14 ESSAYS while in AFRICA (October 2010)

1) At The Feet of Mandela

There is an imposing grandeur to the statue of Madiba, as he is known, the great soul. He stands perhaps 60 feet high, his huge bronze shoes all bright and shiny from those touching or sat at his feet. The rest of him soars aloft and imposing in the subtle greens and browns of Africa. It seems incongruous that opposite him, through the courtyard with its sprouting fountains, there is a model-shoot with an attendant gaggle of cameramen and vanity poses and exaggerations of stance and outer-wear. Madiba is plainly attired, plainly authentic, very real, and as iconic as the statue itself is.

Mike Jablonski takes me there over lunch. We first were in the Sandton Mall, adjacent to the Mandela square, and Mike one-handedly pushes me, walking beside me, and we share stories from childhood and swap memories, yet at each intersection of our thread find meaning and significance in the fact that each ‘then’ brought us to this ‘very now’, even as I type.

Esemplastic and complex is my new friend Mike. He drew attention to the thousands of hands and hearts and steps and thoughts and feelings and ideas that wrought about our very reunion on the same day and moment of time that brings even you right now to be reading these very words. And we agreed that living in a state of gratitude and grace was the way of the present, as had Mandela led the way, rather than to be harping on the very past that we cannot change, not for all our wishing.

We whiled away an hour or three on the square’s patio over Alfredo and Rooibos, and we also went and purchased some gifts for those we love. In the CNA (Central News Agency), a company in which I was the branch manager at Wynberg, Cape Town in 1974, I bought an Afrikaans novel of short stories by a recent writer, Deon Mayer, called “Karoonag en ander Verhale” (and the more adventurous of you might Google the translation). Mike buys me a Herman Charles Bosman compendium; the kind of short stories written from a Boer point of view, in English, full of wry humour and insightful pathos. And at the feet of Mandela I am wheeled close by a contingent of tourists. An elderly Japanese man in a wheelchair, pushed by his daughter, locks eyes momentarily with me, and we both break into smiles at our comparative similarity of predicament, and as we pass we reactively give a high-five, right there, right below the beneficence of the man, the great soul, once incarcerated for over 27 years, yet who instilled the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Madiba reached across the racial tensions of the proverbial bloodbath that so very many expected in 1994. And now that Japanese man and I, below Mandela’s gaze, are in no need of a common language other than the indelible recognition between us of our very humanness. So are the colours and the distinctions and the differences given blend, given oneness, given yet one more push along the turgid river of hope for accord within the natural boundaries that contain us all.

Mike’s rental van swallows up my chair. As I type he is away with it to the airport to go and pick up Rob Zikmann. It is 6.00pm. Rob’s plane got in at 4.30. I stayed behind to meet up with Quenton de Kock. Quenton, you see, was our classmate back in 1970. In fact, he was the last Pretoria Boy’s High boy that I saw, when I went to his house to collect my package of five class photos that he’d had reproduced for each of his friends. And I never saw or wrote to him again. But at 4.45pm today he arrived at my hotel door, jovial and full of camaraderie, and gave me yet another package; a book of South African Writing compiled by John Clare, with its picture researched by a mutual old Pretoria Boys High friend of ours, Harold Thompson. Harold, in gratitude for our Facebook tick-tacking that was initiated just this year, had emailed me about two months ago to say he was bringing the book for me, but now, with the sudden and unexpected discovery of having had an only child, 36 years later, he was on his way to London to meet his new-found son. Still, in all that it must have taken for Harold to come to terms with his new treasure, he’d remembered to parcel the book, to drop it off to Quenton, and then good old Quenton had bothered to find and bring the book to me. And Quenton’s story gave rise to my own, that of our discovering our only sister, 44 years later. Carol was met and fully embraced by my own father, just 18 months before he died, 2004.

We give value to things. We take for granted gestures that may have cost thousands of minute little steps, begun even before Gutenberg’s 15^th century printing press, or Caxton’s  1475 introduction of its efficacy to the West. As Mike had alerted me, all the hours and hands that had floated that book of Harold’s along the river of life into this particular moment of significance, even as I now type, and even as you now read, deserves one’s gratitude. What then do we do with the seeds we so easily sow? What might our awesome responsibility not be were we yet more meta-cognitively to examine our motive, intent, and meanderings?

