Deconstructing rage

I don’t get mad much anymore. Some years ago I had this epiphany in which I realized that when I was angry, that anger was actually hiding…masking…what I was really feeling, which was mostly hurt, fear, and/or disappointment. After some heavy thinking I came to realize that my anger was actually a reaction to one of those feelings, anger being more powerful and empowering than allowing myself to experience, yet again, those emotions I had come to equate with being a victim.

What brought me to that epiphany was a think-session in which I tried to figure out why I cried when I was mad. Talk about dis-empowering! I used to be able to work up a good head of steam…a really intimidating rage…only to have its intended effect completely neutralized by the telltale red nose, watery eyes, and streams of water coursing down my cheeks. Anger…the towering rage kind of anger…used to be the “big gun” in my emotional arsenal. It was effective, it was intimidating, it got me what I wanted, right up to the moment I started to tear up. I knew the tears to be a sign of an escalation of emotion…an expression of a rage so profound I felt like I was going to explode with it, but my victims took quite an opposite view. Instead of the power of my fury, they saw a weeping woman, ineffectually spitting out blunted barbs.

Eventually I would withdraw to a place of privacy and dissolve into a storm of noisy sobs. When that was over, I would emerge and if the situation had not been resolved to my satisfaction, a cold fury would set in. This was the dangerous one, because it fuelled retaliation, rejection, or worse. There were no tears in this determined, steely-eyed rage. It was cold, calculating, and bent on getting what I wanted at all costs. It took me years to untangle this and ultimately discover that this was not my process, it actually belonged to someone else, and the tears were my own personal contribution to it…and my only clue.

By the time I reached my mid-thirties, the cumulative dramas and traumas of my life were beginning to take their toll. I fell into a deep depression and began having suicidal thoughts. When things that would formerly enrage me occurred, I would go to bed, curl into a foetal position, and wish for the dark oblivion of death. During this period I found a therapy group and began to participate twice weekly. In the group sessions, the women would expiate their rages by beating huge pillows with tennis racquets, but I simply observed, clenched and rigid, my rage returned and barely controlled. But by the time I returned home, it had returned to its hiding place beneath my depression where it lay dormant, coiled and ready for its next summons.

I’d like to say that the rage slowly seeped away, but that wouldn’t be the truth. I just got better and better at keeping it under control. A divorce and remarriage later, it still lurked beneath my surface, popping out occasionally for a snack on someone’s ego, never diminishing in strength or potency, but remaining increasingly closeted. And then my husband died.

For the next nine days I was nearly in a fugue. I was unable to eat anything, and slept only when I was falling-down exhausted…and then for only a few hours. My mind, always alert and active, seemed to be a blank. And I couldn’t cry. Finally he was buried and I skipped the family lunch, hosted by the brother-in-law who had spent his life ridiculing and belittling his now-dead brother. I just went home, took off my widow’s weeds and went to sleep. For 20 hours.

I woke up alone and suddenly realized that this was to be my new life. Oh, I had been alone before…I had been divorced, after all, and had been in a more than a few broken relationships in my life, but this time it was different. This time there was no fights and furies and break-ups and make-ups en route to my single status. No indignant “how dare he?” or “what was I thinking?” moments, no grand emotional production leading up to the apocalyptic moment of dumping or being dumped. This time there was a fragile kind of peace around me, a serenity that was not disturbed even by my numbness or sudden, unexpected moments of tears. I was alone, my heart was rent into ragged little bits, but I felt purged of rage. There was no one to be angry with, nothing to be angry about. He was gone, it was nobody’s fault, and he wasn’t coming back.

The next months of being alone were not, surprisingly, lonely. I spent a lot of time fiddling with the computer…something I do to keep my “upper” consciousness occupied with trivialities so my deeper consciousness can work things out and, eventually, kick them upstairs where I can ponder them. About five weeks after he died, my husband came to me while I slept and told me that it was all going to be okay and when I woke up, I knew.

I had a rather grim childhood and adolescence. To speak except when spoken to was to invite a backhand. Despite being a compliant and willing child, I was inept…as children are, until they have sufficient practice to master something…and so I received daily beatings from an unforgiving perfectionist of a mother. In so many ways I was a disappointment to her, and in so many brutal ways she let me know it. And yet, unlike so many children who buy the abuse and come away feeling at fault and therefore deserving of their victimization, I knew, every time that strap bit into my bare flesh, that what she was doing was wrong, that I was being unjustly assaulted…and I would get mad. By the time I was eight years old, I hated my mother with all the fervour an eight-year-old can muster. But to express that hatred was to invite further abuse, so I learned to be silent and nurture the rage, add to it with each new injustice, and eventually allow it to burst forth and defend me.

It took more than half my lifetime to learn that the rage was the mask that protected me from feeling the pain of my mother’s brutality. If I could focus myself on a rage, I would not feel the hurt. I learned to feel angry the moment I perceived any threat, for rage would not only keep me from feeling my fear, if it was big enough, it could actually drive off the threat. I soon came to realize that disappointment also provoked an angry response, too. We all have expectations of others, as well as ourselves, and I discovered that to keep myself from having to experience the pain of disappointment…or the guilt, if I was disappointing myself…all I had to do was stir up a fine rage and its fury would consume all those hurtful feelings so I would not have to experience them.

Once I had synthesized this in my head, I gave the idea to a few of my friends to see what they thought. Without exception, after some reflection on the matter, they agreed. In the throes of a break-up, if you get mad, it doesn’t hurt so much. Facing fearful situations, anger gives you strength, empowerment. And when someone tramples on your expectations, whether it is the third time the plumber has blown you off or it is some idiot who cut you off on the highway, the anger you feel is actually preventing you from feeling the disappointment of having your expectation unfulfilled: that the plumber would come at the appointed time or that the other driver would respect your right of way.

I have come to think of anger as a secondary emotion, an emotion that cannot exist in a pure state, as can fear, for example. Anger is a reaction or mask for certain primary emotions like fear or pain…disappointment being a form of emotional pain, after all. What all of these emotions have in common is that when we feel them, we feel vulnerable, victimized, powerless, at risk. Anger, however, is an empowering, pro-active emotion and the moment we shift from fear to anger, we no longer feel vulnerable, but powered by the adrenaline surge that comes with the advent of rage.

For me, crying through my rages was always a curious thing that neutralized the power of my anger. One cries when hurt or frightened, and it was those tears that eventually put me onto the track that lead me to figuring it out. Today, when I feel anger welling up inside me, I immediately analyze it…fear? pain? disappointment? Did that reckless BMW driver scare me when he passed on a blind curve? Did a person’s remark hurt my feelings? Did I really expect that woman to control her child?

I find that I am more prone to mild annoyance today than anything that approaches anger. I have found I can be outraged by something without being angry about it. I have discovered that there is very little worth working myself into a lather about anymore, not even in my marriage. Hubby and I have a very peaceful life…we hardly ever fight…I just state my case and then shut up until he comes around. Even if it takes him days…

The Unwilling Father

In America it is called "child support" and, according to American law, every child is entitled to support from both of its parents, regardless of whether or not the man wanted to become a father. Now this may sound like a no-brainer, but in the States, it is a bone of great contention.

The issue seems to be that in an age when contraception is pretty much perfected and abortion-on-demand is a woman's right, there need be no unplanned babies born. Therefore, any unplanned pregnancy that results in the birth of a child is done so at the sole behest of the mother, and a man should not be held financially responsible for 18 years for her unilateral decision to give birth.

On the surface that may seem logical, but it seems to me that there are contraceptive devices available to men and a man's failure to use them makes him just as responsible for the resultant pregnancy as the woman. Given, then, that both are equally responsible for creating an unplanned pregnancy, should the man be able to demand the woman have an abortion and, if she refuses, be excused of all paternal responsibility, including the responsibility to support his resulting offspring? The de facto choice to become pregnant was both of theirs, but the choice to remain pregnant is solely hers, after all.

It's a thorny issue...I certainly would not want to have a huge chunk of money sucked out of my wallet every month for the next 18 years as the result of a decision made by someone else, a decision with which I emphatically disagreed. On the other hand, I find the entire concept of forced abortion to be absolutely repugnant. So, should the women who choose to take an unintended pregnancy to term be entitled to support from the baby's father? Or should their unilateral decision be one that leaves them solely responsible for the support of the child?

Personally, I favour the child support. If Dude didn't want to be a daddy, then Dude needed to think ahead and wear a raincoat for the upcoming storm. Failing to use a condom is, in my book, choosing the possibility of fatherhood and all of the responsibilities that go along with it. The fact that abortion is available is, in my opinion, outside the issue...sort of like those word questions in your math exams that threw in extraneous numbers and information to make you think you had more to consider than you really did. If a man can demand that a woman have an abortion or he skates out on child maintenance, then she should be able to make an equally private and repugnant surgical demand on his body...like an infibulation, perhaps, as a reminder of his folly.

There is, I think, no clear or equitable answer for the parents...what seems just to one seems unjust to the other. So I'm going to have to side with the courts...they basically don't care about the adults in the equation, just the best interests of the child, which are obviously served best by more income than less. Papa pays...

Of life and death

Whenever people are feeling vulnerable, when they or someone they know has been a crime victim, or when the crime rate in their area is higher than what they deem to be acceptable, somebody brings up the Death Penalty. If they live in an area that eschews it, they call for its introduction; if they live where the Death Penalty exists, they call for more its more liberal application. Without regard to its efficacy, just application, or ethical/moral implications, the Death Penalty has come to be seen by some as a panacea for whatever criminal ailments are plaguing their society.

Facts, however, do not bear out the intuitive expectation that implementing draconian punishments will automatically result reduced crime. On examination it becomes obvious that such an expectation is actually quite illogical: who commits a crime with the expectation of getting caught? And if you aren’t going to get caught, then what does the prescribed punishment matter?

