg Bay.  Traditionally, the start date of the exodus was 16 December, a public holiday in the old South Africa (Day of the Vow) and the New South Africa (Day of Reconciliation).  Traditionally, also, many people drove from the highveld to the coasts: loading up the staion wagon, attaching a little trailer for the luggage, and setting off on the highway.

Things have changed.  The holiday exodus now seems to start about a week earlier, once schools are out.  Also, rich South Africans have gotten richer, so driving 16 hours seems like an unnecessary pain in the neck.  Tout le monde flies, and therefore, every seat on every flight to Cape Town has been full from Monday to Friday.  This brings me to the point of this post.

I had a full day of meetings scheduled today in Johannesburg, but they all cancelled.  “Let’s pick this up after the holiday!”  Compliments of the season!” 

I also had a full day of meetings in Cape Town, which I had thought I would miss, but suddenly was able to attend.  I lucked into a seat on a 9:25 flight, and would have been in the office in Cape Town by noon.

The incredibly bad and frustrating 1Time airline had a “change of equipment” on the 9:25 flight, so half the passengers got bumped.  I was in that unlucky (or unearly) half, and threw a completely inappropriate shouting and counter-slamming temper tantrum at the counter.  Normally, I am not like that, but twice in a row, 1Time has cancelled a flight when I was in a hurry (Memo to self: don’t fly 1Time!).  Hello Ugly American!

The temper tantrum had the desired effect, though, and they jumped me to the front of the list for the proverbial “next available flight,” again on 1Time. Every seat on every flight for the other airlines is full, so this felt like victory.

In my ill-tempered excitement, I left the notebook which records every important element of my professional life sitting on the check-in counter.  I only discovered this 15 minutes later when I was buying a cup of coffee.  I had to make the walk of shame back to the scene of my temper tantrum.

I said to the agent, “Uh, I was here a few minutes ago, and I think I, uh, left a notebook.” She said, coolly, “Yes.  I remember you.”  Long story short(ish), the agent had “No idea where the notebook went.  No idea.  Next!”  Divine retribution.

Eventually, I found the notebook at the “flight controller’s” desk.  When I set down the hot and full cup of coffee on his desk to pick up the notebook, my hand brushed the cup and knocked it over.  If this were TV, it would have spilled everywhere, making an awkward situation worse.  Fortunately, the coffee lids in the Johannesburg Airpirt are made of stern stuff, and disaster was averted.

In future, I will try to be a nicer person under pressure.

Hours go by.  I took the Gautrain back into Johannesburg and met friends for breakfast, and then came back to the airport, ready to go.  Further divine retribution: the 12:45 1Time flight to Cape Town is now listed as “indefinitely delayed.”  I asked the flight controller what that meant, and he said, “It means there is an indefinite delay in the departure of the plane.”  Ah ha!

As noted above, there are literally no seats on any other flights on any other airlines.  Like Schrodinger’s Cat, I am in a state of limbo.  Unlike Schrodinger’s Cat, however, I can treat myself to lunch at Nando’s and make a few phone calls.  It could end up being a long day.

Greetings from Cape Town!

Warning: this post contains two maudlin poems and a string of unconnected thoughts.  The first poem is by Carl Sandburg.

I was thinking about this poem for two reasons.  The Atlantic Seaboard in Cape Town almost never has a marine layer, but on an otherwise sunny Friday afternoon, the fog rolled in from the sea.  Zola and I were down on the beach playing soccer with some kids, and in a matter of minutes, the sun was obscured, and everything looked like a dream sequence from a David Lynch movie.  The almost-Caribbean blue of the water contrasting with the greenish gray of the air and the sky. 

I went out and surfed (badly) in the heavy fog.  The only adjective I could come up with to describe it was “trippy.”  To my delight, Zola came back down to the beach in his wetsuit, and joined me with his boogie board in the surf.  He said it was too beautiful to not get out into the middle of it.

The other reason for the Carl Sandburg poem is that India got Tallulah a kitten on Friday.  They have named the kitten Tigger.  Our neighbors, Mel and Roxy, are giving away the offspring of their hellcat, Bubbaloo.  The kitten acquisition was not exactly authorized: I sort of hate cats.  It is difficult for me to say no to Tallulah under any circumstances.  It is impossible to say no when she is dancing around the house singing, “The wonderful thing about Tiggers, is that Tiggers are wonderful things!”  A moment of weakness that I will have years to regret.