It is now 2.10 a.m. I’d eventually bid good night, at about 10.30, to Rob and Mike, and was asleep almost instantly. But now the darkness of the early morning and my sudden alertness to the expectations of this first official day of the 40 year Reunion has me waiting for the men to get ready for a very early start to manage the snarling roads and the emergent exigencies of getting from Johannesburg to Pretoria on time for the PBHS breakfast gathering. So, in the privacy of my room I softly go tick-tack on the keyboard with these thoughts of communicating with you. I am alive to the presence of my new friend, Rob, met for the very first time last night, though we’d spent 5 years in a school together.

Rob is this 6ft lean and handsome Comrades Marathon runner. At 88km that marathon’s k.m. stands for kill-me, I think. He’d once run it from Pietermaritzburg through the Valley of a Thousand Hills down to Durban, with a very bad flu, an exceedingly high temperature, and had had to be conveyed at the end of it with saline drips and severe dehydration to the hospital; but he’d done it. When they picked him up in stretcher at the finishing line he was ashamed to be on the stretcher, and covered his face with his track-suite top. That was when he was younger.

Younger. I shared with him the months of 1973 with my being a stoker on the SA Railways, based in Mason’s Mill, just out of P’maritzburg, and working at those old Bongols and Gammats, the coal-fed steam engines on the torturous route to Franklin.

The vanity that drives us is predicated so very much on our past. He’d had a very tough childhood. It was filled with material things. But he had a dominating father who hardly ever praised. The father would take the chamois (shammy) from Rob after he’d been relegated to spend almost the whole Sunday cleaning the Jag and (says Rob, now getting right up from his recline on the couch cushions that he’d set up on our hotel sitting room floor specially so that I would not have to turn my neck alternately to see him and Mike as we three formed a triumvirate of communiqué) “My father would find some spot I’d missed, even if it was in the middle of the car’s roof (and here Rob leans his 6ft height over the TV stand and in classic semiotics, and rubs at the surface) and he’d show me that I wasn’t ever good enough.” There’s a catch in this giant of man’s throat. It was just one of the several times we each had swapped stories and revelations of the past. Rob’s father had two jaguars, and the gold E-type was renown amongst the boys of the school. But Rob used to be skinny, shy, asthmatic, introverted, and pre-pubescent. Even in the army he was but a boy amongst the men. And then one day he discovered he had an academic gift, and that he could actualize his potential by the discipline of redirecting his habits, and he began running. In the late-bloomer stage of his life he entered the bar (no, he did not become an alcoholic, ha!) he became a barrister. He even learned to avoid the reaction people give to lawyers, to pronounce as a barista (ha!) and people presumed he tended bar, not that he served at the bar, (ha! ha!)  And he kept on running, and he grew, filled out, and one magic day, in his late twenties, he crested a rise on one of his marathon runs and there, unexpectedly, was his father, actually jumping up and down with excitement and pride for him, cheering him on.

The conditionality of love, of forgiveness, of acceptance, of receiving or giving love; is it innate or do we acquire such things as a result of watching those around us? Are we like babies who implicitly begin to understand that we too one day, like those older ones around us, will walk? We each gave examples for both contentions.  

Well, Mandela stands rooted, his arm outstretched in welcome, the famous smile now an icon of a time when man began to cross the final frontier of legalized racism.  So it is in Africa. But is it so in our hearts? What other lines stretched taught at the edges of our own individual paradigms do we need to cross before we are free to integrate the yin and the yang? How to flow with the continual balance of calibrating to the vicissitudes of this journey of life? If it is inherent in the moment to particularize, itemize, judge, prefer, co-ordinate, and pre-occupy ourselves with the demands of our self-centricity, how do we easily, simply, let go? And we, individually, by group, either at our own or at our collective peril eschew the letting go of the very constraints that would chain us to the earth, to our habits, to our value judgements, to our enslavement to the need for the approbation of others. We are mimetic, and so, lemming like, we run and turn and sway with the immediate mass of energy swirling about us, even as you have followed with your eyes the back and forth lines of this missive. 