Interestingly, the reality seems to be exactly opposite what is expected. America is a perfect microcosm in which to study the subject, for each of its 50 states makes its own policy: 38 of the 50 states prescribe the death penalty for certain crimes while 12 states and the District of Columbia proscribe it. Data collected over the past 15 years indicates that the crime rate in death penalty states has not fallen as dramatically as the crime rates in non-death penalty states, indicating that the much-touted deterrent value of capital punishment simply does not exist.
Notes:
· Populations are from the U.S. Census estimates for each year
· Murder rates are from the FBI's "Crime in the United States" and are per 100,000 population.
· The murder rate for the region (death penalty states or non-death penalty states) is the total number of murders in the region divided by the total population (and then multiplied by 100,000)

As indicated in the chart above, as executions increased, non-death penalty states did much better than death penalty states with regard to reducing their murder rates. In 1990, the murder rates in the two groups were a mere 4% apart. A decade later however, the murder rate in the death penalty states was 35% higher than in the non-death penalty states, reaching 37% by 2001. (Source: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=12&did=168 )

There is nothing to indicate any causality in the higher murder rates in the death penalty states, but it is clear that if the death penalty did have any effect, it was definitely the opposite of what was expected.

There are those who don’t care whether or not the death penalty has a deterrent effect. Their position is that if a person commits the ultimate crime, they should be subject to the ultimate penalty. The problem in this kind of thinking is that there is presently no way of absolutely knowing whether or not the convicted is, in fact, the actual perpetrator. Jurisprudence is an invention of man, who is inevitably fallible…and so his inventions must be no less fallible than he is. In other words, it is shockingly easy to convict the wrong guy…certainly death penalty advocates do not want innocent people executed?

And yet, some proponents of capital punishment remark that the percentage of executions of innocents must be statistically negligible…and therefore acceptable. But what would their position be if that lonely statistic was a son, a father, a brother? Would such a proponent complacently accept the execution of the son she birthed, the father who loved and guided him, the brother they loved? Or would they rail against the injustice of executing a person they knew to be innocent? How statistically negligible are your loved ones?

A woman once answered that question by saying that the men in her family (women are seldom executed) lived such exemplary lives that they could never be in a position to be wrongly arrested and convicted of a crime. That is probably what went through the mind of Clifford Henry Bowen: despite there being no physical evidence linking him to three murders, and twelve witnesses who placed him more than 450km from the site of the crime, Bowen was convicted and sentenced to death. He spent five years on Death Row until a court overturned his conviction because prosecutors had failed to disclose information about another suspect who resembled Bowen, had greater motive, no alibi, and habitually carried the same gun and unusual ammunition as the murder weapon.

Surely Johnny McMillian had no idea that a murder committed while he was picnicking with friends would land him on Death Row. But that’s what happened…McMillian, a black man, was convicted for the murder of a white woman in a trial that lasted only a day and a half. Three witnesses testified against McMillian and the testimony of multiple witnesses who were with him at the picnic was ignored. A post-conviction investigation by a television show revealed prosecutorial suppression of exculpatory information and perjury by the prosecution’s three witnesses.

The innocent can be…and are…convicted and sentenced to death for crimes. Statistically speaking, in the US, for every eight executions, a Death Row inmate is exonerated and set free. How many of those executed might have been innocent but were unable to prove it before their deaths? This is the major flaw in the pro-death penalty argument: there is no way to accurately insure that the person being put to death is, in fact, the person who committed the crime. And regardless of the statistical insignificance of the execution of innocents, executing your son or father, my brother or uncle, or any else’s family member who is, in actual fact, innocent of a crime, is simply wrong.

Life imprisonment of the innocent may not be just, but at least it is not irrevocable. Peter Limone spent 33 years in prison…originally sentenced to death…for a crime he didn’t commit. Two other men, convicted with him, died during their prison sentence. Limone was eventually exonerated after it was revealed that the FBI had been in possession of exculpatory information at the time of his trial and for the entire term of Limone’s incarceration. Had Limone’s sentence not been commuted to life imprisonment (due to the elimination of the death penalty in his state) he would have been executed long before this evidence was revealed. Limone was released from prison after the evidence came to light. (Go to http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=6&did=109#100 for 123 examples of death sentences handed down to innocent people.)

Many people have allowed themselves to come to expect the insupportable from their governments: perfect safety. Risk is inherent in a free society, and the only way to remove risk from a society is to remove its freedom as well. People sometimes fail to realize that true freedom includes the freedom to make bad, wrong, anti-social, and even criminal choices. Certainly there must be consequences for making those choices, but the consequences must come after the choice is made and the action is taken, not before, and the consequences must not come at the expense of the basic human rights of the accused, who may not, as we have seen, be guilty as charged. The life and basic rights of any accused must be preserved against the very real possibility that he was not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted.

In matters of life and death, one MUST err on the conservative side.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Today is Valentine’s Day.

So far my day has consisted of sleeping late, getting a pretty pair of yellow gold hoop earrings with tiny white gold filigreed hearts suspended in them, brunch at my favourite café, shoe shopping (nope…didn’t find any I liked), and a trip to the spa where both Hubby and I had a massage and champagne in the Jacuzzi. While all this has been going on, the workmen are busy demolishing my kitchen and putting in some new cupboards, sink, taps, and granite tops. This evening we have reservations at the Five Flies…a Cape Town institution and a restaurant that most certainly deserves its 5-star rating. Life is good…and my husband is a superstar!

On the other side of the coin, however, today I have also endured such dismal service that we left less than a 10% tip (we usually tip much better than that, been nearly run down by people who think their sense of urgency gives them a right to be rude to others who are proceeding at a merely normal pace, got half the spa treatment hubby had planned because somebody wrote down the wrong package and therefore didn’t book enough time for us (waaaah! no pedicure!), and I watched a completely uncontrolled two year old dash through the café, ignoring his mother’s whiney, wimpy pleas for him to return to her side, and cringed when he crashed into the side of a server who was carrying two plates of hot food…thank goodness she was nimble, or she would have spilled scalding soup all over that kid!

I’m trying very hard to focus on the positive aspects of the day, but today seems to be an extension of yesterday’s equally frustrating experiences in having to deal with the inexplicable idiocy of others. Woolies, for some odd reason, has chosen to display racks of clothing in the middle of the walkways, reducing space to barely one person wide. So, as I passed by one of these racks and neared the end, why did this woman with a trolley full of food look me straight in the eye and enter the same narrow corridor I am in? Does she think she can pass right through me? Does she think I can step aside (and through a glass display case) to allow her to pass? Or maybe she thinks I will walk backwards to the end of the rack of clothes, allow her to pass, and then make another assault on the inner sanctum? (not bloody likely!) I stood my ground, looked her directly in the eye, and eventually she backed her trolley out (a distance of a meter or less) and permitted me to exit that very narrow space that she should not have entered until I had exited.

Why do people behave like this? Why did a woman try to crowd onto the lift yesterday when it was clear that at least two people (one with a trolley) wanted to get off? Just how much IQ is necessary to comprehend that if you let someone out of a confined space, there will be more space for you to get in?

Then there are people who seem to think they are being put upon when you expect them to do their job. I’m sorry, but when I tell a waiter I need “a few more minutes” to peruse a menu (because he just gave it to me 37.6 seconds ago), I don’t mean the guy should go on a hike through the Andes before he gets back to me to take my order! And what is with having to hoist a flag and wave it vigorously in order to get your bill? And why, why, why do so few waiters bother to bring you a pen with your credit card slip? Am I supposed to prick my finger with the dirty table knife he neglected to clear away and sign it in blood??

It’s been a stressful couple of days, I’m afraid. I am currently collecting a subscription (weekly issues) from CNA, but they cannot seem to keep their stories/rules straight. First they told me it was every two weeks, and they were sending back my every second issue because I wasn’t coming to collect them. Then, when I back ordered the missing issues, they told me they would call me when they came in…which they did not…which meant some of them went missing. Then they put up a rule (and posted it on the wall) that they would keep the issue for two weeks, then return it to stock. HAH! I went in yesterday (having missed one…and only one…week due to having houseguests) and guess what? They had returned last week’s issue and now I have to backorder it…and wait four to six weeks for it! (Interestingly, the two-week sign is missing from the wall now.) This, after having just caught up and waiting twelve weeks for an issue I missed when I was laid up with my sprained ankle. They have done this to me so many times, I’m just about ready to give up the subscription and assuage my collecting fever some other way.

Still steaming about CNA and hungry (bad combination…my normally long fuse shortens as my blood sugar drops), I decided to soothe my grumpy soul with the ultimate balm…shoe shopping. Since I am currently looking for a pair of simple black leather shoes with mid-height heels, suitable for wearing with a skirted suit, my first thought was Green Cross. My grumpy-meter spiked several points when we found them closed for stock taking in the middle of the evening shopping hours. Canal Walk was packed…crowds surging in and out of stores like shoals of fish swooping through the water…and some dimbulb decides to close the store for inventory? What’s wrong with doing it when the mall is quiet (i.e., while most of the shoppers are at their own jobs?)…what’s wrong with doing it after hours? Why close early while swarms of shoppers…people who just might spend a wad of cash in your store (I spent more than R900 the last time I was in there!)…are jamming the mall?

So, today I’m trying block out the irritations and stresses that seem to be finding me lately like a heat-seeking missile and to focus on Valentine’s Day…the brunch was tasty, even if I did have to wait nearly an hour for it because the waiter’s mind (and body) were missing in action. And while the spa visit wasn’t entirely what we had anticipated, my masseuse was really, really skilled and my back feels more like rubber than wood now! The mess in my kitchen…well, I’ve chose to view it as the harbinger of better things…you can’t make an omelette without breaking an egg, and you can’t transform a kitchen full of water-damaged cupboards and rotting melamine tops into a showplace with a Franke sink and taps and beautiful Rustenberg granite tops without first making one helluva mess!

And my new earrings are beautiful and match a heart-shaped silver filigree necklace Hubby gave me a few years back…and he actually took the whole day off from work in order to spend time with me today…

Yup…the day isn’t over yet, but I’ve no doubt that, on balance, it’s gonna be a terrific day and tonight I’ll climb into my bed with yet another smile on my face…and in my heart.

Coffee mugs and global commerce...

My husband really likes his coffee. So much so that, as a Christmas gift from me, he picked out one of those whiz-bang super-duper fancy-schmancy coffee machines that, if it had a set of wings, surely it could fly!