Other unconnected thoughts.

Zola finished exams this week, and has essentially finished Grade 5.  During the course of the year, he had 64 “cycle tests” and “assessments” plus 16 full-on exams.  He passed Afrikaans, which was a big boost to his self-confidence.  I question an educational system that expects 10-year olds to behave with the maturity and self-discipline of university students, but we are proud of him for getting through it.

For the last several months, India has been working with a group of fifth-grade girls from a very tough township called Manenberg.  Every Friday, she goes out to their school, Red River, and leads them in physical exercise and games.  She is trying to instill life skills and self-confidence, and understand the challenges they face.  She likes spending time with the girls, and it gives her insight into the policy realities of trying to improve girls’ lives more generally.

Yesterday morning, India rented a municipal bus, picked up 35 of the Red River girls in Manenberg, and led them on a hike up Lion’s Head mountain.  A wonderful initiative, but  this story ends sort of badly.

I walked with Tallulah at the back of the pack.  Zola was somewhere in the middle, remarkably composed as the only boy amongst 35 girls his same age.  Lion’s Head is not particularly dangerous, but it is a real mountain hike.  Everyone got to the top all right, and there were pictures and celebrations.  On the way back down, a group of girls at the front were running.  One girl, Kayleen, tripped, and fell about 15 feet off a small cliff.  She broke her arm, loosened a few teeth, and was badly cut up. 

The mountain rescue service sent a helicopter for her, which was pretty dramatic.  India held Kayleen for an hour, getting covered in blood, until the paramedics stabilized her and flew her down to the base of the mountain.  India ran down, and rode to the hospital in the ambulance with Kayleen. 

In the meantime, the drama level ran high amongst the 34 remaining girls.  A lot of them were scared and crying.  Fortunately, a community group from Maneneberg happened to be hiking down at the same time, and many of the adults knew these girls.  They helped calm them, and get everyone down to the base of the mountain safely.  It was a nerve-wracking experience, particularly doing all of this and keeping an eye on Tallulah.  The only humorous moment was when we were nearly at the bottom, and Tallulah asked me to carry her, saying, “Dad, my dogs are barking!”   Aside from that, it was tense and unpleasant.

India stayed at the hospital for five hours, until Kayleen’s cuts were sutured, and her arm was set.  Kayleen’s mother arrived eventually, but the mother-daughter dynamic was frosty and formal.  Not sure what is going on there.

Poor India felt horribly guilty and responsible, even though it clearly was not her fault.  All of the Red River girls really hope that India continues working with them.  I hope so too.

The second poem is called “Eight Bells,” and was written by my mother’s cousin, Peter Davis.  Peter wrote this on the occasion of his father’s death in 1998.  Peter himself died last week, and Mom sent this around.  It is longer than Fog.  I found it beautiful and unbearably sad.  I wonder what my own kids will remember when I am dying?  I hope we don’t find out for a long time.

Eight Bells
1
Our father lay dying at 2 a.m.
He is my favorite, said Eileen.
Each midnight she’d toast 4 slices of raisin

bread, buttered.
He would eat them whole, she explained.
We stood around his bed.
Here, see how the skin is mottled. This
is the process.
2
It comes like the tide.
See how the mottling has moved from
leg to hip. Seven breaths like breakers
on a ragged coast, then 40 seconds of silence,
repeating, through the day and night.
2:05 a.m.
It’s happening, Eileen says. She holds my father’s
left hand. My sister, Helen holds his right

hand. He opens his eyes. My sister
says, Hi Daddy. We’re here Daddy.
We love you. It is 2:07. He closes his eyes and does not breathe.
I kiss my father’s forehead.
3
I walk down the hall, past
prints of landscapes,
dancers,
a fire extinguisher,
to the nurse’s station,

to make some phone calls,
thinking of my father singing,
“I’ll Be Around,”
in front of the mirror shaving when we were kids,
in the car on the way to the football games,
at family reunions,
at the nurse’s stations during the last days of his life.
He had a wonderful voice. I was having difficulty
keying phone numbers. He was an excellent punster
and had a fine sense of humor that often involved
shooting one of several persons.
4
Knock knock, he said, on countless occasions.

Who’s there, someone would answer.
Orange juice.
Orange juice, who?