This has been the gist of our discourse. As Rob intoned, tears in his eyes; every one of us has a story, and that story is sacred. It is our story, and it matters not that others validate it or identify with it; it matters that we find our own voice. As Rob quoted from a plaque he’d once come across near a mountain-top. “Death is just a horizon defined by a line of sight.” Yes, we create our own limitations. Rob Zikmann, Mike Jablonski, Quenton de Kock, Brian Cameron Haynes Smart, and me; all men in the late half of our sixth decade, all with a desire to find and share hearts filled with compassion and the search for wisdom, paying homage at the feet of Mandela. How some of our ancestors would turn in their graves!

 

Worth Posting?

There appears no reason to post here. There is little evidence of others reading it. The NOTES section on Facebook Profile has my fourteen or so essays of Africa. Were i to paste them in here, which of you would prefer it to my Facebook pages?? I shall check this missive for a week; no responses, no further postings. But then again, if you would like the essays here, well then, i'm ready to post! Leastwise, we save on trees!

ACCEPTANCE of The Sandy Singer AWARD: 21st August, 2010

Richard: [wheels on, pauses, scans crowd for getting grounded in 'the now']
Thank you, the Awards Committee, I am deeply honoured by your selection of me for this year's award.

There are very many among you who could have been selected for this award tonight; may yet be selected as the years progress. It's a question of not being overlooked. Now, given my physical and geographical stature in this wheelchair you'll say it's easy to overlook me, ha!, but that's not the kind of overlooking I'm talking about. It's that you, who toil so diligently on behalf of us all, be not overlooked: The seamstresses, the prop gatherers, the set painters, the costume and stage and lights and program and production personnel. You are the ones who spend countless unseen if not lonely hours doing what you do, on behalf of us all. But more important than you yourself not being overlooked, is that you yourself do not do the overlooking.

We live in theatre for the reward of giving to each other, especially in amateur theatre. Almost every one of us here does these magnificent shows for the sake of collaboration with our fellows. We give to an audience who pays, yes, but who pays us only with applause. Audience money goes to the company, to the next show, never to us. So we give each other thanks, and every little card you write, every 'thank you' you give, and each time we award someone in this annual event, we show proof of our not overlooking another. Well, tonight it's my turn. I humbly accept your thanks, and I give my thanks too. I know I receive this award not nearly as much as a result of my own efforts, but as a result of all those who have supported me along the way. And that, as for many of us, includes also the, uh, fortitude of our significant others, as in my case: Linda Michelle-Pentelbury.

Now, given that I came into the Calgary theatre scene with Storybook in 1981, a listing of names significant to me is definitely going to leave someone out. Take, for instance, my own guest of honour sitting in her wheel chair up at the back, Hilda Doherty. Now almost 94 years old, Hilda at 80 was the brilliant star of my show Glorious and Free, back in 1996. Then too, only a few here were lucky enough to work alongside the brilliant and talented Jim and Tina Sarantis. Others, like Pasqualina, and Andrea White, and David Gagnier have gone to other cities. So too just think of the huge contribution of a Diane LeBlanc, of an Alana Gowdy, or a Gerry Hemphill, or, back in the 80's, Ellie Tims. Each have had enormous influence and impact on me. And right here there are people I've depended on year after year, like the incredible Cat Bentley, Dennis Daly, Tim and Linda Elliot, Joanne Sampson, Wilma Rothbauer, Frank and Faith and Angie and Margaret and Christine Horne, and then there's Richard Heyman and Mike and Caren Johnson, and Val and Greg and Jay and Lynette Newman, and Karen Iwanski, Paul Hilton, and the phenomenal Pat Becada. Where should I stop? It is Diane Le Blanc, as I recall, who was awarded the first Sandy Singer Award, followed by people we all know and appreciate, such as Paul Stanton, Bill Torrie, Amanda Chapman, Tim Elliot, and...