Six weeks after Christmas he seems happy with his coffee maker. He’s a mechanical engineer, after all, and he seems to be rather pleased with his new toy, fiddling with this control or that, visiting all manner of specialty coffee shops, buying tiny sample bags of this exotic coffee or that, all for trying out in his new…it grinds its own beans!...coffee machine.

One of the more interesting side effects of his new coffee obsession is his attention to coffee cups and mugs. Like most people, we have an eclectic collection of odd mugs, mostly broken sets, but a few strange souvenir mugs from various venues. They come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, some tall and narrow, some short and stout, all of them holding differing amounts of liquid. Hubby likes a big cup of coffee, but one of the unfortunate things about his fancy-schmancy coffee machine is that, while the spout height is adjustable, it is only adjustable to accommodate mugs of the short, shorter, shortest variety. A tall mug that will accommodate a man-sized serving of coffee just will not fit. Alas, my man’s hero-sized Tigger mug from Disneyland has had to be shelved!

So, the other day we were wandering through our local Pick ‘n’ Pay (South Africa’s answer to Safeway, for American readers) and happened upon some mugs that seemed to be the answer to his prayers…just tall enough to slip under the spout and wide enough…in a pleasingly tapered shape…to accommodate a healthy helping of coffee. And, to make them downright serendipitous, they were blue and white, which is the colour scheme of my kitchen accessories. We bought four, but only after searching through a dozen or more to find four relatively perfect ones…the rest having nicks, chips, kiln-marks, sloppy paint, or other such imperfections.

Hubby was overjoyed…we got home and he slipped one under the coffee machine’s spout and it was one of those millimetre-close fits. “Super,” I said. “Give me the mugs and I’ll wash them for you and you can make yourself a cup of coffee.”

Did I mention that they cost less than R7 each…less than a dollar? A peculiarly low price, considering that they seemed to be well made out of quality materials. They had a soft matte glaze that I recognized from more high-end crockery in the States, and while they were obviously seconds, they were nicely designed and made. It hadn’t seemed particularly odd in the store…just a really good buy…but at the sink I had to give them a second thought. The bottom of each mug was covered with a bar coded paper sticker and as I removed the first one I saw the words “The Cellar.” Odd, I thought, continuing to work the sticker off…wasn’t “The Cellar” the name Macy’s uses for its housewares section (which is ordinarily larger than an entire Boardman’s store and more fully stocked with higher quality merchandise)?

I continued to scrub at the sticker until it finally rolled up into a little gummy ball in my fingers and what did I find beneath it? “Made in China Expressly for Macy’s”! I let out a hoot of laughter, distracting Hubby from communing with his Beautiful Machine. “Macy’s!” I crowed. “These were made for Macy’s!” He looked momentarily non-plussed, then wondered aloud if Macy’s knew that merchandise made expressly for them was being sold by other retailers. Ordinarily, when seconds of this nature are released through other outlets, the identifying labels/marks are removed or obliterated…there should have been a big blob of black paint obscuring Macy’s name before this went on the shelf.

Other questions are brought to bear? Did the Chinese manufacturer have Macy’s permission to wholesale Macy’s QC rejects to other vendors? Did the Pick ‘n’ Pay buyer recognize that s/he may have been buying goods that the commissioning retailer may have ordered destroyed (a common practice for seconds in the ceramics industry)? Does Macy’s know that substandard merchandise bearing its name is being sold overseas? Is Macy’s earning anything from the sales of its goods here in South Africa?

My husband is happy with his new mugs, but this whole thing brings up some hard questions for me in relation to South Africa’s newest trading ventures with China. Will my next trip to America find me looking at South African goods that the commissioning manufacturer never intended for sale in the US…and for which he receives no earnings? Somehow, I don’t think that’s such a far-fetched idea anymore.

Alone

The older I get, the more I find I value my solitude. Not as a retreat from a stressful world or for any grand purpose, but for its inherent restorative value.

I love my husband. He’s a great guy and ordinarily easy to live with. I enjoy his company, even when it consists of the two of us doing separate activities while sharing proximal space. But even this companionable pairing needs the occasional break…sometimes I just want to be alone.

It isn’t that I want the alone time for any particular purpose…I’m not planning to go on a shopping spree or a binge of one kind or another. In fact, that’s the whole of it…I’m not planning anything. I don’t need to consider cleaning the house, cooking a meal, making sure there is enough of this, that or the other…none of the ordinary considerations of my ordinary life need be considered. I have a pass to be mentally and physically lazy, to let go the reins of the household and my responsibilities for a day or so. Rather like being on holiday without any of the hassle of planning, packing, and making sure I get my money’s worth of sights, sounds, and tastes. Just permission from myself to veg.

Sometimes I crave the restorative virtues of solitude. Sometimes it’s good to be alone.

Oops! They're at it again!

So, after a couple of weeks of titillating the public, Fed-Ex’s mouthpiece comes out with his big bucket of whitewash and tries to repair the wannabe rapper’s non-existent reputation. The sex tape, trumpeted by the media and even the subject of commentary by those who have allegedly seen it, does not exist. Furthermore, a second cleansing brushstroke claims, poor Kev has been the innocent victim of the envious and malicious who have slandered him with untrue allegations that he had such a tape and was shopping it around for the best price. Not a word is true, Lawyer-Boy says. Nary a word.

Yah, right.

I’m guessing there is something, probably tamer than has been advertised. So tame, in fact, that those who would stoop to make money from such a tape have deemed it unmarketable, either through lack of quality (can’t tell who the woman is) or lack of sufficient prurience to generate enough cash to pay back the initial acquisition and distribution costs. So, after a couple of weeks to flog the tape to various internet porn merchants and finding either no takers or receiving offers well below the millions anticipated, what’s a sleazebag to do? Deny, deny, deny!

Other, not-mutually-exclusive, possibilities include Brit’s legal team having a little chat with Kev’s legal team of one, reminding said individuals that her image is her legal property and the release of such a tape could be seen as a serious infringement of Britney’s intellectual (how’s that for an oxymoron?) property…which would mean any money he made from selling such a tape could be awarded to her in an infringement lawsuit, plus damages. Even a porn king might want to sit back and rethink the tape under such conditions, ya know?

And what if a little birdie perched on Kev’s scrawny shoulder and cooed into his ear “Ya know this will make her even more marketable, right? You do this and fans will flock to see her, to buy her music, to attend her concerts…this is priceless promotion that will make her millions and make you look like and even bigger schmuck than you are today. Let the scales fall from your eyes…nobody’s seen that tape yet and it is already happening! You’re doing her a favour, making her money, and you aren’t getting one thin dime of it!”

As much as Britney has shown herself to be a vulgar, under-educated red neck tart, Federline’s various attempts to further blacken her image (and make money off it) are backfiring. His suit for custody and alimony are publicly lampooned and the very media that delighted in catching Brit in all of her thoughtless moments with Sean Preston is now left-handedly defending her by revealing K-Fed’s long list of parental transgressions. Not only did he spend a whopping total of four days with his newest son in the first eight weeks of the child’s life, it’s been revealed that while married to multimillionaire Britney and dropping as much as $50,000 a night at the craps tables, he has paid no child support to the C-list actress, Shar Jackson, for the two children he sired on her. Oh, he pays for their private school, she tells the media. He does? With whose money?

When I last looked in on Fed-Ex’s antics, I was thinking he couldn’t get any more stupid, but I have to admit that I was wrong. With his attorney spewing out nonsense designed to make Kev a sympathetic figure…a victim of someone else’s malicious press and gossip…he just makes the guy look so much more the pathetic loser…and that’s quite an accomplishment.

What do you say?

Like most women, I like babies. At this stage in my life, I particularly like babies who belong to other people…the ones who get to change the diapers and pace the floor at 3 am…but I still adore babies. So, like many other women, when I espy a pram at the mall or the market, I am compelled to peek in at the little creature and make some kind of complimentary noise to the parent. It’s not generally difficult…even the most visage-challenged babies generally have at least one or two features upon which a stranger can make a truthfully complimentary remark. If the child is truly cosmetically-challenged, there is usually something like smoothness of complexion or plumpness of cheek or thickness of locks or blueness of eyes over which to coo.

So what do you say when you find yourself leaning over the pram and looking into the face of a truly ugly baby?

I’m not talking about a child who has had the misfortune to have been born with some kind of congenital malformation or who is afflicted with a disfiguring malady like eczema or a port wine stain. I am talking about a child who, for all intents and purposes, was born perfectly normal but the shape of the features and their arrangement was less than fortunate. Do you say something untruthful but complimentary, hoping the parents haven’t really realized that Junior’s ears look like wings or his nose looks as if it has been surreptitiously replaced with one from a piglet?

The cliché “a face only a mother could love” exists in our lexicon for a reason…parents seem to see their own children through a filter the rest of us simply cannot seem to replicate. I’ve been known to comment on an otherwise plain child’s deliciously dark and curly eyelashes, eliciting a glowing response from her mother who now has one more thing to dote upon in her…through her eyes…flawlessly configured offspring. But suppose the parents of the bat-winged baby I saw this morning were not labouring under the misconception that their child was a future Miss South Africa? Suppose Mum had already begun a saving account for the otoplasty? What if the child’s other cosmetic flaws are clearly recognized and accepted by the parents? What do you say? Do you say anything at all?

It usually only takes me a matter of seconds to zero in on a feature that can be complimented, and additional time spent gazing into the little one’s face surely is interpreted by the doting parent as rapt admiration on my part. Wouldn’t they be alarmed or disturbed if I took a long look at their child and then just turned and walked away? I would have considered such behaviour very creepy in the days when I was pushing a pram. So, when you’ve looked into those little washed-out blue eyes fringed by stumps of lashes, when you’ve wondered how long it will take the child to grow into that nose, if it will ever grow hair, will the lips ever shape up to more than a thin, colourless line, what on earth gave it that greyish-yellow pallor, and is there any hope that the kid is more intelligent than that dull expression suggests…just what do you say?

Sweet. “What a sweet baby!” Who can argue with that? Mum…who was no Miss South Africa herself…beamed, and pallid, beak-nosed infant waved its arms and legs about and emitted a typical shrieking sound, giving me a perfect opportunity to flash a quick grin and escape.