Orange juice sorry you made me cry,
he would say, and everyone would make a face

like it was lemon juice,
and he would fill the room
with that wonderful wild-ass laugh.
5
They came into his room, one by one,
on the last full day of his life.
He was very special, they said.
He was such a love, said one.
He always said I love you to me, said another.
He had an extraordinary appetite, said a male nurse,
and a smile like sunlight, he added.
6
During the last full day and night before
he died, we sat and stood around his bed:
Jessica, Will, Pete, Carol, Elizabeth,
Tucker, Mark, Deb, Helen, Byron Jr.,
and Linda. Will started the “Whiffenpoof
Song” and we sang together. Jessica
told Byron how unspeakably handsome
he was and how much she loved him. Elizabeth
and Helen kissed and stroked him, and told him
everything was okay. Tucker distributed
his usual rib-cracking hugs. Will put
on the Mills Brothers, one of Byron’s favorites.
Pete (that’s me) read poems by Charles Bukowski
and Mark Strand. I saw my brother, Mark, fill
with grief and silence. My little brother,
Byron Jr. held his father’s foot through
the sheets — silent–tears catching the dim light.
7
I see my father, much younger than I
am now, refereeing football in West
Barrington, leaves airborne in the fall sunlight.

I see him driving to Howard Johnson’s
with the windows down and the radio
blaring double play, Pesky to Doerr to Goodman.
I see him snag a football one-handed
at full gallop.
I hear him singing
with that wild light in his eyes: “Only You,”
“Slingin the Ink,” “Over There,” Then Thousand
Men of Harvard,” Baby Won’t You Please Come
Home,” and my personal favorites — “I’ll
Be Glad When You’re Dead You Dirty Dog,” and
“Hooray! Hooray! My Father’s Gonna be Hung.”
8
I see my father running free, before
a fair wind off the New England Coast,
a single sail, on a great circle: “From
where we come is to where we shall return,”
reads my calendar for October.
He was the last of his generation.
Eight Bells, Dad. What’s the course?
We relieve the watch.

Greetings from Cape Town!

What is it all about?

This has been an emotionally volatile last few days.  On Sunday we learned that close friends have separated (messily, it seems) after 15 years of marriage.  On Tuesday, another friend from the same community died of cancer. He was a young 49, and can only be described as a man in full.  He will be missed.  There was also a very high-profile murder of a young English woman in Cape Town on her honeymoon over the weekend.  This jangles my nerves (maybe irrationally) about security concerns here.

These events have had India and me talking seriously, and had us exchanging phone calls and e-mails with our friends in the U.S.  I can’t make any sense of it.  It has made me more aware of what I am calling “the fleeting sweetness of normalcy.”  This time we have as a family, just normal day-to-day living, without any (evident) life-changing stress or pressures, is incredibly precious. 

I need to treasure these times, and engage emotionally more with India and with the kids and with family and friends.  

In that spirit, Zola and I played the board game “Life” after dinner this evening.  He asked for the actual off-line game in a box for his birthday, after playing the iTouch version for the last year.   Tallulah was my designated spinner and life-decision advisor. 

The game itself was not very competitive.  Zola ended up a multi-millionaire doctor, and I ended up nearly penniless as a computer programmer turned accountant.  Five times during the game he ended up on spaces that required him to “sue me for $100,000.”  I was deep in debt for most of the game, and had to live with my six offspring in a mobile home.  It was interesting to me that Zola and Tallulah  automatically put the drivers on the right side of the little cars at the beginning of the game.  They are becoming South African.  It was also interesting that when I chose to make my character gay (ie, I put a little blue figure into the passenger seat when I got married instead of a pink figure), both kids noticed and objected.  Maybe we should have lived longer in the West Village.

As we made our way around the board, though, I was thinking about our friend’s untimely death, and about the highs and lows of my own game of life. 

Just in the last two weeks, there have been so many small, almost mundane highs: hosting Tallulah’s 6th birthday party on the beach…

Birthday games on Llandudno beach

attending last night’s US vs. South Africa soccer match at Cape Town Stadium, with Zola and three of his friends; helping a new friend with his unbelievably great small business; having dinner in Istanbul; running part of the Three Peaks Challenge with my beautiful endurance-machine wife; having a great afternoon of surfing with Zola at Muizenberg; Tallulah getting accepted (finally!) into the private girls’ school that we have been coveting since we got back to Cape Town. 