Well, there are two individuals I want to thank here especially, for they exemplify for me what our community theatre is all about. The first is my 1988 Grade 8 student, Mary Anne Wilson (now become Mrs. Wickerson). Mary Anne not only performs, but has served as musical director in countless productions since then. The second is my 1989 grade eleven student, Sean Anderson. After doing 12 shows with me Sean started Morpheus Theatre, 15 years ago, and thanks largely to him Calgary-Acts was born! Sean too, in 2005 (?), was a recipient of this prestigious Sandy Singer Award.

But for me the most important person of all, and I submit, to you, is Penelope. [pauses, looks at aisle]. Come up here, my dear. [mimes receiving her] Penelope is the actress upon whom our theatre foundations are built. She represents the brand new, untried, inexperienced, and first timer. Now, lest our want of these awards preclude the Penelope's of our world in our quest for only the best, I would caution directors at the audition table; we want to welcome new blood! As for her male counterpart? [indicates aisle] Well, come on up! [mimes a welcome hug, 'agh'] Allow me to introduce someone many of you may know: Harvey! Ladies and gentlemen, let us not overlook those who appear invisible. They may become the star! Let us see and thank each and every one of us. All for one, and one for? [cocks ear] ...One for? [audience:]...All ! Thank you. With this award you send me off to retirement with a heartfelt Bang, and nary a whimper, indeed. Yes? Good night. [wheels off]

The Hitch (being a discussion about Johari, You, and Me)

(Photo courtesy of Mike Jablonski)

The Hitch:

As soon as dawn begins to gild the African sky I jog, often with my thumb out at a passing car, alongside the highway for about an hour before a lone cream Toyota, a brand new 1975 model, stops just ahead of me. I get inside and the lanky driver, somewhere in his late forties and dressed in a business suit sticks out his hand, and says, "Ian. You?"

"Boe... Adam," I blurt, changing my South African accent to sound more British.

He glances quickly at me, then steers the car back onto the road. "You have something to hide, Boe... Adam?" His accent is foreign. Canadian?

I grimace, "No! Sorry. Just prefer my English name, that's all."

"Ah. So, you look only through one windowpane at a time, eh?"

I realize I'm in for an interesting conversation. There is something educated about the man, something classical. I respond with, "One windowpane. Ha! We have several panes in our windows on the world do we?"

The side of his eye crinkles. He nods. "Yep. I read somewhere that we're viewed through a four-paned frame. The Johari Window, it's called. One pane is the stuff through which you usually view yourself that others see too, the other is the pane through which others view you that you don't know, and the third is the pane you don't let others know about you." He drives on, keeping quiet.

Soon enough, I prod, "The fourth?"

"Ah!" He smiles briefly. "The insight you have yet to discover about yourself."

I chuckle, "We are talking about a 'p-a-n-e' here, are we, Ian?"

"Ha! Not always," he rejoins, "Not always."

As the car winds steeply down through the spectacular jungle of the Knysa Gorge we go quiet. The dense rainforest makes me uncomfortable with its shadowy reminders of my recent army involvement; I see snipers, and my eyes dart about for snares, and snakes; and my skin can feel the itch and crawl of ants. But then, as we emerge over the lip of the climb from the jungle back into the sunshine, I volunteer, "I guess the trick is continually to be aware of the whole window frame of oneself in the first place, isn't it? Ha! It would be good to remember to always look into others that way too."

"Ah! But others could always draw their blinds," smiles the man, his long face appearing sad. "Others do draw the blinds."

I look for a point of intimacy. "Blinds. Yeah. Say, Ian, I knew this old guy, a Meneer Venster. Ha! 'Venster,' it means 'a window,' you know. This old guy thought he saw clearly, but he sure pulled a blind one on me, poor fellow."

His chin rises. "Why 'poor fellow'?"

Suddenly I feel too close to revealing my headlong purpose; to revealing that I'm actually AWOL. I cannot afford to be stopped now! I have to hitchhike to the Cape, stowaway on a ship or work my passage if I can, but I have to...

"Why 'poor fellow'?"

"Ah... his intentions were good."