Later, however, as I was strolling out to the car with a trolley full of groceries, I happened to pass the outdoor area at Mugg & Bean. Due to the inclement weather (Cape Town is finally getting some desperately needed rain!), the outdoor patio was surrounded by plastic and canvas drops, permitting the feeble sun to penetrate into the seating area, but not permitting the dense cloud of cigarette smoke to exit. Consequently, even though the seating area is technically outdoors, the trapped smoke made walking past the area a bit of a choking affair…and I found myself walking past a familiar pram and looking down into a familiar little face, breathing in all that second-hand smoke, a considerable amount of which was being contributed by Mum and Daddy in the airspace immediately above the kid’s face.

What are the chances Mum smoked during this pregnancy? What are the chances that the tyke breathes this kind of stuff all day and night long and now, with winter approaching, he’s going to get an even heavier dose of this poison to breathe? Could the kid’s pallor and generally dull appearance be due to hypoxia? Should Mugg & Bean have refused to seat a person below the smoking age in the smoking area? Should I have spoken up and suggested the mother take the child out for some fresh air instead of the choking smoke the poor little tyke was breathing? Or should I have done as I did…walked on by, shaking my head but unwilling to start a confrontation with a bunch of strangers over the well-being of a child I don’t know, a confrontation guaranteed to result in little more than those parents feeling unjustly attacked by a busybody stranger?

What do you do when you walk past some really ugly parents?

How rude!

Dearest Hubby took me out to dinner last night for my birthday. I had expressed a wish for sushi, so we headed to the nearest Cape Town Fish Market and ended up at the one at the Paddocks in Milnerton, near Woodbridge Island. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the area, it is an upmarket area and the restaurant has a view of the island, the sea, and Table Mountain.

The sushi bar was busy, full of the rich and the trendy, but we managed to find two seats and began ogling the tempting array of dishes rolling past on the little motorized conveyor belt. The sushi bars at Cape Town Fish Markets are long oval affairs with the sushi chefs on the inside of the oval preparing the sushi, the patrons seated on the outside, and a segmented conveyor belt endlessly rotating, carrying the tender morsels past each customer. When something comes by that you like, you simply lift the little plate from the conveyor, place it in front of you, limber up the chopsticks, and dig in.

Because most diners only take a plate or two at a time and the chefs are continuously busy adding new dishes to the conveyor, you seldom have to wait more than a few seconds for something tempting to pass before your eyes. Despite the fact that the place was crowded, things were going along swimmingly, the regularly occurring empty spots being quickly refilled by the busy chefs. And then the Greedy Twins came in.

I don’t know what some people have against taking their turns. What makes two people so oblivious to the local custom…and the feelings of the other patrons…that they can come in from nowhere and lay waste to the evening’s offerings? A man and a woman walked up to the sushi bar and, without taking seats, began snatching things off the conveyor belt and covering the bar in front of them. They were to my right and the conveyor was moving in a clockwise direction so, instead of the occasional empty space on the belt as it passed before me, suddenly there was the occasional dish of sushi as an empty belt rolled by! Slowly, patrons began looking up from their conversations and casting their eyes around the bar, wondering where the food went, while Piggly and Wiggly added to their ever-growing stash.

What really ticked me off was that the management and wait staff didn’t seem to think there was a problem here. When P&W shoved everything in the direction of a waiter and demanded it be packaged for takeaway, someone should have noted down everything on the bar, returned the food to the conveyor so the other 40 or so people at the bar could eat, and told Piggly and his Wiggly gal pal to have a seat while the chefs prepared their takeaway for them!

As it was, even the painfully thin, brutally nipped-and-tucked Paris Hilton wannabe at the other end of the bar took notice of the barren belt…I doubt she ate more than one California roll at a sitting, but even she saw that the bar full of patrons who arrived ahead of these boors were staring at a barren larder as the latecomers packed it all up and carried it away. It took the better part of half an hour to restock the conveyor, during which time more than a few patrons settled their bills and went home…we among them. After all, if you’ve come to eat sushi and suddenly the cupboard is bare, why hang about?

I have to wonder if those people had any idea how rude they were and how they, basically, shoved themselves to the head of the queue and then took almost everything on offer, leaving a good three dozen people staring at empty space where their dinner was supposed to be.

Nah…if they had a clue, they wouldn’t have done it…would they?

Another year gone by...

Today I am 59 and I have to ask…when does menopause end?

I told my Dear Hubby yesterday that I have just one year left now, that I am capable of the kind of sleight-of-mind necessary to stretch the definition of “middle age” to cover the fifties, but nobody, not even me, can call 60 “middle aged.” In 365 days, I will be officially old.

Funny, but I don’t feel old. I don’t even feel old approaching. According to most people who know me, I’m not looking particularly old, either…but you know friends and family…they probably wouldn’t tell me my age was showing even if I was down to no teeth and wrinkles so profound I was tripping over them. While having my roots touched up last month (yes, I am a natural blonde, just not this naturally blonde) I asked my hairdresser how much grey has sprinkled itself into my tresses and she said about a dozen…I have to believe her because the reason I asked is that I didn’t see any when I checked and Hubby, a wise man who knows when to keep his own counsel, wouldn’t admit to having found any!

While I am postponing the admission of being old, I cannot escape the fact that I am aging. Of course we are all aging…we begin doing that the day we are born…but there is a certain point in life when we look at ourselves in the mirror and realize that some things in our lives are not only gone, they are gone forever…like perky boobs or an unlined brow…and some things are here to stay…like crinkly skin and sagging jowls. Time and gravity take their toll and at that certain age…if you aren’t one of those pathetic people showing your wrinkled belly to the world in obscenely low-cut jeans and your pre-teen granddaughter’s cropped top…you simply cannot deny it any more.

I don’t know if men have a biological rite of passage out of youth, but women do. It’s called “menopause.” We can hand over our pension savings to the cosmetic surgeon, with his scalpels and lasers, suctions and injections, and come away with a temporarily updated version of ourselves, but we can’t fool Mother Nature and our ovaries. At some point in life the oestrogen factories start shutting down and middle age comes firmly upon us, like it or not.

Menopause has been likened to a latter-day menarche, just in reverse. Girls’ bodies gradually prepare themselves for the onset of womanhood and, once the ovaries kick into gear, there are a few years in which the hormones have to get settled down into a predictable flow: adolescence. We know, however, that this “adjustment period” will eventually end…at least physically…and once it is over and our bodies are acclimated to the new chemical brew, life goes on. One would expect menopause to work much the same way, but in reverse: a period of time in which the body reverts to its previous low-oestrogen state, followed by an expanse of years in which we are no longer tormented by cramps, PMS, monthly indispositions, or rabid curiosity about the latest and greatest advances in contraception and feminine hygiene products. And, indeed, that is our eventual destination but just how long is this journey and just how rocky is this road?

Fully twelve years ago I remember getting up from my desk and heading for the copy machine and nearly fainting half way there. Now, this is wholly unlike me…I am one of those indomitable types who would be at the very bottom of your list of “women most likely to faint for any reason whatsoever.” I’ve administered first aid to auto accident victims with gruesome injuries, I’ve endured a robbery in which I was assaulted with fists, feet, and knives, I’ve suffered the sudden and unexpected death of my dearest husband, and sat vigil at the bedside of a comatose infant. If that which does not kill us makes us strong, then I’m among the tougher of my sisters…so what is this nearly fainting half way to the copy machine crap?

So, I figured I was just standing up a bit too fast…blood rushing out of the head sort of thing…so I tried rising from my chair more slowly and, instead of rushing to the copier, being more measured in my approach…to no avail. Half way to the copier, I was feeling faint again. After a few more episodes, one in which I actually saw stars and swirling black clouds, I made it a point to visit my doctor. She gave me a prescription for female hormones and when I objected, she said “just try it for a couple of weeks…trust me on this…” Amazingly, my near-fainting spells cleared up in less than 48 hours and, thankfully, did not return when I stopped the hormones.

A dozen years have passed and, frankly, I have no idea why I am still experiencing symptoms. Oh, the fainting spells are gone and I am finding the odd stray dark hair in places more appropriate to my husband that to me (I’m beginning to think that the Bearded Lady of circus lore was simply any post-menopausal female who has lost her tweezers!), but the classic symptoms don’t seem to want to give up their hold on my physiognomy and retreat into the mists of history: I am still getting random hot flashes, especially at night. I am convinced that the sleep disturbances that are a legendary part of the “change” are really nothing more than nocturnal hot flashes that require the sufferer to awaken to some degree in order to alleviate the discomfort…remove the blanket…remove the sheet…remove the nightgown…remove the husband…point the fan directly at the body…and now you’re awake!

Unlike some women I have known, the hot flashes haven’t been such a problem for me. Some women have told me about trembling spells of rushes of body heat, sweat pouring down their brows, and noticeably reddened faces…I’ve never experienced anything like that, just a mild, uncomfortable overheating, easily remedied by a small fan directed at the face for several hours at a time. My doctor tells me that this is due to my excess weight, that fat tissue produces oestrogen and helps to mitigate my symptoms…who knew?? A positive side to being a pudgy! But that fat tissue must be sleeping at night, right along with my consciousness, because at two in the morning, with a fan trained on the bed, I find myself awake and rearranging the bedclothes and rolling Dear Hubby to the far side of the, thankfully, king-sized bed!

So, maybe the difference between being old and being middle-aged is less one of a number of years achieved and more of development. My body seems to be stuck firmly in the middle ages, and my husband (who is considerably younger than I am) tells me that I will never be old because I don’t know how to be (such a sweeeeet man!).

I dunno…I guess I’ll have to check next birthday and see how I feel then…

The myth that will not die...

I’ve been having some work done in my house. The previous owner did some remodeling and one of the things he did was replace the original lighting in the kitchen and dining room with down lighters. These give a nice, almost indirect glow of light to the rooms…but only when they work. And there’s the problem…almost half of them don’t work. The last owner also remodeled the kitchen and, while the effect is quite nice, he didn’t leave much space for a fridge. That hasn’t been a problem up to now, since Hubby’s fridge was narrow enough to fit the space available. Unfortunately, the fridge has fully packed it in (not a heartbreak for me since it is waaayyy too small) and we decided on a side-by-side so we could have enough freezer space for more than a carton of ice cream and a bag of frozen veggies. So, I’ve had workmen at the house moving a bank of cabinets to make room for the fridge and pulling the light fixtures out of the ceiling to see why they won’t light up.