Even the mere fact of lying on our living-room floor with two great kids, playing a game that I loved when I was Zola’s age.

I am thinking about how many things have to be going well for any of these events to take place, and for us to enjoy them.  We have to be alive, for one thing, and healthy, and have a little bit of money, and be physically together and reasonably functional.  Pedestrian and bourgeois miracles, perhaps, but I sure am appreciating them at the moment.

Tallulah singing in her school play

I’m heartsick about missing Tallulah’s birthday today, and generally I hate being stuck somewhere for hours with not much to do. The only saving grace is that I’m stuck at the Istanbul Airport, which is one of my favorite places in the world.

Full disclosure: for the first time, I am waiting out the hours until the midnight flight to Johannesburg in the business-class lounge. And it is nowhere near as exotic as the rest of the airport. Mostly middle-aged business guys watching soccer on TV and reading newpapers. Collectively, we miss our families, and wish we were at home.

Many of my other experiences in this airport have been memorable. I spent hours one night drinking beer with South African mercenaries who were going home from Iraq on leave. I stood in an endless passport queue with the Latvian national basketball team. They weren’t as tall as I would have expected.

While boarding a flight to Istanbul, my small children got elbowed aside and nearly crushed by a mob of Mecca-bound Algerian pilgrims. I have idled away time wondering what the appropriate collective noun is for a large group of women who are completely covered by black tent dresses, head and face coverings. Pails of veils? A boatload of burqas?

I romanticize this airport as the epicenter of exotic.

A few sightings just now have made me laugh, and think of our family trip around the world.

I waited in a check-in line with a planeload of passengers bound for Ashgabad, the capital of Turkmenistan (of course). Every passenger had a trolley piled high with 5-f huge soft-sided bags, wrapped in tape and plastic. Every single passenger. I gather that: Turkish Airlines doesn’t charge for extra luggage, that consumer goods must be hard to come by in Turkmenistan, and that customs enforcement must be a little lax. The sheer amount of stuff being transported made me think that we could have carted a lot more around on our trip if I hadn’t been such a grouch about luggage.

In the lounge they are serving a cold drink that reminded me of one of the funniest moments of our entire family trip. We were in Gocek, Turkey, geting ready to go out on a sailboat for a week. We stopped for lunch at a pizzeria before boarding the boat, for what we thought would be our last fishless meal for a week. The restaurant had this awesome drinks machine, that was gushing a frothy, creamy, vanilla milkshakey drink in a circulating fountain. Both kids locked onto this spectacle, and ordered by pointing. The anticipation grew when the waiter pulled two giant frosted mugs from a freezer, and made a huge production of filling the mugs, and blowing the foam, and making comic sounds like “Mmmmmmm.” The mugs he set in front of the kids were overflowing with magical, cold, foamy white stuff. Zola grabbed his first, and took a big sip. It turned out to be sour milk, and I thought he was going to keel over, barf, and scream, all at the same time. The gap between how awesome it looked and how awful it tasted was as wide as any food experience I’ve ever had.

I bought an ice cream cone from a classic Turkish ice cream guy, wearing a white top hat, and scooping with a long metal paddle.

This trip to Istanbul was too short to see or do anything in the city. Still, I just love it here. The energy, and the determination, and the pride of the people are powerful and exciting. The economy is booming, and there were more English and American banker types around than I have ever seen before. Turks believe (with great confidence and some justification) that this is their time, and here they come.

I think I will go out and wander around the main part of the airport for my last few hours. Maybe I can transport some of that confidence and energy back to self-doubting South Africa.

Greetings from Cape Town!

In the last couple of weeks, everyone else in the family has achieved things that seem beyond their previous capabilities.  Maybe it is coincidental, but it has been fun for me to watch.  At the risk of sounding like a self-aggrandizing holiday letter:

Tallulah has started reading.  For several months she has been close, reading a few words when we looked at books together, surprising us by having clearly understood something that no one read to her.  I actually think she was holding back, sneaker, because she likes having us read to her.  Last week, though, she just decided to reveal all and read aloud.  No hesitation, just words tumbling out of her. 