Ian grimaces. "Intentions, without insight, I think, are like a pecking chicken found suddenly without a head. Perk-perk. Flapping about. Ha! What'd he do?"

Somehow, I now recall George, the old goose of my childhood. Do we all get caught in the end? I become progressively uncomfortable. "Oh, nothing... he just thought he'd be helping me out, when in fact he precipit..., provided that doomed chicken its own ax! Ha!"

Ian grimaces, then, "Yeah," he sighs.

I keep my eyes on the road. "So?" I venture, "Someone had an ax to grind while you were too close?"

"Ha! Happens to all of us." He smiles with blue eyes, dips his head, and volleys back. "You?"

Again, I feel disconcerted. I'm aware that this gentle-talking man will easily pull my story from me; there is something of the seeker in him, the mentor, the consoler, the intimate. I fob him off with: "Me? Nah. Too busy getting out of the way! Ha! That's my motto: always get out of the way!"

"Getting out of the way, eh? Yes. Yes. So? That's what you're doing now?"

I nod.

"Want to tell me about it?"

"No! No. Thanks. Not yet. Maybe you'll read about it sometime. I'm think I'm going to write about it... someday."

He focuses on the road intently, and then says, "Promise."

"Promise what?"

"That you'll write."

I swallow. "I promise."

"O.K. So? I'm only going as far as Bredarsdorp. You?"

"Bredars..." Images of the nearby Air Force base overwhelm me. I cannot afford to have anyone who'd perhaps served with me in some capacity or other recognize me; I've got to get outta here!

Ian adds, "Or is that too far off the beaten track?"

"Oh! Well, thanks. I'd like to be dropped off at Swellendam then. I'm going to Stellenbosch. You know; the university and all that. I'm a student." I lie.

He looks quickly at me. "Great. Well, not much further."

We fall silent.

At our parting Ian says, "Adam. Look. Here's my address. Calgary. Write sometime."

"I promise," I say, again. And then he is gone, the sun glinting brightly off the back window of the hurrying Toyota.

Now let's get outta here, I keep hoping, as I set to flagging down passing cars. I gotta get outta here!

The Hole in The Whole (from a chapter of my novel)

                                                                        [photo courtesy of Justin Neway]

A boarding house friend's borrowed front wheel now on my bike, my old flat one tucked under my left arm, the spanner in my pocket, I pedal hastily through the lamp-lit streets. Only the moon peers at me occasionally from between buildings, or as I round a corner. At my feet the old stars of the reflector strips whirl and whirl until I come at last to the familiar wire-fence surrounding the Kimberley Big Hole, locate the old crawlspace that we boys have used since making it over three years ago, and stop.

Quickly, I exchange the front wheels and hide the borrowed one behind a big clump of prickly cactus, obscene in the silvery light. Then I push the bike closer to the wire fence that surrounds the giant crater, hoist the handlebars to a cling over the top barb-wired strands, and let it hang.

Next, I slide on my sweat-soaked back through the tight wire-gap. Carefully, I keep the old rusty slice-sharp prongs away from my face. Ha! I care. I still care! Given my plan, the subconscious one surfacing from within me, it is strange to care anymore. On the rusty wire, wobbling and jangling like a skeletal curve-horned buck, the bicycle and its reflectors blink. I shoulder and buttock and heel at the ground, then I’m through.

The diamond patterns in the criss-cross wire fence serve for toeholds as I climb to reach the handlebars. Then, as savage as a leopard at a deer, I tug. It's stuck! I try to wrench the contortions of the contraption up and over but it pulls heavily, then sticks tight, its saddle caught. I growl, clench tightly, and throwing my whole weight downwards, kick with my feet at the fence and wrangle at the writhing cycle until there is a sudden tearing sound as the spiked wire rips through the seat-leather, and the whole thing comes free, too instantly, and I fall with it nearly atop me in a loud clatter, its pedal-strips spinning brightly.

A dog at the houses on the other side of the road sets up a noisy alarm.