Thursday (yesterday) is ordinarily a busy day around here because both the maid and the new gardener work. Yesterday was particularly hectic because the handyman, Graham, was added the mix, along with the delivery of the massive monolithic slab of white steel that is my new refrigerator. It was hectic…the cupboards slated to be moved first had to be emptied, which left the dining table and all available flat space covered with a muddle of dishes, bowls and tchotchkes, and the normal Thursday cleaning had to be done around the jumble. And, throughout all of this, the threat of further power cuts hung over our heads, prompting everyone to gou maak with the tasks that required electricity before we once again found ourselves cast back into the Dark Ages for a span of hours. When we sat down to lunch on the patio…the dining table was still buried under a mountain of cupboard disgorgings…we had a moment to chat. Over roasted chicken and koeksisters, Graham, who is a member of a three-man handyman team and new to our household, asked the inevitable question: why on earth would I leave the bounty of America for a place like South Africa? Christopher, the new gardener, chimed in saying that everybody knew that America was a rich place where nobody had to live in shacks and everybody had a job…a good job. I had to shake my head.

How does America manage to export this myth and…more to the point…keep it alive? Don’t tell me it’s movies and TV…American movies and television show the ugly underbelly of crime, poverty, substance abuse, abuse of authority, and homelessness right along with the vast expanses of neat middle class tract homes that look like they could have been teleported direct from the Cape Town suburbs and dropped, unchanged, onto American soil. Perhaps America is not so much exporting the myth as other nations are casting America in the role of a secular heaven…an idyllic land of universal wealth, a place where you need only arrive on its shores to be showered with everything your heart desires. I really don’t know. But what I do know is that the image of America in the eyes of much of the rest of the world has very little to do with the reality of the place.

One of the most frequent questions I am asked here is why would I want to leave America for a place like South Africa. It still makes me laugh because the query itself reveals at least two things about the questioner: a dismal ignorance of the reality of the US and a serious lack of appreciation for this country. My standard answer is “My husband and I did the math: we can live better here on one income than we could live in California on two.” This answer is universally met with raised eyebrows, but it is the truth: we do live better here on one income than we could in California on two. Yes, there are cheaper places to live than California, but if we are going to compare apples to apples here, we have to stick with comparable locations: I didn’t live in the American equivalent of Pofadder or Mamelodi, I lived in an area much like Cape Town, both in terms of affluence and climate.

The first thing people find shocking is the news that domestic workers are very rare in America and very expensive. Graham asked me if that was even true of people who had several children and both adults worked…his eyebrows took a rapid trip upwards when I replied that was especially true of such people. People whose jobs put them at the very top of the earning scale…the American equivalent of managing directors, for example…might have domestic help, but those domestic workers often earn more than their PAs. This is no bull…I was an executive PA in the states and at my last job (2003) I earned $216 a day (a respectable but not especially high wage for an executive PA)…I had to pay a domestic worker $250 for one day’s work cleaning my house…and that was after every stick of furniture had been removed from it! My boss, the one who paid me $216 a day (and that is before deductions for various taxes which ate up fully one third of the gross amount) paid more for her Tuesday cleaning lady than she paid me. And a gardener who will come and work a whole day in your garden? Forget it! You can get casual labourers who speak little or no English for $10 an hour if you are willing to pick up strangers standing on a street corner, but a regular garden worker? Or even a garden service to mow and trim? Very, very few people employ such a service domestically.

Living in America is very costly. The American dream of owning your own home is increasingly out of reach of Americans. A co-worker of my husband is a young (24) single female professional…an engineer. She has just started her career…she has been employed for about a year. She has already bought a brand new car and a townhouse. She can afford, on her income alone, to do this. It is not because she is being paid an extravagant salary, but because the ability to buy your first home on a single professional income is alive and well in South Africa. My husband did the same thing in 2002…he bought his first S2000 and a four bedroom house in an upmarket Cape Town suburb, all on his income alone and without borrowing a cent from family members. This is simply impossible in the place I lived for the last 30 years in America.

There are always going to be people who will dispute, on the basis of their own (or a friend’s) brief sojourn in the US, the things I relate here about my homeland, but it is my opinion that knowledge gleaned through more than fifty years of living there is a bit more reliable than a few anecdotes collected on a holiday visit or even a short residency. I didn’t live in one isolated corner of the country, either, so I have a bit of perspective on more than just California…I lived in four of the fifty states, visited more than two-thirds of them, and lived in three distinct parts of California (the third largest state in geographic area and the largest, in terms of population). California is a long and narrow state that takes up more than half of the western coast of America, and the various regions of that state are as distinct from each other as chalk from cheese. I lived just south of San Francisco from 1974 to 2004, an area colloquially known as “Silicon Valley,” and I worked in the high tech industry for most of that time. I owned three houses during that time, raised three kids, was married, divorced, remarried, widowed and married again there. (Earlier in my life I also lived in San Diego and Santa Barbara.) I have been in Cape Town for two years now and I can assure you, Cape Town is more like the parts of California where I have lived than different from them, the primary difference being cost.

South Africans nurture a notion that America is virtually crime free, a fatuous notion that sometimes amuses me greatly. I had locks on my doors…and on my windows. Many of my neighbours had alarms on their houses (even in middle-class neighbourhoods that didn’t hold the promise of riches to be found in upmarket areas). My neighbour across the street had bars on all her windows and a security door, and the man next door had an iron cage around his front door. Few American houses have masonry walls around the front of the property but the reason is NOT because crime is non-existent…it is because the police have told us not to do it because once a burglar scales that wall, he cannot be seen by neighbours or passersby…it protects him from discovery. Police also tell us to keep hedges and bushes near windows trimmed down to prevent the burglars from having hiding places, and to make sure trees and trellises to not afford robbers a means to climb up into our second stories.

America has gangs. When I was a youth, they were pretty much an East Coast thing, but by the time I reached adulthood, they were all over the country. With them came new words in our vocabularies: “drive by shooting” and “turf war,” for example. There were the Bloods and the Crips, the Norteños and the Sureños, and they ran unchecked through our streets, our schools, our prisons. America has school shootings and drug dealing and violent attacks in the schools: students all over America are checked daily for weapons when they enter their schools, and yet assaults, including shootings, continue to happen (one in Roseburg, Oregon…a quiet little town I have visited many times…just this week). It is not unknown for a student to be killed by another student because he would not give up his new Air Jordans or leather jacket or simply because he wore a shirt in a colour that one gang or another had declared as its own. America is not free of violence or crime and you are no safer in your home in San Francisco or Salt Lake City than you are in Cape Town…for a chilling illustration of this fact, Google the names “Polly Klaas” or “Elizabeth Smart,” just two of numerous American girls who have gone missing in the night from the supposed safety of their own homes.

Americans are not all rich, nor do even the majority of Americans work at jobs that pay them princely wages. That staggering $216 a day I earned as an executive PA was a paltry sum when measured against the costs of mere survival in my area. I inherited a 40-year-old house (along with its bond) that cost me $1550 a month plus gas, water, electricity and telephone, just to keep a roof over my head (easily another $500 a month). Then there were things like petrol for the little bakkie to get to work ($40 a week and going up every day), insurance for the bakkie (mandatory under state law and $150 a month) plus little incidentals like groceries, doctor bills ($300 a visit since I had no medical aid), clothing. That seemingly comfortable wage was subject to tax…deducted before I received my pay, and when the tax man got done with me each month, I had to make $3000 stretch to cover everything. It wasn’t easy because, invariably, something unexpected would always come up, like a burst water pipe or geyser, new tyres for the bakkie, a leak in the roof…there was always something. When you consider that I was supporting only one person on that wage and it was so much of a struggle, imagine what people with kids go through! (And, to any person who wants to suggest that I should have sold the house and gone to live in a flat, those bond payments…on a 20 year-old bond…were considerably cheaper than rent on even a small flat. My bond was $1550 per month…the people who bought my house took out a bond with payments of more than $4000 a month and she was an executive PA like me…and her husband was an engineer like mine…and they didn’t have any kids to support, either. The bond payment was more than her gross salary, and this was for an older house in a working-class neighbourhood!)

America has poverty…real poverty. People live under bridges and beg in the streets in America. They sleep in parks and doorways and in makeshift shelters made of cardboard. They live in old cars with their children, or in tumble-down shacks without running water or as squatters in abandoned buildings that have no power. They eat out of dumpsters and go hungry, every winter people literally freeze to death on the streets in the winter, and there is no child maintenance money guaranteed to indigent mothers…Americans are as unsympathetic to their own poor as they are sympathetic to the poor of other nations. The gardener was astonished to learn that my life started in a little two room shack with no running water, that I was intimately familiar with the long-drop toilet (called an “outhouse” or “privy” in America), as my grandmother did not get indoor plumbing on the farm until long after I had started school (and moved to the city). I know about homemade dresses, shoes with holes in the bottoms, letting out the seams and hems of my dresses so I could wear them another year, and colourful quilts made from old clothes, a stack of threadbare blankets tufted and used for the fillings. Today, in America, there are people who live no better than those in squatter camps here…and the local governments, instead of bringing in clean water, chemical toilets, and electricity (which cuts dependence on dangerous items like paraffin stoves and lamps) like they do in South Africa, bring bulldozers and destroy what little these indigents have and force them to move on.

Opportunity is thin in America. It is so over-regulated that opening a new business is a costly, time-consuming nightmare, and maintaining that business even more so. My husband has a South African closed corporation (a “cc”). It cost less than R500 to set up that cc, and it is a one-time charge. My late husband owned a printing business…he had to pay sales tax on supplies and equipment he used in his business and then, once a year, make a list of his supplies and equipment and pay a “use tax” simply because he had them. He had to pay for his business license every year. He had to charge sales tax on everything he sold and give it to the government, and he had to pay it quarterly, along with filling out complicated forms. This, of course, was in addition to the income taxes he had to pay every year, and the payroll taxes for his employees (American employers are required to pay certain taxes FOR their employees, such as matching the employee’s mandatory contribution to the Social Security fund…which is bankrupt because the government has stolen the money and used it for things other than for which it is collected). It is much easier…and much less costly…to start and maintain a business in South Africa, and the proliferation of small businesses here is proof of it. Many people who find themselves retrenched simply start a business of their own (like the three guys who do handyman services for us) and many of those people become quite successful at it (like my previous handyman who is now too busy as a builder to come unblock a drain!). In America, the cost of entry to even the simplest business is often prohibitive and even if you scrape up the funds to get started on a shoestring, the government hounds you mercilessly at every turn, sucking your pockets dry.