Tallulah is also pushing the edge of an envelope called turning 6.  Hard to believe that we celebrated her birthday in Rajasthan two years ago already.  Time flies, so we must be having fun.  She and India organized a great birthday party on the beach on Friday afternoon.  The weather was awful, cloudy and windy and cold, but the kids had a grand time splashing in the freezing water and running in the sand.  The parents grumbled, but we retreated to the house and opened a few bottles of wine, and had a very civilized adult party, watching while the kids all went into the pool.

Zola has finally turned the corner in speaking Afrikaans.  We have had a great tutor for the last couple of months, and something has clicked with grammar and vocabulary, and away he goes.  We are still worried about his grades in Afrikaans, and exams and cycle tests, etc., but he is actually getting it.  India and I have worried a lot about his academic self confidence, and it would be great if Afrikaans somehow turned from a weakness to a strength.  Maybe we should let him walk a little before we expect him to run.

Zola also had a swimming time trial for the Surf Lifesaving Club on Thursday. For the first time in his life, I saw his mother’s fierce competitiveness come through.  When Zola and I practiced for the time trial, he complained, and swam side stroke, and adjusted his goggles a dozen times.  On Thursday, though, he just swam as hard and fast as he could.  He didn’t quite make the cutoff, but he knocked two minutes off his previous best time.  He said, “It was like a man came into my brain and threw a big switch, and all I wanted to do was beat those other kids.  I was really tired, but I just had to beat them.”  This is so far removed from his normal behavior that it was quite stunning.  If he qualifies on the swimming (it is difficult), he can compete in the surf lifesaving events against other clubs, and I think that is driving him as well.

India pushed the envelope the furthest.  Last Friday, she was invited to run in a crazy, 120-person Cape Town endurance race called the Three Peaks.  The distance is listed as +/- 50 kilometers, climbing and descending about 2700 meters.  The distances are not precise, because there is no fixed course.  The rough course is: start at sea level in the center of Cape Town (Greenmarket Square) and run to the top of Devils Peak (900 meters), then run back down to Greenmarket Square and run up to MacLear’s Beacon at the top of Table Mountain (1100 meters), then back down to Greenmarket Square and up to the top of Lion’s Head (700 meters), then finally back to Greenmarket Square.  She started at 5am and finished at 2pm.

To put it in context (for New Englanders, anyway), this is like running East from the Vermont-New Hampshire border, to the top of Mount Washington, then up another 3,000 feet or so, then back down.  I am in awe.

The Three Peaks Challenge is deep in the realm of psychotic endurance events.  India hooked up with a great support team of veteran runners and their long-suffering spouses, so she had good guidance in finding the right trails (getting lost on Devils Peak in the dark  is a real risk), and having her supplies and dry clothes handy.  It was raining for the first part of the race, and very misty on the first two peaks.  India, however, was in her element.  When the kids and I found her, coming down the Platteklip Trail on Table Mountain, she was drenched, but deliriously happy in an endorphin-fueled runner’s high (pupils dilated, permagrin, high fives all around).  Two hours later I caught up with her as she climbed Lion’s Head slowly in the bright sunshine.  She said she was “empty,” in part because I had missed our connection where I was supposed to bring potatoes and peanut butter, but her mood was good.  The fact that she refused to take off her jacket in the heat made me concerned that she was not exactly compos mentis. 

We climbed Lion’s Head together: it is the 45th time she has climbed it in 2010. The checkpoint at the top gave her a Snickers bar, some water, and a banana.  Suddenly the old India was back, and we raced down the mountain and back to town.  She crossed the finish line with a huge smile. 

We sat in Greenmarket Square with her team mates for an hour after the race.  They, and all of the other finishers we met, were incredibly nice, interesting, people: young archaeologist, recent heart-surgery patient, ex-chainsmoker, mild Aspergers sufferer.  They had welcomed India into their lunatic-fringe fraternity of extreme trail running.  We were both sorry to say goodbye and go pick up the kids.  They told India that the new training schedule for the 2011 race will be e-mailed around on Monday.

So, envelope edges being pushed all around.  My only claim to same is that I have been officially named the Provisional Deputy Assistant Flags Coach for the lifesaving club.  “Flags” is one of the competitive events in lifesaving, and it involves a lot of shouting at kids as they lie face down in the sand.  I’m not sure whether I am good at it yet, but Tallulah (my Deputy Deputy Assistant) and I are having fun on Sunday mornings.