I grab up the bike up and scoot off with it into the deeper shadows of the humped and hardened mine dumps. But there is no sign of pursuit. I push the bike further through the soft gray-blue sand and the rubble alongside the ragged lip of the dark-throated crater. And I grit my teeth; the now dead boy who'd stolen it from me had pushed the thing just like this; and it had got him back! Thrown him into the path of a car. I just have to get rid of it!

At the edge of the pit I pause. The Big Hole gapes grimly. In the moonlight the cliffs at my feet descend and descend, then slope off in a shelf, before slicing straight down again. Like a rock-hewn funnel, the pit is more than a thousand feet deep, by more than a mile or so across. The black earthen humps around it can hardly account for the volumes of soil that had once been excavated. At the bottom is this great silvery gray-green lake, bound in by sheer rock, yet perhaps no more than an aggregation of scummy water collected over the decades. Some spindly looking trees clutch to the slopes here and there, like the sickly shadows of so many desperately clinging men. The projection of the slope below me is the problem; I need a free fall.

I loosen the knot of my school tie, and then shove the bike onward, alongside the lip of precipice, until I reach the distinct prominence that the other boys and I have at times stood on as the only likely platform from which to hurl stones all the way to the bottom.

Even now, as I take up and hurl a fist-sized rock into the blackness of the void and listen for the distantly muted, plop, I catch myself briefly wondering about the old problem. On the formula of speed-equals-distance-over-time, we’d tried to work out the depth by counting out the seconds as we listened for the splash. But always, the answers would vary, although we know the museum records to reflect the average depth at 1,335 feet.

I put down the bike, fasten the tail end of my school tie to the front rim, double-knot the wide end as a hand-grip for me, and then stand up. “Here we go, old friend,” I breathe at last, and feel tears run down my cheeks.

Dragging it first even closer to the edge, I begin ever faster sliding the bike round and around in the dirt, before it becomes airborne, and holding tight and whirling in the dust, I finally feel its centrifugal force take over, and I let go.

The bike sails flatly away from me and over the edge and into the blackness. As brief as flitting fireflies the spokes twinkle, and the pedals sparkle, and then the thing is swallowed down deep. I listen, it seems forever, for the expected splash. And just when I think that I’ll have to return in daylight to find some way of dislodging it from a shrub, or the face of the lower slope, I hear a faint gargling swallow echoing up from the well of that great dark throat. Hau!

“Eyah!” I scream back, loud and raw and ragged, so that it resounds over and over from the bowels of the cauldron. “Eyah; Eyah; Eyah!”

But it gives me little release.

I sit down on the rockledge over the darkly yawning abyss. Thick black silence issues in almost palpable densities from below. Away in the distance the dog still yaps unendingly. Above me is the leaden night, like a broad smudge of gray paint holding the beleagured moon up against the face of the universe.

Why not jump too?

I blink. And shiver. And need to stand. And struggle to rise on stiffened joints and aching muscles, and suddenly wobble and tip toward the gulping void.

“Whuh-ha!” I sit down quickly, and dig into the earth with my fingertips, my heart thumping. Then I laugh out loud at my own foolishness. Eyah! I very much want to stay alive!

I shake my head. The thing is over. But why do I not feel free?

Sufficient Unto the Moment

We stand in stasis at our own peril. That’s what Sam does. He stands perfectly still; been doing so for years. A fairly ordinary looking man, except that he’s bronzed by time and stature, Sam stands permanently at the railing of a boardwalk that woodenly rattles at the rest of us on our way over the Victoria pond. Sam is not his real name, it’s Roy, but I call him Sam. He looks so serenely meditative that I’m sure he’d not mind, even if he were not a statue, for the sculptor has him captivated in a stasis not only of immobility, but of reflection for the rest of his years.
Sam’s stance has him leaning on the railing, most naturally. The pigeons leave their goo on him. The rain must wash it off. People pass by, and some spare him no glance; others will stop and talk around him, about him, poke him, prod him, even write on him, but I doubt that many speak to him. And I doubt even more that people stop and stay to listen to what he has to say. Or is that, to hear what he has to mean?