I think part of what keeps the myth of America as a place of unlimited wealth and opportunity alive is that most people in countries outside America don’t meet “average” Americans, they meet the ones who can afford international travel. A round trip ticket to Cape Town from San Francisco cost me more than $2000…do you have any idea how long I scrimped and saved for that money? And if my then-boyfriend had not provided accommodation and meals, there is no way I could have made the trip. The average wage-earning American cannot afford to spend money on travel unless they max out the credit cards or unless some kind of cash windfall drops in their lap and they decide to throw caution to the winds and do something totally frivolous with it…like my friend Aisha who will soon be receiving a year’s salary in her retrenchment package, but who has always wanted to come to South Africa (she loves sharks). Another things that locals don’t realize is that stuff is much, much cheaper here than in the US, so when they see American tourists spending wads of rands at Waterfront stores and tipping extravagantly at up market restaurants, they think not only are the purchasers rich, they presume they are representative of Americans as a whole.

My husband’s auntie and uncle went to India on holiday a couple of years ago, and brought back a whole suitcase of things…she paid only a few rands for beautifully embroidered and decorated saris, items that would easily cost R500 or more here. Interestingly, saris of the same type I saw in shops in America for $500 and more. Surely the Indians perceived our thoroughly middle-class auntie as rich due to her spending thousands of rupees on fancy saris…just as South Africans perceive Americans as being wealthy spendthrifts when, in fact, they are buying at what they perceive to be bargain basement prices.

This is not to say that America is a terrible place, either, only that America is a real place, just like South Africa, with its faults marching in lockstep with its virtues. And like South Africa, it is neither heaven nor hell, but a combination of the two, depending on how you view it and what you make of it.

The Sound and the Fury

What is it with men and their fascination with their bodily noises?

I’ve been around men all my life…father, brothers, uncles, boyfriends, lovers, husbands…my life has been filled with them. And, to a greater or lesser degree, just about every one of them has found everlasting amusement in the sounds they can produce with their bodies sans vocal cords.

One of my brothers could burp the alphabet and talk with his burps…a useful skill should his larynx ever be removed, but a bit of a gross-out otherwise. This same brother, as a primary schooler, used to sprawl out in front of the TV on his belly and, engrossed in some mindlessly violent midday program, rip such loud explosions from his nether regions that my grandmother, usually the very picture of gentility and decorum, would occasionally remark “Goodness, did you scorch your shorts with that one?” Lacking in subtlety (or the ability to recognize it), my brother would simply laugh and attempt to muster up the necessary abdominal air pressure to do it again.

While one could argue this propensity is forgivable considering his tender age, it is important to note that there were three girl cousins of about the same age and the cousins and I were not prone to such displays. In fact, if a bodily sound escaped us from any place other than our vocal cords, we were overcome with mortification! Our brothers, on the other hand, would bask in manly pride.

Lest we try to forgive the little rascal with references to his tender age (and presumed lack of maturity), let us not forget that, as an adult, he has been known to do the “pull my finger” trick on younger family members. I haven’t asked his wife if he scorches his shorts these days, but there have been moments of temptation. Interestingly, the men in my life who find burping the Star Spangled Banner a worthwhile goal or whose rump-trumpeting skills are Guinness Book worthy, didn’t advertise their talents early in our relationships, proving to me that these are not uncontrollable events of nature, like a tsunami or Hurricane Katrina. If, on our first dates, they could sit through an entire evening of dinner, movie, and coffee without a single noticeable bodily emission, why must a televised football game, six months later, require the windows open to waft away noxious fumes?

This is not to say that women do not suffer from conditions requiring the release of steam…all people do and that’s just part of the human condition. The difference is that on average, women go about exercising their vents quietly and, if a sound emerges in the process it is invariably accidental…and the cause for a very immediate and horrified apology. Males of the species, on the other hand, tend to preen and the louder and longer the blast, the more polished the pride.

I haven’t figured out when guys think it is OK to rip a good one and when it is not. I have sat in many a board room and more engineering department meetings than I care to count, and nary a peep, so it isn’t the fact of males gathering together. My female presence surely did not put them off, as we women are well acquainted with the behavior, having endured it in our presence on numerous occasions… “ladies present” is not a mitigating factor. It seems to serve no other purpose than amusement, but it seldom amuses women…just the guy who does it and/or his buddies.

I don’t get it.

Non-sequitur

On the topic of eschewing capital punishment because of its inherent fallibility, I have repeatedly received missives of the following nature:

What, in your opinion, happened to the right to life of a murder victim.
1. You have murderer a who may not be executed because the constitution protects his/her right to life.
2. You have a murder victim who HAD a right to life but it has been voided by the murderer whose right to life is still protected by the constitution.
Does the constitution only protect the right to life of murderers?
Something does not add up here.

The questions posed by this individual are non-sequiturs. The topic of the blog was the inherently fallible nature of capital punishment. It has nothing to do with the right to life of anyone other than a person incorrectly convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death…a person who is not a murderer, but who may well be executed as one. The blog was about innocent people facing execution because the justice system has no way of ensuring 100% accuracy in its convictions and, because of that, it cannot justly condemn anyone to death without risking the execution of innocent people.

The American Constitution does not protect the lives of murderers…it permits the death penalty to exist, which, unfortunately takes the lives of the innocent as well as the guilty. The problem with the death penalty is that we humans cannot know if a person is truly guilty or not when we sentence him to death…we can only make our “best guess” based on the evidence presented to us and, entirely too often, we guess wrong. Would anyone reading this care to be shut alone in a windowless room less than six metres square for years on end, wondering each morning if this to be your last, when you committed no crime? If it happened to a law abiding citizen like Ray Krone, who wasn’t even in the wrong place at the wrong time but simply had crooked teeth, you can be assured that under such a justice system, you are just as much at risk as he was.

The question of one’s right to life covers the innocently convicted as much as it covers the victim of murder, and until there is a 100% accurate means of convicting only the murderer, until there is a 100% means of preventing convictions like Ray Krone’s, the mechanism by which Ray Krone was almost deprived of his life by the very government tasked to protect him must be dismantled. A man serving a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole is as isolated from preying on society as a dead man: if he is guilty, he is punished by his isolation and the society is protected from his predations; but if he is innocent, if and when that fact finally comes out, he can be released. You can’t give an innocent…but executed…man the rest of his life back. It is important to err on the side of conservatism in matters of life and death…if you must make mistakes in conviction, which is inevitable at this point in history and scientific development, then those errors must not take innocent lives.

The life and death of the victim are moot in this discussion. The victim is already dead, his right to life violated, and no rights exist for dead people. At best, his remaining right is to have his killer apprehended and punished, but that is violated by the State when an innocent person is brought to book. But what of the rights of the person who committed no crime but who faces the death penalty anyway? What of his rights? What is germane here is the life of the innocent person who may be convicted for causing the victim’s death…because he is innocent, does he not have a right to have his life preserved? And what of the further victims of the real perpetrator, still running loose in society because the authorities, satisfied with their conviction of the innocent, fail to pursue? The real rapist/killer, in Ray Krone’s case, went on to sexually assault a child. Sentencing an innocent man to death deals a double tragedy, for not only can an innocent person face institutional death, the authorities cease to search for the real perpetrator, who continues to prey on society and may well commit further crimes.

The death penalty surely kills people guilty of murder. But it just as surely kills people innocent of it. And until we have an absolutely foolproof means of telling them apart, it simply makes sense to stop the killing. How, after all, does the execution of an innocent man effect justice for the victim?

A final note: many people mistakenly believe that the US Constitution guarantees its citizens “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These words do not appear in the Constitution or in any of its Amendments. The words come from the Declaration of Independence, which does not have the force of law.

A Reasoned Response...

To my 29 January blog I received a comment that begs for response. Herewith my rejoinder:

All good and well, I agree, lets find a way to prevent wrongful sentencing. Sentence them to death only after being 100% sure. That, of course, is the crux of the entire matter: these individuals have been unanimously sentenced to death by twelve people…not one or two or even three, but twelve people…who were 100% sure of their guilt.

In these cases juries are not to be trusted. You’ll have to re-write the US Constitution to take juries out of the equation. It guarantees that people will be tried by a jury of their peers (meaning regular people, not members of the aristocracy). And since it is a part of the Bill of Rights, it is highly unlikely that such a change will ever be made…that document is considered more sacrosanct than the Constitution itself. In other words, it ain’t ever gonna happen, so juries and their inherent vagaries must be taken into account.

You need to have a panel of trained experts. What guarantees are there that these experts are infallible and incorruptible? If they aren’t, they’re no better than a jury.

The technology available today including DNA and more should allow there to be no reasonable doubt. Without DNA testing there may be reasonable doubt. If I remember correctly, of the 100 cases mentioned in my original blog, only 16 of them hinged on DNA evidence. In fact, the biggest problem in these wrongful convictions were due to eyewitness testimony…faulty eyewitness testimony! For many cases, there is no biological evidence for DNA testing…three guys wearing trench coats. gloves and balaclavas storm a bank, gun down the guard and several customers with automatic weapons, grab a ton of cash and run…not much DNA left behind…except for the victims bleeding out on the floor.

If the prosecution hides exculpatory evidence, The prosecution should be charged with Defeating the ends of justice. A bit of a circular response, isn’t it? If the prosecution is hiding exculpatory evidence and the suspect is convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death, exactly how are the prosecution’s misdeeds to come to light? In Ray Krone’s case, it happened quite by accident: he was awarded a retrial based on procedural anomalies in his first trial, and his defence attorneys submitted his bite pattern and photos of the bite marks on the victim to an internationally renowned forensic odontologist. This doctor informed the defence team that the bite patterns didn’t match now, just as they had not matched four years earlier when he had first seen them. Surprised, the defence attorney asked how this doctor had come to see these impressions four years earlier and the doctor said the prosecution had submitted them…and he had told the prosecution then that they didn’t match. Not only did the prosecution ignore this information, they “shopped” the evidence around until they found a forensic odontologist who would testify that they did match…if memory serves, there were nine specialists consulted, only one of whom believed there was a match. And the prosecution not only withheld from the jury the evidence that eight out of nine forensic odontologists viewing the evidence gave it a thumbs down, the prosecution withheld the information from the defence team (they are required to turn over such evidence). How likely is an accidental discovery such as this would fall in the lap of every person wrongly convicted as a result of the suppression of such clearly exculpatory evidence? My opinion? Not bloody likely.

Also if the person is executed due to lack of concience and investigation, the prosecution team should be charged with murder. Along with buying stolen goods, these are the worst crimes in my book. Well, that’s really good incentive for the prosecution to make sure any suppressed exculpatory evidence goes mysteriously missing after the conviction, isn’t it? And buying stolen goods doesn’t seem, to me, to be a worse crime than rape or torture, particularly of children, but to each his own, I guess.

Saying that the death penalty is not a deterrent is factually incorrect. Look at the countries that vigorously enforce capital punishment such as Singapore, Do they have the levels of crime that are found in more civilised societies? I made no argument regarding the supposed deterrent value of capital punishment, but studies in the US, where there are 50 states and something over half of them have capital punishment, has repeatedly shown that the rates of capital crimes are not lower in states that impose the death penalty. I suppose that might have something to do with the arrogance of the criminal mind…if you don’t think the cops are smart enough to catch you, then you don’t even think about the penalty for the crime. Besides, the vast majority of murders are crimes of the moment…not planned and premeditated…so it is unlikely that the moment necessary for reflection and contemplation of the penalty even arises. Um…in Singapore you can be arrested for chewing gum. As a country, it is hardly a model for human rights and I, for one, would prefer not to live in a totalitarian state in which the citizens must be obedient little ’bots or get caned…or worse. Not only that, Singapore is known for rapid execution those convicted of capital crimes…is the life of an innocent Singaporean worth less than the life of an innocent American or South African or Brit? How would you feel if your kid was Ray Krone but he was in Singapore and he wasn’t given the time for the technology to mature enough to prove him innocent?

Make it a crime not to investigate thoroughly, The police are known to be lazy and go for the solve. And who is going to determine “thoroughly”? Even the most industrious police force can do nothing about faulty eye-witness testimony, for example, or a fellow officer who plants evidence (this was a huge scandal in the LAPD a few years back…right down to planting “throw away” guns).

The obvious is not always the answer. but sometimes it is. And sometimes the obvious is stubbornly overlooked: the entire system of justice is riddled with fallibility because it is riddled with human beings. There is no way to be 100% certain…we can’t even reliably determine when a person is lying or not, let alone if a witness’s report is an accurate reflection of the events. Any margin for error is too big if it leaves an innocent person at risk of being deprived of his life. And the only way to guarantee that will not happen is to put the death penalty on hold until a 100% foolproof means for determining guilt is devised. I’m not gonna hold my breath!

A second commentator says:
Excellent piece of work. I agree with what you are saying. By doing this you prtect the rights of the perpretator but what happened to the rights of the victim? Ray Krone was not a perpetrator. Ray Krone was an innocent man who was twice convicted of a vicious rape and murder that he was later incontrovertibly proven not to have committed…DNA not only exonerated him, it identified the real perp. Eliminating the death penalty protects the rights of victims of miscarriages of justice, like Ray Krone and more than 100 people over the last 30 years.

I am talking murder victim here. I would like to hear what your point of view on this is.
And if Ray Krone had been executed, he would not have been a victim of murder? Truth is, nobody loses if the death penalty is put permanently to bed. If the perps are guilty, they are off the street and no longer a danger to society; but if they are convicted wrongly, they don’t end up dead at the hands of the government that is supposed to protect and preserve their rights and, when they are finally exonerated, they can be released to live the rest of their lives in freedom.

What do you say to a mother whose son has been executed and later discovered to be innocent of the crime…somehow, “Oops! sorry!” just doesn’t seem to cut it.

Life and death on a whim...

Television is a little slow in South Africa. Despite ubiquitous satellites that deliver signals instantaneously from any point on the globe to any other point, American television takes months…sometimes years…to make it here. Nationwide, we have only four non-subscription television stations, three of them owned and operated by the government, and this being a nation of eleven official languages, locally produced programming runs the gamut from Afrikaans to Zulu…which can be a bit of a problem for a person like me who speaks only pidgin Spanish, high-school French, and American English. And so, despite the programs being outdated and old news, I confess to watching American television programs here, trying to think of them as reruns of programs I missed the first time around. This, then, brought about the situation in which I found myself, last night, watching a year-old episode of “Extreme Makeover” and being unexpectedly…and forcefully…reminded of my long-standing opposition to the death penalty.

I didn’t always object to the death penalty, you know. Once I was a staunch supporter of the concept of permanently and irrevocably removing predatory individuals from society. My family had believed in it and, as a youth and a young woman, I had unquestioningly absorbed that belief and the rhetoric that supported it. But something changed: at the age of 38 I began college and, in preparation for the final debate in my Argumentation and Debate class, I spent several weeks intensively researching capital punishment. Since this was before the advent of the internet, my research did not consist of biased and subjective websites posted by the uninformed but highly opinionated; all that was available to me were scholarly tomes, research studies, and white papers. Instead of Google, I had the Library of Congress index and several libraries full of books, magazines, and papers. It was a slog, even with a partner who worked with me shoulder-to-shoulder. We created pile after pile of 3x5 index cards full of data, then colour-coded and sorted them and, from there, created our attack…and our defence. And, for me, an entirely new point-of-view.

What fired my thinking were the accounts of the Salem witch trials. We tend not to think of them in terms of capital punishment, but they are archetypal examples of everything that is wrong with capital punishment, both then and now. As many as twenty-five people were executed after being convicted of the capital crime of being a witch…two dozen people who were killed by the state for crimes they did not commit. Worse, after the hysteria died down and reason returned, many of the accusers and even some of the prosecutors, expressed regret for their involvement…but no amount of regret or remorse could give back the lives taken. And therein was the crux of my dilemma: duly constituted authority, respectable citizens and presumably rational human beings had, under the banner of protecting their society from the threat of evil, had brought about the legally-sanctioned deaths of their fellow citizens…and when having second thoughts about the whole affair later, could do nothing in the way of making right their grave wrong.

It hit me like a brick: there is something wholly irrational about imposing an irrevocable sentence based on an inherently fallible system. If the guy isn’t guilty…if the evidence is flawed or incomplete, if the prosecution is not honourable, if the defence is not wholly competent, an innocent person can be convicted of a capital crime. If the person is given a sentence of life without possibility of parole, then if errors in his conviction are discovered, he can be exonerated and released to live the rest of his life in freedom. But if the person is executed, it is moot: convicted rightly or wrongly, he’s still dead and no form of restitution is sufficient to right such a wrong.

It seemed pretty simple to me: human beings are fallible and because of that, the institutions we create are fallible as well. The fact that someone joins the police force or becomes a prosecuting attorney does not ensure that the person is, ipso facto, honest and above reproach. In America, more than 100 people have been released from prison since 1973 after having been convicted of capital crimes and sentenced to death. They have been released not due to the diligence of the system in discovering their innocence late in the game…indeed, sometimes the system has fought long and hard to prevent outsiders…attorneys, journalists, family members of the convicted…from having access to the means to exonerate those in prison and thought to be wrongfully convicted. Despite this, more than 100 times in the last 30 years convicts with friends outside have been successfully exonerated through the efforts of those friends. Sometimes it was new evidence, sometimes it was discovering exculpatory evidence suppressed by the prosecution, sometimes it was DNA, sometimes it was the discovery of false testimony…but every time---100 times---it resulted in a person facing execution being discovered to be innocent of the crime of which he was convicted.

Amazingly, this concept…the idea that if the conviction was incorrect you can say “Sorry!” and let the guy go…seems to be beyond the grasp of many people. I’ve heard people say “Well, there are bound to be occasional errors…” as if an error that can end a man’s life is of no more consequence than picking up the wrong brand of washing powder at the supermarket. Would they be so offhand if the person who is the victim of that error was a close family member? A brother or a husband or a father or a son? (The vast majority of those facing the death penalty are men.) One woman astounded me with her response: she said her father and brother lived the kind of lives that would not put them in jeopardy of being arrested for such a thing as a murder or rape. She, therefore, need not concern herself.

It was this woman’s remark that came to mind last night when I watched Extreme Makeover. A man had spent ten years in prison, three of them on Death Row, only to be ultimately exonerated through the efforts of his friends and family (to the tune of $800,000). Known as the “Snaggle-toothed Killer” due to his crooked teeth, he had been convicted primarily because the police, comparing the pattern of his bite on a Styrofoam plate to bite marks on the skin of a raped and murdered waitress, looked no further for a perpetrator…even to the point of suppressing and ignoring exculpatory evidence. Since we know now that this man, Ray Krone, is absolutely not the killer (DNA tests eventually exonerated him and implicated another man), what lead to this man being identified by the as their prime suspect?

I thought about what that woman had said, about how father and brother led such exemplary lives that they would never even come under suspicion…a feeling I am sure many others share. And yet Mr. Krone also led such an exemplary life. He had never been in any difficulty with the law, he had served his country for six years in the Air Force, being honourably discharged after attaining the rank of sergeant. He shared an apartment with an old Air Force buddy and worked for the US Postal Service as a letter carrier. He was a member of a darts team at a local pub where the murdered woman was an employee…he was casually acquainted with her.

If you are thinking… “Ah! A bar…” suppose for a moment that she was a hair stylist and worked in the salon where Mr. Krone got his hair cut. Would that make any difference? Or maybe she was a cashier at the local 7-11 where he regularly stopped off to buy the newspaper? Or perhaps she was a barista at the corner Starbucks where he picked up his morning cup of joe? Her place of employment is immaterial, and his acquaintance with her was no more than casual...the same kind of casual relationship you might have with a car wash attendant, news seller, or McDonald's cashier. The salient point is that Ray Krone led a clean, above-board life as a law-abiding citizen…and he ended up wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering a woman and sentenced to die anyway, due to the justice system’s inherent fallibility.