Sam’s very immobility is the art with which he lives. Arresting, arrested, the kindness of his face beaming out over the pond, Sam has no judgement, no censure, no expectations, and no defensiveness in play. He’ll listen to whatever one has to say, and he’ll appear to sympathize, to empathize, to hear, or at least to give back whatever projection one may ascribe to such a one as Sam. It is quite possible he may even only be pretending to hear, as trapped in his own thoughts as he is, but that too is the way of Sam.

It does strike me as selfish, this stance of Sam’s. He has no responsibility other than to himself. He has no obligations. He need not even make choices. He need not shift, move, decide, look left or right, nor even so much as take a seat; Sam stands in stasis, ready only to receive, and ready to give back whatever one may presume, assume, glean, garner, or perceive of him. But to demands he is immobile. One cannot threaten, cajole, bribe or jibe him into a response. Sam stands inviolate, at least, in his inner core. There are about him the markings of the rude, the crude, the lewd. There are about him the detritus of the uncaring, the messy, the selfish. And still, Sam stands and watches it all.

We stand in stasis at our own peril. But not Sam. Whenever I pass him, or even think of him, I wonder if he’s that much wiser for having so stuck himself to one spot that he, frozen in the moment, has extended that moment of presence to the full meaning of his lifetime, which, given Sam’s very stasis, is bound to outlive us all. And then again, I wonder if Sam is not a metaphor for the moments in all of us, caught up like photographs and extended into the multi-dimensionality of time and space; a moment in the now when everything that we are, have been, and will be, is sufficient entirely unto the moment.
Next time, Sam, I’ll stop and try to listen to what it is that you mean. And, now that I’ve given you this much thought, I’m resolved to calling you Roy, the name by which you go. In the meantime, stay well.

A PITY

“No value to me.” That’s what he said as I approached with my store of the steps I’d taken to reach him. He sat stolid, immovable. We once had been boys together; toiled side by side at lessons, books, on the playing fields, and under the masters. And now, he on his pinnacle of immutability, his right to make decisions for himself, his private reasons for disassociation, or even his ineluctable intractability brought out not necessarily by his own wants but by the dictates of his purveyance, his vocation, his location, gives him licence to be dismissive? Would that he said something of regret, but, “no value”?


Obligation is an awful feeling. We are each obliged to be at the meeting place, the crossroads, the bifurcation point, the intersection, the wedding of time and space; it is incumbent upon being human, a necessity of being part of the whole. But obligation engenders in us a different reaction to that of an accidental meeting; it requires of us a conscious presence however unconscious we may prefer in the moment to be. For it is a degree of consciousness that has us evaluating and judging and approving and disliking the moment sufficient to feel obliged in the first place. So we despise the family gathering, the birthday party, the celebration of precepts and concepts and concomitance that is not of our own accord. Obligation takes the ‘me’ of the moment and requires my ego to be sublimated to the needs of others. Moreover, it often dictates that I come attired in garb uncomfortable, unusual, or unnecessary to my everyday practice. Obligation expects if not demands the monetary contribution, the gift, the bottle of wine, the card, the smile, the pretence, the in-authenticity of chatter and light-hearted matter and polite but inane pleasantries that skim the surface of time and space. Yes, obligation is awful; until I care.


In caring I loose the sense of me to the welfare of others. In caring I loose the interest in myself to an interest in others. I do not lose! In caring I find myself entertained, invigorated, freed, and connected. And so the obligation of the event of our meeting becomes not about me, but about the other. That Christmas gathering, that birthday party, that graduation event, that office meeting, that forty year reunion; they all become part of the vicissitudes of valuing life as it is, as it was, as it will be. Caring practices integration, meta-cognition, giving.


We bring the past to each other cupped in our hearts as a thing of unique value to ourselves, for apart from the commonalities of being human, the marriage, the job, the children, the hopes and dreams, we each have a story of the whole that no other can have fully seen. And we bring the present to each other in a spirit of camaraderie, friendship, gratitude for each other’s interest, and a sense of contributing to the care of the whole. It will add to the future, to this meeting, to this offering up of the moment, obliged or not, provided that we care.


As the song might have sung it: “Regrets, I have a few, but then again too many to mention.” Well, at the very least, one may send regrets; but to deem our reunion of no value? A pity.