Despite the fact that the delays between conviction and execution are often decried by death penalty proponents, it was just this delay that saved Ray Krone’s life. Had he been swiftly executed, as happens in many countries, the maturity of science and diligence of his family and friends would have come too late to save him. The loss of ten years of the prime of his life was a terrible tragedy, but it pales by comparison to the tragedy that his execution would have represented. What is most frightening to contemplate, however, is not Ray Krone’s ordeal but the statistics that his nightmarish experience represents: since 1973, for every seven death penalty inmates who are executed in America, an eighth inmate is found innocent and released. Does that make you wonder if one…or more…of those seven might have been innocent as well? Florida has executed 51 people since 1976…in that same period of time, 22 people have been released from Florida's Death Row as having been wrongfully convicted…that’s nearly one third of the total…22 out of 73 people sentenced to death were later found to be innocent. The governor of Illinois put a moratorium on executions in his state when 13 people were released from Death Row, having been exonerated of the crimes for which they were sentenced to death. Isn’t this beginning to alarm you?

There are those who say that the fact that these individuals were found and released proves that the system works, but they are wrong. The system did nothing to exonerate these people and, in many cases, opposed every effort by others to do so. In some instances it took years of litigation simply to force the state to turn over biological evidence so that it could be tested using modern technology. In Ray Krone’s case, his parents lost their house, the community in which he grew up held car washes and bake sales, a distant cousin contributed $100,000 worth of defence efforts, and his attorney allowed him to run up a bill of half a million dollars, all in an effort to see justice done on Ray’s behalf.

The desire for law-abiding citizens to remove predators from their midst is understandable, and killing those predators is the most sure way of guaranteeing that they will not return to commit their crimes again. But until we have an absolutely foolproof means of identifying those predators, we are at risk of murdering the innocent who, for whatever reason, fall unsuspectingly into the legal system. And that is just too high a price to pay, especially if that executed innocent is my son…or yours.

I need a vacation to recover from my vacation…

Has anyone else noticed that when you return home from a holiday, regardless of where you went and what you did, you get up the next morning to suitcases full of dirty laundry and an empty refrigerator?

We got home Sunday night from 16 days of driving, looking, seeing, photographing, and then driving some more. We dragged in a multitude of suitcases, bags, bundles, and packets plus a small table and a large plant. After depositing them randomly in the dining room and wolfing down a Mr. Delivery order, we fell into an exhausted sleep…blessedly in our own bed, for a refreshing change…and rose to the raucous racket of the alarm clock at barely six. Monday morning and Dear Hubby has to hie himself off to work.

As I closed the garage door after his departure, I fatuously said to myself “Ah, poor thing…he has to go back to the office while I have the day all to myself…Felicia is on holiday, no workmen scheduled…I can read, compute, watch TV or DVDs…” Smugly, I sauntered back into the house and made the mistake of stepping into the dining room…

It was nothing short of carnage, my dining room. The table was covered with packets and bits and bobs of things and surrounded by half-opened suitcases and bags, their fetid contents spilling untidily out onto the floor like so much offal. Even the kitchen counter was inaccessible, every available inch littered with the disgorged contents of shopping bags, tote bags, and miscellaneous containers. Discarded bits of bubble wrap, newspaper shreds and wads of packing paper littered the floor, mute testimony to my haste to reveal the glory of my prized Ardmore pot…purchased direct at the Ardmore pottery…to see if it really would look as great as I had imagined it would standing on the hand-carved three-legged table DH had negotiated for me in St. Lucia (it did).

But the room was a disaster…my beautiful polished pine furniture was buried under a blanket of discards mixed with as-yet-unrecovered treasures, the Oriental rug was nothing but an occasional glimpse of colour beneath the shifting dunes of discarded packing materials, dirty shirts and scattered shoes; nothing of the kitchen counters were visible beneath their burden, the refrigerator and cupboards were bare…there was nothing to eat, nothing to drink, and virtually nothing to wear…and DH was off at work, sitting in an air conditioned office, with nothing to do but play with his computer! There would be no lollygagging for me this day!

Laundry was the first order of business, five loads of grubby, sweat-stained garments that had been stuffed into suitcases for the better part of two weeks. Yah, we’d found a laundry partway through the trip and had things washed, but we had since worn them again and…well…let’s just say there is a reason that laundry hampers do not have tight-fitting lids… The doggies were filthy, their hair overgrown and sticking out wildly in all directions, their silky white coats grey with dirt. Obviously somebody had found themselves a nice patch of sand or dirt and had had a joyful time rolling in it…repeatedly! When I called the groomers, however, I learned that they were booked solid through the week…and they were closing on Thursday and would remain closed until January 3! Fortunately, a little whining and pleading (and the fact that we’ve been loyal customers for nearly two years) got me an appointment, but no pick-up and delivery…I had to do that myself.

I had to make a plan…there was just too much to do, too little time to do it, and the maid is on holiday in the Transkei. There was a mountain of laundry, two dirty doggies, and entire ML-load of purchases to unpack and put in their places, empty refrigerator and cupboards to fill…who was kidding whom about reading, computing and TV watching?

I did manage to catch up on the email and to get a blogspace going on my old site so I could point readers to the new one, but from the time the stores flung open their doors, my trusty laptop was destined to languish, abandoned and alone on the unmade bed, until I could rejoin it in the dark hours. I had been on holiday for two weeks and now it was time to pay the piper.

Bertha…which we were now calling “Dirty Bertie” due to the unimaginable coating of dust and the crust of kamikaze bugs she had collected on our many off-road adventures…and I rolled out the driveway with the two wriggling yapping doggies on board. Nashie loves to go “bye-bye” and apparently has communicated his joy to Candy for she no longer cringes at the prospect of a ride in the car. Nashie, however, is no fool. Halfway to the groomers he figured out where we were going (maybe I should try another route next time?) and began to moan pitifully. Candy, oblivious as ever, continued bounding happily from the centre console to the window and back, making occasional forbidden forays into my lap. She leapt joyfully out of the car when I opened the door and strained mightily at her leash while poor Nash just stood on the seat and looked at me with mournful, reproachful eyes. I could read his little doggie mind… “abandoned for two weeks and the first thing she does is take me to the torture place to be sudsed and drowned and my butt shaved and my glands squeezed…she really does hate me!”

Doggies safely entrusted to the groomers, Dirty Bertie and I rolled majestically (even disgracefully dirty, Bertha has a grand aura of stateliness to her) towards the Pick ‘n’ Pay…the cupboard really was bare!...only to find ourselves surrounded and immobilized by a slavering horde of other cars. Where did all these people come from? And why couldn’t I get just one kilometre from the groomer to the market without being embroiled in a bad imitation of commute traffic? It wasn’t even noon! At first I thought it was the Christmas shopping rush…I was passing Bayside, after all, and the parking lot was full. But as the traffic inexorably crept forward, the true source of the problem was revealed: a timid driver in a royal blue Toyota was afraid to stick his neck out and enter the traffic circle at one of the Bayside parking lot exits and the exiting shoppers were rolling through unchecked. Car after car crept out from behind Blue Toyota Man and entered the second lane of the circle while the Toyota stayed rooted to the spot, effectively choking traffic for nearly a kilometre back. I slowly rolled Bertha’s imposing bulk up until she filled the Toyota’s rear view mirror and at the next opening in the stream of cars leaving Bayside, I gave Blue Toyota Man a blast of Bertha’s hooter. The third time I “alerted” him to an acceptable opening in the traffic stream, Blue Toyota Man got the hint and bolted out into the traffic circle like a scared rabbit, a big grey Mercedes wolf on its tail. He was still running when I veered off his trail and wheeled Bertha into the Pick ‘n’ Pay parking lot.

Not being entirely stupid…and having long ago learned the value of doing last minute Christmas shopping at the very moment the store opens (and exiting within an hour)…I expected to find the Pick ‘n’ Pay centre a bit less hectic than Bayside. There are few browse-worthy shops in the centre, its tenants being more the kind of shops that you visit with a purpose…shoe repair, liquor store, security shop, pharmacy…that sort of thing. But I underestimated the zeal of the shopping-frenzied South African woman, for despite the store being relatively uncrowded, my fellow shoppers had not shifted out of retail combat mode.

South Africa enjoys the dubious distinction of having one of the worst traffic fatality records of any civilized nation on the planet…600 people have already died on the nation’s roads this month, in a country roughly twice the size of Texas…and if South Africans take the same mental attitude into the car with them that these people were displaying in the store, the only wonder is that the carnage is no greater than it is! I have long-since learned the folly of being in a hurry…the gain of a few seconds (which is all you ever get) simply is not worth the elevated blood pressure and souring of mood…but it seems I was much in the minority. Women of all shapes and sizes, ages and descriptions shoved their trolleys in front of them like rolling battering rams, whacking and sideswiping anyone or anything unfortunate enough to be between them and their objectives. Powered by caffeine and determination, they surged through the aisles, unapologetically crashing into other trolleys and even into each other without the barest hint of apology or acknowledgement. Queue-jumping at the deli and cold meat counters was rampant, arms snaking out into one’s field of vision to snatch a jug of milk or loaf of bread from in front of one’s face a regular thing. The thin veneer of courtesy and civilisation that separates us from the beasts had been scraped away to reveal the brute within. It was ugly.

And so I sojourned home to face the soothing mindlessness of unpacking the groceries, unpacking more bags, washing yet another load of clothes, my peace of mind gnawed at the edges with the sure knowledge that tomorrow I would have to venture out again…this time to Makro (a down-sized CostCo, for Americans---same stuff, same style, same volume, half the space to display it in). Dinner came and went and finally…finally!...I could rest my increasingly weary bones on my wonderful king-sized bed with all the fat pillows, fire up the laptop and blog.

I’ll bet you know what happened next…yup…fell dead asleep and had to write the blog this morning!

Happy Holidays to you, and the next entry will see me trying to upload photos of my holiday. Skip it if you don’t like travelogues punctuated by photos of yawning hippo, annoyed elephant, and basking crocodiles. We went a lot of places and saw a lot of stuff!